He gave me a look, then pushed one of the hay bales back and arranged two more on either side until we had a tiny couch. He lay back and then pulled me close. He put his arms around me. I rested my head on his shoulder and wondered what he would do next, if now came the big seduction moment, but he was smarter than that, better than that. He turned my face up to his and kissed me, kissed me with everything, then pulled me even closer if that was possible.
“Stay close,” he whispered.
“You want to sleep here?”
“Well, we could sleep in bed, something we’ve both done a thousand times. Or we could sleep here next to the horses in Amsterdam in each other’s arms and remember it the rest of our lives. Is it really a choice?”
“This is your code?”
“Something like that.”
“Rough treasures?”
“Experience everything, I suppose. Drink it in. Is that a horrible cliché?”
I was still stung by his comments about Bank of America, but I understood him a little better.
“I’m still deciding,” I managed.
A little while later, our breathing matched, and the scent of hay covered everything.
13
I woke to the smell of cigarette smoke. For a moment I had no idea where I was. Jack still slept beside me. The rain had grown heavier. Bit by bit, the pieces of the previous night came parading back. I sat up, slightly panicked. I had no notion of the hour, no notion of anything except that we had petted the horses last night. With the rain obscuring the sun, it might have been any time. The question of the cigarette smoke puzzled me until I realized someone smoked below us, under the cover of the pole barn, probably on break from doing something with the horses. Then I heard a voice speaking to someone. Jack slowly sat up beside me, his finger again to his lips, a smile spreading on his face.
“We’re trapped,” he whispered and almost started laughing.
“What time is it?”
He shrugged.
Ten or a million thoughts surged through my brain. For one thing, I had to pee. I mean, really pee. And I imagined the hay had made me look pretty much like a crazy woman. I put a hand to my hair and felt it going out in every direction. My lips and throat felt coated with chocolate, and my fingers felt greasy and dirty and horsey.
Then I thought about Amy and Constance. I glanced at my phone, but neither one of them had texted.
It was six forty-eight in the morning. That was the other thing the cell phone said. Brian had left a message, but I didn’t have the stomach to listen to that at the moment.
“How are we going to get out of here?” I asked Jack.
“We’ll just climb down. We haven’t done anything wrong.”
“How about breaking and entering?”
“We’ll act like we just got done having sex,” he said, grinning and balling up the paper bag and policing the area. “Everyone loves a lover. Besides, what can they do?”
“They can call the police.”
“For two people having sex in a haystack?”
“We didn’t have sex.”
“But you wanted to.”
I nudged his shoulder. He laughed. We heard a shoe scuff below us, and someone called up, his voice coated with nervousness.
“Who is there?” he called.
At least I think that’s what he said. He called in Dutch.
“We fell asleep,” Jack called down. Then he said the German word for sleep.
Then another voice joined the first voice, and I knew we had to climb down and face the music. Maybe they thought we were bums. Maybe they thought we were thieves. Jack went first. He turned back to me and helped me down. Two men—one young, one old—had backed away from the hay bales, their faces turned up to watch us.
“We came in to pet the horses and fell asleep,” Jack said.
The old man shook his head. He obviously wasn’t happy with us. But the young guy—who had the cigarette and probably had broken a rule by smoking next to the hay bales—spoke to us in passable English.
“This is not good what you have done,” the young man said.
He had a thin face and a bunch of hair that went up a few inches from his scalp, then fell over into a hair hedge. He lips came together in a pucker.
“Sorry,” Jack said. “We were out late. We didn’t hurt anything.”
The old man spoke rapidly to the younger one. The younger one answered. Then the older man hurried off.
“He’s going to call the police. You’d better hurry. There’s a station nearby here, so they won’t be long.”
Only he reversed the word order so that it came out, long won’t be. He sounded like Yoda from Star Wars.
Jack grabbed my hand, and we ran for the door.
* * *
Halfway home—after stopping in a restaurant and going to the bathroom and getting more coffee—Jack made me stop to watch a swan paddle beneath a cobblestone bridge.
“My grandfather wrote about swans in his journal. I think it surprised him to find them here. He seemed to relish seeing any signs of nature, because that signified they had survived … that things would go on.”
“Can you find a passage about swans?”
“I know one almost by heart, but let me see.”
He dug in his pocket and brought out a small journal, Bible sized, that had a rubber band around the center. It was a Bible, really, I realized, at least for Jack. He put the spine against the railing next to the river and slowly opened the journal. I’m not sure why, but I had imagined the journal as a big, wide book—like a scrapbook, maybe—but when I saw its dimensions, it made more sense. This was what a man might carry after the war. He could keep it in his pocket, as Jack did, and pull it out when it was time to make an entry. It wasn’t much different from my calendar book.
“I thought it would be bigger,” I said, leaning close to him to see the book.
“A woman should never say that to a man.”
He kept his eyes on the book, carefully paging through it. I bumped his shoulder. I loved seeing the tenderness with which he handled the journal. He did not rush to find the passage, but lingered on each small portion of it. Twice he stopped to show me pictures of his grandfather that were wedged among the pages: a tall, handsome man in uniform, the pictures grayed and cracked now with time. His grandfather’s eyes, in each picture Jack showed me, looked tired and hollow and sad. What made his expressions sadder and more poignant was the attempt, at the borders of his face, at the lines of his forehead, to smile for the camera. But he could not hide his sorrow and his feelings at coming through the horror of World War II.
I put my cheek against Jack’s shoulder. I wanted to watch his hands move slowly over the onionskin pages of the journal. Finally, he found the selection and tilted it for me to see. Then he read. His voice became solemn and quiet and filled with love.
“The swan swam on a small portion of water, its neck bent in a perfect curve. The angle of the morning light threw the swan’s reflection onto the surface so that it seemed to move with a companion, one matched to each slight movement.”
Beneath the passage, his grandfather had drawn a small sketch of a swan swimming among lily pads.
“That’s beautiful, Jack. It’s poetry, really.”
“I think he secretly wanted to write. We talked about it now and then. He read a great deal, mostly nineteenth-century novels. He shared books with me, and each year we read Ivanhoe together. We read it out on the porch at night before bedtime, and I loved that story and that memory. That’s why I guess I gave you such a hard time about your iPad. Have you ever heard someone say that books are places we visit and that when we run into people who have read the books we have read, it’s the same as if we had traveled to the same locations? We know something about them because they have lived in the same worlds we have lived. We know what they live for.”
Jack blushed. It was the first time I had seen him blush, and I liked him for it.
“I like knowing
you have that feeling for literature.”
“Well, at least for my grandfather’s journal.”
“Is this the only copy? Would you mind if I held it?”
“I made a transcription. I typed it all in so that I would know each word. I guess that sounds funny. Honestly, I have most of it by heart.”
“That’s not funny at all,” I said, slowly receiving the book from Jack.
The journal had a nice weight and balance. I opened it and saw the inscription. It simply said his grandfather’s Christian name—Vernon, and his military ID number—and his address as Bradford, Vermont, USA. Beside it was an inked sketch of a tank. Whether the tank was German or Allied, I couldn’t tell.
“He was a farm boy, and he was dazzled by what he saw, and he really wrote beautifully. He was also hollowed out, I think. This trip filled him up again. I suppose I was hoping it would do that for me, too. This trip.”
“I’d like to read his journal if it wouldn’t be overstepping.”
“You’d be the fifth person in the world to read it. My mom and dad and my grandmother.”
I returned the journal to him. He put it carefully back together, reset the rubber band around it, and slid it in his pocket. Then he held my hand while we watched the swans paddle gracefully upstream. He told me to look for iridescence in the feathers. He said the legend was that the swans had once lived by eating light, but the gods had found their beauty threatening and made them hunger for grass instead. But the swans had eaten enough light that it could still sometimes be seen within them.
There was no need for a photograph.
There was no need for anything at all.
14
Back at the hostel, I had maybe the best shower of my life. I washed every inch of my body and shampooed and cream-rinsed my hair. Now and then, as I moved under the spray, I thought of Jack. Each time he came to mind, my body gave a small spasm. Jack Vermont. I didn’t even know his last name, although I now knew his grandfather’s first name and that his family came from Bradford, Vermont. For now, Jack was just Jack, my knight with a garbage can lid, my late-night horse whisperer. He had already taken too many of my thoughts.
When I stepped out, I found that Constance had texted me while I was in the shower. She had reached the same conclusion I had: it was weird to be passing through Amsterdam so quickly. We hadn’t seen a thing, really, except the inside of a party, and she had half a dozen sites she wanted to visit. We were leaving because of Amy, I remembered. We had an appointment in Prague, and I couldn’t recall all the details, but the plan permitted only a night and part of a day in Amsterdam. It was a bad plan, but because we hadn’t heard from Amy, we couldn’t change anything. I texted Constance and recommended we stick to the plan. She texted back, agreed reluctantly, and also said Raef called her his Sheila.
Back in the room, I sat on the bed and called my father. It took a long time for my dad to answer. When he did, I could tell he was in some sort of meeting or someplace he couldn’t talk easily. My dad was usually in some sort of meeting. He spoke quickly, in short bursts, and behind him I heard glasses tinkling and other people conversing.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he said. “How goes the grand European tour?”
“It’s great, Daddy. We’re in Amsterdam. It’s a gorgeous city.”
“How long will you be there?”
“We’re leaving today, I think. We’re bopping through because we have to get over to Prague to meet up with Amy’s cousins.”
“Well, that’s good,” he said, and then he evidently covered the phone and spoke to someone else. It was always hard to get his full attention, even long distance, when he was in a business environment. At home, he was a softie.
“Listen,” he said when he came back on, “I talked to Ed Belmont, and he’s really pleased you’re joining his team. It’s going to be long hours, but it will be worth it. You couldn’t learn from anyone better. There’s no limit on that position. But he said you didn’t fill out the paperwork yet. You can’t let these things go like that, Heather. You know better.”
“I’ve got it covered, Daddy. I’ll take care of everything, I promise.”
“I missed that last part,” he said.
“I said I’d take care of the paperwork,” I said. “Scout’s honor.”
“Okay. It just puts me in an odd position with Ed. I thought you had already taken care of it. Business is all about first impressions and about follow-through.”
“I’m on it, Dad.”
“If you were on it, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?”
There it was. The old two-step we did together. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say. I wasn’t positive he knew what he wanted out of the conversation. He had plenty of plates in the air, I knew, and at some level—business-wise—I was simply another plate. He had extended himself with Ed Belmont to get me hired, and now, to his mind, I had paid him back by not getting the paperwork in earlier than it needed to be in. I had not been sufficiently bushy-tailed and eager, and that was against the business ethos. If I entered his world, then I had to play by his rules.
At the same time, he had been happy to see me head off to Europe. His attitudes were contradictory and complicated. He probably wasn’t aware of the mixed messages.
“Daddy, I am aware of my obligations and the expectations from Ed Belmont’s team. I am. It’s not your onion.”
“What?”
“It’s a French phrase. It means it’s not your problem.”
Something else made noise beyond his phone. He was in the middle of something and said as much when his voice came back to me.
“It is my problem, Heather! What do I always say? Either one meets his obligation or he doesn’t. There’s no in-between that’s worth anything.”
“I’m meeting it, Dad,” I said, feeling my neck turning red and my blood beginning to percolate. “It’s not your worry. I have an understanding with Ed’s team. It’s all going to be okay.”
“Just call them, would you? Check in?”
“I can do that, Dad.”
“Remember, Ed’s an old bastard like I am. We feel better knowing where the thermostat is set.”
“Dad, you’re not an old bastard. You’re a really old bastard.”
He laughed. Whatever storm clouds had choked his sky seemed to lift a little.
“Sweetheart, I should jump off here. Glad to hear you’re doing okay. How are the other girls?”
“They’re doing fine. We’re having a great time.”
“Good, good. Well, you’re only young once, right? Isn’t that what they say? Okay, sweetie, I’ll see—”
His voice disappeared, cut off by some unexplained transcontinental quirk. I didn’t call him back. You didn’t call my father back. Not when he was in a meeting.
15
“I lost all my shit! Everything! Phone, license, passport, you name it! I am the worst, stupid-ass American tourist who ever lived!” Amy said when she finally got herself under control in the hostel cafeteria. After not showing up for most of the morning, she had finally borrowed a passerby’s cell phone to call and tell us not to meet her at the train station, but to stay where we were. She hadn’t explained much except to say she had been in a situation, a bad one, and that she only had her own idiotic self to blame. Now, sitting in the small hostel breakfast room, she looked like a wild woman—her wolf hair stood up like a British grenadier’s hat—and she was angry enough to kill someone. “It must have dropped out when I put my coat on the couch at this party. I had it all together in that little, like, makeup bag thing, the one with frogs on it—you know the one. But who knows? I think it slid out when I lifted the jacket up, or maybe it was earlier. It’s so fucking dumb it makes me cringe to think about it. Amy, the great and freaking powerful Amy, who can go anywhere, do anything, and here I am like the most dumb-ass tourist who ever left the U.S.”
“Did you have it at the jazz club?” I asked. “The one Raef took us to?”
“Yes, yes, believe me, I’ve gone over it in my head a thousand times. I even went back to the apartment where I took off my coat, but it wasn’t there. The apartment owner was very nice. He said he’d get in touch if anyone found it. He made me give him my information, and I took his.”
“Do you think someone could have stolen it?”
“Possible, but not really. I think I just lost the fucker. What a reckless, stupid ass I am.”
Constance sat beside her and held her hand. I had never seen Amy so shaken, and I couldn’t blame her. The story didn’t make much sense, at least not initially, because she had trouble telling it in sequence. We were all too drunk and too stoned the night before to be clear about any detail. But the basic elements came through.
Bottom line, she had no identification, no money, no phone, and no real way of resupplying herself.
“I am so, so, so, so, so bummed,” she said. “I am such a complete rookie! What an idiot!”
“Okay, lighten up, Amy,” I said. “Things happen. It’s just a thing. We can get it ironed out. It’s just a small setback.”
I didn’t dare glance at Constance, because I was certain she had come to the same conclusion. Amy had just fumbled away her trip. We didn’t have time, I didn’t think, to go through the headache of getting a new passport, new credit cards, and so forth. That’s what made Amy so irate. She knew it, too.
“It’s okay, honey,” Constance said. “It’s a setback. Heather’s right about that.”
“No, it’s not. I almost couldn’t even get back here! I can’t travel without a passport. All my credit cards are gone, too. I have to cancel all those and call Mom and Dad. They are going to freak, I promise you. They warned me about this sort of thing.”
“All our parents did,” I said.
“Yes, but I always lose shit! I hate it about me. Even in second grade, I lost my mittens every day. I swear! My mom got so tired of it she made me wear my brother’s socks on my hands!”
The Map That Leads to You Page 6