The Map That Leads to You

by J. P. Monninger

  Carefully, carefully, carefully, I walked out of the restaurant. I made sure not to storm out, not to show any impatience in my walk. Besides, I didn’t feel angry. I felt I had a hole in my heart, that’s all. I held my breath and pretended I was at the bottom of a pool. I kept my chin up and tried not to look right or left. A small part of my brain started sending messages and asking questions—Where is my backpack, where am I going, where is Constance, how can I reach her?—and at the same time, my head began to pound. I wanted to cry, but I wouldn’t let myself.

  When I stepped outside, I realized it had become cold. Truly cold. And the mountains said it was almost time to go home.

  29

  I did not charge off and leave. Dramatic departures cost money, and I was down to the last pennies of my budget. Besides, I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go, how I wanted to get there, what the next step should be. We had a room in a cheap hotel, and I needed a place to stay. Simple as that. You have to have a roof over your head. That was the first law. It was time to be practical. I decided I didn’t hate Jack. I decided he had a right to be frightened by his friend’s illness. He had behaved badly by involving me, but he wasn’t the first person in the world to make a mistake. I had made plenty of mistakes. I told myself that I should be relieved. I had enough to do in New York. I had too much to do, honestly. Back in the room, I pulled out my iPad and answered every form, every request, every e-mail that waited for me while I traveled around Europe with Jack. I had simply lost focus, I reflected. Jack had lost focus, too, in his own way. We didn’t have to be enemies. It was all a simple question of emphasis.

  I changed into my pajama bottoms and an Amherst hoodie.

  Then I held my breath for a while again. It helped. Afterward, I propped up the pillows behind me and read Hemingway. Hemingway, I reflected, left his first wife for greater experiences. The greater experience was a woman named Paulette, or Pauline something or other. It was a question of emphasis. Emphases. Everyone had to decide where to put his or her money on the roulette table.

  I turned off the lights a little later. I wasn’t sure I could sleep.

  Jack came in quietly about an hour later. He used the flashlight on his phone to see where he was going. I kept my eyes shut.

  “Can we talk?” he asked softly. “Heather, are you awake? Can we talk?”

  I considered pretending to sleep, but what was the point of that? I reached to the lamp beside the bed and turned it on. Jack sat on the bed and put his hand on my leg. I shoved up into the pillows and tried to push my hair out of my face.

  “That didn’t go so well,” he said. “The dinner, I mean.”

  I shrugged.

  “Do you think we can repair it?” he asked.

  “I don’t see how. Not the way it was before.”

  “I’m sorry I was ambivalent about going to New York with you. I don’t want to lose what we have. I’m drawn to you, Heather, but I’m scared of what that means. Here’s what I want to say: I was like you a couple of years ago. I cared about promotions and climbing the ladder, but one day Tom came to me and explained what had happened. I realized through his death that I hadn’t done the things I wanted to do. I know that sounds melodramatic, but I promised myself that I would never spend another day in an office. I asked myself if I wanted to change my life, if I could change my life. I took this trip, this mission to follow my grandfather’s journal in the hope that it would restore me somehow as it restored him. Then I met you.”

  “Jack, I’m sure I can’t understand what it means to watch a friend die that way. Not really. But you have to understand that you’re free. You can do what you need to do. You don’t owe me anything.”

  “It’s not about owing, Heather. I’m sorry I’m so bad at framing this conversation. I keep saying things I don’t mean exactly.”

  “I’m listening, Jack.”

  He took a breath. I could see he wanted to say things clearly.

  “It’s not just about you exactly. It’s about work and getting back into journalism. It’s a whole range of things. It was Tom’s death, too. He had a shunt put in his chest and had a bunch of interferon pumped through his system. That went on a long time, and he was sick every day. It made me pretty gun-shy to watch that, Heather. It made me not trust the world. I’m afraid you got swept up in all those thoughts, but it’s that, not us.”

  “I understand, Jack. You don’t need to explain yourself to me or to anyone. I think I’m going to head to Paris. We’re flying out soon, anyway, and my money is low. I already let Constance know. She’s coming up from Spain soon.”

  “I’m coming with you. I want to be in Paris with you.”

  “Not sure that’s a great idea.”

  “We talked about being in Paris together.”

  “We talked about a lot of things. I won’t kid you, Jack. I’m falling for you. I know it’s a cliché, but you take my breath away. You do. I don’t know if we would have been perfect, but I was willing to try. I didn’t see getting together with you as the end to anything. I saw it as a beginning. An exciting one. I want to keep traveling, Jack. I’ll be going to Japan and Indonesia … all over the world, really. Yes, I’ll be working, and yes, I will have to pay my dues at the office, but I’m happy to do that. It’s part of my life. I thought you might be part of that life, too. I hoped, anyway. But if it’s not meant to be, okay. It hurts, but I can accept it. I still love what we’ve had here.”

  “I just need a little more time.”

  “Time for what? That doesn’t sound very likely. Or practical. It’s just going to dig the hole deeper, isn’t it? I don’t want to give you an ultimatum, but I suppose we’re coming to the fish-or-cut-bait stage of things. It means too much to mean just a little. I can’t make it casual at this point. If we had met in a town in the States, we could have kept dating and let time help us decide what to do. But that wasn’t our fate, was it? We met on a train going to Amsterdam. Maybe spending so much time together, traveling, you know, maybe that raised the ante. Maybe it rushed things without our knowing it. I’m not sure. I’m tired of thinking about it, Jack. I have to go home soon. I want to see Paris one more time before I go because I’ve always loved the idea of Paris even before I saw it. But I don’t want to see Paris with you. Not anymore. Not if you’re coming to see me onto a plane. I don’t want to remember Paris as the place I went and broke up with a sweetheart. Remember a long time ago you asked me what I liked in Hemingway, and I said I liked his sadness? Well, I do like his sadness, but I don’t want to bring that sadness with me to Paris.”

  He looked at me a long time without speaking. Then slowly he removed his shoes. He leaned over and put his head next to mine on the pillows. I turned to him. Our faces rested inches apart.

  “I choose you,” he whispered and stroked my cheek. “I do. I choose you. You’ve given me back some hope I lost along the way. Will you still have me?”

  I nodded. I didn’t have a doubt from my end of things.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Don’t say this kind of thing anymore if you don’t mean it. We can’t have this conversation again.”

  “We’ll go to Italy first, then Paris. We have time, and I want to see one last thing from the journal. Then I’m going to Paris with you, then to New York. I don’t know everything yet, but I know I want to be with you. I’m sorry if I’ve been difficult. I don’t mean to be. I was scared, Heather. Maybe I told myself not to have too many hopes, and then you came into the picture.”

  “You’ve changed me, too, Jack. You made me question some of my assumptions, and you made me slow down. I’ve learned from you. I’m thinking of getting rid of my Smythson.”

  “I’m not sure the world is ready for a Heather Mulgrew without her Smythson.”

  “I’m the new, freer Heather. Wait and see.”

  “We’ll meet in the middle.”

  “Yes, that’s the plan.”

  His eyes crinkled. He kissed me lightly, his lips barely resting on mine.

 
; “You must be starving,” he said. “You didn’t eat anything at all in the restaurant.”

  “I am starving.”

  “What if I told you I had Ben and Jerry’s in my backpack?”

  “You’d be lying.”

  He nodded, and he kissed me again, and a little later we fell asleep. The sand cranes did not trouble my sleep, and the storm passed away to the east. But what had happened, what it all meant, still wasn’t clear to me.

  30

  “His name is Jack Quiller-Couch, and I met him on a train going into Amsterdam … yes, no, you will like him, Mom. So will Daddy.”

  I spoke to her on the train on our way to Italy. Jack had gone off to the bar car. The train, for once, was fairly empty. We had the luxury of a pair of facing benches entirely to ourselves.

  “So what does it mean? That he’s coming back with you?”

  If I didn’t miss my guess, she had a cup of tea. I knew she sat in the solarium, her favorite place in the summer, the room filled with houseplants and geraniums. She loved geraniums.

  I heard her being deliberately even. I heard the mistrust of Jack in her voice—of everything Jack represented—but I knew she was trying to be motherly and calm, and that only made it worse.

  This was the conversation I had dreaded. If Jack was coming with me, then it meant Jack was going to stay at our house, at least briefly, and I wanted to clear that with my mother.

  “In what sense?” I asked, mostly to give myself time to think.

  “Well, I don’t know, Heather. I really don’t. I mean, are you two engaged somehow?”

  “No, Mom. It’s not like that.”

  “But he’s coming with you?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  She didn’t say anything. She was the absolute master of not saying anything. She never made it easy. She paused long enough to make it awkward, and then I usually vomited something out to kill the silence.

  I tried to wait her out, but I couldn’t.

  “We’ve been traveling together,” I explained. “In Germany and Poland and Switzerland, Mom. We’re going to Italy now—I told you that. Obviously, we care for each other. We’re deciding what that means.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m not sure you do see,” I said, flashing a little. “He’s a terrific guy. He’s very handsome. He’s a Vermonter. He grew up on a farm, at least mostly.”

  Again, the Mom-a-saurus, master of silence.

  “And I think I’m in love with him, Mom. Do you understand? I think I love him. I think we might be right for each other in a big way, in the way you and Daddy are right for each other.”

  I felt close to tears.

  The train continued to knock along. The mountains and pines outside the window sometimes held pale ghosts of snow and ice.

  “So when you come home, he will be with you?” Mom asked.

  “Yes. Jack. Jack will be with me.”

  “Are you planning to live together?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t discussed things fully.”

  “But if he’s coming home with you—”

  “I get it, Mom. I get what you’re asking. There are some practical matters we need to iron out. I understand. We’ll do all that. We’ll come up with a little more of a plan. I’m sorry to drop this on you this way. It’s new to me, too, so I don’t have all the answers. But I wanted you to know what was going on.”

  “I’m glad you did. You know, you could just bring back a souvenir. You don’t have to go to Europe and bring a man home with you.”

  I took a deep breath. It was a joke. I think she meant it as a joke.

  “I want you to be happy for me, Mom.”

  “I am, honey.”

  “Really happy. Not reservedly happy. Not standing-in-judgment happy. I don’t know if what we are doing is the right thing, but it feels that way. I’m not being rash, believe me. I’m not losing my head. Jack is real and solid—as solid as anything. And he sees the world in such a beautiful way. It’s different from the way I see the world, but we complement each other in that regard. I don’t know. I’m tired of trying to fit everything into convenient boxes, Mom. I feel I’ve been doing that all my life. Jack doesn’t fit neatly into any sort of box, and I love that about him. The world feels more open with him beside me. It does. I’ve thought about all the sensible objections. We’re too young, we’re not established … there are a thousand valid cautions, but there are always a thousand cautions, right, Mom? You taught me that. Sometimes you have to accept what is given to you and hold it close. Please tell me you understand, Mom.”

  “Of course I do, honey,” she said, and it was the good mom, the warm mom, the perfect mom who caught a picture of my friends and me at commencement oozing all that hope and the one who maybe, maybe, maybe, understood me better than anyone else on earth.

  And I could imagine her conversation with my dad later that night.

  Heather has met someone.

  Someone?

  A boy. Well, I guess he’s not a boy technically. A young man.

  And…?

  My father sitting in his chair, maybe watching a Yankees game, maybe sipping a dark, single-malt scotch out in the solarium with her.

  And she’s going to bring him home.

  The Dad look. The slow study. The quizzical lift of his eyebrows.

  She’s starting the job, he would say.

  Mom might nod.

  Hmmmm.

  Then he would look back at the TV, or peer out at the setting sun, lift his glass, sip.

  He would think the pieces don’t quite fit. He would think I was being hasty and lacked seriousness. He would wonder what I was possibly thinking.

  * * *

  “How did that go?” Jack asked, sliding back into the seat across from me. He handed me a hot chocolate. He looked handsome and rested. It occurred to me I now knew how he slept, what he felt like each day.

  “As well as it could, I suppose. It’s a lot to spring on them.”

  “Good. Give me your feet, and I’ll rub them. That’s the least I can do.”

  “My feet are filthy.”

  “I accept that condition.”

  “You do have a foot fetish. It’s becoming clearer and clearer.”

  I sipped my hot chocolate. It was pretty good. He patted his knees to get me to put my feet up. I did. I told him to leave my socks on.

  “When will you call your folks?” I asked.

  “Oh, we’re not that kind of family.”

  “What kind of family is that?”

  “I don’t know. The kind that actually likes one another.”

  “More pathology?”

  “It’s what gives me my edge. Did you talk to your mom or dad?”

  “Mom. But that’s the same as talking to both of them. They share relentlessly.”

  He hit a nerve in my toe, and my foot jumped a little. We were back on our even keel. We were back on even a better keel, because now things were out on the table. For the first time, we had begun talking about New York not as a hypothetical destination but as a place we intended to live. It changed the music for both of us.

  “Sleepy?” he asked. “Sometimes a foot massage makes me sleepy.”

  “What are we going to do in Italy?”

  “Eat spaghetti. Look around.”

  “We’re going all the way to Italy to eat spaghetti?”

  “It sounds pretty badass when you say it like that.”

  “Your grandfather went there?”

  He nodded.

  “Then Paris?” I asked.

  “Then Paris. And Raef and Constance will be there. And then the trip is over. Just like that.”

  “It will be good to see them.”

  “I wish they could meet up with us in Italy.”

  “I guess there’s not enough time, really. Did I ever tell you I used to think Venice was on Venus? That it was a place on a different planet?”

  “And you with a degree from Amherst.”

  “I
think it was just the Vs. I don’t know. I remember being disappointed when my friend told me Venice was a city in Italy. I didn’t believe her at first. I thought she was misinformed. I thought the gondoliers wearing striped shirts … I thought that was a space uniform.”

  “You have your moments of strangeness, Heather.”

  “It was an easy thing to mistake.”

  “Like thinking an aardvark is a car ark. That’s what I thought when I was a kid.”

  “An aardvark is a car ark? I can’t even pronounce that. It’s a tongue twister. What is a car ark?”

  “I thought Noah built an ark for the animals, so why wasn’t there a car ark? Or, as I thought of it, as an aardvark.”

  He held my toes. Things felt light and happy and solid. We still looked into each other’s eyes when my phone sounded. I glanced down and saw it was my father. I showed it to Jack, and he nodded and climbed out of the seat.

  “All yours,” he said.

  He kissed me lightly and headed back to the bar car.

  31

  “So tell me about Jack,” my father said. “Your mother says he’s accompanying you home.”

  Accompanying, my father said. He made Jack sound like a valet.

  I knew he had been put up to the call by my mother, by her insistence that he find out what this all meant. It was an old pattern with us. And, man, they worked fast.

  “Jack is a man I met on a train to Amsterdam.”

  “He’s an American?”

  “Born and bred.”

  “And your mother said from someplace in New England?”

  “Vermont,” I said.

  I hated giving him short answers, but I didn’t trust myself to go on at length. It was better to speak in short, declarative sentences without volunteering too much.

  “And what are his plans? Do you know?”

  “Regarding what?”

  “Well, just his general plan. For life, I guess. Have you had that kind of discussion?”

  “Dad, you’re prying.”

  “I don’t mean to, sweetie. Sorry. I’m curious, I guess. So is your mother. This is a big step. You just graduated this spring.”