7: GRAY CITY

Layla's pov

The plane landed in Paris on a cloudy morning, and the sky was gray from one end to the other.

I woke up with a dry mouth and a heavy head because of the pill I took before the flight. I followed the other passengers off the plane and walked down the long halls with my bag pulling on my shoulder. Everyone around me seemed to know where they were going, and I just followed them.

At the baggage area I stood and watched the suitcases go around until my two black ones came out. I lifted them onto a cart and pushed it outside, where the air was cold and wet.

A line of taxis was waiting by the curb. I had written my address on a small piece of paper because I didn't trust myself to say it out loud, and I handed it to the first driver. He was a big man with a gray beard and a scarf around his neck. He read it, said "Belleville," and put my bags in the trunk without another word.

The ride into the city was quiet. I watched gray buildings and gray roads go by, and I kept my head against the window. The driver had a radio on, but I couldn't understand any of it.

I kept waiting to feel something. I had wanted to see Paris since I was a girl. I used to cut pictures of it out of magazines and stick them on my wall. Now I was finally here, and I felt nothing. I wasn't happy, I wasn't scared, and I wasn't even sad. I just sat there and looked at the city like it belonged to someone else.

The taxi stopped on a steep street in front of a narrow building with old green paint on the door. I paid the driver with the euros I had changed at the airport, and he drove off and left me standing on the pavement with my suitcases.

A small older woman was waiting in the doorway. She had gray hair tied back tight and her arms crossed over her sweater.

"Madame Orion?" she asked.

I stopped for a second. I had given her my mother's maiden name on the phone without really thinking about it, because I couldn't make myself say Walsh. "Yes," I said. "That's me."

She looked me over from my head to my shoes, then turned and walked up the stairs without waiting for me. There was no elevator. I pulled my suitcases up one step at a time, my arms burned, and I was out of breath by the third floor. She waited at the top with her lips pressed together.

"Sixth floor," she said in careful English, and unlocked a door at the end of the hall.

The room was tiny. There was a narrow bed against one wall with a thin blue blanket on it, a small sink with a mirror, and a hot plate sitting on a wooden box. One window looked out over rooftops and chimneys.

"The bathroom is in the hall," she said. "Rent is due on the first. No guests, and no noise after ten."

"That's fine," I told her.

She handed me the key and left. I pushed my suitcases against the wall and sat down on the bed, and the old springs made a loud noise under me. The room was quiet, but I could hear a television somewhere below, and a child laughing, and a woman calling out in French.

I unpacked because I needed something to do with my hands. I had four sweaters, three pairs of jeans, and some underwear and socks that fit in one drawer. I put my mother's jewelry box on the windowsill and stood the photo of my parents against the mirror. They were smiling at the beach, my father squinting at the sun and my mother laughing at something outside the picture.

I looked at them for a long time and waited to cry, but the tears didn't come.

Later I went down to the shop on the corner and bought bread and cheese. I ate standing at the window because there was nowhere else to stand, and I chewed and swallowed without tasting anything.

The afternoon turned into evening, and lights came on in the windows across the courtyard. I watched a man stir a pot while a woman set the table. Two small children ran around a couch. I felt even emptier than before, because everyone over there had somebody and I had nobody.

When it was fully dark I washed my face at the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were hollow, my lips were dry, and I looked much older than twenty two.

I took the bottle of pills out of my bag, the one Claudia had pushed into my hands at the airport. She had told me to take one every night until I felt stronger. I shook the bottle and listened to the pills rattle inside, and my hand tipped one into my palm.

Then I stopped.

I thought about the hospital and how foggy my head had been every time I tried to ask a question. I thought about how easily I had stopped asking, and how fast I had agreed to leave everything behind. I thought about Claudia at the airport, smiling too wide and waving too happily, like she was glad to see me go.

I put the pill back in the bottle. Then I opened the bottle again, turned on the tap, and poured all the pills into the sink. I watched them roll across the white bowl and wash down the drain until none were left.

The room felt very quiet after I turned off the water. I lay down on the bed in my clothes and pulled the thin blanket up to my chin. I stared at the cracks in the ceiling while the lights across the courtyard went off one by one.

For the first time in weeks my head felt clear. My thoughts were slow, but they were mine.

Then I heard it.

It wasn't in the room or in the building. It was inside my head, so clear that my whole body jumped.

A cry.

Small and sharp and alive. It was the same cry I heard in the delivery room, before anyone told me she was gone. It was louder now than it had ever been, with no medicine to blur it, and I pressed both hands over my mouth and shook in the dark while it rang in my ears.

She had been alive.

I knew it the same way I knew my own name.