Wanderlust

by Lauren Blakely

  “Yes,” I say with a gulp because I need to know what I’m up against. Once upon a time, I believed my own reticence over relationships would be our biggest barrier. Now I know the highest hurdle is one that I can’t, and won’t, tear down.

  It’s time, it’s space, it’s distance. It’s family, it’s love, it’s honor.

  It is intractable.

  He takes a piece of paper from his wallet and unfolds it. I hold my breath, waiting. Once he spreads the paper open, it’s like seeing a ghost. The handwriting is his brother’s. It’s a scratchy and uneven scrawl, the penmanship of someone who could barely hold a pen anymore. It breaks my heart.

  * * *

  1. Live in Paris for a year. Check.

  2. Sleep with all the French women. Check.

  3. Visit Indonesia. Run a marathon there. Travel across the country, then everywhere.

  4. Pack your bags, wander the globe, and eat macarons, or whatever you want because you can, since you’ll . . .

  5. Have six-pack abs. You can do it. I was almost there. Hell, show me up and go for an eight-pack. Check.

  6. Help someone you care about achieve their dream.

  7. Have your caricature drawn in Place du Tertre. Preferably a highly amusing image that would have made me laugh.

  8. Sleep under the stars.

  9. Take a chance that terrifies you. Check.

  10. Drink champagne along the Seine when you bid adieu.

  P.S. Be nice to Mum and Dad. It’s hard for them.

  * * *

  I laugh at the same time that a sob works its way up my throat then escapes. I drop my head in my hands, and let a few tears slip down my cheeks.

  Griffin rubs a hand on my back. “Are you okay?”

  I nod. “It’s just sad.” I don’t mean him leaving, though that is intensely sad. I raise my face, a new tear streaking down. “I’m sorry your brother’s not here. I’m sorry this happened to him.”

  Griffin dusts his lips over my cheek, kissing away the evidence of my tears. “It’s okay. I mean, it’s not, but what can you do? Don’t cry, sweetheart. I hate to see you sad.”

  That only makes me want to cry harder. The sweetheart. The endearment. The way my emotions matter to him.

  But this isn’t about me.

  This is so much bigger than him, than us.

  This is about a promise to the person you love most. The person you love unconditionally. It’s a dying wish to do what someone else can’t.

  Gathering myself, I draw a deep breath, swallowing past the harsh lump in my throat. It’s not my loss. It’s his, and I’m acting like I own it. I lift my chin, keeping my voice even. “Why are some underlined?”

  “Those are the ongoing ones. I should always be nice to Mum and Dad, right?” he says with a smile.

  “Of course, but it’s sweet Ethan pointed it out.”

  “He worried about them. And it’s not hard to be nice to them, but it’s important, and that’s why I try to talk to them often. To stay in touch.”

  “And the other one underlined is the one about helping someone achieve their dreams. I guess I’m still a work-in-progress,” I say, a quirk to my lips.

  He wraps his arm tighter around my shoulder, leans his face to me, brushing his lips against mine. “Yes, I like that you’re ongoing. I like that you’re not there yet. It means you still need me.”

  More than you know. “I have so much to learn.”

  “I’ll get you there.”

  And then you’ll leave. Then you’ll take off.

  But I don’t say that. I’m a grown-up, and that’s the role I need to play. I fasten on a smile. “And then you’ll be on your way to Indonesia. You’ll do the marathon and travel, then you’ll wander and eat macarons. So that’s three and four.”

  He nods. “Which leaves me with three left to do here, I suppose.”

  “Sleep under the stars. Why haven’t you done that? That seems like something you could do any night.”

  “True, but I don’t think that’s what it means.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “We used to make lists of all the places we wanted to go. We had this huge map of the world with pins stuck in future destinations, and we’d say that we’d sleep under the stars if we had to.” His eyes look faraway, and he’s slipped back to the past, to memories that are bittersweet. “Or if we wanted to,” Griffin adds, a cheerier note to his voice. “We always gave ourselves an out. If we had to, or if we wanted to.”

  “So, it applies to traveling,” I say heavily, and it seems many of these items do. But that’s who Griffin and his brother were, I’m learning. They were boys bitten with the bug of adventure. Then, they became men, unable to pack their bags and take off. And so, now, one of them must.

  I move down the list, running my finger over the caricature one, and the champagne item. “I know someone who can help you with these final two.”

  He raises an eyebrow playfully. “Oh, do you?”

  I dance my fingers over my chest. “I happen to adore champagne, and I also know a great caricaturist.”

  He laughs heartily. “How on earth do you know a great caricaturist? That’s so random.”

  I wave broadly at the streets in front of us. “Hello? Montmartre? Place du Tertre. Elise lives near here, and when I was on my way to her home, I had a drawing done a couple months ago. I’ll take you to see the guy. It’ll be fun.”

  “There you go. Done.” He mimes making a check mark.

  I squint. “But I don’t understand why you didn’t do that one yet. It seems easier.”

  He shrugs. “Maybe because it’s easy. I figured I’d tackle the others first. Besides, this was one I knew I could do anytime, I suppose.”

  Part of me desperately wants to believe he hasn’t had his caricature done so that he’ll have a tether to Paris. I want to believe he loves Paris as wildly as I do, and when the time comes to say good-bye, he won’t be able to. The tie to this place will be too strong.

  But that’s a fool’s hope.

  I’ve been a fool before.

  I can’t do it again.

  I’ll be a rock. That’s what I know how to be. This man is teaching me a whole new language. The least I can do is be by his side as he finishes his brother’s bucket list. He needs to see this through. It’s not my place to hold him back with a heart too full for him. It’s my place to help guide him there, a gentle hand on his back, an encouraging word, and a fantastic time before he waves good-bye. Send him off in style, even if it makes my heart ache more than I would like.

  So much more than I would like.

  I lace my fingers through his and walk to the nearby square, where charcoal artists draw elongated faces. But it’s late, and most have gone for the night.

  “We’ll come back another time,” Griffin says, and a faint kernel of hope dares to take shape inside me. The hope that there will be another time, another chance for us.

  A ragtag group of musicians plucking away on violins and cellos play a French tune, the words melancholy but the melody upbeat enough. Griffin takes my hand and spins me, and we dance under the moonlight, the stars winking above us, the old-time music becoming our soundtrack.

  “Now all this dancing makes me want to do one thing only,” he says as the song ends.

  “What’s that?”

  “Make love to you.”

  Uber has never made it to my place so quickly.

  In my bed, we speak less than last night. We tease less, too. But here in the dark, as he climbs over me, runs his hands down my naked body and enters me, I don’t need words to know what he’s feeling. I see it in his eyes. In the intensity of his gaze. I hear it in his sounds, his noises. He hikes up my leg, opening me more, moving in me. He doesn’t look away, and it’s almost too much.

  But too much of him is what I want.

  Even if it hurts.

  Even if I know it’s ending.

  When we’re like this, tangled together, our bodies slick and h
ot, our breath wild and erratic, our lips parted, it doesn’t feel as if we’re counting down.

  But once we come down from our high, I’m keenly aware that I’m crossing off days on the calendar until the man I’m in love with leaves.

  24

  Griffin

  * * *

  The first time I traveled to Paris, I was three.

  My mum took Ethan and me to see where she grew up, before she left to live in England. Shockingly, I don’t remember a lick of that trip. But the photos are enough to make me shudder. Mum dressed us in prissy little shirts that no child should ever wear.

  We visited again when I was six and Ethan was five. Apparently, we were little shits then. The story goes that we nicked a little Eiffel Tower keychain from a young boy selling them by the carousel near the famous landmark. I’ve always suspected the story was apocryphal, told at dinner parties by my parents to entertain the guests. But there is a photo of us in front of the tower, and my dad wrote a caption on it: Little troublemakers.

  We visited many times over the years, seeing Mum’s sister, who now lives in Brittany. We’d check out the sights and the famous landmarks, and go to the open-air markets. Though I did all that with my family, I also looked elsewhere on those trips. Down alleys, around corners, in the passages. Always seeking unknown treasures and odd little curiosities.

  As a teenager, when I went about the city on my own, I started keeping track of all the unusual things I saw—level markers, corner guards, antique signs. I was like a surveyor conducting an inventory of Paris, recording all the things that caught my eye.

  Funny that I never noticed the angels Joy keeps telling me about.

  I’m still not an angel person. I don’t believe they’re watching over me, and I definitely don’t think my brother is an angel. That’s just not how I’m wired. But since Joy mentioned the very first one on the door knocker, I’ve been intrigued with their presence. Because I’d missed them. Because I failed to notice them on my journeys around Paris. That’s why over the next week I research them online, marking where to find them.

  When I hop on my bike one afternoon, I ride around the city, visiting a pair in the window of a luxurious mansion, another blowing a horn on the frame of a hotel, and one more in a Japanese garden, that came from the remains of a church bombed in Japan during the Second World War. The damaged angel sculpture was sent here as a symbol of peace.

  I stop at the last one, staring for a long time, as if I can find a special meaning in it. But I don’t know what to make of the angels scattered around the city, unless it’s as simple as this—each one whispers a story of how Paris came to be. Some offer clues about art and music. Others tell of how the city moved through war and revolution. Still others speak of survival, lasting among the wreckage.

  Maybe that’s what links these winged statues—they’re a new form of connect-the-dots in this city. I smile as I hop back on my bike, pleased that I’ve figured out this little riddle.

  I’ll miss discovering oddities like this, puzzling them together to learn what they mean. I’ll miss many things about this city, I realize as I ride along the river. The bread, for starters. I don’t know that there has ever been better bread in the entire world. I’ll miss the streetlamps, the cafés, the sidewalks themselves. I’ll miss that everywhere around me there is beauty, even if it’s simply in a shop window.

  I’ll miss the people. Marie at the bakery, Julien by the river, even Jean-Paul and his absurd stories. I’ll definitely miss Christian and his devil-may-care spirit.

  Most of all, I will miss the woman I’ve spent so many hours with over the last few months. As I ride aimlessly along the Seine, I think back to the day many weeks ago when I was ready to take off and explore Indonesia before the marathon, finishing my training on the island. Instead, what frustrated me at the time gave me three months with Joy.

  Three unexpected months I wouldn’t ever want to give up.

  I only wish it were longer. I wish we’d started sooner. I wish it were fair to ask for something from her that I know in my heart is wholly unfair. Even so, there’s a part of me that longs to ask Joy what she’ll be doing six months, maybe twelve months from now. If she might want to somehow make a go of this. But I honestly don’t know when I’m coming back, or if my journeys will take me elsewhere. Is that even fair? To ask someone to wait for you when you don’t know how long you’ll be gone?

  I slow my pace as I near Julien’s green stall by Notre Dame. Hopping off the bike, I lean the metal frame against the stone wall by the river. He raises his chin and barks at me. “Where is your lovely woman? I’d rather look at her pretty face than your ugly mug.”

  Yeah, I’ll miss his gruffness, oddly enough.

  “Nice to see you, too.” I clap him on the shoulder. “And to answer your question, I’m taking her out tonight. I’m meeting her friend, and she’s meeting one of my mates.”

  He huffs, parking a weathered hand on the faded green wood on one side of his stall. “She likes you more than you could know.”

  I tilt my head. “Why do you say that?”

  “You must have charmed her. That’s all I can figure. She was here the other day.”

  “She was?” I smile, picturing Joy here, perusing the wares.

  “She bought some postcards. She asked me questions. How long have I worked here, how I was doing?”

  The grin spreads as I imagine Joy practicing her language skills. “Were you nice to her, old man?”

  He scoffs. “She was about ready to have a nightcap with me.”

  I laugh, amused. “Don’t steal my girl.”

  “Does she know how much you’ll miss her when you do your stupid run in some stupid country that isn’t France?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you really think?”

  “You’re a fool.”

  “You’re extra salty today.”

  “You have a woman you love, and you want to leave. You’re a fool.”

  “Love?” I ask, narrowing my eyes, surprised at his quick verdict. “The woman I love?”

  He waves a hand dismissively. “Young people. You don’t realize what you have.”

  He’s wrong. I do realize it. I see it plain and clear.

  But there are choices that aren’t mine to make. There are promises I made more than a year ago.

  That day will never fade.

  * * *

  “What can I do? Anything. Just name it. I’ll do it for you,” I told Ethan when he took his last turn for the worse. The infection had done irreparable damage to major organs and the doctor had just told us there was nothing more they could do. The fighting was over. The infection had won.

  “You don’t have to do anything for me.”

  “Let me,” I pleaded, desperate to be his voice, his legs, his last chance.

  “You want a bucket list?” There was the faintest laugh in his voice.

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “You’ve gone mad.”

  “I mean it. We were going to do everything. We had plans. What would you do if you could? I’ll do it for you.”

  “You mean it?”

  I nodded savagely. “Yes, I’ll do anything. Except skydiving. Anything but skydiving.”

  Silently, he watched me for a long moment, studying my eyes as if searching for something in them. He found whatever he was looking for, perhaps the permission to ask me to do what he couldn’t. Because then he smiled amidst the tubes and beeping machinery of his hospital room. “Okay. Let’s do it. One last list.”

  I scrambled for a pen and paper, and he started to write. The pen wobbled in his weak fingers. My heart splintered, and I choked back a tear. “I’ll do it.”

  Ethan shook his head, his grip tightening, harder than I’d seen him hold a pen.

  The lump thickened in my throat. “I need to get some water.”

  I excused myself for a moment, ostensibly to head to the water fountain. Jamming the heel of my hand against my eye, I wiped away the evidence, t
hen returned to his room, and watched as he managed to write it all down. Ten items, and a final postscript.

  * * *

  I blink away the harsh memory, and gesture to the shelves of books and small notecards. “Anything here she wanted?”

  Julien surveys his goods, then taps a notecard with a photo of Monet’s garden. “She liked this picture. She bought it for herself. Maybe she doesn’t need you to buy her things.”

  My shoulders tense. His words clang around in my head.

  He’s right. He’s ridiculously right, but not about buying things. About Joy needing me. She doesn’t need me, not truly. She’s independent and capable and bold, and she’s learning a whole new language. She won’t want to wait for me. I need to excise the idea of even asking her to.

  Instead, I’ll make the most of the last few weeks with her.

  I buy a few of the small notecards of flowers, grab a pen from Julien, lean against the stone wall by the river, and write a note.

  But when I look back at my words, I can’t say that. I can’t ask that. I tuck it into my wallet, and write another.

  An invitation.

  Ivy climbs the white walls at the back of the six-room boutique hotel, while songbirds chirp in the night air. Music pulses low and sensual, and absinthe flows freely in glasses at this outdoor enclave, a secret nighttime garden that Joy uncovered deep in the heart of the hip Oberkampf district in Paris. It’s at the Hotel Particulier Tenth, nestled among verdant trees and lush bushes, off a quiet side street with an address nearly impossible to find.

  Her friend Elise knows the owner. I have the impression Elise knows everyone worth knowing in Paris.

  “So, this is the woman who says days should be eaten,” I say as we’re introduced.

  “So, this is the man who’s so enchanted my friend,” she says, her chocolate-brown eyes skeptical behind her glasses, almost as if she doesn’t quite trust me. Elise has a sisterly protectiveness to her, even though I doubt Joy needs it. She’s the kind of woman who can fight her own battles.