Lost in Paris by Elizabeth Thompson (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

tobacco stores, and more restaurants serving everything from sushi to kebabs to curry. I wonder what happened to the French food.

“Were you by yourself?” I ask, determined to resume the conversation.

“When?”

“When you were following The Squelching Wellies.”

“No, Hannah. I was adventurous, but I wasn’t stupid. My friend Callie came with me, but she only stayed two weeks.”

“She left you and went home?”

“Actually, we were only supposed to stay two weeks. That was the original plan, but I wanted to stay longer. What the hell is wrong with my phone?”

She shakes it and nearly drops it.

“I don’t know if shaking it like that is such a good idea, Marla.”

“The damn thing keeps freezing up on me.”

We walk a little farther and that’s when I notice that the landscape has changed to a decidedly seedier atmosphere. The storefronts we’re passing are shuttered by corrugated metal doors and covered with bright-red graffiti.

The family-friendly bistros have given way to tired-looking neoclassical buildings. I glimpse theaters clearly marked ADULTS ONLY and at least a half dozen sex and lingerie shops.

We are definitely not in postcard Paris anymore.

I wheel my suitcase closer to me and avoid making eye contact with a scantily clad woman who has draped herself along the threshold of an adults-only “bookstore” a few doors down.

“Isn’t our hotel in the first arrondissement?”

Marla nods absently.

“The first arrondissement is in the center of the city. Are you sure we’re heading the right way? I thought Sacré-Cœur was toward the outer edge of the city.”

“I’m just following what the GPS says. Do you want to navigate?”

“Not really. My phone battery is low.”

“Then stop complaining.” Marla shakes her phone again. “I can’t help it if my phone keeps freezing up. I don’t know if it’s the phone or my service plan.”

“Why don’t you reboot it? Sometimes that helps. Did you talk to your service provider about an international plan before you made the trip?”

Three men pass us on the sidewalk, do a double take, and slow their pace. I have no idea what they’re saying in French, but the way they’re elbowing each other, leering and laughing, makes me uncomfortable.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say to Marla. “I don’t like this.”

“Oh! Here it goes. We’re good. This way.”

I figure as long as we walk briskly and don’t engage with anyone, we’ll be fine. The best way to calm my nerves is to pick up our earlier conversation.

“So Callie was splitting expenses with you, right?”

“Yeah, money was pretty tight. I mean, we were teenagers. We just wanted somewhere cheap to sleep after the concerts. Then the next day we were off on the train to the next show.”

She stares straight ahead into the distance, seeing something in her mind’s eye that I can only imagine.

“What did you do after Callie went home? Did you room with someone else?”

Marla laughs. “Oh, Hannah, by that time I was ‘with the band,’ as they used to say.”

Oh… Oh!

“So, like what? You had a thing with one of the band members?”

Was my father one of The Squelching Wellies?

Marla has stopped again. This time we’re in front of the iconic red windmill of the Moulin Rouge. She’s looking at her phone and frowning. “Oh, for God’s sake. I guess I’ll try rebooting it like you suggested. How do I do that? No… Wait—no need. Service is back. Let’s go… this way.”

I follow her.

“You didn’t answer my question. Did you have an affair with one of the band members?”

She waves me off with the hand that’s holding her phone. “It’s not that simple, Hannah. It was a long time ago. Let’s talk about something else. We’re in Paris. Let’s live in the present, not the past.”

I’m not sure if she’s irritated by my questions or the spotty cell service. On the train, we exhausted all discussion of the apartment, so I’m out of ideas for small talk.

We walk in silence for the next several blocks.

Finally, we reach a large traffic circle with a statue in the middle and people loitering at its base.

Marla takes an abrupt left and forges ahead. I have to quicken my pace to catch up with her.

Soon, the traffic thins out. The area transitions into a tranquil, tree-lined street with a mix of residences and businesses occupying street-level storefronts. We pass a photocopy shop, a bank, several internet cafés, a grocery, and a couple of pharmacies.

A few minutes later, we round the corner and we’re on a pedestrian market street. Cafés and shops spill out onto the curb. Everywhere I look I see artisanal food boutiques, flower vendors, and fruit and vegetable stands. There’s a fish market displaying poisson on beds of ice. There are souvenir shops offering racks of postcards, Eiffel Tower memorabilia, Notre-Dame gargoyles, and I HEART PARIS hats and scarves that tourists will spend thirty euros on today and toss in the backs of their closets tomorrow. But that’s how Paris enchants. I can’t blame anyone for wanting to take a piece of the magic home.

Suddenly, I realize we’ve been walking a long time, so I stop to check my watch. “Marla, we’ve been at this for almost an hour. I thought you said eleven minutes.”

“And we’re not going to get there any faster if we complain about it.”

“I think we need to stop here and regroup,” I say. “Let me see your phone.”

She hands it to me. “Fine. If you think you can do better, go for it.”

Her phone appears to be frozen again, but from what I can see of the map, we’re way north of our hotel in the city center.

“Are you kidding me? We’ve been walking in the opposite direction of our hotel.”

“What?” she says. “No we’re not.”

She grabs the phone back.

“No. This isn’t right,” she says. “It’s frozen up again. The hotel should be right around the corner.”

It better be close since we’ve gotten our ten thousand steps in via the Seedy Paris walking tour.

I start to say that, but I don’t, lest I be labeled judgmental.

“Don’t get your panties in