Free August in Paris by Marion Winik Page B

children, I changed my tune.
    On the way home from dinner, 17-year-old Emma and 15-year-old Vince had jumped off the subway at the nasty Chatelet stop to find a club Emma had read about on the Internet. Had we actually given permission for this? "Be back by midnight!" I called.
    Now, long past that time, I was standing outside our borrowed apartment, freaking the hell out. The rue de la Tombe-Issoire was as silent and motionless as a hyperrealist painting, every shuttered pastry shop, every glowing streetlamp, every parked scooter pulsing with ominous portent. On the corner, the red digital marquee of a closed-up drugstore ticked off the minutes. 2:11. 2:12.
    At what point should I wake my husband, Crispin? When would we have to call his ex-wife in Baltimore and tell her we had lost her daughter? When to go to the police? I gingerly began to imagine what could have gone wrong. They weren't dead, of that I was fairly certain, but they could be with bad people. Bad people with cheap vodka and bad drugs. Bad people in bad apartments with no furniture, with smelly mattresses and uncircumcised penises, with larcenous hearts and false assurances. 
    Vince was tall and sort of imposing-looking, but he was only 15. Emma was small and vulnerable and, though less reckless than Vince, no wizard of circumspection. But part of my panic that night was that I assumed the two of them wouldn't do this on purpose. Something had to have happened to them.
    At 3:21, a white police van pulled up right in front of me and three young officers, two male and one female, leapt out. Le Mod Squad. I rushed up to them shouting in broken French. “Les enfants! Ils sont disparus!”
    They looked at me like I was nuts and said to go the main police station and file a missing persons report. Then they went into the alley with flashlights, executed “la mission,” rushed back to the car, and sped away.
    Practicing for the post-August crime rush, perhaps.
    Around 4:00, I went inside to pee. "Are they not back yet?" my mother-in-law, Joyce, whispered down from the loft. Now it turned out that both she and her friend Sallie had been awake all night. They had heard the phone ring at 1:15, when, thank God, we heard from Emma, calling from a pay phone to say that they had missed the last train. Her younger brother Sam answered the call; Emma hung up before I got there. I chided Sam about this, as if he could have prevented it, and the poor boy was beside himself. Until I stepmotherishly snapped, “Stop apologizing, for God’s sake!”
    While Sam drifted off at last, his tiny, white-haired grandmother was tiptoeing down the narrow wooden staircase in her bathrobe. Life is tough, people are weak, Marx was right—these tenets are the building blocks of my mother-in-law’s worldview. Much in the world does not pass her exacting muster. Lucky for me, when I met her for the first time, a couple of months into my relationship with her son, a 40-year-old woman in horrifically short cut-offs (that detail haunts me), floating into her living room like a Macy’s parade balloon of midlife romantic happiness, she took to me right away. Having been hated by my previous mother-in-law, I cherished my good fortune. In fact, this whole trip to Paris had its inception when I said something dreamy about wanting to spend some time there, and Joyce sighed, “I’ve never been. And now I’ll probably never go.”
    My own mother hadn’t been either, I realized. And though each of these elderly widows needed little help in most areas, it seemed Paris was my department. I had been several times, I speak a little French, I know a few people.
    If I had planned a trip for just the three of us…but this simple, civilized approach never crossed my mind. I never thought of leaving my husband, or the five kids we had between us, aged 5 to 17, or my best friend Sandye and her four-year-old, and now both of our mothers were coming, and