Half an hour later Amy finished providing the men with all the particulars. Paperwork completed, she told them in English and then again in French where we could be reached if any news came in about the taxi or our luggage.
The men smiled for the first time that night, and one of them said something to Amy that made her blush. She smiled and shook her head saying no and thanking him. I thought I noticed a hint of tears glistening in her eyes. As soon as we were out of the station, I asked Amy what he had said.
“He offered us a ride back to the hotel on his Vespa,” she said with a crooked grin. “But he could only take us one at a time, so I declined.”
“Good choice. Not that I wasn’t secretly hoping you would leave me at the police station while you took off scooting about Paris with your arms around the middle of a man young enough to be your son.”
Amy started to cry.
“I was only teasing, Amy.”
“I know. And what you just said was hilarious.” She propped open a wobbly, upside-down umbrella smile that caught her spring shower of tears.
“Then why are you crying?”
“Because for that brief moment I believed I actually could fit on the back of a Vespa!”
“Of course you could fit on the back of a Vespa. In your skinny jeans, no less!”
Amy’s shower of tears turned into a downpour.
“What? Amy, what’s wrong?”
“My skinny jeans are in our stolen luggage!” she wailed.
I tumbled in my shoulder bag for a tissue and handed it to Amy under the glow of the streetlight. “It’s been a long day. We’ll go shopping tomorrow and buy you some new skinny jeans. Shopping in Paris! Ooh la la, right? How fun will that be?”
“Lisa, it’s not the jeans. It’s more than that.” She sniffed. “Don’t you see? We’re in Paris. It’s spring. Springtime in Paris! You and I are finally here. A French guy just offered me a ride on the back of his Vespa!”
“Yes,” I said, still not seeing the cause for so much emotion.
“A year ago if someone would have made me an offer like that I would have thought they were making fun of me!” She burst into a fresh round of tears.
“Oh, Amy-girl!” I wrapped my arms around her. “You did a superb job losing all that weight. You should be flattered that he offered you a ride.”
“I am flattered.” She pulled back and wiped her tears. “That’s just it, Lisa. Don’t you see?”
I was having a hard time seeing anything through my hazy brain at that moment. I handed her another tissue. Amy blew her nose and dabbed away the final tears. “This is what I always dreamed of you and me doing.”
“What, blowing your nose at midnight on a Paris street corner?”
“No, being here. Together. Coming to Paris. We did it! We’re here! But I didn’t expect to be this old when we finally showed up. Don’t you see? We’re here, but we’re old. It’s all so wonderful and so tragic at the same time.”
“I know.” I gave her my most sympathetic smile. But I knew something Amy didn’t. Age had nothing to do with the aching that had overtaken my forty-five-year-old friend. Paris was equally exhilarating and tragic when I was twenty-two.
I said, “There’s something about this city that breaks your hope into a thousand pieces and then stands back and watches as you cut yourself trying to gather up the shards.”
“Ooh,” Amy said pensively.
“Yeah. Ooh or ow, whichever the case may be. Come on.” I put my arm around Amy’s shoulders. “We’ll both feel better after we get something else to eat and get some sleep. Why don’t we walk across the cobblestones, sit down at that café, and order some food?”
“I’m too tired to try to order in French. I think I’ve used up every French word I know.”
With no decision-making skills between the two of us, Amy and I ended up back at the creepy convenience store where we ignored the brooding man at the register. We left with bottled water and two oranges. We also bought contact lens solution for Amy, toothbrushes and toothpaste, and what we hoped was roll-on deodorant. It was either deodorant or a spot remover for clothing. At that point, we didn’t care.
As we entered the hotel, the night desk clerk politely greeted us and asked if we met with success at the police station.
“No,” Amy told him.
He didn’t look too surprised, which was not very encouraging.
We rode the tiny elevator to our fourth-floor room in silence. At least the room was a nice size, and the twin beds looked inviting. I ate my orange and brushed my teeth with the chalky toothpaste.
“I miss my things.” Amy sat on the edge of her bed, rubbing her bare feet. “I wouldn’t make a very good player on Survivor.” She finished her orange and then went into the bathroom to wash up.
“What am I going to do with my contacts?” she moaned. “At home the travel boxes of solution come with a lens case. This one doesn’t. Why is everything so complicated?”
“Amy, just put them in the drinking glasses and get some sleep. We’ll figure all this out in the morning when we can think straight.”
We turned out the light without a kind word between us and fell asleep in our clothes.
When I woke, it was daylight, but I refused to open my eyes. I had been dreaming I was in a Jerry Lewis sort of movie that took place at a sidewalk café lit up in twinkle lights. A bunch of Johnny Depps in dark-rimmed glasses were racing around on Vespas. Amy was waving to me from the back of one of the scooters that I think was being motored about by Michael Nesmith, the tall Monkee with the stocking cap. A uniformed police officer stood in the middle of a busy intersection holding up a white-gloved hand and blowing a whistle. I didn’t know what people were saying in my dream because oddly, or perhaps expectedly, the dream was in nonsensical French phrases.
I drifted in that floaty, subconscious place between sleep cycles until Amy stirred in her bed. She padded over to the window, opened the drapes, and gasped. “Lisa, get up. You have to see this.”
“I can see from here.” I squinted in the daylight that now flooded our room. “What time is it?”
“Ten o’clock. And it’s a beautiful day in Paris! Come over here.”
I pulled my glasses off the bedside table and shuffled to the window. “Wow,” I murmured with appreciation for the expansive garden that paralleled our hotel. The green grass and trees stretched as far as we could see from the Louvre to the Concorde. Below our window and across the street were a large Ferris wheel and other amusement park attractions. Behind the wide park rose the immense central train station making a bold statement. To our right in the distance stood the landmark known around the world. The Eiffel Tower.
“What a view!” Amy said.
“We didn’t have a view like this from the youth hostel, I’ll tell you that. What I remember the most about the youth hostel was how the common washroom had one long sink like a metal feeding trough. A long pipe ran above the trough. It was peppered with pinholes from which the cold water sprayed out. That was our only way to wash up. We had to go to a public bathhouse to shower.”
“I don’t imagine the beds were as nice, either,” Amy said. “These beds are great. How did you sleep?”
I told her about my wacky dream and the part about Johnny Depp. She laughed. “Wait. Don’t make me laugh any more. I have to go to the bathroom.”
As I stood by the window and took in the view, Amy scooted into the bathroom.
“No!” Amy suddenly screeched.
“What? What’s wrong?” I tapped on the closed bathroom door.
Amy opened it with a drinking glass in her hand. “I am such a doof.”
“What happened?”
“I just drank my contact.”
“Amy!”
“I know. Don’t say anything. I know.” She walked past me and crawled back into bed, putting the empty glass on the end table.
“You brought another pair of contact lenses, right?”
“Yes. Two pairs.”
/>
“And your glasses?”
“Of course.”
“So, relax. I doubt the lens you swallowed will goof up your digestive system. Just drink some of your cranberry extract and psyllium stuff. You brought that, too, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I brought some psyllium.”
“See? You’ll be fine.”
Without looking at me, she pulled the covers up to her chin. “The psyllium is with my other pair of contacts, which are with my glasses.”
That’s when I knew what she was going to say next.
“And they’re all together, packed neatly in my suitcase. My suitcase that is roaming around Paris in the trunk of a stolen taxi.”
“Oh, Amy.”
“What was I thinking? Those are essential items. I should have put all of them in my purse. I don’t know how to travel! I’m a train wreck, Lisa. A disaster limping from one fiasco to another!”
“No, you’re not. We’ll work this out. We’ll find an optometrist or have Mark send some of your contacts or something.”
“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime? Put in my one surviving contact and walk around viewing Paris with my other eye closed?”
“We could get an eye patch for you at a pharmacy,” I said, halfway serious.
“Oh, great! How cute would that look? Can you see me showing up at the house Grandmere wanted me to visit? ‘Hi, I’m Amy the Pirate, and yes, I have been wearing these same clothes for the past four days. But hey, at least you can’t see the bruises on the back of my legs from when I did have luggage to haul around.’ ”
I ignored her ranting and stepped over to the phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling room service. We need some serious croissants and black coffee in here.”
“Oh, sure. Try to cheer me up with food.”
“Hey, I’m starving even if you aren’t. Bon jour,” I said, responding to the voice on the phone. “I would like to order some breakfast.”
Even though I’d spoken my request slowly and assumed a large hotel like this would host English-speaking guests frequenty, the woman’s voice on the other end responded to me in French.
“I’m sorry, I …”
“Here.” Amy reached for the phone. “Pardon?” she said and then followed with several smooth sentences in which the only word I recognized was croissants.
“Twenty-five minutes.” Amy handed the phone back to me. “I hope you don’t mind waiting that long.”
“If I feel faint, I’ll go drink your other contact.”
Amy squinted her eyes. “You’re just asking for it, Lisa-girl. I’ve never taken you out before, but I could do it right here, right now, if I had to.”
Not since junior high school had I seen Amy go through so many mood swings in such a short period of time. It was as if this were her first time away from home and away from anyone who expected her to act a certain way. She seemed to be spinning through all the options, trying to decide if she was going to be tough chick Amy-girl or Amelie, American princess abroad.
Secretly, I enjoyed watching her find herself out of her element. I suspected I was seeing the true Amy, in all her variations.
“I dare ya.” I challenged her to get out from under those puffy covers and prove to me she was brazen enough to start a catfight. It was a crazy way to begin our first day in Paris, but somehow, after all we’d been through, it didn’t seem unreasonable.
“No,” she said with a pout. “I’m going back to sleep. Wake me when the food arrives.”
I was about to taunt her with some sort of sassy comeback when someone knocked on our door. Amy and I exchanged surprised glances. It was too soon for room service.
A knock sounded again. A male voice called out something in French. Amy’s eyes widened. She hopped out of bed and stood behind the closed door, peeking through the small viewing hole. “Oui?”
“Who is it?” I asked.
“The hotel manager. He says there’s an inspector in the lobby who wants to ask us some questions.”
The manager spoke again through the closed door. Amy turned to me. “He wants to know if we’re dressed and can go down to the lobby with him.”
Sadly, we already were dressed and had no other apparel options.
“Oui,” she answered the manager. In English she added, “We’ll be right down.” She repeated the phrase in French as I stepped into the bathroom and splashed some water on my face.
“I’m not going to put in my one contact,” Amy said. “So if we need to read any fine print or sign anything, you’ll have to do it for me.”
I didn’t explore the thought that my trying to read French fine print to her was not going to happen. Especially on an empty stomach. All I said was, “I hope this doesn’t take very long. I don’t want to miss breakfast when it shows up.”
The uniformed inspector was all business. He stood to the side of the front desk, his hands clasped behind his back. He was nothing like the traffic-directing policeman in my dream the night before. And, as an added reality check, not a single Monkee popped out from behind the counter or rode a tricycle through the lobby.
“Bon jour,” the inspector said without smiling.
“Bon jour,” Amy and I repeated in unison.
He motioned for us to be seated on the only sofa and chair situated in the small lobby area. We were barely settled in before he asked us a question. Amy took it from there. Every so often she turned to me and asked for verification. Did the driver have dark hair? How tall would we estimate he was? Any distinguishing marks?
“I thought we went over all this last night,” I said to Amy, while nodding politely to the inspector.
“No. The questions last night were about the taxi and where the driver picked us up.”
The inspector took notes on a small pad of paper with a Montblanc pen. I noticed his long fingers and trim nails. His watch was gold and shaped like a rectangle. It was too bad I hadn’t noticed as many details about our driver last night.
While Amy was nodding in response to one of the questions, I looked out the glass doors and noticed a taxi double-parked in front of the hotel. Two more taxis went around the idling car. I tried to imagine how many hundreds of taxis were driving around this huge city. Another taxi sped around the parked one, and I felt a new empathy for the police and their challenge of finding our contraband cab among perhaps thousands.
The automatic doors opened, and a dark-haired taxi driver entered pulling two wheeled suitcases behind him. He left a third suitcase outside on the curb. With my new powers of observation warming up, I noticed that he was wearing a gray sweater, but his head was down so I couldn’t see his face. And no passengers were exiting the taxi. The luggage was being delivered sans hotel guests. A dozen reasons could explain such a drop-off, but the instant I spotted Amy’s bright yellow luggage tags dangling from the otherwise nondescript black bags, I screamed.
Jumping to my feet, I charged toward the cabbie yelling, “Hey, you! What are you doing? Stop!”
He bolted, entered the taxi through the passenger side, and peeled out into the flow of traffic. An immediate chorus of honking from the other cars accompanied his getaway.
The inspector looked at me and then at Amy. She was rattling a string of words in French as I ran outside and grabbed what turned out to be my suitcase from the sidewalk where the cabbie had left it. I dashed back inside. Amy was holding on to one of her luggage tags and nodding wildly.
With one swift motion, the inspector stormed the front desk, commandeered the telephone out of the hand of the dazed desk clerk, punched in some numbers, and barked orders. Three other hotel personnel appeared from a back room just as an older German-speaking couple exited the elevator. Everyone talked at once while the inspector shouted over the commotion.
Amy and I looked at each other open mouthed. A smile of uncontrollable exuberance lit up Amy’s face. We both laughed.
I didn’t want to be the doubting Thomas, but this was too
bizarre. Too good to be true. I hurried to open my suitcase and immediately saw that all my neatly packed belongings had been rifled through.
“Amy, don’t get too excited yet.”
She sifted through her suitcase and pulled out a small slip of orange paper. “Hey, did you get one of these?”
Typed in English was a notice that U.S. Customs had searched her luggage as part of a routine security check. Spotting a matching orange card in my muddle of clothes, I withdrew my unbelief.
“Yes, my luggage was inspected, too.”
“See!” Amy still was giggling. “God sent the thief back here this morning with our luggage. Isn’t that a scream? Who says God doesn’t answer prayer?”
Just then the inspector darted past us and ran out to the squad car that had pulled up in front of the hotel. The chase was on.
“Ooh! Don’t you just want to go follow them?” Amy asked.
“Ah, no.” I zipped up my suitcase.
“Come on, Lisa! Where’s your sense of adventure?”
I couldn’t help but laugh at Amy. “You know, as tempting as it sounds to go running around more unfamiliar streets in Paris in pursuit of a deranged taxi driver who demonstrated a strange sense of propriety in returning our belongings, I think I’d rather go upstairs and see if our breakfast has been delivered. Then I’d prefer to take a long hot shower and change clothes. To be honest.”
“Well, I do always want you to be honest,” Amy said, still smiling.
We rolled our luggage into the elevator, and Amy said, “Can you believe this? We asked God to bring our luggage to us, and He did.”
Something inside me felt compelled to launch into a clarification of how prayer works. It seemed important to point out that God doesn’t have to do what we ask, just because we cry out to Him whenever we have a problem. Things don’t always go the way we think they should. This time it just happened to turn out favorably for us.
Then I realized I didn’t have to explain God to Amy. Why was I trying to protect His reputation? All Amy wanted was to be delighted with what He had done.
She stood in the elevator beside me, lifting up her chin all the way and with a wide smile whispering, “Thank You, Papa! You are incredible! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!”