The Map That Leads to You

by J. P. Monninger

  “I’m aware of that, Dad.”

  I sipped my hot chocolate. I determined not to step into any traps with my dad. If he wanted answers, he would have to lead the conversation. After a pause, he continued.

  “And with the new job—Ed Belmont’s team just went through the roof, by the way. Their sales, I mean. They had a big write-up in The Wall Street Journal. Anyway, Jack is going to be living with you?”

  “We don’t know exactly, Dad. Probably. We only know we want to be together. That’s the crux of our plan.”

  An intense, narrow headache lodged like a bullet in my front cortex. I put the cup of hot chocolate against my forehead, but that failed to help.

  “And what is his line?” Dad asked.

  “His line?”

  “His trade, his ambition. What does he want to do?”

  “He’s been following his grandfather’s journal through Europe. That’s what he’s been doing, mostly.”

  “His grandfather’s journal?”

  “His grandfather traveled through Europe after the war. Jack is retracing his steps with the idea of maybe doing a book. He loved his grandfather. Jack was a journalist before that at a paper in Wyoming.”

  My father didn’t say anything. The tide of electric whatever-buzz that connected our phones made the sound of the sea swelling and subsiding.

  “Okay, then, I guess you know best, Heather. We’re a little concerned—your mom and I—we’re a little concerned about the timing. You’re young, kiddo, and this is your first big love.”

  “Dad, come on. Stop, please. I’m not doing this lightly. I’m not. Neither is Jack. We didn’t plan to meet or fall for each other. It just happened. We want to be together. He’s a great guy. You’ll love him. He makes me feel solid when I’m around him. I know it may take a little juggling at first, but I’m good at that. And don’t worry. I’m still fully committed to the job and my career. You don’t have to worry about that. I won’t embarrass you, I promise.”

  “Nothing you’ve done has embarrassed me, sweetie. Don’t even think that.”

  We didn’t have much more to say, at least not without getting into a major fritz with each other. I wasn’t going to defend Jack as an abstraction to my father. They would have to meet, to size each other up, have to do that maddening boy-boy thing that I never quite understood.

  “How’s Mr. Periwinkle?” I asked to break the awkwardness.

  “Doing fine, I guess. I haven’t heard anything to the contrary.”

  I took a deep breath and then tried to frame my thoughts carefully for my father. I started once, stopped, then started again.

  “Dad, I don’t know for sure what it all means with Jack. I love him. I know that. And I think he loves me. I know some of the timing may be a little awkward, but there’s always a glitch, right? Isn’t that what you say? Life is one long fight against glitches? Well, I’m starting this new job, and I will give it everything. I promise you that. But Jack counts for something, too. We could postpone everything, tell ourselves what we experienced here doesn’t count, but you didn’t raise me to think like that. You didn’t. Life doesn’t happen someplace in the future. You said that. You said life happens here and now, and it’s a fool’s bargain to let something good go now in the hope of something better at a later date. That’s almost a direct quote. So trust me, Dad. This is a good man. He sees the world in a way that interests me. We make a good team. Maybe it’s not the most convenient set of circumstances, but life is always full of glitches, right?”

  “Always full of glitches,” Dad agreed.

  It was his adage. He had to agree.

  “Okay, sweetie, I guess that’s it. We’re looking forward to seeing you home here. Will Jack be with you here?”

  “We haven’t discussed it, but yes, if that’s all right with you.”

  “It’s your home, too, sweetheart. You’re always welcome no matter what.”

  “And Jack?”

  “If Jack’s okay with you, then he’s okay with us.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate your saying that.”

  “You’re not supposed to be growing up so fast, you know?”

  “Not that fast, Daddy. I still feel like a ten-year-old.”

  “Well, we all do in one way or another. All right, I’ll report back to headquarters. Mom will want to know the scoop. See you in what? A little over a week?”

  “A little over a week.”

  I thought for a second he hung up. But then he said what he always says.

  “You’re still my pumpkin, you know.”

  “I know, Daddy. I always will be.”

  32

  July 30, 1947

  I arrived in a beautiful Italian city called Finale Ligure. It’s not really a city, I suppose. More of a village. It’s on the seacoast, the Gulf of Genoa. The war didn’t consume it as it consumed other places. Being near the sea air has improved my appetite. I ate two large bowls of tomato and noodles at lunch. Afterward, I slept a long time beside the ocean. I had one of those strange sleeps in which the sound of gulls plays in your dreams and you hardly know what is the dream and what is waking life.

  “These must be the stone pillars he wrote about,” Jack said, the journal in his hand, his head turning back and forth from the café nearby to the line of pillars that now towered above us. They were heavy spears of stone jabbed into the earth as if someone had thrown them. No one seemed to pay them any mind except other tourists. One short, round man with enormous forearms stopped near us and explained in Italian that the pillars had once belonged to a Roman brothel, but I had a feeling he was having us on. I tried to google Roman brothel and Finale Ligure on my phone, but the phone claimed it was out of range. The Italian man laughed and walked off. We were the American dupes.

  “Is the café name…?” I asked and borrowed the journal from Jack. The journal read Café Excalibur. The café now was called Café Caprazoppa, named after the great limestone rock that formed the mountains, but that did not necessarily mean it was not the same café.

  “Put the journal in your backpack, will you? But wait. It says seven pillars, doesn’t it?”

  I searched the entry. His grandfather had drawn pillars, fat tubes of rock, but he did not give a number in the text that I could find. I read it up and down while Jack wove in and out among the pillars, his eyes up. It was late afternoon, and the cafés had begun to fill with crowds taking late coffees or having their first cocktails.

  “The drawing has seven pillars,” I said, my eyes going back and forth from the stones to the journal, then back again. “But I don’t see it in the text.”

  “Imagine if he was here. I like thinking that he was here.”

  “I suppose it could be plenty of places, but this seems like it has all the right ingredients. You don’t see pillars like these every day.”

  “I’m still picturing this Vermont farm boy wandering around Europe all by himself. It’s strange in some ways.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, I guess most people’s impulse would have been to get home as soon as possible, but not Grandpa. I don’t think he left the farm more than a couple of times the rest of his life. It’s almost as if he knew he wanted to gather up some images for later reference. I don’t know. It’s kind of funny. I wonder if he resisted going home for some reason.”

  “We passed the Benedictine abbey, didn’t we? That’s in Finale Pia, I think.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just triangulating. Trying to get the layout.”

  It occurred to me how different it was to travel with Jack. Here we were investigating random pillars in a small Italian town, when most people would have been on the beach or traipsing through the ruins. If I had been with Constance, there would not have been a question: we would have seen the sights suggested by the Lonely Planet guide, and that would have been that.

  “Are you bored?” Jack asked, his hands on the pillars, his eyes up at the smooth rise of stone. “You’re probably
bored, right?”

  “I’m always bored around you, so it’s hard to distinguish one time from another.”

  “Must be.”

  “I wanted to learn more about pillars while I was in Europe. It was on my to-do list.”

  “I figured.”

  “I am going to take a couple of pictures of you,” I said.

  “You’re so pushy.”

  “If you do a book, you’ll want them. And even if you don’t, you’ll still want a picture of you standing where your grandpa stood.”

  He started to say something, then he shrugged. I snapped a half dozen pictures of him. He smiled. He had a dazzling smile.

  “Am I going to like your mom and dad?” he asked as I slipped my phone away, changing subjects, his hands still on the stone.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “They probably think I’m digging for your gold. They probably think I’m your man-candy.”

  “And that would be wrong how?”

  “So you admit I am your man-candy. I thought so.”

  “It’s okay. Men are the ultimate accessories. I thought you understood that.”

  “Let’s go to the beach and find a nice café and have a good dinner,” he said. “You can show me off.”

  “I’m pretty broke, Jack.”

  “We need a good dinner in Italy. At least one. My treat.”

  “And wine?” I asked, tucking the journal in my backpack.

  “Plenty of wine.”

  The next thing slipped out of my mouth before I could catch it. It had ghosted our conversation since the night of the mechanical bull. I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “Are we going to start saying we love each other out loud?” I asked.

  I watched his expression carefully.

  “You first,” he said.

  “No, boys always have to go first in that situation.”

  “Why?” he asked, dropping his hands from the pillars and coming to put his arms around my waist.

  “It’s one of the rules of the universe. I think it’s on the periodic table, actually.”

  “I love you, Heather. There you go. Right out loud. The whole thing.”

  “I love you, too, Jack.”

  “So now that’s part of us. We can’t go back. We can break up, but we can’t go back.”

  “True.”

  “I feel as though I’ve loved you from another life almost.”

  “Me, too. Feels that way, I know.”

  “We don’t have to stop falling in love, do we? We can fall deeper.”

  “We will.”

  “We can make our own world. We can live how we like,” he said, his lips close to my ear.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  We stayed for a while longer and looked at the pillars. I liked that we didn’t know their exact purpose. I liked that we committed ourselves to one another in a spot where Jack’s grandfather once stood. It was a gorgeous little village, a perfect Italian comune on the Italian Riviera. In a way, life seemed to be beginning right in that instant, immediately after our words had passed from one to the other. Everything before it had been mere prelude; everything afterward would be Jack. We stood until a flock of pigeons circled near us and landed. They came forward hoping for handouts, their glittering necks holding the light of the sun and turning it green and blue and yellow.

  Paris

  33

  Whatever you bring to Paris, it takes away and uses for a time, then it returns it to you. But what it gives back is altered, sometimes subtly, sometimes more noticeably, but the city guards a small part of whatever you brought and keeps it for itself. Paris is a thief. It is a smiling thief, one that lets you in on the joke but steals just the same. And you can’t resist, because it is Paris, and the city falls into darkness at ten o’clock on summer evenings and the cafés turn on their lights and the streets fill, and the scent of coffee, of perfume, of cooking eggs and onions, is everywhere. In recompense for the theft, Paris returns small, glorious pictures, beautiful moments when it gives you back the thing you brought and hints that you can have more, go deeper, if only you accept the bargain. Sometimes it is only the swell of the Seine as it throbs against its ancient bank, or the absurd open mouth of a sword swallower at Montparnasse, or the feral glint of a traveler looking to lift a wallet on a crowded train platform.

  Paris is the cupped hand of a woman accepting a match light from a man at a small round table under a chestnut tree thirty minutes before a rainstorm.

  * * *

  I spotted Constance from half a block away, and my heart leaped up.

  I ran toward Constance, and she ran toward me—her look as ethereal as ever—and we embraced in a do-si-do that threatened to knock us over from the weight of our backpacks. After a deep, satisfying hug, we pushed away from each other to fill our eyes with the other person, then hugged again, this time more fiercely, and some small thing that had been missing returned to me in a great, gushing relief.

  “You look amazing!” I said, because she did. She looked radiant and happy, and one glance told me everything I needed to know about how her time with Raef had been.

  “You do, too!” she said, nodding, and our eyes worked on one another’s, trying to send messages, to interpret everything in a mad rush to understand what the other had experienced.

  “Did you love Spain?”

  “I loved Spain,” she said. “And Italy?”

  “It was wonderful. We only saw a little, but it was wonderful.”

  “And what about Switzerland?”

  It was too much to tell all at once. We realized, gradually, that Raef and Jack stood back from us, giving us a chance to catch up. We both laughed as it became clear that we had ignored the men. I hugged Raef, and Constance hugged Jack. Then for a moment we didn’t know what to do next.

  “I have a line on a place,” Raef said when we settled in a small circle together, blocking too much foot traffic, it was true. “Maybe we could leave our bags with you two while Jack and I go sort things out. You said you’re okay with a cheap hotel?”

  “Sure,” I said and looked at Jack. He nodded.

  That became the plan. Jack and Raef walked with us to a café near the train station and left us with all the baggage. We ordered two coffees from a stringy old waiter, his white hair like a Roman’s laurel wreath around his temples. The waiter nodded and wandered off. I put my hands across the table, and Constance placed her hands in mine.

  “So?” I asked.

  Her eyes filled.

  “He is the kindest, gentlest man I have ever met,” she said, understanding instantly what I had asked to know. “I’m so mad about him I don’t know what to do with myself. Honestly, I don’t. I keep telling myself this is nutty, this can’t be happening, but then he does something else, something so sweet and thoughtful that it knocks me over again.”

  “I’m so glad, Constance. I’m so happy for you.”

  “And Jack?”

  I nodded.

  She squeezed my hand. The waiter returned with our coffees. She spoke again.

  “We went to Spain, and at first I had difficulty with the language and the pace of things. It was slow, and I felt this nervous need to keep going, to see more, but Raef worked his magic on me. I started asking myself, is this some kind of race? Is it a game where someone wins a prize by seeing more museums, visiting more cathedrals? Why hadn’t I ever thought of that before? It’s so basic and so obvious, but it wasn’t until Raef helped me see it, gave it a context, that I understood a little of what I was doing here in the first place.”

  “I felt the same way,” I said. “With Jack. I had this absurd checklist in my mind, and if I didn’t notch all the squares, then I had somehow failed. I wasn’t the good tourist. I wasn’t getting full value. I don’t know if it’s an American attitude, or just one of my own. Maybe it has something to do with being a good student, but suddenly with Jack I no longer felt in a rush to get somewhere that I had never wanted to get to in the first place. Not rea
lly.”

  “Raef wants me to go to Australia with him. To not go home, but to go with him instead. He wants me to meet his family.”

  “Are you considering it?”

  She looked steadily at me. My lovely, intellectual friend, the young woman who studied saints, merely shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not at all what I came to Europe to do. My parents would think I’ve gone insane.”

  “Have you told them about Raef?”

  “I told my mom. She’s supportive but wants me to be cautious. I’ve hashed it all out in my head. I don’t have to start work until later in the fall. I could do it, go to Australia, I mean. It’s tempting. Raef has to go back for the summer sheepshearing. I think that’s what he said. The seasons are reversed, so I get confused when he talks about it.”

  “You’re that serious?”

  She nodded. She sipped her coffee.

  “Apparently we are,” she said.

  “I’m happy for you. I know I said that, but I really am.”

  “I’m not ready to say good-bye to him. Not yet. Can you say good-bye to Jack?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t feel I could ever say good-bye to Jack, but I didn’t want to say that aloud. Seeing Constance, listening to her plans with Raef, made me realize Jack and I could go on. We didn’t have to end in Paris or New York—or anywhere else, for that matter. It made my stomach feel buttery to think it.

  The waiter brought us more coffee. For a little while we watched the café, the crowd moving around, people coming and going. The crowd looked different from the crowds in Berlin or Amsterdam. Younger, perhaps. Lighter. I felt the ache that I had felt the last time in Paris: that life was here as it was present in few places. And although that didn’t make logical sense, I still felt it, still needed to know it somehow.

  “Let’s call Amy,” Constance said after the waiter left. “It doesn’t feel right to be here without her.”

  “Okay,” I said, because it was the perfect idea. “Let’s call her.”

  * * *

  We Facetimed Amy.