That evening, I couldn’t sleep.
I got out of bed and went to the closet and pulled down the cardboard box. Not the RICHARD box. The older one, underneath it. The one with my notebooks from before. From college. From the first years we were married.
I sat on the bedroom floor with my back against the bed and flipped through them.
There were grocery lists. Phone numbers of people I couldn’t remember. A pressed flower that crumbled when I touched it.
And there, on a page from the year we got married, in my own young handwriting, with a little heart drawn next to it:
See Paris someday.
Richard and I had always dreamed of visiting Paris together. We talked about it the way young couples talk about winning the lottery. We’d stand in front of the travel posters at the library. We bought a French phrase book at a garage sale for a quarter. Richard used to practice with it in the bathroom mirror. “Où est la bibliothèque?” he’d say, in the worst accent you’ve ever heard. Where is the library. That was the only sentence he ever learned.
But there was always a reason to wait. The house needed a roof. Emma needed braces. The car broke down. Next year, we’d say. Next year for sure.
Then there was no next year.
I touched the faded ink with my fingertip.
“Well, Richard,” I whispered. “I guess I’m finally going.”
The bedroom was very quiet.
“I just wish you could come with me.”
The next morning, I called Emma.
She picked up on the first ring. She’d known about the appointment. I’d told her it was routine. She knew it wasn’t.
“Mom? What did they say?”
“I’m going to Paris,” I said.
There was silence on the line.
“Mom?”
“I’m going to Paris, Emma.”
“Mom. What did the doctor say?”
So I told her.
I told her the way I’d told parents things for thirty-nine years. Calmly. Simply. Without too many big words.
She didn’t say anything for a long time. I could hear her breathing. Then I heard her put her hand over the phone, and I heard a sound behind it that I knew she didn’t want me to hear.
When she came back, her voice was thick.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. And Paris?”
“I’ve never been abroad,” I said. “Not once in sixty-eight years. Your father and I always meant to go. I want to go, Emma. I want to see it. Before.”
She was quiet again.
Then she said, “Then you’re going.”
Just like that. No arguments. No Are you sure, Mom. No What about your treatment.
I think that’s when I realized my daughter had grown up into a better person than me.
Daniel was a different story.
He came over that Sunday for dinner. He drove two hours from Columbus with his wife, Rachel, and their two boys. I made pot roast, because it’s his favorite. I’d told him about the diagnosis on the phone. He’d been quiet. Daniel has always gone quiet when he’s scared. He’s just like his father that way.
He didn’t eat much pot roast.
After dinner, while Rachel took the boys out to the backyard, he helped me with the dishes. He washed. I dried. That’s how we’d always done it.
“Emma says you’re going to Paris,” he said, scrubbing a pot.
“I am.”
“Alone.”
“Yes.”
“Mom.” He put the pot down in the water. “You shouldn’t travel alone. Not now. What if something happens? What if you get sick on the plane?”
“Then there’ll be a plane full of people to help me.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “I can take a week off. Rachel’s fine with it. I already asked her.”
I put down the dish towel and looked at my son. He was forty-one years old. He had gray coming in at his temples. He had his father’s jaw and his father’s habit of rubbing the back of his neck when he was worried, which he was doing right now.
“Daniel,” I said. “I taught thirty eight-year-olds how to behave during fire drills. Every year, for thirty-nine years. I can manage an airport.”
He laughed, even though he didn’t want to.
“That’s not the same thing, Mom.”
“I know it’s not.” I picked up his wet hand and held it. “But I need to do this one by myself, honey. I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve never done anything by myself. Not really. I went from my parents’ house to your father’s house to being your mother. I’ve never even eaten in a restaurant alone.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
He looked at me for a long time.
“Will you call me?” he said. “Every day?”
“Every day.”
“And if you feel bad, you’ll go to a doctor? You won’t be stubborn about it?”
“I’m always stubborn about it.”
“Mom.”
“I’ll go to a doctor,” I said.
He sighed and went back to the pot.
“Dad would’ve gone with you,” he said quietly.
“I know,” I said. “That’s the whole problem.”
I got my first passport. I had to go to the post office and have my picture taken against a white wall. The man behind the counter told me not to smile. I looked like a woman being arrested for shoplifting.
I booked a modest hotel in a neighborhood I couldn’t pronounce. It had a little picture of a balcony with red flowers on the website. I booked it for eight nights.
I bought a plane ticket. Dayton to Chicago, Chicago to Paris. I bought it on the computer at the kitchen table, and my hands were shaking so badly that I typed my credit card number wrong three times.
When the confirmation email came, I printed it out and stuck it on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like an apple that a student had given me in 1994.
I stood in the kitchen and looked at it.
Then I opened my notebook and wrote Dear Richard, I bought the ticket, and I stopped.
I didn’t know what to write after that.
For the first time in thirty-two years, I didn’t finish a letter to him.
On departure day, Emma drove me to the airport in Dayton. I arrived three hours early. She tried to talk me into one hour. I said three. We compromised on three.
She hugged me at the curb for a long time.
“Call me when you land.”
“I will.”
“And Mom?” She was holding both my arms. Her eyes were doing something strange. Like she was excited and nervous at the same time. “Just… keep your heart open, okay? Whatever happens.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” She smiled. “It’s just a thing people say.”
It wasn’t a thing people said. Not people like Emma, anyway. But I was too nervous to think about it.
My first flight went to Chicago. It was short and bumpy. I gripped the armrests the whole time.
In Chicago, I had a three-hour layover before the flight to Paris. I found my gate, B14, and I sat down, and I checked my passport.
Then I checked it again.
Then I checked it again, because what if it had fallen out of my bag in the forty seconds since I’d last checked it?
I checked my boarding pass. I checked the screen above the gate desk. PARIS CDG. ON TIME. I checked my boarding pass against the screen.
A man sitting across from me, an older man with a cane, watched me do this about six times.
“First time?” he said.
“Is it that obvious?”
“You’ve checked that passport more times than my wife checks the stove,” he said. “And she checks the stove a lot.”
I laughed.
Then a wave of weakness came over me. It started in my stomach and went up into my head. The gate and the people and the big windows full of airplanes all went soft and gray around the edges.
I put my head down. I took a sip from my water bottle. I breathed slowly, the way the nurse had shown me.
“You okay, ma’am?” the man with the cane asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired.”
I waited for it to pass. After a few minutes, it did.
I sat there with my hands in my lap, and I thought, What are you doing, Margaret? You’re sixty-eight years old and you’re dying and you’re sitting alone in an airport in Chicago. Daniel was right. This is foolish.
Then the loudspeaker crackled.
“Mrs. Wilson. Passenger Margaret Wilson. Please come to the desk at your boarding gate.”
My stomach dropped through the floor.
My first thought was that something was wrong with my ticket. That I’d typed something wrong on the computer. That my passport picture looked too much like a shoplifter and they weren’t going to let me on.
My second thought was that something had happened to Emma. Or Daniel. Or one of the grandkids.
I grabbed my bag and hurried to the desk. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m Mrs. Wilson. Is something wrong with my ticket?”
The young woman behind the desk, Jessica, looked up and smiled.
“Not at all,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Waiting for me?”
“Someone arranged for this to be delivered.”
And she handed me the cream-colored envelope.
“Who sent it?” I said.
“I’m afraid I only have instructions to give it to you.” She read the sticky note. “There’s something you still don’t know about this trip.”
I opened the envelope.
Inside was the old letter, folded in thirds. And underneath it, a small black-and-white photograph and a few pages of thin paper, stapled together, covered in French.
I unfolded the letter.
My darling Sparrow,
I had to put my hand on the desk.
Nobody had called me Sparrow in thirty-two years. Nobody alive even knew he’d called me that. Not even the kids. It was just ours.
My darling Sparrow,
I finally bought that little apartment in Paris we always dreamed about. I wanted it to be your anniversary surprise. I can already see your face. You’re going to talk for ten minutes straight and not let me get a word in, and I’m going to let you.
One day, we’ll sit on the balcony together. I’ll bring the coffee. You bring the phrase book.
All my love, Richard.
At the bottom was an address. A street name I couldn’t pronounce and a number. Appartement 3.
The photograph showed a pale stone building with iron balconies, on a narrow street. Someone had drawn a little arrow in pen pointing to a window on the third floor.
The stapled pages had an official stamp on them and Richard’s signature at the bottom, next to a date thirty-seven years ago.
A purchase document.
“My husband wrote this,” I whispered.
Jessica was watching me. Her smile had faded a little.
“Are you all right, ma’am?”
“He died thirty-two years ago,” I said.
Her face changed completely.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t… they just told me to…”
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”
Then a voice came over the loudspeaker. “We’ll now begin boarding Flight 142 to Paris, Charles de Gaulle. Group one, please make your way to the gate.”
I stood there with the letter in my hand.
Jessica touched my arm.
“Ma’am? That’s your flight.”
I boarded carrying the envelope against my chest like it might fly away.
I found my seat, 23A, by the window. I buckled my seatbelt. I put the envelope in my lap and unfolded the letter again and read it over and over while the plane taxied and took off and Chicago got small beneath us.
I finally bought that little apartment in Paris we always dreamed about.
Richard had bought an apartment in Paris.
Thirty-seven years ago. Five years before he died.
And he’d never told me.
I’d been his wife for fourteen years. I’d balanced our checkbook every month at the kitchen table with a calculator and a pencil. I knew exactly how much money we had, down to the penny. We’d argued for a week over whether we could afford a new washing machine.
How do you buy an apartment in Paris without your wife knowing?
And if he’d bought it for me, then why had nobody ever said a word about it after he died? Not the lawyer. Not the bank. Not his company.
Where had it gone?
I boarded carrying one question, and it got bigger with every mile.
Why had Richard hidden an apartment from me?
The woman in the seat next to me was a college student named Priya, going home to visit her grandmother in Lyon. She noticed me staring at the letter for the fourth hour in a row.
“Is that a love letter?” she asked shyly.
“I think so,” I said. “From my husband.”
“That’s so sweet. Is he meeting you in Paris?”
“No,” I said. “He died a long time ago.”
She went pink. “I’m so sorry.”
“Everybody keeps saying that today,” I said. “It’s all right. I’m used to it.”
She offered me half of her chocolate bar. I took it. Then she put her headphones on and fell asleep against the window shade, and I was alone with my memories again.
During that flight, somewhere over the dark ocean, I remembered the early years of our marriage.
Our first apartment was above a dry cleaner on Third Street. It always smelled like steam and chemicals. The radiator banged all night. We had one good chair, and we took turns sitting in it.
One winter night, we were lying on the floor of that apartment on a blanket, eating popcorn out of a mixing bowl, because we didn’t have a couch yet. Richard was looking at the ceiling.
“Someday, Sparrow,” he said, “I’m taking you to Paris.”
He called me Sparrow because I was always rushing around, talking a mile a minute. Hopping from one thing to the next. He said the first time he saw me at that dance, I talked so fast he only caught every third word.
“With what money?” I said.
“I’ll figure something out.”
“And where will we stay?”
“Our own apartment.”
I laughed so hard I spilled the popcorn. “Our own apartment? In Paris?”
“Why not?”
“With a balcony?” I said, teasing him.
He turned his head and looked at me very seriously.
“Obviously,” he said.
I’d thought it was just one of those silly things young people say on the floor at night. Something you say because it feels good to say it.
I’d never once thought he meant it.
