Justin stepped into the bathroom and shut the door, probably sensing the anger that had started boiling up inside of me.
“Mom?” I asked. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes,” she said, looking anywhere but at me. “I suppose it was. Though I don’t want to talk about her and bring us all down. I’m happy to be on this trip with the two of you. That’s what’s important now.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at her. “Well, maybe I like talking about her. She was my grandma, and I’m so sad she isn’t here. But it’s like you’re actually glad it worked out like this. You almost seem happy that she died. Are you?”
Now my mom glared at me. “Stop it. You know that’s not true.”
“No, I don’t,” I said, tears pricking my eyes. “I don’t understand why you act like you hate her so much.”
“I don’t hate her,” she said softly. “But it’s complicated. And I’m not going to discuss it with you now. Justin? Hurry up. We’re ready to go.”
Justin came out as soon as the words were out of her mouth, like he’d been waiting for the storm to pass.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“I’m not very hungry,” I said, taking a seat on my bed. “I think I’ll just stay here.”
“Nora,” Justin said. “Come on. Don’t be like that.”
“No,” Mom said. “It’s fine. She can stay here if she wants to.”
Justin gave me a look that said, “Are you kidding me?” But I was totally serious. I was too angry to be hungry.
After they left, I lay on my bed, hugging Hedwig, thinking about the adventures Grandma had prepared for my mom and me. Grandma Sylvia had acted so lovingly toward my mom, even after the way Mom had treated her, and I couldn’t understand why.
I let the tears fall, wishing hard that my grandma was with me instead of my mom. If Grandma were here, I thought, she’d take me to her favorite restaurants and tell me all about the fashion shows she’d watched that day or the fascinating people she’d had meetings with. She’d teach me things that would actually be helpful to me in life, like how to put together outfits and how to tie a scarf. It seemed like the only thing my mom wanted to do was talk about dolls.
Tired of thinking about it all, I got up and turned on the television, hoping I could find something to take my mind off of everything. But there was only one channel in English, a news channel, and that was the last thing I wanted to watch. I finally settled on a cartoon, even though the characters were talking in French.
“I wish I could understand,” I said to myself. But it wasn’t really the television show I was talking about.
The next day, we woke up and got ourselves ready, and I tried to forget about the disagreement Mom and I had the day before. I didn’t want her to ruin the trip for me.
Mom and Justin had brought me a baguette and a little fruit tart from a bakery they’d visited on their way back to the hotel after dinner. It seemed like she was trying to say she was sorry without actually saying the words. So I accepted the food, which was delicious, of course. By then, I was starving, and probably couldn’t have said no even if I’d wanted to.
Over breakfast, Mom told us that she’d been too busy shopping the day before, so she hadn’t made it to the doll museum, and wondered if it would be all right if we started our day there. After we toured the museum, she said Justin and I could choose a place to go. So off to Le Musée de la Poupée we went.
I enjoyed myself more than I thought I would. The owners had done a fantastic job arranging the dolls in scenes that were fun to look at. Each exhibit included doll-sized furniture, accessories, and even toys to make the scenes realistic.
One of the scenes was an old schoolhouse, with dolls seated at little wooden desks. The desks had teeny-tiny little books on top, many of them open so it actually looked like some of the dolls were reading. A map of the world was hung at the front of the room, behind the teacher doll. The room even had a tiny little chalkboard.
Mom was in doll heaven. After a couple of hours, Justin and I were ready to go, and we had to practically drag our mother out of there.
“Oh, that was wonderful,” Mom said. “I feel inspired to do some different things with my dolls when I get home.”
I didn’t ask her to explain what she meant by that. Unless she was planning to move them all to the attic, I really didn’t want to know.
“Okay, where to next?” she asked. “Whatever you kids want to do, I’m game.”
“How about a boat ride down the river?” Justin said.
“Ooh,” I said. “I’d love to do that.”
Mom pulled out her guidebook. “I think there’s a section in here that talks about trips down the river. Let me see what I can find. Maybe we can do that, and then have lunch somewhere? And I’d really like to take you two to the Louvre this afternoon.”
I thought of Lindy back home, who’d asked me to wave at Mona Lisa for her. I knew a trip to Paris wasn’t complete without a visit to the most famous museum in the world. I just didn’t want to have to spend hours and hours there.
Justin must have read my mind. “As long as we don’t have to spend all day in that gigantic place, I’m fine with that.”
“Me too,” I chimed in.
We ended up finding a riverboat that served lunch, so while we dined on pasta, we got to see some of the great sights of Paris in a whole different way. It was amazing. We were a little cold, but it could have been worse. Like, at least it wasn’t raining.
Then, just as we’d agreed, we spent a few hours at the Louvre. Mom suggested we try to find the fourteen or fifteen most famous paintings that were listed in the brochure. Both Justin and I liked that idea, so that’s what we did.
The Mona Lisa was nothing like I’d expected it to be. I didn’t know if it was because it was so much smaller than I’d expected, or because of the bulletproof glass around it (I wondered who would even want to shoot at a painting), but it was nothing like the spectacular painting I’d had in my mind. As I stood there and watched the circles of people snapping photos with their phones, I thought of how the Mona Lisa was kind of like my trip to Paris. Originally, I had thought Grandma’s notes would lead me to clues so I could find the key, but now, it didn’t seem like this trip was about the box at all. It seemed like maybe the notes and the map were about something bigger than that, if only I could figure out what it was.
I think my favorite painting was the one called Le Jeune Mendiant, which means “The Young Beggar.” It’s a painting of a boy sitting on the ground, sunlight streaming through a window and onto his body. His feet are dirty and his clothes have holes in them. Next to him is a straw bag with half-eaten apples, like maybe he had just come back from picking them up off the ground somewhere.
What caused me to stop and stare for a long time, though, was the look on the boy’s face. The artist had done an incredible job capturing his sadness. The longer I stared, the more my heart broke for him. I wished I could reach into the painting and help him somehow. Now that is good art!
After we found all the paintings in the brochure, we spent some time in the Egyptian section, which Justin really liked, because mummies are cool, I guess. My favorite part was when we visited Napoleon’s apartments. I’d never seen anything like that! Who would have guessed they once made chandeliers the size of small cars? The crowns and jeweled goblets were gorgeous, too.
Before we headed out, we stopped at the souvenir shop for postcards. I picked out three, one of them with a picture of the Mona Lisa to send to Lindy. Mom chose a stack of postcards, so I asked her who they were for.
“I want to send them to people I work with,” she said. “They were all so jealous of me going on this trip. It’ll be nice to let them know I was thinking of them.”
“Do they know why you were able to go on the trip?” I asked. As soon as the words were out, I wanted to snatch them back. We’d actually been getting along really well all day, and I didn’t want to get into another
argument about Grandma, especially in the middle of a souvenir shop.
“Yes, Nora,” she said sternly. “They know my mother died and that she left us the airline tickets. I needed time off for her memorial service, after all, so I had to tell them. I couldn’t keep her death a secret.”
The way she said it, it seemed she would have liked to keep it a secret if she could. Was she really that ashamed of her mother, a mother who clearly loved her and wanted to fix things between them?
“Why do you have to sound so angry when you talk about her?” I asked. “She wasn’t a bad person. She was exactly the opposite, I think. Even though you treated her the way you did, she wanted to try and make up with you. I think that’s why she bought you the airplane ticket. But it’s like you don’t even care.”
“I’m not discussing this here, Nora,” she said. “As I said last night, it’s complicated and you don’t understand.”
“Why don’t you explain it to me?” I asked. “Jeez, I’m not a baby.”
Before she could answer, it was our turn at the register, so we didn’t say anything more.
As we walked outside, Mom asked, “Where to next, kids?” like everything was fine and the conversation three minutes before had never happened.
How was I going to tell her about Grandma’s notes when she didn’t seem to want to talk about her at all?
“I don’t care,” I said softly.
“Cheer up, Nora,” Mom said, putting her arm around me. “We’re in the most beautiful city in the world, and we have the whole evening ahead of us to enjoy it.”
And all I could think was, If only Grandma was here to enjoy it with us.
In bed that night, I lay there with Hedwig clutched to my chest, trying to go to sleep, wondering how it was possible to be in Paris and feel so miserable.
The treasure hunt had turned out nothing like I’d hoped. On top of that, my mother didn’t want anything to do with Grandma Sylvia, which meant that even if I got up the nerve to tell her about the notes and map, she’d never agree to go with me around the city to see what Grandma had left us.
The whole thing felt like trying to touch a cloud—completely impossible and hopeless.
I rolled over and looked at the clock. It was almost midnight. I wished I could get up and go for a walk. Paris was probably beautiful at midnight.
“Nora?” Mom whispered.
“Yeah?”
She rolled over and faced me. Our beds were near each other. Justin was on the other side of her, in the third single bed, snoring away. Every night, Mom had left the bathroom light on for me, with the door cracked. I hadn’t even asked her to do that.
There was just enough light to see her eyes, looking at me. She reminded me of the young beggar in the painting at the Louvre. All I could see was sadness.
“I’ve been thinking. About what you said earlier. When you asked me how come I haven’t wanted to talk about Grandma?” Her voice was shaky, and I could tell she was starting to cry. “I guess it’s because … I feel so guilty. About the years I let slip away. I thought if I ignored you when you talked about her, I could make the pain go away. But I think maybe I’ve figured out there’s nothing I can do to make it go away. It’s going to be something I have to learn to live with.”
I got up and went over to her bed and sat beside her. She sat up, sniffling. “I’m so sorry, honey,” she said. “I’m sorry you didn’t go to Paris with your grandma like you wanted to do. And I’m sorry I didn’t make up with her before she died.”
“Why were you so mad at her?” I asked. “I want to try and understand.”
She wiped the tears away with her thumbs. “When I was about your age, my best friend’s parents got divorced. It devastated my friend, Diana, and as a result, it devastated me. They’d always seemed like the perfect family to me. After Diana and her three siblings came home from school to find her dad had moved out, she came to my house and cried on my shoulder for an hour. It was the most heartbreaking thing I’d ever witnessed. After that, I begged my mom to promise me that her and my dad would never get divorced.” Tears slid down my mom’s face. “As she held me tight and stroked my hair, she promised that we would be a happy family forever, and I didn’t need to worry. And I believed her.”
“But, Mom—”
She didn’t let me finish. “I hung on to that promise because, like you, I was easily scared as a child. And when I got married and had kids and had more things to worry about, I’d go back to my mother’s words again and again, and they always made me feel better. No matter what, I was part of a happy family forever. That’s what I kept telling myself. So, a few years ago, when that happy family was shattered, and my mother broke her promise to me, it crushed me. It crushed me like nothing I’d ever experienced before, and I didn’t know how to handle it.”
She started to cry harder. I got up and went to the bathroom and grabbed a few tissues from the dispenser on the counter and brought them back to her.
“So because she wasn’t in love with Grandpa anymore,” I said as I sat back down on her bed, “it felt like she didn’t love you anymore, either?”
She wiped her nose with a tissue and tried to take a deep breath as she nodded. “It’s so crazy now, thinking about it. I pushed her away because I was hurt and mad, and I wanted her to hurt like I did. I was an adult, yet I was acting like a six-year-old.” She sniffled and wiped her nose again. “After some time had passed, I knew I’d made a mistake. But I didn’t know how to fix it. So I didn’t do anything. I kept hoping that she would come to me.”
“And she was going to,” I said. “That’s why she bought you the ticket to Paris.”
A couple more tears fell as she said, “But it was too late.” She reached up and stroked my cheek. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Finally, I knew. Finally, I had the answers to the questions I’d asked myself for years. And finally, my mother had apologized for what she’d done.
I scooted closer and put my arms around her. We cried together for a few minutes and then I whispered, “People make mistakes, Mom. I forgive you.”
There was someone else who forgave her, too. Grandma. Maybe I couldn’t help the poor, young beggar in the painting, but I could help my mom. And in the morning, that’s exactly what I planned to do.
Dear Lindy,
It’s Wednesday morning, and my mom and Justin are still sleeping. I met a girl named Phoebe from London, and she helped me go to a few of the places Grandma wanted me to visit. We had a lot of fun, but I don’t think her notes and the maps are clues to finding the key for the box. It seems like it’s something much bigger! I’m kind of confused about it all, actually. I’ve decided to tell my mom about it. I hope to have more to share when I get home!
Love, nora
* * *
My mom woke up, got out of bed, and started humming as she gathered clothes and then went into the bathroom to take a shower.
Justin groaned.
I began collecting everything I needed for the big reveal.
When Mom came out a while later, smiling and dressed, she asked, “Okay, who’s next?”
“Justin can go,” I said.
He groaned again, but eventually made his way to the bathroom, closing the door behind him.
Mom sat down on the bed next to me. “I’m glad we had that talk last night, Nora. I’m feeling better today.”
I took a deep breath. “Good. Because I need to tell you something.” I pulled the envelopes and map out from beneath my pillow. “Please don’t be mad, but I didn’t tell you the whole truth. The airplane tickets weren’t the only things I found in that old trunk. Grandma left me these.”
Mom looked over the map and the envelopes. “What is this?”
“Here. Read the first letter. It’ll explain things.”
While she read, I fidgeted like a kindergartner who’d been kept inside during recess. I had no way to know how she might react. When she was done, she kind of just stared at me, stunned.
; I knew I needed to tell her everything. It was now or never. “I went to the first three places, Mom. On Monday. With my new friend, Phoebe. The thing is, Grandma left instructions with each of the people to only give me what Grandma had sent ahead of time if you were with me. I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, but I’m telling you now, and I hope you can forgive me.”
She shook her head. “So wait. You and Justin split up?”
“Yes,” I squeaked.
She stood up. “He left you alone in a strange city?”
“I wasn’t alone, Mom. I was with Phoebe. And she’s been to Paris before. Plus, we had Grandma’s maps and instructions. Everything was fine.”
“You and your brother are both grounded when we get home, do you understand? That was not okay to do that. You were supposed to stick together.”
“I know, and I’m sorry,” I said. “But please, can we talk about the notes? About the people and places Grandma wants us to visit? See, I want to take you to the first three places this morning, so you can meet her friends and we can see what gifts she left for us.”
She started pacing in front of the beds. “I don’t know, Nora. I have other things I want to do with our time.”
“It won’t take too long, I promise,” I told her, jumping off the bed. “I know exactly where to go and who to ask for. Please, Mom? Grandma went to so much trouble for us.”
She stopped pacing, crossed her arms, and sighed. “All right. We’ll go to the first three places. But I’m not making any promises about the rest quite yet.”
Justin came out of the bathroom then, and I ran in to get ready and let her explain to him what was going on.
When I emerged a while later, Mom told me Justin was going to explore on his own for the morning, but we’d meet up with him for lunch. I fingered the button I’d picked out to carry in my pocket. It was one of my favorites in the bunch. The entire button was a detailed owl face, complete with markings for the feathers, along with two beady eyes and a small beak. I told myself that telling my mother about the treasure hunt had been the wise thing to do, and hopefully everything would go smoothly from there on out.