The Canterbury Sisters

by Kim Wright

  It was not until hours later, when I was in bed with the lights off and almost asleep, that I even remembered Ned’s letter.

  I turned on the bedside light, to the dismay of the dozing Freddy, got the letter from my coat, put on my reading glasses, climbed back into bed, and ripped open the envelope. Three pages, typed and single-spaced, followed by a fourth one containing numbers. An estimate of how much it would cost one of us to buy the other out of our vacation cottage in Cape May.

  And that’s how I learn what you’ve undoubtedly already figured out.

  That I am being dumped.

  THE GIRL Ned is leaving me for is named Renee Randolph. He wants to make sure I know the facts right up front. He isn’t going to make excuses or pretend she doesn’t exist. He respects me too much to go through all the standard stuff about us growing apart or how it isn’t me, it’s him. He wants, he says, “no artifice between us.” We are far too good friends for that.

  They met in a gym, he explains, and then adds that this fact will probably amuse me. I can’t imagine why, until I remember that he and I met in a gym, or at least the workout room of a hotel, each of us on side-by-side treadmills. And at that point I begin to skim. I can’t seem to keep reading from left to right in any sensible fashion—I hold the paper in front of me and words and phrases swarm up from the page one by one, like a thousand little stings.

  This woman, this Renee, it would seem she has a bad husband. Worse, she has a bad foreign husband. He comes from one of those countries where they divorce you for having only daughters and then they try to kidnap the daughters. She lives in fear, he writes, never knowing when this man will appear, or send some sort of heavily armed emissary on his behalf. The teachers at her children’s school have been instructed not to let the girls leave the campus with anyone but Renee.

  Yes, she’s got a bad husband and then she trumps that by being sick. Something is wrong with her. She has some unpronounceable disease—more of a syndrome, really, the sort of thing that’s tricky to diagnose, the sort of thing they decide you must have when you don’t seem to have anything else. But this syndrome, this illness, it may require him to give her . . . I don’t know, something. Something vital. A cornea, his bone marrow, access to his most excellent health insurance. My heart.

  She needs me. The words float up from the page, accompanied by their silent echo, and you don’t.

  He’s right, in a way. Since we met six years ago, each of us on a business trip, walking side by side on those treadmills, staring up at CNN, Ned and I have had a partnership, a friendship sweetened by an almost epic sexual compatibility. I liked it and I thought he did too. The way we left each other alone through the week to work, but how on vacations we would meet in so many interesting places—Napa, Austin, Miami, Montreal, Reykjavík, London, Key West, Telluride, and Rome.

  When we bought the cottage in Cape May we put sunflowers on the table and a hand-braided rug on the floor. Our furniture was old, good wood but old, and we painted each piece burgundy or moss green or Dutch blue. Van Gogh colors, that’s what Ned called them. It was a perfect little world, made complete by a couple of carefully planned imperfections, the kind you throw in just to make it clear that you aren’t, you know, Those Kind of People. Each Sunday morning we would walk down to the corner café for two copies of the New York Times so that we could sit at our table, racing each other through the crossword. We were well matched. Sometimes he won, sometimes I did.

  Was I in love? I think I was. I must have been. It was a very modern sort of romance, or at least that’s what I told myself as I traveled back and forth, always in some car or train or airport. And we laughed . . . dear God, Ned and I laughed all the time.

  And when you laugh that much, when you finish every puzzle at precisely the same time, when you look up across the painted table and your eyes lock in satisfaction . . . it has to mean something, doesn’t it?

  I’m sure I loved him on the weekend that we bought Lorenzo. Lorenzo was a lobster. We got him from one of those roadside places where the signs read “FRESH” and they have a bunch of hand-drawn pictures of smiling seafood. He was packed in ice and Styrofoam, his claws bound shut with big rubber bands, and I had begun to feel regret over the whole idea before we’d even managed to pull Ned’s Lexus back on the road.

  “Do you think it can breathe in there?” I’d asked, and Ned had said, “Lobsters don’t breathe.”

  Well, that’s ridiculous. Everything breathes, in one way or another. But I didn’t say anything and after a mile or two Ned said, “If he needs anything, it would probably be water.”

  Of course we were silly to be so concerned about the welfare of a creature that was hours from its execution, but I knew even then that we’d never bring ourselves to boil Lorenzo. You can’t boil something you’ve named. We went ahead and made several more roadside stops, collecting our lettuce and tomatoes and lemon and herbs and sourdough bread, and by the time we pulled into the driveway of the cottage, Ned had already taken to talking to the lobster, pointing out landmarks we passed along the way, as if Lorenzo were a weekend guest. We made the salad and opened the wine and even set the big pot of water on the stove to boil, but it was a lost cause. We ended up snipping Lorenzo free from his bands and tossing him into the bay.

  “You know,” Ned said, raising his wineglass in salute as Lorenzo drifted out to sea, “we need to stop thinking of this place as an investment and start thinking of it as a home.” The next weekend we went out and bought Freddy.

  Now he says that he wishes me the best, but the best is what I thought we had. No, “the very best,” that’s what he writes. That he wishes me “the very best of everything.” According to him, I deserve nothing less.

  Is he telling me the laughter didn’t matter? Nor the friendship, nor the sex? We worked crosswords together, for God’s sake. We had a lobster and a dog. He’s the only man I ever dated that my mother liked.

  But evidently that’s all out the window now that he has found his wounded bird. Now that he has stooped to rescue her, now that she is fluttering in his hand. And he has written to inform me that he has never been happier.

  I think, he writes with a killing simplicity, that she may be The One.

  Yes, he capitalizes it, lest I miss the point. The. One.

  I LIE there in the dark for hours, my heart pounding, my legs numb. He will call me on Monday, the letter says. We have many things to discuss, but he didn’t want to drop them on me unawares. That’s why he has written in advance, to give me time to absorb the news. Which, of course, is utter crap. He sent the letter because he didn’t want to hear me wail or cry or attack him with questions. When did this happen? How long has he known her? Were there times when he came from her bed to mine, and did she thus win him slowly, in tiny incremental ways, or was her victory over me accomplished in one swift stroke? And which answer would be harder to accept?

  It’s almost light when I emerge from my bed. I open another bottle of the Syrah, slosh some in a juice glass, and go to my desk to turn on the computer. For a minute I fight the urge to google the girl, to learn all about Renee Randolph, but I stop myself. She is undoubtedly beautiful. Beautiful and tragic is such an appealing combination, the natural stuff of romances, while average-looking and tragic is just . . . average-looking and tragic. Certainly not compelling enough to drive a man to upend a life as pleasant and convenient as the one Ned and I shared. So she must be beautiful. Nothing else would make sense.

  I take a long, slow draw of the wine and consider the search line where I’ve typed REN. What could Google possibly tell me about this woman that I would find comforting? If she is more accomplished than me, that will sting . . . but what if she’s less accomplished? Somehow that would be even worse. Finally I delete REN and enter PILGRIMAGES TO CANTERBURY instead.

  What I’m thrown into, of course, are sites devoted to literature and history. Articles about Chaucer and Becket
and Canterbury’s reputation for miracles. I sit back in annoyance as the scholarly articles roll by and while I’m waiting, my eye falls on a copy of my alumni magazine, which has languished for God knows how long on my desk. In the back they always list guided tours and I’ve noticed them before, in a passing sort of way. I’ve always thought it would be nice to have a professor lead your group through museums, battlefields, and palaces. To have someone there to point out the important things. It’s easy to imagine how these trips would be appealing for lonely single women, those sad souls who have reached middle age with enough money to travel but no one to travel with.

  I scan the catalog by the glowing blue light of the computer screen and soon enough, there it is: the name of an art professor who escorts both groups and individuals through southern England. She looks like just what I need—pale, serious, academic, disinclined to asking personal questions. I send her a quick email, telling her I need to walk the Canterbury Trail ASAP, top to bottom, from London to the steps of the Cathedral. And then I google how to transport ashes on an international flight.

  Evidently the dead are a sizable segment of the travel industry, because the answer pops right up. The urn must be carried onto the plane, not packed in a suitcase. It must be scanned and taken through security and I will need a note from the crematorium confirming that the contents are human remains and not something like plutonium. I must be prepared for the fact that security can open the urn at any time if they wish, that small bits of my mother might fly out onto the airport carpet or dirty the hands of a TSA agent. Or perhaps I might choose to eschew the urn altogether, the site suggests, with a gentle but pointed hint. Transfer the ashes to something less heavy and likely to trigger the scanning machine. Like, for example, a ziplock bag.

  I always meant to take my mother to Europe, but my travel was so often for business or I was meeting Ned in some romantic place. And of course she was busy too, fostering misunderstood pit bulls, walking for Amnesty International, framing houses with Habitat . . . Then she got sick. We let all our chances pass, Diana and I, and now at last she’s coming with me, but she’s coming in my carry-on bag. I put the wine down, thinking that it’s bitter, but I know I’m being unfair. I’ve been drinking while thinking of something else, which is the cardinal sin of wine tasting, for everyone knows how easily emotions can trickle from the mind to the tongue. Has the wine gone bitter, or have I?

  The sun is up. I rise and leave my desk, the juice glass still in my hand. I pour the remains of the Syrah into the kitchen sink and look down at the dark-red stain. In my email I told the professor that I could be in London as early as Sunday and I would like a private tour. It probably costs a fortune to hire a personal guide, but all I can think is that I need to be gone, long gone, before Ned calls to apologize and explain again about how he just couldn’t help himself, how no man can resist a woman in need. The desire to escape feels huge within me. In fact, if I don’t get out of here right now, I’m not sure what will happen.

  I pick up my phone and try again. “Siri,” I say. “What’s the meaning of life?”

  A pause and then the answer: I Kant answer that. Ha ha.

  Ha ha. She’s quite the hoot, that Siri.

  Two

  They did a study once on why so many people cry in airplanes—whether it’s the silence, the isolation, or perhaps just some primordial fear of leaving terra firma.

  I think it’s because airplanes are the closest most of us come to enforced meditation. On the runway, in that small, trembling world between here and there, we have nothing to do but sit with our thoughts. Of course, once the plane is airborne, there are a thousand things to preoccupy us—movies, Kindles, games, puzzles, drinks, that slim but seductive possibility that our seatmate could turn out to be our soul mate. But during takeoff and landing, we’re on our own. We cannot avoid the vast lonely prairies that exist inside our own heads.

  At first, it seems luck is with me on the flight. No one is sitting in the aisle seat, so I’m able to stretch out and sleep. We land early; so early, in fact, that Heathrow doesn’t have an empty gate ready for us. While we wait for an opening, I pull out my phone and check my messages. Most of them are predictable—work and ads and notifications from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But one of them is from the college professor I’ve hired as my guide, and the subject line reads Slight change of plans.

  Slight change of plans? That’s not good. In my experience, there’s no such thing.

  I look out the airplane window at the rain-washed tarmac, a tremor of anxiety working its way up my spine. Even the brief time I spent researching this trip on my computer taught me that walking the Canterbury Trail isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds. It’s more a matter of walking what’s left of the Canterbury Trail. The original pilgrim route followed an even more ancient Roman path, but now this old and holy road has been broken by the demands of modern life. The trail is slashed in several places by a major highway and the pieces left intact weave largely across private land, through farms and orchards and even the backyards of rural homes. Since the trail belongs to the National Trust, the owners of the land knew they must cede the route when they bought the property. Presumably they are used to Americans with backpacks and blisters and broken hearts stomping past them in the mist. But Google warns that following the path is tricky. The markers are few and subtly placed, making it nearly impossible to tell where the trail breaks off and takes up again.

  Bottom line, you need a guide.

  But it would seem I’ve already managed to lose mine. She is emailing me from a gurney in a hospital ward, where she lies awaiting an emergency appendectomy.

  “Can you believe it?” she writes.

  No, I can’t believe it. No one has an appendectomy anymore. She may as well be telling me she’s succumbed to bubonic plague. But then, in suspiciously complete and grammatical prose for a woman who is allegedly in the grip of agony, she offers me a solution. One of her fellow teachers at the university, by luck, is leading an organized tour to Canterbury that will be departing London this very afternoon. A classics professor, highly regarded in her field, quite young, almost a prodigy. And she assures me that I needn’t worry that I am crashing someone’s party. The women in the group come from all over America and have booked their trip through an outfit called Broads Abroad, which caters to the solo female traveler.

  The solo female traveler. I guess that’s what I am now.

  “It’s the perfect solution,” the professor writes, but I’m not convinced. I don’t want to talk while I walk. I don’t want to bond with other women, to tell them my troubles, which, while agonizing, are also—let’s face it—pretty clichéd. And once I’ve been forced to tell them my stories, politeness demands I must listen to theirs and I bet they all have dead mothers and bad boyfriends too. My phone has adjusted to the local time, which is not quite seven a.m. I gaze out into the ugly foreign morning and consider my options.

  Maybe I should just take the train to Canterbury. Dump Mom and get the hell back to Heathrow, and with any luck I could be on a return flight to Philly tonight. It wouldn’t be a true pilgrimage, not in the step-by-step sense, but it would fulfill my promise. And that’s what this is about, isn’t it? Putting the period at the end of a sentence. Hitting TAB and starting a new paragraph in my life. Saying goodbye. Ridding myself of ghosts. There is absolutely no reason to make things harder than they have to be.

  The plane at last begins to move toward an open gate. I look down at the message in my hand.

  The Broads Abroad. Jesus. The name doesn’t sound promising.

  BY THE time I take the Heathrow Express into the city, the rain has stopped and the morning has turned pink and gold. Oil-slick puddles shimmer like Monets on the sidewalks and the air feels fresh. I emerge from Paddington Station and head in the direction that my phone assures me is dead east, the autumn leaves crunching beneath my boots as I walk. London moves at a different
pace than American cities, I think, stopping on a street corner to change hands on my suitcase. The bustle is more muted. The tempo more civilized and humane. I don’t like it.

  How long has it been since I’ve eaten? Too long to remember, which isn’t good, so I dip into the nearest café. Order the “standard” without thinking and am greeted with the eternally confounding British breakfast of baked beans, mushrooms, and tomatoes. But I realize I’m hungry once I smell it, perhaps truly hungry for the first time in days. As I work my way through the plate of food, I read the email from the professor once again, this time in a calmer state of mind.

  The Broads Abroad are meeting at the George Inn for luncheon, she writes. It’s near the site of the Tabard Inn where Chaucer and his pilgrims began their journey five hundred years ago, but the Tabard burned somewhere along the way in some sort of brothel fire. The George is of the same ilk and era and thus a suitable spot to inaugurate a pilgrimage. Those are the precise words she uses—“ilk,” “era,” “inaugurate” and “pilgrimage”—and I wonder again that a woman on the brink of surgery would take the time to write such a wordy and persuasive note. It is a British trait, evidently, this chipperness in the face of adversity, this compulsion to wax about medieval history while bent double in pain.

  Take the tube to London Bridge Station, she advises, and you’ll find the George no more than a ten-minute walk away. I eat my beans and look at a map I grabbed on the train. It’s a considerable distance from Paddington to London Bridge, but then again I have hours to kill and after being cooped up on the plane, a long walk might do me good. I don’t intend to actually join the group, of course. At least not without a little reconnaissance. She says there are eight women on the tour, counting the guide, and a party of that size should be easy to spot. I decide I will observe them from a suitable distance and try to gauge how annoying they are before I make my decision. If they seem okay, I will approach them. If not, I can catch the train from London Bridge to Canterbury and scatter my mother alone.