What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

I

In the spring, ivy grew over the only window in Juliana’s classroom, the vines thick as a child’s finger. During her last class, the afternoon sun fanned out behind the window and the leaves glowed a luminous green. After the students left, she rested her head on the desk. It was early May in Paris. Sunlight splashed across her arms and she felt heat seeping into her hands. The walls of her classroom were bare, the shelves unadorned with books or an aquarium filled with miniature turtles or jars of gray pebbles, like the mathematics teacher had across the hall. In fact, the only personal detail was the aluminum tin of dominos in her desk drawer. Sometimes, during her free period, she lined the dominos across her desk, seeing how long she could go before the rows tipped and the whole structure collapsed like a wave flattening on a beach.

She found a pack of Kleenex in her purse and wiped the sweat from her face, leaving dark smudges of mascara on the tissue, then unsuccessfully searched her drawers for a rubber band to pull back her long hair. She was expecting Mrs. Reinard, the mother of a student who had been doing poorly in her class, at any moment, and was surprised when the woman arrived thirty minutes late. She was dressed entirely in black, her dark hair coiled into a bun, her lips and fingernails painted red, a gold pin in the shape of a cicada fastened to the lapel of her suit jacket. She paused in the doorway before entering the classroom, framed by the fluorescent light of the hall, holding her purse against her stomach.

Juliana suddenly felt insecure about her French. She had been fluent for years, but retained an American accent.

She expected Mrs. Reinard’s speech to be confident and throaty, a voice cured by cigarettes and good wine, but when she smiled and gestured toward the chair across from her desk, she strained to hear the whispered apology. As Mrs. Reinard took her seat, Juliana noticed a tiny run in the woman’s stockings.

“I’ve asked you here to talk about your son,” she said, folding her hands on top of the desk. “And his progress in my class.”

“I gather he hasn’t made much.”

Juliana was aware some parents thought English shouldn’t be offered in French schools, that it was an inferior language. As a result, several of her students didn’t take her class seriously, submitted assignments late and didn’t study for exams. She told Mrs. Reinard all this, then said what concerned her about Fredrick was not his performance in the classroom — he was, in fact, an average student — but the troubling behavior he’d started to display.

Mrs. Reinard adjusted her gold pin. “What kind of behavior?”

“Last week, a boy said something that upset Fredrick and he tried to stab him with his pencil.” She didn’t tell Mrs. Reinard that she hadn’t been in the room when the incident occurred. One of the office assistants had called her into the hallway, and she’d told the children to review a chapter in their textbooks before rising slowly and walking outside, feeling light-headed, wondering if this had something to do with her husband, Cole, although it turned out the assistant just wanted to tell Juliana the afternoon teacher’s meeting had been cancelled. When she returned to the classroom, Fredrick was sulking in a corner, the other boy crying and gripping the pointed end of a broken pencil. None of the other students would tell her exactly what had happened and she’d reported it as a minor scuffle. “Surely you received a call from the headmaster?”

Mrs. Reinard did not respond.

“I’ve also been finding these drawings underneath his desk.” She opened a drawer and dropped a thin stack of paper in front of Mrs. Reinard. When she remained silent, Juliana added that she’d heard Fredrick had also attempted to smother the science class’s pet frog.

Mrs. Reinard held up a particularly gruesome drawing: a man with red hair, his thin neck twisted as though it might be broken, plumes of blood shooting from his open mouth. The figure had no eyes or nose and appeared to be floating. It had the smudged, asymmetrical look of a Basquiat — but more lurid and frightening. “Fredrick drew this?”

Juliana nodded.

“The man is his father. I can tell by the hair.” She pressed the sheet of paper face down against the table. “He left us in February,” she continued. “Not a word. Just gone.”

The first thing that entered Juliana’s mind was, of course, her own husband, who’d disappeared in the fall, but she didn’t mention that to Mrs. Reinard, nor did she say how Fredrick often looked at her during their lessons or when students were filing out of the classroom — a dead-eyed stare that made her stomach tighten, his green eyes unfeeling as stone.

“His father is fortunate to be on his own.” Mrs. Reinard brushed lint off her jacket sleeve. “I really have no idea what we will do now.”

Juliana suggested Fredrick start seeing the school counselor once a week, but Mrs. Reinard only shrugged and said she would look into it.

“Please do,” Juliana replied. “It really might help.”

“What about you?” she asked. “Do you have a husband with you in the city?”

“Not presently.” Juliana glanced at the pale circle on her finger, a reminder of where her wedding ring had once been, a plain band with three rectangular diamonds. She had loved it at first, enjoyed the weight on her hand and the glint of the stones, but by their five-year anniversary, it had started giving her blisters and the diamonds had taken on a cloudy glare. The mark had started to fade during the spring. By mid-summer, she predicted it would be gone completely.

“How long do you plan to keep at this?” Mrs. Reinard flung her hand into the open space of the classroom.

“Perhaps through the fall,” Juliana replied, even though she had not yet decided whether she would continue teaching English in the St. Germain district or return to the States or go someplace else entirely.

Mrs. Reinard rose and smoothed her skirt. “Paris is miserable in the summer.”

“I’m not looking forward to it.”

“You could travel.”

“I could.”

“Take my advice.” She leaned across the desk and touched Juliana’s wrist. Her skin smelled of gardenia. “And go to the sea.”

Juliana was unable to find a seat on the metro — not surprising for a Friday evening. She stood in the center of the car, squished between two balding men and a woman cradling groceries. She peered into the paper bag and caught the scent of basil. Sparks of silver light flickered in the dark tunnel and she heard a whistling noise, as though they were burrowing deep into a cave.

Cole had never adjusted to Paris. He found the city crowded and dirty and, after being flashed by a man in a black trench coat on the metro, added perversity to his long list of complaints about the French. They had moved to Europe in August, when Cole — an economist— accepted a two-year offer from the Bank of France and Juliana registered with a teaching abroad program. They had come from Boston, where she taught literature at a private school, and in some ways the new locale wasn’t so different. She liked the city, the gardens, the cafés, the bridges, the craft stalls that lined the Seine. After the first few months, she even started dreaming in French: she was a hostess in a patisserie in one, a guide at the Louvre in another. But Paris also raised her husband’s bothersome qualities to unbearable levels. He was irritable and narrow in his refusal to adopt French customs. She was always asking colleagues for restaurant recommendations and taking him places she thought he might like, but he was never satisfied. She fell into the routine of polishing off a bottle of wine every night just to quiet her nerves.

Still, the most startling changes in her husband didn’t occur until the fall, when riots bloomed in a Paris neighborhood and spread all the way to the countryside. The violence was triggered by the deaths of two teenagers in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. The boys, thinking they were being chased by police, dove over a wall and hid in a power substation, where they were electrocuted, their deaths unleashing waves of anger at the French authorities. In the months that followed, fleets of vehicles were burned, schools and public buildings destroyed, thousands arrested, power stations attacked. Before it was over, the rioters had spread all the way to Toulouse, Lille, Strasbourg, and Lyon.

It was a concern to her, of course. They had only been abroad for three months when unrest unfurled into chaos. Juliana checked the news each morning to stay informed and then went about her business: teaching, grading papers, buying baguettes and slabs of butter at the corner market, finishing the Balzac novel she’d been struggling through all summer, going to weekend art exhibitions and concerts.

She felt it was important to maintain her routines — just as she and everyone she knew had tried to do after the attacks in New York. But for her husband, it was not such a simple matter. He started leaving the office early to watch news reports, stepping out in the evening for a paper and coming home with four or five in his arms. And the cutting of the newspapers that came later: isolating articles about fires and assaults on police officers and spreading them across the kitchen table, as though they were puzzle pieces he was trying to fit together. Then, just after a state of emergency was declared in early November, he disappeared.

In the weeks before he vanished, Juliana found nests of paper scattered around the apartment. At first, the notes were connected to the riots: the times of special news programs, statistics on unemployment and poverty. But they quickly became more abstract, half-finished phrases and odd illustrations she assumed were economics equations: a shape that resembled a spider web with numbers and letters attached, intersecting lines and circles. Then one evening after work, she went for drinks with several colleagues, not bothering to call Cole and tell him she would be late. When she returned well past dinnertime, the door was unlocked and he wasn’t in the apartment. She assumed he’d stepped out for a while, probably to gather more newspapers, and so she graded a batch of student exercises, relieved to have the study to herself, then went to bed.

When she woke at two in the morning and realized he still had not returned, something in her chest went slack. She stayed up the rest of the night, waiting in the living room in jeans and a pajam a top, listening for the creak of the front door opening. He had been missing for three days when she came back from a meeting with the police and found a message on the answering machine. He had gotten out of the city and didn’t want her to look for him. He said she would be getting some papers in the mail— divorce papers, she thought at the time, although they never arrived — just before hanging up. Her sister, Louise, had been with her and re-played the message over and over. Even though they’d never been close, never shared the sisterly camaraderie Juliana envied in other women, Louise had insisted on flying from San Francisco to keep her company through the search.

“Do you really think that’s his voice?” Louise had asked, after she finished listening to the message for the sixth time.

“Of course,” Juliana had replied. “Who else could it be?”

“He sounds strange, doesn’t he?”

“Wouldn’t it be worse if he sounded totally normal?

Louise re-started the message. “What’s that background noise? Is he in traffic? At a train station?” She bit her upper lip. “Maybe an airfield?”

When Juliana said she couldn’t listen to the message anymore, they uncorked a bottle of wine and sat in the kitchen, where her sister eyed the answering machine as she talked about rising housing prices in California.

In the end, Juliana did not know whether he had gone back to the states or traveled elsewhere or remained in Paris. She had contacted his relatives and friends, searched all the places he frequented in the city, a wallet-sized picture in hand, called hotels and hospitals. He never returned to work, according to the Bank of France, and the police ended their investigation before the first snow fell. It could be a late-onset psychotic break, one officer had told her. Or perhaps some kind of mania. Her sister and the friends that visited — bringing along books on urban anxiety and personality disorders, things that were supposed to explain the turn her life had taken — had all come and gone by the end of spring.

Shortly after the metro had departed from the last station, the cars lurched to a stop, causing Juliana to stumble forward. The passengers muttered and swore and brushed against each other. It was incredibly hot, the air thick and sour. Juliana sipped her bottled water, then pressed the cool plastic against her forehead. The whistling was gone. The tunnel was quiet. She peeked into the woman’s bag once more before the lights went out.

The passengers began speaking loudly, shouting complaints and questions. The car was still and dark. Someone pushed Juliana and she stumbled to the side, knocking into another person. She dropped the bottled water and it rolled across the floor. She heard something fall from the woman’s grocery bag and splatter. Her leather satchel was heavy on her shoulder; she pulled it close. Something was swelling in her chest, hard and cold as Fredrick’s stony gaze. In this black space, suspended beneath the pulse of the city, it seemed possible for all of them to disappear.

Juliana heard footsteps and doors slamming. The passengers quieted and migrated away from the center of the car. Three people burst into the space, carrying flashlights that omitted a dim glow. “Laiser passer! Police!” one of them shouted. For a moment, a flashlight shone on the leader and Juliana saw the dark blue uniform and the blunt nose of a gun. She was relieved until she realized they appeared to be chasing someone. Even after the officers left the car, the passengers remained silent. She wondered if some of them were remembering London, the images of smoke and crumpled bodies that had flashed across television screens. She couldn’t stop thinking of Mrs. Reinard and her strange manner. Years from now, would the police find Fredrick clipping wires in a metro station or standing in a car with explosives belted around his waist? Was such a person here right now, a detonator hidden in his fist? It was then the lights returned and the train began to move.

The Hotel de Roch stood on Rue Chapon: a slender white building with a worn façade and a sign that extended into the street, flashing “hotel” in yellow letters. After Cole had been gone for a month and the police closed their investigation, Juliana moved out of the apartment. The two-bedroom was too large and expensive for her alone. She had spotted Hotel de Roch during an afternoon walk; it was only a few metro stops away from the school and guests were permitted to stay indefinitely. She had spent Christmas dragging luggage up the narrow staircase.

In her room, she switched on the small television that sat on the dresser and scanned news channels for a report on the incident in the metro, but found nothing. She went into the kitchenette and put a kettle on the stove, then sat at her desk and watched commercials for perfume and cleaning products before turning off the TV. She had scuffed hardwood floors that always felt cold in the morning and a single lamp on the bedside table, so there was never any good light. She had not unpacked her prints to hang on the walls and unopened cardboard boxes were still piled in a corner.

She heard footsteps in the hallway. The door opened and Leon stepped into her apartment. He had not shaved since she saw him earlier in the week and his white tee-shirt had specks of paint around the collar. He grew up on the southern coast of France — close to Spain, where he’d lived with his father after his mother died — and had maintained the room across the hall for two years. After a few chats in the hallway when she was still new to the building, he started dropping by on Friday nights for coffee. In the beginning, she thought it was possible something might happen between them, from the way he occasionally touched her knee, his eyes settling on her face with unbroken focus. But they had instead eased into something that was intimate and charged but managed to sidestep the erotic. When the heat was malfunctioning on their floor one evening in winter, they’d gone to Bistro d’Henri for drinks and she told him about coming to Paris and the riots and Cole leaving. I left all his clothes in the old apartment, on the bed, and my wedding ring on the dresser, she’d confessed near the end of her story, though she could not bring herself to tell him that she sometimes thought it would be easier if Cole had died, that she wanted so desperately to be done with the searching and the wondering that the certainty of death, of understanding what, exactly, she was mourning, would be a relief.

She waved Leon inside. “That is a look of desperation.”

“What can I say?” He shrugged and rubbed the stubble on his chin. Like Juliana, he was in his forties. His eyebrows were full and streaked with gray, although his hair was still a rich black. He pulled up a chair and sat across from her. “The tourists aren’t even giving me a second look. I need to have a new vision.”

Leon split his time between waiting tables at a neighborhood café and standing outside the Pompidou Center in a skeleton costume. There were always a handful of street performers in the square; on the afternoons she had gone to see her neighbor, she counted a man who had painted his entire body gold, two violinists, and a teenager doing back flips. The head of Leon’s costume was the most startling: five times the size of a human head with huge black sockets for eyes and jagged teeth. He alternated between jiggling his limbs whenever people walked by and breaking into a kind of grotesque dance, an open guitar case close to his feet. She took a photograph during her last visit: Leon leering at a pack of American teenagers, the shot mistimed so the skeleton head and the buildings in the background were blurred. She kept it on her dresser, propped against the side of the television. She thought of them as people between the acts, although he seemed to be handling limbo with more assurance.

The kettle whistled. She got up and made two instant coffees, knowing what he wanted — lots of cream, no sugar — without having to ask.

Leon sniffed his coffee. “This smells dreadful.”

“I’m out of the regular,” she said. “Don’t drink it if you don’t like it.”

He shook his head and took a sip. She opened her purse and pulled out a sheet of white paper, a drawing she had found underneath Fredrick’s desk this afternoon and chosen not to share with his mother. “Look at this.” She handed it to Leon. “It’s the worst yet.”

Leon was quiet for a moment, holding the paper close to his face. The picture showed a man lying in what appeared to be a river, his stomach cut open and flushed with blood, the hands and feet missing. The man had the same red hair, like all the others. “A madman.” He shook the paper. “I cannot believe he is only eleven.”

“Today I found out the man in the pictures is his father.”

“That’s no surprise,” he said. “Most boys hate their fathers.”

When he gave it back to her, she folded it up and slipped it into a drawer, which contained several other drawings she had brought home, thinking it might be smart to collect evidence, in case something ever happened.

“Careful.” Leon pointed at the drawer. “That stuff will get in your dreams.”

“My dreams are already full of things I don’t like,” she said.

“Juliana.” He finished his coffee and set his cup on the floor. “Would you consider going on a trip with me?”

This was not the first time he’d offered to show her the other regions of France, but she had always declined. The very prospect of travel made her tired and she was unsure of how to interpret the invitations, if he was making overtures.

“I work, remember?”

“We would leave tomorrow and be back by Sunday, traveling south.” He stood and walked over to the photograph on her dresser. “It’s supposed to be even hotter in the city this weekend.”

She was already feeling worn down by the summer temperatures and imagined breezes gusting off the coastline. “What would be the purpose of our visit?”

“To go to the beaches. To get away from your students and those drawings and the heat. We’d take the train to Marseille and then drive to the coast.”

“I’ll think about it,” she replied. “If I can have the window seat.”

“Do you know how I got the idea for this?” He pointed at the photo. “When I was in Spain for the Day of the Dead celebration, I saw skeletons dancing everywhere.”

“Sounds awful.”

“At the time, it was a happy sight,” he said. “But we’ve gotten off subject. Will you come?”

They agreed to meet at Café Concorde in the morning for coffee, then catch the nine o’clock TGV train at Gare de Lyon.

“I wouldn’t drink another cup of yours if you paid me.” He picked up his mug and put it in the sink.

She rose and kissed him on both cheeks. “So stop coming over for coffee.”

After he left, she added her own mug to the sink and filled them with warm water. Then she opened her door and looked outside. The hallway was completely dark, the light by the stairs burned out. Things were always breaking down in the Hotel de Roch; her toilet overflowed three days after she moved in and the hot water once stopped working for an entire week. She went back inside and opened her window in time to hear a melodic siren passing on the street below.

II

The morning train from Gare de Lyon was curiously empty for a weekend. Juliana leaned into the aisle to get a look at the other passengers, but could only see fingers and elbows and tufts of hair. She watched the blurred landscape, a swirl of yellows and greens with occasional bursts of red and violet. It felt strange sitting so close to Leon, their legs crowded together in the narrow space between the seats. She shifted and squirmed to prevent her knees from pressing against him, but after an uncomfortable period of keeping her legs pulled back, she relaxed and let them bump against his, a small gesture of intimacy that both comforted and unnerved her.

She told Leon about the dream she had last night. She was in the city, standing on a bridge that reached across the Seine, although she wasn’t sure which one. The city was empty — somehow she knew this. The trees had lost their leaves and she could only hear the hollow sound of the river passing underneath. The gray buildings pressed against the sky like graves on a hilltop.

“Then my sister called and woke me. I couldn’t go back to sleep or remember anything else.” They flew by a cluster of stone houses, a dirt parking lot with a pair of dogs stretched out on their sides. “She always forgets the time difference.”

When Leon asked why her sister had called, Juliana told him that Louise wanted to know if she’d given any more thought to her offer of the spare bedroom in her San Francisco loft. It seemed every friend or relative Juliana spoke with encouraged her to return to the States and resume her old teaching job or move to another city and start over, unable to understand why, after everything that had happened, she could stand to stay in Paris any longer.

“Have you given it any thought?” he asked.

“Not very much.” It wasn’t that she wanted so badly to remain in Paris; more than anything, she was incapable of deciding, of striking in a different, unknown direction, and was frustrated by her inability to release herself from her life as easily as her husband had, a top spiraling across a flat surface.

“I visited her in San Francisco two years ago,” she continued. “But I can’t even remember what the city looks like now.” When she thought of California, the only thing that came into her mind was the dense fog that hung over the bay, as though the clouds had sunk down to meet the earth.

The train entered a tunnel and the rush of darkness reminded her of the incident on the metro, which she relayed to Leon.

“I haven’t seen a thing about it on the news,” she said. “It was like we just fell out of the world for a moment, then jumped back in.” She remembered the lights coming back on and seeing a shattered egg near her feet, the yellow yolk oozing onto the floor. “Toward the end, Cole became convinced the Metro was going to be bombed. By the time he left, he’d spent hundreds of Euros in taxi fares.”

“I think your husband was afraid of the wrong things,” Leon said.

“Really? Was he?” She crossed legs. “When I was down there, for a second I thought everything he’d feared was coming to pass. That he’d been in his right mind after all.”

“But he was always looking to the outside, finding danger in shadows.” Leon tapped his chest. “What about what’s in here?”

Juliana suddenly felt restless and wanted to be off the train, in the open air. She asked Leon how much longer until they reached Marseille.

“Less than an hour,” he said, pointing to the river they were passing. Juliana looked out the window in time to see the little blue and white boats tied to the banks, the paint gleaming in the sunlight, cheerful hostages.

After they arrived at the Marseille train station, she followed Leon into a parking lot, where he stopped in front of the Smart Car he’d rented and unlocked the doors. Near the end of the train ride, he’d mentioned wanting to drop in on a friend before going to the beach and she had agreed, wondering if they would be visiting someone from his youth.

Juliana sank into the passenger seat and opened her satchel to check her cell phone, noticing a new voicemail. When she listened to the message, no one spoke, although she thought she heard the faint static of breath, a low sound that deepened and shifted like wind. A wrong number, she told herself, although she couldn’t help but imagine the caller might be Cole, phoning for something that couldn’t be explained in a voicemail, and felt a flush spread down her neck when she realized the missed call was listed as an unknown number. Or, she wondered, could the caller be Fredrick. Her number was in the school directory, so it was possible. Was he angry that she’d spoken to his mother? What would he have said if she’d answered? It was too much for her, these pointless speculations. She turned off her phone and tossed her bag into the backseat.

“A good day for swimming,” Leon said. He drove with one hand on the bottom of the steering wheel. The sun was full and shone brightly against his face. “After our visit, we’ll go to the beach.” He turned onto a two-lane road. “It’s only a little farther south.”

She hadn’t been to a beach since her college years, always favoring the enclosure of cities. When the weather turned warm in Paris, she joined the groups who lay on the concrete banks of the Seine in their shorts and bathing suits or went to the enormous fountain near the Palais De Chaillot, where she could dangle her legs into the water and feel the spray from the fountainhead. She liked the anonymity of being deep in a crowd, of temporarily forgetting all the days that had come before. But a real beach, with pale sand and deep waters. She looked at Leon, cupping her hand over her eyes to block the sun. “I think that’ll be nice,” she said.

She leaned forward in her seat and watched the scenery, struck by the disparity of the terrain. She felt moisture in the air, yet the ground was dry and hard. One moment, the plants and trees were gray and arid, then they rounded a corner and were met with lush color. The land was flat for miles and then blossomed into impressive rises. They passed a vineyard, rows of low green plants, and an overgrown field with a dilapidated farmhouse in the center. In the distance, she saw the purple silhouettes of mountains.

She noticed a man walking down the road. He resembled, from afar, her husband, the same lanky build. He appeared to be wearing a pinstriped coat and carrying a briefcase, walking with a swiftness that seemed out of place in the country. But as they passed him, she realized his face, his soft features, looked nothing like Cole’s; the briefcase was actually a toolbox, the man’s jacket frayed and dusty. She recalled the early days of Cole’s disappearance, scrambling to catch up to a man in the metro station, darting across the street to follow someone who had (she thought) his walk, staring through the window of a restaurant at a diner who held a spoon in the same way. She had grown used to these tricks of the mind.

Although they had lived on the outskirts of Boston and hadn’t been directly impacted by the attacks in New York, Cole had fallen into a dark period that lasted until Christmas, attending every meeting on port and transit security that was open to the public and trying to push his way into some that weren’t, detouring to avoid the busiest bridges, working from home as much as possible to limit his time in the Financial District. But it had passed and she never imagined a resurgence. After all, the media was flooded with stories about people suffering from post-traumatic stress; his behavior had seemed understandable. It wasn’t until the Paris riots that she realized how much he’d changed, as though some dark seed buried inside him had found the ideal conditions for growth. And after he left, she was forced to recognize how she’d changed as well, her determined cheerfulness and willful ignorance, her ability to read the newspaper and then push the unpleasantness from her mind (how typical, how bourgeoisie, how very American, she thought now), as though the world wasn’t shifting very much at all, as though everything wasn’t disintegrating beneath them.

They passed an old couple standing in a pasture, rows of stone houses with pink and yellow shutters, and then a field of red poppies, the petals delicate and thin as tracing paper. She wondered if someone had planted them or if they had taken root naturally. She asked Leon to pull over and he did. She got out of the car and walked into the field. He rolled down the window and watched her.

She stepped carefully to avoid flattening the poppies. The soil was cracked and brown. It seemed miraculous that such brilliant color had emerged from this parched square of land. She bent over and pulled a flower from the ground. A breeze passed over the field, bending the stems of the plants. She crushed the petals in her fist, the little slivers of red pushing between her fingers like silk. The poppy was soft and damp in her hand. From the center of the field, it felt like she was surrounded by a thousand tiny faces.

“Hey,” Leon shouted from the car. When she looked over, he was pantomiming a camera. He brought the imaginary camera to his face and made a clicking noise. “I’ll call it still life with poppies.”

She smiled and waved, then dropped the petals and wiped her palm on her jeans.

“You don’t see flowers like this in the north,” he said when she returned to the passenger seat. He started the car and pulled into the road. “Lavender,” he added. “That’s another thing that grows like wild over here.”

“Question.” She touched the red streak on her palm. “What do you think Fredrick is trying to say with his pictures?”

“That the world is too much for him.” They turned onto a dirt road. White dust rose around the car. “Children say it all the time in different ways. The privilege is lost with age.”

“If you were going to draw a self-portrait, what would it look like?”

He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “A bunch of lines maybe. Like a ball of string. Or maybe a big flat shadow.”

“Do you remember the Henri Cross painting at the d’Orsay? The one that looks like it’s made of a million little dots?”

He nodded.

“When I saw it, I felt like if I blew hard enough on the canvas, all those specks of paint would scatter.” She tried to rub the red from her skin, but it barely lightened. “I would make something like that.”

III

They parked in front of a squat cobblestone house and got out of the car. Leon walked to the front door and knocked. An elderly woman answered. She was small, her skin freckled and creased. She wore a white linen dress with large pockets on the front and a black scarf wrapped around her head, revealing only a curve of silver along the hairline. Her eyes were small and dark.

The woman invited them inside, her French marked by an unfamiliar inflection. The house was small and low-lit. Juliana smelled rosemary and bread. The woman showed them to a rectangular wooden table, where she served herbal tea in clay mugs. The cups were shallow and Juliana finished her tea quickly.

“Leon,” the woman said. “Are you still wearing the skeleton mask?”

“I haven’t given it up yet.”

“Keep going through the fall,” she said, “And you will see something remarkable.”

“The weather is very hot now,” he replied. “The tourists stand around like dazed cattle. Few people give me money.”

“Bear it,” the woman said. Then she set aside her cup and smiled at Leon, showing crooked and stained teeth. He glanced at Juliana and nodded.

She produced three large stones from her pockets. They were inky and smooth, as though they had spent years in a riverbed. The woman made a triangular shape with the stones and covered them with her hands. Juliana nudged Leon underneath the table, but he just sat there with his arms crossed, staring at the woman and her bean-shaped stones.

The woman reached for Juliana’s hand. She pressed her thumb against the red mark on her palm.

“From the poppies,” Juliana explained.

The woman held onto her hand and began speaking in a dialect Juliana could not translate. She lowered her head and rounded her shoulders. Juliana felt heat entering her body; she imagined the woman peeling back her skin and studying the geography beneath. She did not pull away, too surprised for a struggle. When she asked Leon what was happening, he shook his head and brought a finger to his mouth. She was disturbed by her inability to comprehend the woman’s language — I can’t understand you, she wanted to shout — but the feeling of being shut out, of being unable to interpret, was also somehow familiar. The woman squeezed her hand harder, pressing the slender bones in her fingers together. She pursed her lips and hummed. It frightened Juliana to be dominated in this way, but a part of her wanted the woman to keep her pinned to the table, to dictate her next movement, and she felt a shiver of disappointment when her hand was finally released.

Juliana rested her elbows on the table and stared into her mug. She interlaced her fingers; her hands were hot and moist. The door was cracked open and warm air flowed into the house, the sunlight making a pattern on one end of the table that reminded her of Cole’s equations, the bands of signs and symbols. After giving herself a moment to settle, she stood to leave and Leon placed a hand on her knee.

“Not yet,” he said.

She returned to her chair. They sat in silence a little longer, then the woman reached into her pocket and gave Leon an old-fashioned iron key. He took it and thanked her. “Nothing is waiting,” the woman said to Juliana in her accented French. She did not make any other gestures toward her before they left the house.

Juliana and Leon walked half a mile down the road and entered a garden. A low, rocky hill stood behind the foliage. They followed a gravel path, passing thickets of lavender and oleander before reaching a bench at the bottom of the hill. To the left, purple geraniums concealed their view of the road; on the other side, rows of Italian cypresses and sage-colored olive trees.

“Want to sit?” He pointed at the bench.

“All right.” The wood was cool against her legs. Leon did not join her, instead standing in the shadow of a tree. “What language were you speaking back there?” she asked.

“A dialect from the Camargue region,” he replied. “Where she’s from.”

She had read a little about Camargue, the marshes and pink flamingos and ranches that bred white horses. “Is that why we really came all the way out here?” She picked at the moss growing on the bench. “To see that woman?” She thought of how soothing the warm sand of a beach would feel right now, of leaning back and planting her elbows in the ground and looking out at an endless span of blue.

“That was one reason,” he replied. “But there’s something else.”

She looked at him. “Well?”

He smiled. “Shall we go to the cave?”

She followed him to the hill, ducking underneath low-hanging branches. An arch had been carved into the rock, the entrance covered by a steel gate. Vines dangled in front of the bars like tentacles.

“The town installed this last year.” He unlocked the gate with the key the woman had given him. “To protect the inside of the cave.”

He stepped inside, leaving the gate open. Sunlight brightened the pale walls. The cave was much longer than it appeared from the outside. The light began to disappear as they went deeper and soon they were in total darkness.

“We’re getting close now.” A tiny beam appeared in his hand — a flashlight the size of a pen.

“How long have you known the woman we visited?”

“For years. My family vacationed in this part of France when I was a boy.”

“Exactly what does she do?”

“She lives near the sea and goes to the garden. She collects those stones you saw and tells people about themselves. My mother used to visit her every summer, always on the first day of June, before she died. Her drowning was predicted one year before it happened.” Leon stopped and faced the wall, then moved the light around. She was watching the beam slide across the stone when she saw a dark shape: a sketch of an animal, a horse or a cow.

“There.” He pressed his hand against the wall. “This is what we’ve been looking for.”

Soon the light revealed a black outline — yes, it was a horse — and three mountain peaks, the rock underneath shaded faint yellow and blue. The drawings were small, no larger than her fist. She stepped closer to the wall. “How old are these?”

“Thousands of years,” he replied. “They were discovered by a group of geologists last spring. Scientists have come all the way to Marseille to study them. Another group is scheduled to return this summer. But my friend has a key. I don’t know how she got it. She lets me use it whenever I like.” He passed her the flashlight. “Here,” he said. “See for yourself.”

The coarse grain of the rock rose through the color, giving the drawings texture and ripeness. Occasionally the borders faded and it was difficult to tell where the shapes began and ended. She wondered what was supposed to be at the bottom of the mountains — a pool of water, perhaps. Was the dry land she had seen from the road once a sea? She heard Leon clear his throat and move away from the wall. She turned and aimed the light at him.

“What did the woman tell you?” she asked. “What did she say when she took my hand?”

“That she could see everything inside you,” he said. “And then she told me what was there.”

Juliana didn’t press any further. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted to know what was inside of her.

“You don’t have to think about this now.” He touched her elbow. “Just keep looking at the cave.”

She pointed the light at the wall, the white circle falling on the horse. The neck was craned slightly and she could imagine the animal standing alone in a field, the intuitive angle of the head. She thought of the centuries that were contained here, the evidence of so many lives. She touched the stone and rubbed the damp grit between her fingertips.

For a moment, she returned to the apartment in Paris, to her husband standing in the kitchen, washed in the bluish light of evening. He was hunched over the sink, his hands gripping the edges of the counter. They had been arguing. She had been pushing him to get help and, in a flurry of desperation, even suggested they return to the States. She knew some kind of end was near. They had stumbled onto a path and moved too far, the ground now irretrievable. Sweat had bled though his white dress shirt, forming a pattern along his spine that resembled a ladder. He reached into his pocket and took out a ribbon of paper. Look at this, he told her, and tell me what it says to you. She had taken the note and stared at the jumble of numbers and told him it meant nothing. Nothing to her, nothing to anyone. Her marriage ending was not a shock; it was the spectacular strangeness of it that had left her staggering. She had been an ordinary person with an uneven marriage and a good job and the occasional adventure, unprepared for this life of peculiar and slippery grief.

The familiar weightiness came over her. She thought of finding Cole’s notes, of holding the curls of paper in her hands and failing to interpret his secret language, and wondered if she was making the same mistake with Fredrick’s drawings. Her husband and her student, it seemed, had been talking to her in the same way. It was something foreign and inaccessible and she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to keep trying to listen.

Juliana heard footsteps and shone the light around the cave, but couldn’t find Leon. She shouted into the tunnel, first in French and then, out of some hidden instinct, in her native language. The echoes stunned her — she couldn’t recall ever really listening to the sound of her own voice. She took one last look at the drawings, then started toward the gate and the garden and the cobblestone house across the road. She pointed the light at the floor; the walls and ceiling went black. She kept going until sunlight spilled down the path and she saw the entrance. Leon stood underneath the arch, facing away from her, hands in his pockets. She stopped and turned off the flashlight. She wanted to know what the woman had said, every word, as though she needed to hear it aloud in order to set forth in a different direction. The sunlight was warm against her face and arms; dust had stuck to her skin. She held her poppy-stained hand like a wound, feeling at once dazed and urgent. She tasted salt and dirt in her mouth. Before she could call to him, he turned to her and asked if she understood what he had wanted her to see. “Oh, yes,” she said, stepping toward the mouth of the cave.