But today was his birthday. He was twenty years old, a grown-up, and, as Professor Piot said, sometimes one has to stick up for the facts.
“The dates don’t work, Dad,” Neil said. “You were, like, two when she left the States, right? Even if you had seen her, you couldn’t have remembered it.” He’d never said anything quite like that to his father before, and he was a little impressed with himself.
“That’s not true—at two or three years old, kids remember. There are studies—”
“But you’re the only one who thinks it could have happened,” Neil said. “Everyone else says she never came back.”
“Well, son, sometimes everyone gets it wrong,” his father said, and the way he said it made Neil pretty sure that they weren’t just talking about Inga Beart and whether she’d made a secret and totally unrecorded visit to Nan and Pop’s ranch that Nan and Pop and everyone else had managed to forget.
There was another long silence on the phone. Neil stepped ankle-deep into a puddle hidden under dead leaves and almost forgot to look right instead of left as he crossed Oxford Street, accidentally letting himself remember how his father had said believe me that day back in eighth grade when Neil had come right out and asked him about Becca Gallegos. He had called Neil son then too, as in Son, you’ve just got to believe me.
“Okay, well, whatever, Dad,” Neil said, which came out sounding less nice than he’d intended. His phone beeped to say he was getting another call. He said, “Oops, just a second,” and when he tried to put his father on hold he accidentally hung up on him. It turned out it wasn’t another call, just a text telling him his credit was low. Neil would have called his father back, except that he didn’t have enough for an international number. He could have stopped on the way to class to buy more minutes, but he didn’t feel like it; one shoe was soaked through and now his foot was freezing. Neil kept expecting his father to call back and say he was sorry he hadn’t said happy birthday, but he never did, and a week or so later Neil got a birthday card and a check in the mail.
But that was back in January. Now it was June, and after Magdute’s call, Neil spent the rest of Professor Piot’s lecture feeling seriously bad about not having sent his dad her mother’s Christmas package. So much time had passed, his father had probably forgotten all about their last conversation. When he got the package he might not even think to ask about Neil’s trip to Swindon, and if he did, Neil could always lie and say that Magdute was living with friends. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. The shopping bag Magdute had given him was in his suitcase, along with the jacket and dress pants he’d brought to Paris but hadn’t had any reason to unpack. When he got home from class he put the presents in his backpack, planning to mail them on his way home from the archives that afternoon. He figured that if he left a little early, he could get to the post office at H?tel de Ville before it closed, and next to it was a kiosk with flowers. If he could find some that hadn’t quite bloomed and if he remembered to put them in a vase, they would still be fresh enough to give to Magdute the next morning at the station.
But that afternoon Neil didn’t end up leaving the archives until quarter to six, which meant that the post office and the flower kiosk would be closed. He’d requested some documents from the abbey of Saint-Jean-d’Angély, where medieval pilgrims on their way to Spain had stopped to see the head of John the Baptist. A choir of a hundred monks was said to have surrounded the relic, singing to it day and night. Neil thought it said something useful about the medieval worldview that so many sleepless voices had been raised perpetually in praise of a decapitated head, and he was trying to figure out if it had been the actual head with flesh still attached or just the skull—the relic itself went missing during the wars of religion in 1500s—when he found a thin bundle of vellum that contained what seemed to be an account written in the thirteenth century by a monk from Rouen who was making the Saint Jacques pilgrimage to Spain.
Neil was interested to see if the monk mentioned stopping at the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie on his way through Paris. At the end of the document was what Professor Piot called a colophon, a description of the manuscript that had been added centuries later by an abbey historian, and Neil started his translation there. If what the colophon said was true and it really was a first-person account of the pilgrimage, it could be a real discovery. A famous guide to the Saint Jacques pilgrimage had been written in the twelfth century, and in the fourteenth century a number of wealthy or important pilgrims had recorded their impressions, but there was a gap in information from the thirteenth century, when the roads were particularly dangerous and church authorities began to be concerned about so many penitents and adventurers roaming the continent. Neil thought, with a quick silvery shiver, that just possibly he had come across something new in the dusty carton of records from Saint-Jean-d’Angély.
But before he’d had a chance to look past the spidery Latin of the abbey historian to the monk’s own words, it was far past the time he should have been leaving if he was going to make it to the post office, and the archives staff were beginning to turn out the lights. He was the last in line to return the documents to the stern men in gray smocks at the requests counter. He tried to explain that they could just set the Saint-Jean-d’Angély papers aside somewhere, that he would be back first thing in the morning and there was no need to send them back down into the recesses of the National Archives, which Neil of course had never seen, but which he imagined to be the very innards of Paris itself, filled not only with crumbling cartons bound with strings, but with abandoned metro cars and extra guillotines, statues of various Napoleons, flying buttresses, and spare dauphins.
One of the men in the smocks listened to Neil’s explanation, then told him that, in fact, he would have to officially request the documents all over again. The box disappeared below the counter. He would have to fill out the yellow form and the green form and get the stamp from the chief archivist again if he was ever going to find out if the monk from Rouen had stopped in Paris at the old church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie.