Wanderlost

by Jen Malone

  I am in the Alps. I am in the Alps, on a bus with a Spaniard, a cute boy, and six senior citizens. And I am singing. Loudly and (mostly) without shame.

  I collect my breath for the last line.

  “I have confidence the world can be all mine / They’ll have to agree, I have confidence in me!”

  EIGHTEEN

  As it turns out, only Emma and Mary have confidence in me. Or at least they’re the only ones who agree to hike with me to the mountaintop meadow, which also involves a bit of sneaking through someone’s farm. I can’t decide if it’s the Alpine-flower-scented air or the illicitness of tiptoeing through private property, but the three of us are cackling like the Wicked Witch of the West when we get back to the bus, having had our fill of arms-flung-wide spinning.

  Even though I knew to expect it from my Sound of Music trivia research, I was still ever so slightly disappointed that the winding brook and the bank of birch trees really weren’t there. I was having a hard time believing the movie production would have built a grove of trees and a burbling brook just for one scene, but, yep. They did.

  “Have fun, ladies?” Sam is wearing his trademark grin. I’m beginning to wonder if he even owns a frown.

  “Tiny bit, yup.” I answer his smile with one of my own. And we did have fun. With so much more to come. I’m giddy about that and I think, for not the first time, that I might be a little too invested in my Sound of Music fandom. But so far no one is complaining, and in fact, Mr. Fenton is rewinding the opening scene so Emma can compare her moves to Maria’s.

  Hank and Maisy are, of course, making out in the back of the bus.

  We head back down the hill to a lively chorus of “Do-Re-Mi,” which even Bento knows the words to. “So Do La Fa Mi Do Re,” my merry troop sings as our bus careens down the hill and back into the city. By the time we reach Hellbrunn Palace, where they’ve built a replica movie gazebo in the middle of expansive gardens, we’re all as breathless as Maria trying to work all the billy-goat puppets while yodeling.

  When I’ve composed myself, I say, “All right. If you want, you can take a Sound of Music break for a bit and just explore the gardens. The gazebo from the film is here, but this place is actually more famous for the water games designed by the prince archbishop. All over the grounds are hidden spray fountains that were designed so the prince could play jokes on his guests. So, fair warning: you may get wet.”

  It’s amazing the kind of tour one can give when one has had full access to the internet. Sam’s iPad is a godsend. It’s not my missing binder, but it’s pretty damn close.

  “And no whining if the fountains get you. There is a strict no-whining rule on Aubustus Caesar.” Sam places his hands on his hips as he says this.

  I wait as everyone files off, then whisper a “gracias” to Bento. He’s been following Sam’s written directions to the letter and not giving any indication that he and I do not share a common language. I get a smile and a nod in return.

  When I catch up with everyone, we’re at the entrance to the palace and it’s beyond amazing. To think one person lived here (well, along with his staff of a billion) and it wasn’t even his full-time house. I’m fairly sure mine back in Ohio would fit inside a broom closet in this place, and it’s not like I live in a shoe box or anything.

  We’re really here to see the gardens, though. This prince archbishop dude who built the place was seriously obsessed with water. There are fountains everywhere, and that’s not even counting all the ones we won’t be able to see because they’re camouflaged in the bushes and under trees. I read there’s even one hidden in all the seats of an outdoor table. Except, of course, for the chair the prince sat in. That way, when he wanted everyone to sober up and go home, he could give them all a good dousing. There’s a reason certain people should not be allowed to be obscenely rich.

  Mr. Fenton wants to get up close and personal with someplace called the music room, and Mary and Emma trail off toward the gift shop. They try to include me now that we’re newly bonded from our alpine adventure, but I’m not quite ready for my Sound of Music break. I’m on a quest to find the gazebo from the movie. Hank and Maisy have their hands in each other’s back pockets as they wander off toward the grottos and I feel sorry for any school group that stumbles upon them. Dolores, Sam, and I move toward the gardens, in the direction of the gazebo.

  Since I’m the one who researched this place online yesterday, I’m also the one who knows to watch where the employees leading the garden tours stand if you don’t want to get wet. See, us tour guides know the lay of the land. Okay, fine, today is the first time this trip I’ve known the lay of the land, but I intend to revel in it. And maybe not share all my tour guide secrets with Sam.

  I race after him along a narrow pathway with sprinklers forming an arch over our heads. Dolores was first through, so she’s standing off to the side watching when, just as I reach the end, the sprinkler pressure changes and the water lowers to waist level. Two seconds earlier and we’d have been drenched. A tourist behind us rattles off a string of words in what I assume is Chinese as he reverses course, and Sam turns to me with a satisfied smile.

  “Ha!” he says. “They missed us. I’m telling you right now, I’m making it through this entire visit without getting—”

  A hidden fountain of water bursts from the sidewalk directly under Sam’s feet. The surprise of it throws him back a step, so that the water sprays into his shocked face. In five seconds it switches off, but it’s still long enough for Sam’s hair to soak into clumps, dripping rivulets down his face.

  He sputters and stares at me, mouth open. I can’t help it. I dissolve into giggles. Dolores hides her smile behind her hand, but I’m positive it’s there. She’s been way more relaxed since her grandson joined our trip. Still quiet, but definitely more engaged.

  “Quit laughing at me.” But he’s laughing himself, so I don’t hold back. Over his shoulder, I spot the gazebo across the lawn and point it out to Sam, who groans at its distance from us.

  “I’m going to rest on this bench where it’s nice and dry. You kids go on ahead,” Dolores offers. Sam tries to join her, but he’s dripping so much that she shoos him away. He turns to me with a shrug.

  “Race you,” I challenge.

  “Hold on, I need to empty my shoes.” He pulls them off and lets a river of water tumble out of each. “Ha! Don’t Liesl and Rolfe duck into the gazebo to keep from getting wet? Looks like that’s not gonna work for me.” He replaces his shoes and bunches his T-shirt to wring it out. I try not to stare at the strip of exposed skin above his waistband as he twists the fabric. Whoa. Hello swimmer’s abs.

  Instead I cover with, “Just as well because you can’t duck into it anyway. I read last night that they had to close it to the public when too many people got hurt trying to re-create the bench jumping.”

  Sam hunches over to slide a shoe back on and says, “We’d have totally tried to re-create the bench-jumping scene, wouldn’t we?”

  “Duh! How could you not?”

  Although I blush a little thinking of how that scene finishes with Liesl and Rolfe crashing into each other on their spins and ending up in a kiss. I’m pretty sure Sam’s having the same thought because when he straightens, his ears are turning slightly red. Just as I get my composure back, Mary yells out a “Helloooo” from the far left side of the lawn. I steal a last sideways peek at Sam before turning toward Mary and Emma.

  “Hi, ladies. Having fun?” Sam is alongside me as we jog to reach them, effortlessly casual again.

  “This place is beautiful. Oh, I’m so glad we added it to the schedule today. The whole morning has been a blast so far.”

  “Speaking of a blast,” says Emma, arching an eyebrow at Sam’s soggy appearance. “Had a run-in with a hose, did you?”

  “More like one of the hidden sprinklers. You be careful, Emma, they’re evil and they’re everywhere.”

  “I’m sorry, young man, but weren’t you the very one who instituted a no-whinin
g rule a short while ago?” Mary has him there. I raise my hand to high-five her and we all smile at Sam as he hangs his head in mock shame.

  “May I escort you ladies to the gazebo?” he asks, holding up two dripping elbows to Mary and Emma.

  Emma wrinkles her nose and says, “What you may do is venture down this pathway ahead of us. That way if any of those fountains are hiding, you can suss them out for us.”

  Sam gamely heads up our procession, taking steps that are exaggeratedly slow. He peers at the ground with great concentration. When we reach the gazebo, nice and dry still, I’m shocked to find how small it is. I knew they built a larger one on a soundstage in Hollywood for that scene, but I still didn’t expect this one to be quite so tiny. We spend a few minutes taking pictures of Emma and Mary in front of it with their cameras. They insist I join them for a couple, which is super sweet.

  As Sam hands Mary back her camera, she says, “Oh, but we need one with Sam in it. Lizzie, you hop in there too. I’ll take it and Emma can, uh, help me.”

  I raise my eyebrows at this, but Sam just laughs, so I play along. We stand next to each other and paste on smiles.

  “Step in closer, you two,” calls Emma.

  Oh, I am soooo onto them. I slide an inch nearer to Sam, but he surprises me by closing the gap between us, draping an arm over my shoulder and settling his hip against mine.

  “Gotta give the guests what they want, Lizzie,” he says out of the corner of his mouth, keeping his smile in place. Um, I think there are limits to that, but I don’t protest. I’m too busy absorbing the feel of his leg on mine and I don’t even care that his wet clothes are pressing against my dry ones. Mary takes an extra long time framing the shot and I have every suspicion that’s on purpose too.

  She finally says, “Got it,” and I step quickly to the side, blushing again.

  As we walk back toward the palace, Emma steals a last look at the gazebo. “Oh, that scene is my absolute favorite, even if Rolfe does turn out to be a—what did you call him, Sam?”

  “An asswaffle,” Sam answers, stepping gingerly along the path, his eyes still searching the ground for hidden fountains.

  “Right. He may have been an . . . asswaffle, but there’s something about Liesl getting her first kiss and that squeal she gives when she does. So sweet and innocent. I get teary every time.”

  “Remembering Corporal Anderson?” Mary teases.

  “A lady never divulges intimate details.” Emma swats at Mary before winking at me. “But she also never forgets her first kiss.”

  “You go, girl,” says Sam, bending over to inspect something on the pathway more closely.

  “That song from the movie got it all wrong, though. Not all girls need someone older and wiser, telling them what to do,” Emma says.

  “You don’t say?” Sam’s head comes up, and he suddenly seems less concerned with attacking sprinklers.

  I avoid looking at him. “Was your corporal a younger man, then, Emma?” I ask.

  “No, he wasn’t. But my husband, Stanley, was three years younger, and that didn’t keep us from forty-one happy years together. I’m just weighing in with my own opinion here, but if you ask me, plenty of girls do all right by a younger man.”

  “You know, Emma, I, for one, couldn’t agree with you more,” Sam says.

  He’s just turning to me with a smirk on his face when another water fountain explodes underneath his feet.

  After the palace, we take a funicular (this train built into the side of a mountain and pulled up on a cable) to a fortress overlooking the Nonnberg Abbey, where Maria was a novice, and have lunch in a café on the battlements. Then our afternoon is spent visiting another palace (the one that provided the facade for the Von Trapp residence) and the church Maria and the captain got married in. We also manage plenty of hissing at the on-screen Baroness. From the front of the bus, I deliver movie trivia I dug up online, like the fact that Christopher Plummer had all of his songs dubbed because his singing voice didn’t hack it, and how the bell cord on the abbey was put there for the movie and never actually worked, but the nuns liked it so much they asked the crew to leave it up.

  As I collapse onto my bed back at the hotel, I’m exhausted but happy because the day was pretty much perfect. I had a big test with Sam looking over my shoulder all day and the pressure of actually engaging with my tour, but it turned out better than I could have hoped. Everyone seemed to really like it. To like me.

  We’re off to Vienna tomorrow. A whole new city.

  And tonight I feel energized, because I’ve decided I’m taking this tour into my own hands. As we headed off to our rooms after dinner, I asked Sam if I could borrow his iPad for the night under the pretense of keeping up with the latest in Ohio political news.

  Obviously I’m not reading any policy initiatives, but I do send an email to Mom and Dad, telling them how amazing camp is, and a very brief one to Elizabeth, telling her I am in Austria and fine. I’m grateful to not have to talk to her. I may have been wrong about hanging up on her the other night, but I feel like my other feelings were valid and I’d rather have some space from her until I sort them all out.

  Once I hit send on those, though, I spend the next several hours researching everything I’ll need to know about Vienna and the stop after that, Prague. I spend longer on my work than I did on most of my high school papers.

  As I clear the browser history so Sam won’t see the websites I looked at, the only thing dampening my mood is how crazy bad I feel lying to him. But it really is for the greater good.

  My last act of the night is a postcard to Madison. I found one of Julie Andrews on the hilltop, arms spread wide, and I draw a little arrow to her head and write Me today! beside it. On the back I scrawl Got to live out my Sound of Music fantasies in the Alps! I missed your voice on the “Do-Re-Mi” rounds. Holy snowcaps, you should see these mountains—you’d die!! Miss you, love you, eat some campfire s’mores for me. XOXO, Bree

  As I switch off the light, I’m still singing snippets of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.”

  “Timid and shy and scared am I, of things beyond my ken.”

  Never mind that I don’t have a clue what a ken is, I can completely identify with how Liesl feels. But I’m making progress.

  NINETEEN

  Vienna is only a three-hour drive away, but we have to be there by ten a.m. to catch the morning workout session of the famous Lipizzaner stallions, and I happen to know that Mary, for one, would kill us if we missed it. Apparently she was quite the rider back in the day. So it’s extra early when we all gather for breakfast in the hotel restaurant.

  Emma and Mr. Fenton immediately begin debating whether it was the Turks or the Austrians who introduced coffee to Europe, and Mary gets busy wrapping pastries from the buffet into napkins and stuffing them into her purse. Sam and Dolores have claimed a quiet table in the corner where Sam is cutting up Dolores’s plain pancakes for her.

  No Maisy. Or Hank.

  “Has anyone seen our favorite couple?” I ask.

  Everyone shakes their heads. I return to the lobby and do a quick scan. Nope. Grabbing a list of room numbers from my pocket, I punch in their extension on the lobby phone. It rings six times.

  Argh. It’s 6:22 and we’re cutting it close as is, so I guess I have no other choice. I researched half the night, dammit. No one’s messing with my day.

  I make my plea at the check-in desk. “Um, I don’t know if you remember me from yesterday. I’m the one who was asking you if a binder and a cell phone had been delivered here for me? Anyway, I’m the tour guide for a small group staying here and two of my guests haven’t shown up for breakfast. Would it be possible to have their room key?”

  The employee checks my credentials and hands over a key card just as Mr. Fenton crosses the lobby to stand next to me.

  “Like some company for this bed check? No telling what you’ll walk in on with those two.”

  We both shudder and grin as I follow him into the elevator and pus
h the button for the sixth floor. A few moments later we’re standing in front of their room. Mr. Fenton gives a gentle knock.

  “Just a second!” we hear from inside. Okay, phew. I won’t need my key. Inside the room a shower turns off. So that’s good, right? If one of them is in the shower, it’s pretty unlikely the other is in a compromising position. I exhale in relief.

  Hank flings open the door and we’re treated to the sight of him with only a towel around his waist. His belly spills over the top and practically into the hallway. I take an involuntary step backward.

  “Uh, good morning, Hank. I just wanted to be sure you both were, um, awake. The bus is leaving in ten minutes.”

  Maisy steps into our line of vision. She is also dripping wet and wearing only a towel. Oh dear Lord! Do these two ever quit? I guarantee most honeymooners do not get this kind of action the first time around.

  Mr. Fenton coughs into his fist. Real subtle.

  “Okay, then. So, uh, if you could just get downstairs as soon as possible, I’ll grab some pastries for you and we’ll be waiting on the bus.”

  I don’t even give them a chance to answer or react. I turn and retreat before they have any thoughts of dropping those towels.

  Mr. Fenton catches up with me at the elevator doors, barely containing his glee.

  “Those two are worth the price of admission.”

  I would prefer not to have a ticket to that particular show. But I am glad to have Mr. Fenton alone.

  “Could I talk to you a sec?” I ask as we wait for the elevator.