“Where’s our stuff?”
My stomach drops, the sensation of tumbling out a window just before you fall asleep. I whip around, though I know it deep in my body even before I turn and look: the pile of bags Sadie and Ian charged us with watching is nowhere to be found. In fact, nearly everything is gone, nothing left behind but my gauzy cardigan sitting in a cotton puddle on the floor.
“Um, you guys,” Sadie says, sounding oddly, preternaturally calm. “What happ—”
Gabe cuts her off: “Who had the passports?” he demands.
Holy shit, I realize with a fresh wave of horror, thepassports. Part of me can recognize that this is funny in an eighties-comedy kind of way, all of us frantically patting our pockets like we did anything with them—and ourwallets, I realize belatedly—besides what we all know we did. The other part is blinded by dumb, scalding panic.
“This isn’t happening,” I mutter, my heart like a trapped bird at the back of my mouth, something I need to cough up or spit out. But of course it’s happening: the truth is, this all makes a sick kind of sense. I got tangled up with Gabe again and it led to calamity. Just like it always does. “I can’t believe I let this happen, I—”
“Did you guys walk away?” Ian asks me. “Is that why—”
“We were right here!” Gabe snaps. “We just—” He breaks off. “Didyousee anybody?” he demands, looking at me urgently.
“OfcourseI didn’t see anybody!” I nearly shout. “Didyousee anybody? If I had seen anybody, don’t you think I would have said something? Like:hey,don’t steal our fucking luggage?”
“Okay,” Sadie says, in a voice like she’s talking to a bunch of panicked children. “Let’s all take a breath. Maybe it just got lost somehow.”
I whirl on her. “All our stuff?” I counter. Suddenly I’ve had it with her, her guilelessness and her waterfall of hair and her can-do, wilderness-survival-guide, not-like-other-girls superiority like a battering ram against the back of my skull. “Maybeall our stuffjust somehow got—”
“Easy,” Ian cuts in, holding his hands up. “Hey hey hey, Molly, easy, you’re okay. This is totally solvable.”
“Is it?” Gabe growls. He is so, so pissed: at me, at the situation—and at himself most of all, if I know him as well as I think I do. “Because I’ll tell you, dude, from where I’mstanding it looks like a pretty colossal clusterfuck.”
Ian nods. “No, it’s bad, I’m not saying it’s not bad. But we’ll go to the embassy, we’ll sort it out.” Through the haze of panic in my own mind it occurs to me to be shocked he’s not losing his shit at this. How is he not losing his shit at this? “We should find the airport police, first of all. You got your phone still?”
I slap at my back pocket, nodding numbly when I feel its familiar outline through the denim. Can my mom wire us money, I wonder? How does wiring money evenwork? I’m imagining us sleeping under a bridge somewhere, begging for change at the train station and stealing half-eaten breadbaskets off people’s tables at cafés.
“How are we even going to check into the hostel?” Sadie asks, sounding significantly less calm than she did a moment ago. “My credit card was in there, all my money—”
“I still have my wallet,” Ian says, digging it out of his back pocket and holding it up as evidence.
“Well, good for you, man,” Gabe snaps. “But I don’t. And—”
“It’s fine,” Ian says in that same collected, easy voice. “We can stay at my parents’ place while we get it figured out.”
For a second I think I’ve misheard him, that he’s naming some French shelter for teenage idiots from America. Then my brain makes the connection.
“Your parents’ place?” Gabe and Sadie ask in unison.
“Yourparents’place?” I echo.
Ian smiles sheepishly.
It’s not in Paris, not exactly, but in a quiet residential suburb on the outskirts called Saint-Cloud that’s full of lush green parks and expensive-looking houses. Ian uses my phone to get us an Uber from the airport, keying in the address off the top of his head and speaking quiet, capable French to the driver; I sneak incredulous glances in his direction before giving up and openly staring at him, wide-eyed. He looks over, shrugging in a good-natured, slightly embarrassed way, like I caught him picking his nose.
Finally I shrug and lean my head back against the seat, wrung out and exhausted as a used-up travel tube of toothpaste. We spent close to an hour with the airport police, who took our statements and my cell phone number and instructed all four of us to stay together in case they found our stuff and caught the guys who’d taken it, while also somehow managing to communicate—without ever actually saying it—that we ought not hold our collective breath. “You have a place to stay, yes?” the officer asked us, clearly hoping we weren’t planning to camp out in his terminal for the foreseeable future. When Ian nodded hastily, his entire body relaxed.
The house itself is tall and narrow, a stone and stucco situation with a high, peaked roof and fat yellow rosebusheson either side of the bright-red door. From the wide leaded front window I can see straight through to the back of the property, where a small courtyard holds a sunken swimming pool lined with painted Spanish tile. “They rent it out sometimes,” Ian explains, keying a four-digit code into the pad above the doorknob. “But there’s nobody here right now.”
“This isamazing,” Sadie is saying, clearly taking the entire situation in stride like it’s just one more neat backpacking adventure. Gabe still looks like he wants to die. As we step inside the cool, dark house I turn in a circle, gazing around at the wood and marble, the antique chandelier hanging above the steep staircase that leads to the second floor. I can’t help thinking of Ian’s dowdy Bay State parents, who I met for dinner at a Legal Sea Foods in Boston back in April: his dad was wearing Tevas and a golf shirt. His mom carried a Museum of Fine Arts tote bag instead of a purse. Both of them were friendly and engaging, but neither of them seemed like the kind of person who secretly owned vacation property in France. Not to mention Ian himself, with his flannel button-downs and job shelving books at the library and nose for the cheapest noodle bowls in Chinatown. How the hell did he forget to mention this place the whole time we were planning our vacation?
Never mind how—why?
“Ian, seriously,” I start, then snap my jaws shut as I catch sight of Gabe and Sadie still standing in the front hall, empty-handed as two paupers straight out of a fairy tale. Idon’t know what I want to say to him, exactly, but whatever it is, I know that I don’t want to say it in front of this particular audience. “Um, is this okay with your mom and dad?”
“Oh, yeah, for sure,” Ian says. “I mean, I’ll call them from your phone in a bit, but they’re definitely not going to mind.” He turns to Gabe and Sadie, motioning down a long, wide hallway beside the staircase. “You guys can camp out in the guest room through there.” He sounds completely unbothered by the whole situation—happy for a chance to play the host, even, like having our luggage and passports stolen in a foreign country is just another kuddelmuddel to tell stories about later. For the first time his competence kind of annoys me: I’ve spent the last few days—I’ve spent our wholerelationship—admiring his talent at getting around in unfamiliar places, how unflappable and open to the unexpected he is. But now I can’t help feeling like it’s probably easy to seem sophisticated if you’ve already secretly been everywhere with your rich parents, eating snails and strolling through galleries and sneaking sips of wine across the table.
