Welcome to the Ark - Softcover

April 15, 1999

PARIS (AP)-Fifteen-year-old Miranda Ellenby, known to the world through her mother's best-selling book, Phenom in the Family, has disappeared from an academic conference on language and culture where she was to present a paper. She is the youngest person ever to be asked to participate in the elite international gathering. Ellenby was last seen by a doorman at her hotel yesterday when she left "for a walk" shortly after dawn. "We were to meet for breakfast," said Dr. Miriam Freidenberg, her companion and adviser at Harvard, where Ellenby is pursuing a doctorate in Romance languages and literature, "but she never appeared." French police have been joined in their investigation by Interpol. The girl's distraught father, Dr. Walter Ellenby, who has built a multimillion-dollar business aimed at teaching parents how to create geniuses, arrived in Paris this morning to join the search.

April 15, 1999

Miranda

IN THE LATE-AFTERNOON SUN, the girl in blue jeans and sneakers and a flowered warm-up jacket, her hair pushed up into a gold beret, was very still. Leaning over the bridge rail, she watched a bateau-mouche churn by beneath, stirring the dark water as it passed. She kept her head turned away from the figures moving on the busy sidewalk behind her. Among the stories of border conflicts and terrorist bombings, the morning papers in three languages had been full of her disappearance, her publicity photo from the conference brochure smiling out from the pages.

She sighed and reached into her jacket pocket to pull out an orange. It was the last remnant of the food she had bought yesterday--cheese, bread, fruit, pastries, sparkling water. The rest she had consumed in the shabby pension in Montmartre where she had spent the night. The concierge had asked no questions, accepting her accent, the way nearly everyone did, as Parisian, with a shadow of something that hinted, perhaps, of a country childhood.

She had not meant to run away. She had meant only to take a walk, as she had told the grandfatherly doorman who fussed about the dangers of the city and the chill of the misty morning air. But when it was time to go back she had found she couldn't. Something drew her on, farther and farther from the hotel, finally to have breakfast alone at a sidewalk café, watching people as the city woke up and went about its business. And then on again, first along the Seine, then into side streets, watching the people. Always watching the people. The woman pushing a baby carriage, the lovers leaning against a tree in a tiny park, their arms twined around each other. The old men on a bench, arguing in a dialect she could barely understand, one gesturing with his cigar, the other with a folded newspaper.

She had a sense that she was looking for something, something all those other people seemed to have. She didn't even know for certain what it was, only that in spite of speaking their language, the thing that should have made her one of them, she didn't have it. Had never had it.

Now she began peeling the orange, dropping the first bit of peel into the river below and watching the spot of color bob sideways in the fading wake, dipping and turning as it moved toward the line of foam and debris along the muddy bank beneath the bridge. The rest of the peel she put into her pocket. As she separated the segments, she thought about last night, the first night of her life when no one, not Mother or Daddy, not Miriam, not Dr. James, had been with her, or even known where she was. The first night of her life she had ever been truly alone.

She had sat by the window of the little room with the stained ceiling, staring out over the rooftops of Paris, silvered by moonlight. By morning she had made a decision. She would go back, of course. About that she had no choice. She would not explain her leaving -- how could she when she didn't fully understand it herself? She would greet their questions with silence and let them invent their own stories. This evening she would present her paper on schedule. And when the conference ended she would fly home with Miriam.

But she would not continue the life her mother and father had planned for her.

When Miranda had finished the orange, her hands and mouth sticky with the juice, she turned toward the street and began to walk back to the hotel, keeping her head down, her eyes on her feet. As she walked, unnoticed among the hurrying people, even by the soldiers patrolling with their guns slung over their backs, she thought about what she had understood in the long, drifting quiet of the moonlit night. She had started learning languages all those years ago in a desperate search for her native tongue. She had never found it. She suspected now she never would.