Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  Slipping one of her arms behind her back, in the space between it and George’s chest, she thought for the first time that even if being married meant that she would spend every day from here forward watching George grow older (as he would watch her), then she was extremely lucky that the two of them had known each other when they were young. No matter how they changed from here on, they would still have that between them. She’d be able to see behind the bags under George’s eyes and find that spark of still-twenty because she’d seen it before. They could always save that for each other.

  Gingerly, she unhooked the top of her bikini and let the straps fall down. George’s hands instinctively rose to cover her up, but she gently nudged them higher to her shoulders. In her whole life she’d never been naked in public. There were so many first times left to come.

  • • •

  That evening they took a cab into Cannes to dine at the famous La Palme d’Or, and between Michelin-starred courses, they strategized the next day’s hike. On the way, Sara had contacted their tour operators and made arrangements. The group they’d originally planned to hike with wouldn’t start out until the end of the week, and there was nothing scheduled for the upcoming day. But they could make their own way to the Chalet Castellane and pick up some basic supplies and a map of the national preserve. They spent the entire meal talking about the things they expected to see on the hike, getting more excited with each delicious course and each paired wine.

  They were just coming to the last of three desserts when George looked up and noticed someone familiar sitting across the restaurant from them. “It’s Santiago!” he said, a little too loudly. “From ¡Vámonos, Muchachos!”

  Sara squinted and saw George was right. “Wow. He looks much handsomer in person.”

  “We should say hello,” he said. “Just that we’re fans. You know?”

  “Do you know his name? You can’t go over there unless you know his real name.”

  “It’s Victor. Something.”

  And before she could stop him, George was crossing the room with almost frightening speed. She watched, afraid that he would say or do something very drunk and they’d be asked to leave. But to her surprise, with each step, she could see him pulling himself back together. There was her old George! The consummate and confident host. Had he been capable of this all this time? Santiago—Victor—seemed polite and friendly, not at all put out by the intrusion. He gestured to the gorgeous woman next to him, introducing her to George, who in turn, pointed back at Sara, who waved excitedly in their direction. They spoke for a minute or two, and George shook his hand again and returned to the table.

  “Well?” she squealed. “What did he say?”

  George stared at his dessert plate and played with his fork. “He said the show’s over. He’s here celebrating with his wife.”

  “George! What a great story! I can’t—”

  And she had been about to say she couldn’t wait to tell everyone, when she remembered that the only someone who cared besides them was back at the hotel in an urn. Which explained the gloomy look she now saw on George’s face.

  “The last episode aired in Mexico a week ago. It won’t air in America until next year.”

  She tried to cheer him up. “Well, did he tell you what happens? How does it end?”

  “Oh, yeah. He gets Renata, and there’s a big wedding.”

  Sara clutched her heart. “I knew it!”

  Neither of them said anything for a minute, and finally Sara said, “Well, I can’t wait to watch it!”

  George took her hand. “Let’s get the check. Big day tomorrow.”

  Leaving the restaurant, both of them waved cheerfully at Santiago’s table, and then they were quiet all the way back to the hotel, just watching the city lights going by and playing with each other’s hands. They were both so full and tired that they went straight to bed. Sara fell asleep almost right away, but George lay awake. He couldn’t quite figure out why it made him so sad to know the show was over. Renata and Santiago would be together, married, out there in TV land, forever. It was stupid. Just fucking television. But it bothered him that Irene, who had watched every episode from the beginning, would never know the ending.

  • • •

  They left in the morning with everything mapped out: where to find the Styx (the local name for a series of lovely natural bathing pools), as well as spots suitable for kayaking, fly-fishing, or rock climbing if they were interested. They had a tight schedule to keep if they were to get back to their hotel in Antibes by dark and then travel up the coast to Nice as planned. They’d go nine miles through the rocks along the turquoise riverbank to reach Point Sublime, an elevated spot at the far end of the canyon that offered breathtaking views of sheer cliffs and the pristine water, with miles of untouched woodland all around—the perfect spot to scatter Irene’s ashes. Carried off by the mountain winds, they would dissipate into a scene of natural and epic beauty that, they agreed, would be beautifully fitting.

  The skies were clear the next morning after they finished provisioning at the château. The owner, Raif, a Flemish man in loose overalls, said bad weather was expected overnight, lasting probably the rest of the week, so it was good they’d set out early. George couldn’t help but feel that this was, in some way, fate. The moment he stepped out there into the fresh air, he felt young again, as if he were still discovering what his body could do. When was the last time he’d worn hiking boots? He’d been a Boy Scout once upon a time, out there in the Senecaville Lake campground. It all came back to him, during the first two hours of the hike. Cutting up worms for a day of failed ice fishing. Canteen at his hip. Flimsy little compass in one hand, a nice hiking stick in the other. Only now instead of his father he had Sara at his side, with a bottle of Côtes de Thongue and an assortment of cheeses wrapped up in her pack for lunchtime. In his own pack he had a bottle of J&B from the hotel, which he thought he’d save to celebrate with after emptying the heavy urn he was carrying. The weight had hardly bothered him at first, but the pack felt heavier and heavier in the third hour. George looked forward to their return to the château, eight pounds lighter and warm with scotch.

  They were still creeping carefully down into the gorge, advancing toward the little curving line of water at the bottom. There were well-placed footholds in the rock and cables bolted in to grab for safety. For a while Sara was aware of the occasional white and red markings along the trail, but there were so many other hikers making the same trek that day that she hardly noticed when she stopped seeing other people ahead of or behind them. George had brought a map from the chalet, but they hadn’t needed to look at it even once. It was simple to follow the trail and the river, which got wider and more powerful, the closer they came. At first they’d been chilly, well shaded by the giant cliffs, but as the sun rose higher in the sky, it became very hot, very quickly. When in the fourth hour they came at last to a little pebble beach by the water’s edge, they decided they definitely deserved a break for lunch.

  George wanted to cool the wine down a little, so he undid one of his bootlaces and made a sort of noose around the neck of the bottle, tying the other end to a branch that had fallen by the bank. While they waited for the wine to cool, he and Sara strolled barefoot through the stream, letting the freezing water soothe their blisters. Light danced down through the leaves. It was like something out of a fairy tale—for the first time, George felt good about their choice for Irene’s final resting place. It had that same quality as the shores of Shelter Island. What had she called them? Mythic.

  “We never do things like this,” Sara said.

  “Back in Ithaca we used to go hiking all the time,” he replied.

  She remembered going hiking exactly once, for about fifteen minutes, before Jacob ran into a spiderweb on the trail and refused to continue. The farther they got from those times, the less she idealized them and the more George seemed to. He didn
’t remember how often they’d fought and argued.

  “The wine should be cold enough by now,” he said. They’d walked a lot farther than he’d intended. “I say we drink half now and save the rest for the next stop.”

  Sara agreed, and they turned to walk back to where they’d left the bottle cooling. After a few minutes she began to wonder how they’d gotten so far upstream, because they should be back at the pebble beach by now. George was sure it was just a little farther, so they kept going, but still there was no sign of it.

  “That’s crazy. How could we have missed it?” she asked.

  They decided to walk back a little ways and double-check. So they turned around, and now everything seemed different yet again from what they had seen before.

  “Did you see any kind of fork in the stream?” George asked for the eighth time.

  There was no sign of the beach, the wine bottle tied to the branch, or their backpacks, or Irene. Sara wasn’t especially worried, sure that if they didn’t find it soon, they were bound to find some other hikers who could point them on their way. But as the minutes ticked by, they saw no one and heard no one, and she became aware of something even more distressing.

  “It’s getting kind of dark.”

  “Kind of,” George agreed, just as they felt wet drops fall onto their faces. He looked up through the leaves above, thinking maybe this was just some mist or dew from the morning, dripping off of the treetops, but the powerful sound of rain in the distance was unmistakable, and soon it began to pour.

  “Let’s get over by that cliff.” George tried not to sound worried. “This will pass by us pretty quickly. You get all kinds of weird weather patterns in canyons. Lots of very fast changes in air pressure when you have altitudes like this.”

  Sara could hear thunder and tried to remember how to count the interval between thunder and lightning to see how far away it was. The trees were swaying wildly as the wind picked up. She couldn’t help but worry about their packs, and Irene, out there somewhere.

  They got their boots back on, though George moved a bit awkwardly with only one of his laces, and they hurried over to a rocky ledge. In an indentation deep enough to slide into and out of the rain, they got out of what clothes they could, shivering, and tried to wring everything out, their wet bodies pressing clumsily against each other in the narrow space. They made jokes to pass the time; they thought back to the dinner of the night before and lying out on the Riviera beach; they imagined what Jacob would say if he were with them. George could just see him, shouting lines from The Tempest or something.

  But the minutes worryingly ran into an hour, and one hour into two, and the rain only got more intense. They had no flashlights or phones, no blankets or shoes or food. George realized that his watch had stopped and he didn’t have his compass. He remembered Raif at the château assuring him that the bad weather wasn’t due until nighttime but was likely to last for a while. George prayed—that the rain would stop, that they would find their way back to the pebble beach where their things lay. He hadn’t prayed in a long time.

  Terrifyingly fast and brilliant lightning sparked blue-white down a tree and out along the branches. At first George thought the incredible crackling sound was the earth itself coming apart underneath their feet. By the time he had realized what had happened, it was over—just a burned acid smell in the air and darkness. Sara was scared that it was getting darker, and they were pretty soaked, so finally George agreed that they should move out along the bank of the stream. They went carefully, looking out for bushes, rocks, tree roots, and other hikers as they walked through the storm.

  The rain pounded around them like bullets; branches slammed their bodies from both sides; the wind twisted in all directions. At first George kept talking, trying to stay upbeat, but before long Sara couldn’t hear him. In fact, he couldn’t even hear himself, so they fell into a silence. It lasted a long time. Another hour, maybe more. They held hands so tightly that their knuckles began to ache, and their wet palms began wrinkling against each other, so that when they did have to briefly detach—to get a better grip on a rock or to push a branch out of the way—it felt like Velcro wrenching apart.

  Finally, the rain softened and slowed to a drip. George guessed it was now maybe late afternoon, but the clouds above the trees were still black and heavy. Sara knew they ought to keep searching while they had the chance, but beyond exhausted, she lay down in the first clear area and wondered how they’d survived.

  “We’re going to be fine,” George said. “The important thing is we’re not hurt.”

  Sara tried to take comfort in this, but to her the important thing seemed more to be that they were still very lost. She couldn’t imagine getting up now and starting to look for the trail. If they were missing for a long time, she imagined, it might be in the news. At least locally, back home—which meant 7News Boston now, not NBC 4 New York. She looked over at George, lying on the wet ground beside her, staring up at the edge of the great, gauzy sun, now beginning to beat through the clouds. She could tell it was soon going to be brutally hot. George looked completely shot. And she was sure he hadn’t the faintest clue where they were now.

  “For fuck’s sake,” she heard him saying. “Irene!”

  Sara looked over, in the half-hope that Irene was actually there, that she had appeared in the midst of all this madness to lead them out. But George was pointing not to some ghost but to his backpack. It was up ahead, half sticking out of a bush, nowhere near where they had left it. There was no pebble beach or stream anywhere nearby. Someone had found it and tried to walk off with it, then realized it was much too heavy and tossed it into the bush. George’s dry clothes, the liquor bottles, and all his other supplies were gone, but Irene, or her urn at any rate, was still there. Sara dug around in the pack and found two granola bars that had fallen to the bottom. They ate them without speaking. The thief had also—thank God—left behind the guidebook, the little gift shop compass and the very soggy map from the chalet. As she shook these carefully to dry them out, George smacked at the compass, which had gotten water inside and was now cloudy. Inside, the needle seemed to spin freely. He paced around as if he were looking for cell reception, then gave up and began studying the map.

  “Any idea where we’ve gotten to?” she asked.

  George laid a finger down on a small bend in the river marked “Bettes,” a little ways off the marked path. “This was where we left our stuff. On the pebbly beach. Then we walked this way a little while and came back along here . . .” He traced the path with his thumbnail.

  “What time is it?” Sara asked.

  “I have no idea. How long were we walking?”

  “We couldn’t have been going that long,” she repeated, looking again at the map.

  They peered around at the rocky cliffside, hoping to spot one of the red and white trail markers.

  “Let’s say at most we were walking around for an hour. Moving maybe two or three miles an hour, given the conditions?”

  As Sara watched, he cautiously spread his fingers out to measure three miles. Then he set his thumb down on the pebble beach and rotated his hand around this point. It was a huge area, filled with all kinds of strange squiggles and shapes that she couldn’t identify on the map key.

  “So . . . basically, we could be anywhere in here?” Sara said.

  “Basically.”

  George climbed up on some nearby rocks to get a better view, but he couldn’t make out any significant features. The sun had come out from the clouds between two barren cliffs along the horizon, but neither had any houses or roads that he could see—only some old, falling-down link fences along the white rock shores and the occasional cluster of sun-baked trash.

  “I think this way is the best option,” George said. “Where there’s litter, there’s bound to be a path, or people.”

  But there were no people, and there was no path. By the
third cliff, Sara was beginning to doubt they could even find their way back to the stream. The next set of rocks turned out to be an extension of the previous one, and still there were no signs of civilization.

  “I don’t understand,” she cried. “There were dozens of hikers out here with us this morning. Now nobody?”

  George took out the map again, and scrutinized it. “None of this adds up at all,” he shouted.

  He tried tracing little circles on the map representing the distance to the horizon, as far as the eye could see before the earth curved away. Wherever he saw a clump of rocks, he traced a circle, until it was covered with possibilities. He began to feel dizzy. They had not had their lunch and he could only assume their cheese, the wine, and Sara’s pack were all long gone.

  “Sara, what’s left in the canteen?” he shouted.

  “It’s about half full,” she said. “Goddammit. We should have refilled it at the stream.”

  George shook his head. “I think we’re cursed.” He was dying for a real drink. Usually by now he’d have had at least his first of the day, and this had been a far more stressful day than most. He kissed Sara on her sunburned forehead and continued studying the map.

  There was no key, and he wondered what any of it meant. The small purple triangles marked what he presumed were mountains: la Blache and Clau and Mandarom, with numbers next to them. 1725, 1549, 1667. At first he thought these were dates, but no, more likely altitudes. Only standing where they were, all the mountains loomed equally huge. And there were dozens of them! Some had no names at all, only numbers.

  “What are you doing?” Sara called from where she was resting.

  “This goddamn map doesn’t make sense! Nothing’s where it should be.”