I reached for my phone to put a stop to the insistent humming. It was still early, but I had a phone full of text messages from Lochlon, all liberally apologizing about last night. My head was foggy, but I was impossibly clear about one thing: Last night had nothing to do with me.
He didn’t want to run away with me; he just wanted to run away. It killed me to realize it, but it was the truth. He cheapened what we had with a last-ditch go of asking me to run away with him just to escape his own problems.
Screw him, I thought violently and cruelly.
There was one happy text from Elsbeth in response to last night’s email. “So glad you’re coming with us today. We’ll be leaving for the airport at precisely 8 A.M. No technology or no trip .”
I tossed my phone like a Frisbee to the foot of the bed and glanced at my stuffed backpack, pleased with myself for packing it in advance. In fact, I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of here. Eight A.M. couldn’t come fast enough.
My phone buzzed again, and I groaned aloud at its bleak persistence. I was actually welcoming this no-technology holiday.
“Come onto your terrace. Please,” the text read. I spewed out a rainbow of curses.
“Please don’t be there,” I begged uselessly, swallowing down my surging fury. “Please don’t be there. Please don’t be there,” I repeated.
I yanked the curtains out of the way and stepped out on the balcony barefoot. As if I had lowered myself into an icy lake, the cold from the tile jetted up my bare feet and surged upward until it reached my jaw, which plunged open in shock.
Like some screwed-up version of Romeo and Juliet, Lochlon was standing below my balcony on the street.
I shook my head at him furiously. “You have to get out of here,” I whisper-shouted as quietly as I could. “You’re going to get me fired. Is that what you want?”
Lochlon dug his hands in his coat pockets and looked up at me with big eyes.
“Please, Kika, come down. It won’t take but a few minutes, then I swear you’ll never hear from me again.” He looked and sounded sober, but like me, he was still in the same clothes as last night.
My nerves jangled in the chilled morning air as he kept talking and gushing apologies.
I put my finger to my lips, gesturing for him to be quiet. Then I stuck my finger into the air as if to say, Wait a minute.
Before I could really think about it, I ducked inside, yanked on my boots, and raced downstairs to the street.
“Lochlon!” I spat when I got close enough. Why won’t he just go away?
“I am leaving for a vacation with the Darlings soon. You have to leave right now.” I was no longer afraid of him or even saddened by him. I was just straight-up livid. How dare he try and mess up my life here?
Lochlon took a step back and held up both hands in defense. “Please, Kika, just give me a quarter of an hour to say what I need to say. I promise if you listen to me I’ll go and leave you be forever.”
“Fine!” I started power walking away from the house with beastlike concentration. “I’ll give you five minutes—that’s it. Come on. You’re going to wake up everyone. God, what the hell is wrong with you?”
I hated myself for giving him the chance to talk to me, but I felt like I had no other option. And in a few hours I would be unreachable—this thought was my life preserver just now. I just have to get through five minutes of his bullshit and then I can get gone.
Without speaking, he followed me into a little French café on one of the mews beside the house. The café was mercifully empty on this early Sunday morning. I dropped down into a table by the window.
He didn’t sit and instead loitered above. “Shall I get us a coffee?”
I strummed my fingernails on the tabletop. “Fine, whatever. Just hurry, will you?” Dropping my head in my hands, I heard Lochlon walk toward the counter and order two coffees. Funny, he didn’t remember that I take sugar and milk in mine.
He positioned a cup in front of my elbows.
I rubbed my hands over my face in exhaustion and then peeked out from behind my fingers. He sat across from me and blew at the rim of his own coffee. I remembered how he took his: black.
I pressed my forearms into the table and assessed him frankly for a moment. His front teeth slouched in on each other like two drunks holding each other up. I never noticed that before. He pushed my coffee toward me like a peace offering, but I didn’t touch it.
“Lochlon. Do you have any idea how mad I am right now?” I asked.
He looked down but didn’t interrupt me.
“Your behavior was unacceptable last night.” The words sounded like something a parent might say, but I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate. “You should have told me about your dad and about Bernadine before you came here. You omitted the truth and came here under false pretenses. Do you understand how unfair that is for me?”
His face looked like it had been punched.
“I cared about you, Lochlon. I wanted to be with you. I haven’t been with anyone else since you!” I jeered maliciously, just to make him feel even guiltier. “And then, you get wasted and try to assault me—”
His head shot up. “No, Kika, I would never lay a hand on you. I—”
“Well, you did last night. You terrified me, Lochlon. I don’t even know who you are.” Once again, the words were a cliché, but there was simply no other way to put it.
He ground the heels of his palms into his eye sockets.
I kept my eye on the café counter, like the girl behind it was doing something incredibly interesting. I couldn’t stand to look at him. It was too raw.
“So that’s what I have to say. And I have no clue what else it is that you need to tell me so desperately”—I crossed my legs—“but you have five minutes to do so.”
Lochlon inhaled at length. Facing the window, he looked outside like he was staring at some faraway distance in his mind. And maybe he was.
His Adam’s apple dipped down his grizzled neck, and I was once again taken aback by my own lack of wanting for him. His scruffy neck used to drive me crazy. Now I felt only rage, which I suspected was masking the rotting scent of pity underneath.
“Kika, all right. Here’s how it is: The reason I didn’t tell you about Da or Bernie was that I was having trouble accepting my fate, see? In fairness, you’d want to refuse it, too. I’m sorry for not telling you sooner.” He cleared his throat.
“I came here thinking that maybe this was a way out, that you’d come away with me. With you, things were always, like, grand, really perfect and that. You never even gave me a hard time about my past. But deep down, I knew I couldn’t run away, but just for a moment there last night, I thought I could fight it. Do you understand what I’m saying?” His eyes were wet and searching.
“Lochlon.” I sighed in exasperation. “That doesn’t have to be your fate. It’s not about abandoning your priorities; it’s about reestablishing them. I’m glad that you’re not running away from your responsibilities, but once you tend to them, you can still live the life you want, just with some changes. Don’t just give up. You can definitely still write—”
He laughed darkly, nostrils flaring like a villain. “Oh, come off it, Kika! Traveling around the world and writing—it’s a bloody dream, a bit of fun. I’ve a living to earn now.”
He held his hand up as if he wanted to reach out to me, but I tipped my body backward. He closed his hand into a fist and dropped it on the table instead. He knew he wasn’t allowed to touch me ever again.
“Where I’m from, people don’t do those sorts of things. I have to marry her. I have to take over the farm and have a proper job, like,” he said. “I’ve made my bed, and now I have to—”
“Fuck Bernadine in it?” I lashed, stripping the argument of any euphemisms that he could hide behind.
He ignored my outburst. It wasn�
�t about me anymore.
“I have to live there, and I have to die there with the rest of that lot. That’s all there is to it. You can’t leave. Not where I’m from, you can’t.”
He spoke with a miserable, quivering vigor that showed me that he believed what he was saying—unlike last night when he was just desperate to bolt. But his resignation was uniquely devastating to me.
“If you think there’s no other way to live your dream, then I feel bad for you,” I told him, hoping to rile him up.
“But there isn’t any other way. As much as I want to run away with you and start fresh somewhere new, I can never do it—and not because you’re not mental enough to come with me; because it isn’t possible.”
For a passing moment, the morning sun outran the clouds and razored through the café glass, bathing Lochlon in a sepia shade of sorrowful light.
“I suppose I’m just destined to watch life on the telly. Like everyone else,” he concluded with a short nod.
I fingered the lip of my coffee mug, steamy and wet. “Not like everyone else,” I said.
He sighed in exasperation, deep and breathy like in sleep. “Will you stop going on about that traveling shite, Kika?” he said. “Life isn’t like the way it is in films. One day you’re going to have to get a real job as well, instead of minding well-off schoolchildren. You can’t live like this forever. Your luck will run out just as mine has. I’m only telling you this so that you’re not surprised—as I was.”
I was so wrong about him. I thought we were both going after the life we wanted with everything we had. I thought we both loved traveling enough to rearrange our lives to make sure it was always a part of it. Turns out I thought wrong.
“You used to be on my team. You used to be one of my kind.”
He wouldn’t meet my eyes now.
“The old you could come up with a better solution than this—than just giving up.” Coward, I thought. Look how quickly you gave up on everything you ever wanted. “And Lochlon, you know I don’t plan on being an au pair forever. This job is a great way to make money for Gypsies & Boxcars, and sure, it’s a means to an end, but it’s a wonderful means. I have a real plan now. I’ve even been saving money.” I flopped my arms into the air and let them fall limp.
When I mentioned Gypsies & Boxcars, he curled his mouth. “It’ll never work,” he said under his breath. “You could never save a cent.”
I shook my head in brazen disappointment. I wanted to say: I expected more from you, but instead I just stared him down, daring him to say anything more.
Lochlon gave me a mournful side-smile. “I suppose this is it, then, Kika.”
“It is.”
“Just promise me: When you’re forced to stop traveling and settle down, you’ll think of me then, won’t you? Promise me that?”
“I’m done thinking of you, Lochlon.”
Lochlon smiled again—unhappy but proud. “Well, then I am sorry for last night. It did me in thinking I could have hurt you—what a bleedin’ disaster this whole trip has been, hasn’t it? Pity, that.”
I nodded glumly and left my gaze pointed downward.
When he didn’t speak, I dragged my focus onto him: His eyes were fixed outside the window, and he wrinkled his brow.
I stared down at my hands in my lap and braided them together. There was nothing left to say. We both knew it.
And just then, I felt the back of his hand faintly stroke my cheek. It was so unexpected and unduly intimate that I froze against his touch, and it took me far too long to bristle away. But I did.
Disgusted, I searched his eyes and started to confront him, when I noticed that he wasn’t even looking at me! He was looking beyond me—right out the café window at someone outside.
I whipped around just in time to see what was captivating him. When I saw, the gesture suddenly made complete sense. I caught the briefest glimpse of a familiar coat sailing by just out of the frame.
Aston did not linger, peering into the café window; instead, he walked away robotically as if he had just seen everything he needed to see.
47
“WHY DID YOU do that, Lochlon?” I yanked myself up, thrusting the bistro table toward him. The table screeched like a hawk. His coffee spattered. “You saw Aston, didn’t you?”
Lochlon didn’t move from his seat and scrutinized the dark slick of coffee dripping between his legs.
With a clench-jaw reserve, he said, “I’m sorry I did that. It was too bold. I hope you’re very happy together—have at it.”
I choked, aghast. All I could do at the moment was stare at Lochlon and try to process the punitive damage he just caused, his hostile intent to injure. I knew now more than ever that I did not love this man. In fact, I suspect I hated him.
Lochlon’s jawline tightened. He looked at me brazenly. “Actually, I’m not sorry for that, Kika. But maybe one day I will be.”
What a bullshit apology. I grabbed my coat and pushed open the café door, the cold snapping on my skin like a rubber band. Before I left, I heard Lochlon say, more to himself than to me, “I’m well rid of you.”
I shimmied into my coat as I whipped down the street. The damp air was cold enough to frost my lungs. I looked down at myself as I zipped up: still in last night’s outfit. Lochlon was in the same clothes from last night, too. Oh God, I hope Aston doesn’t think we spent the night together.
“Aston!” I called, though he was nowhere to be seen.
The streets were starting to thicken with bright-eyed families off to church. I had to get back to the house—the Darlings would leave without me—but I had to find Aston first.
Somehow, this is the most important thing to me, I realized as my rubber soles clung to the sidewalk. I loopholed around babies in strollers and old ladies with canes; past churches, sleepy chocolatiers, corner shops, launderettes.
My heart clobbered my chest urgently; my eyes teared up in the cold.
Just then, a stab of clarity pricked into me: Even before Lochlon came to visit me and mucked up my grandiose fantasy, Aston meant something to me. And I was pretty sure I meant something to Aston.
I like Aston! I self-confessed. And what I thought next surprised me further: I like Aston despite the fact that he doesn’t like traveling.
My breath went in and out and in and out in speedy little huffs. He had gone back home; I was certain of it. I would find him and explain everything. But as I approached our row of houses, my leg muscles quivered and cramped to a stop. The Darlings’ Audi was parked out front of the house, puffing out billows of warm exhaust—it was time to leave.
48
I NO LONGER had to check the time to know that we were due to leave this instant. Elsbeth sat in the front seat, and the girls sat in the back. (Mr. Darling was already in Italy.)
Before anyone could stop me, I made a break for Aston’s front door. I banged the door, rattling the house while calling out his name. For a moment, I stepped out of myself and thought, Damn, this girl is desperate.
But I was.
Mina lowered the misty car window. “Kika, come on,” she called. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
I pushed my face to the peephole of Aston’s door, but there were no signs of movement or light. He didn’t go home after all—I was wrong.
“Get in the car, you big goon!” added Gwendy, pushing her head next to Mina’s. My chest heaved, and I was unable to speak.
Now Elsbeth’s window lowered. “Kika, there you are. We’ve taken your bag from your room. Get in the car right this moment or we’ll miss the plane. We thought we were going to have to leave without you!”
I aimed one last desperate look up at Aston’s windows, but it was clear that no one was home. I watched in slow motion as Elsbeth climbed out of the car toward me. She held out her gloved palm at me, the other hand cocked on her waist. I wasn’t sure what she was
after until she said with a formidable smile, “Phone, Kika. Now.”
She was no pushover about this no-technology rule.
My backbone stiffened, planning my objection, but she nimbly tweezed the phone out of my coat pocket, right under the tip of my nose.
Before I could stop her, she trotted up the steps of our house and neatly slipped the phone through the mail slot. My heart plunged as I heard the bump of the phone hitting the rug. I opened my mouth, but Elsbeth interrupted:
“When you get back, everything will be waiting for you exactly as you left it. I promise,” she said, shepherding me into the backseat with the girls. “Come this instant.”
The girls’ cheeks were rosy and doll-like from the car’s blasting heat and the anticipation of the holiday.
“Yay, Kika!” Gwen said in her sweet, honest-to-God, genuine way that could make you forget, just for a moment, that your world as you knew it had just been dismantled. Gwen plunked down on my lap with a sigh of exaggerated pleasure, but Mina gave me a look that proved she experienced the same conflict over her phone.
“We’ll get through this together,” she said in earnest as she rested her hand on top of mine somberly.
“Very good then,” clucked Clive after he heard the click of our seat belts fastening. Then, the luxury car swayed forward with whispering ease.
I squinted out the rear window as we left behind the row of white Victorian terraces fringed with skeleton trees.
I didn’t see anyone. But I knew Aston was there somewhere. And I hoped he’d still be there when I came back.
49
ON THE M4 motorway, my fingers itched to call Aston. Luckily, I had his number written down in my notebook, since he was our landlord. The rough-edged thought that he may believe I had forgiven Lochlon and spent the night with him chafed against me.
“So you had a change of heart, then, lamb?” Elsbeth turned from the front seat and blocked the shushing stream of overbearing heat. “Do you want to talk about it later?”
Girls Who Travel Page 17