Emerging

It started, as these things sometimes do, with a phone call from Canada.

“What do you think,” my husband, who was slightly drunk, said over FaceTime, “of packing up the house and going on the road for a while?”

I glanced down at the sleepy baby, his giant melon head long since having made my right arm go completely numb.

“Sounds great, I can be packed before you get home!” I replied, only sort of kidding. It wasn’t a large house, but it would definitely take more than a day to empty it.

That was how I found myself in possession a plane ticket, a suitcase, a passport, and a toddler cracked out on Dramamine. Which did not, despite the multiple cheerful warnings emblazoned across the yellow packaging, make him even the tiniest bit drowsy.

“Hello, my name is Kendra. This is Malcolm, I apologize in advance for the next 11 hours,” I told the woman seated next to me.

“Och, nae bother!” the woman next to me replied, her Irish lilt about to get thicker with the consumption of the itty-bitty bottle of Jameson’s that she fished from her purse. It was the first of many. “I have t’ir’teen wee grandies at home in Galway.”

Then the wee baby Malcolm popped out his binky and barfed all over himself. And me. The man seated on the other side of us began to dry heave. The flight attendant produced about ten thousand cocktail napkins. They were, as you might imagine, useless.

It is, to this day, a matter of great personal pride that while I considered it, I did not open any of the emergency exits and chuck the little…darling…out of the plane somewhere over the Atlantic. I did take every single offered bottle of complimentary alcohol. Each tiny whiskey a bribe to Katrin, who, good to her word, was in no way bothered by a ginger demon who slept not a wink, drank roughly double his body weight in milk, and threw his precious CuddlePup on the ground approximately every five million times, howling at the betrayal of gravity each time.

By the time we navigated Heathrow airport and boarded an AirFrance flight to Charles De Gaulle airport, I was somewhere past harried and rounding the bend toward a dramatic profile on the tv show Snapped. It is worth noting that the only French that I spoke at the time was a dialogue I had memorized in the seventh grade. As it turns out, inquiring about the location of the library is not as helpfully applied at an airport as one might think.

It is further worth noting that Charles De Gaulle airport deserves every bit of hate that it gets.

We landed at terminal 2. There were, and I am only slightly exaggerating, SEVEN terminal 2’s. One of which was in no way connected to the rest. Four of which were across a service road from the others. None of which are helpfully labeled. Having not slept in roughly 36 hours and toting a baby who was, reasonably, super done with the whole adventure, I managed to find an open wifi signal and text my husband.

And because this is how things go, there was a bomb threat, a service worker strike, and it was, because it always is, a holiday of some sort. I was in tears when my husband managed to locate us. The baby screamed. People stared. I regretted every life decision that had brought me to that hellscape of shiny linoleum.

But my husband was a rock star. He scooped up his mini-me, cheerfully grabbed the handle of the suitcase, and apologized to everyone we passed saying “Désolé! Mon petite fils est très fatigué!” I tried not to make eye contact. The baby waved goodbye to each departing plane. There were a lot of planes.

Finally, at last, we boarded the only RER in service at the time. Possibly in the entire city. Facing sideways, I tried my best to take in every sight we passed without vomiting.

Then, nervously, my husband cleared his throat.

“Uh, so, when I arrived yesterday, there was, uh, a bomb threat? No worries, it was just a lost piece of luggage. I think. So, I took a cab to the flat. I think I know how to get us there,” he said. “Pretty sure. Yeah, I think this will take us to the right place.”

Now, when I think of this adventure, I hear Morgan Freeman's voice narrating, saying: It did not.

“OK, I think this is the right exit.”

Morgan Freeman again would like to assure you that it was not. At all.

But that was where the miracle happened.

38 hours after boarding a plane in Phoenix, I emerged, blinking, from the depth of the Metro.

And there, in front of me, was Notre Dame de Paris. And she was beautiful. For 800 years, on the banks of the Seine, she had waited. For me. Okay, perhaps not exclusively for me. But it didn’t matter. In that moment, smelling vaguely of vomit and exhausted, the world was perfect.

During the weeks after and the years that have followed, I have gone out of my way to walk out of that Metro stop every opportunity that I could, just to see her glowing in the rising sun like the promise of new life. As beautiful each time as she was that first time. She, like me, has gotten older, developed new scars, and seen more things, not all of them good. But still, when I emerge from the Metro, for just a moment, every single time, the world is perfect once again.