The Map That Leads to You

by J. P. Monninger

  “You okay, miss?” he asked in French.

  I nodded.

  He studied me.

  “You sure?” he asked.

  I nodded again.

  “It’s late to be around the park,” he said. “The jardin is better during the day.”

  I nodded.

  He pulled forward when the light changed. We drove a long time in silence. His eyes checked on me frequently in the rearview mirror.

  “This is not the best place,” Bormo said when he pulled to the curb outside the jardin and flicked off the register. “Forty-seven euros. It can be dangerous at this time of night.”

  He turned around in his seat so he could speak to me directly.

  “It would be my honor to take you for coffee … to bring you someplace with lights.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, paying him. “Ça va.”

  He took the money. I gave him an extra twenty euros. One of the good things about working tirelessly and having no social life was that I always found money in my pockets. He took the twenty euros and slid them into the brim of his lumpy hat.

  “It’s very late,” he said. “You were in a nice hotel, and now … it’s not good out here.”

  I smiled and climbed out of the cab. Then I stood for a time facing the iron gate of the Jardin du Luxembourg. Bormo pulled away from the curb.

  He was correct about everything.

  The jardin was better during the day.

  * * *

  I had no light except the flashlight on my cell phone. Park lights did not quite illuminate the bed where the Esche was located. It grew in a shadow. It took me surprisingly little time to recall precisely where the tree lived.

  I used the fork to dig in the soil. The soil was damp and cold.

  You can visit it whenever you come to Paris. Everything else in the world will go along, sometimes failing, sometimes prospering, but your tree—our tree—it will keep growing.

  When I struck the clear plastic container holding our braided locks of hair, I pulled it slowly from the earth. I saw the new note—the note from Jack—immediately. It had been placed inside the plastic container after we had buried it. It was clear that he had dug it up and placed a note for me inside. He had used our own secret mailbox to leave me a message I would find if not today, then tomorrow, then a thousand tomorrows later. No one else in the world would know to look for it. And the Esche, the honorable Esche, had stood guard over it until I could come for it—had stood next to it in the winter, through the long, gray days of autumn and bursting fruits of spring. Hadley and Hemingway had been here, as we had been, and it did not surprise me to see his careful handwriting.

  Heather, the writing said.

  A plain business envelope enclosed whatever note he had written. A little dirt had soiled the bottom-right corner. For a moment I couldn’t touch it, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything.

  In that instant I knew he had not forgotten me, not forsaken me. He would not have written a note, not bothered to return to the mighty, mighty Esche if he had not cared. I knew he had thought of me kneeling in the same place that I now knelt. I knew that he understood I would search for him, that I would come looking until I found him at last. I felt an enormous torrent of love and hate and every emotion under the sky. I lifted the absurd plastic container and kissed it. I removed the letter carefully and then closed the plastic box again and buried it once more. I thought of Mr. Periwinkle and of all those creatures that try to go on bravely. I knew about Jack now. I knew he had left me for all the reasons Raef had explained.

  And I also knew he was dying.

  * * *

  “Drove past here twice and wasn’t going to come back,” Bormo said, “but I had a feeling something was going on.”

  I opened the door and climbed in.

  “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  “You got dirty.”

  I nodded.

  He regarded me in the rearview mirror.

  Then he shook his head, apparently unable to figure it out.

  “Back to the hotel?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Love,” he said. “That’s the only thing makes people act that crazy.”

  I smiled. He smiled back. Then he drove off, and my heart felt empty and frightened. I held the letter against my chest. I could not open it. Not yet. Not until I could breathe again.

  51

  Amy called me before we made it back.

  “Where the hell are you, Heather? I woke up and you weren’t here.”

  “I’m okay, Amy.”

  “That is just not fucking cool! To leave without saying anything—”

  “I’m sorry. I really am. I apologize.”

  “I thought … I don’t know what I thought. That is so, so, so not cool, Heather. It rings some bells for me when people disappear like that. You’re not with Xavier, are you?”

  “I apologize. No, I’m not with Xavier. I wouldn’t have left if it hadn’t been important.”

  “What was so goddamn important that you had to leave the hotel in the middle of the night? We have to be on a plane at noon, Heather. Have you left the hotel? Are you in someone’s room?”

  “I had to go look at something. Something Jack related,” I said.

  Amy didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “Where are you?” she said eventually.

  “On my way back.”

  “I’ll wait up.”

  “Thank you, Amy. And I’m sorry.”

  “So am I. Hurry.”

  Dawn light pushed from behind low-hanging clouds by the time I arrived back at the hotel. Bormo swung the cab into the porte cochere, and a doorman stepped forward to handle my door.

  “Thank you, Bormo,” I said, paying him.

  He would not accept a tip.

  “The fee, that’s business. But the tip, that’s between us.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Hope it was worth it.”

  “I hope so, too.”

  He flipped down the meter and drove off.

  I went in and found Amy sitting in the lobby.

  She stood when she saw me and crossed the lobby floor and hugged me hard. Then she pushed me away, examined me, and hugged me again. I couldn’t raise my arms. I couldn’t dare lose sight of Jack’s note. I put my forehead against Amy’s shoulder and wept. She pushed me away, looked again at my face, then hugged me as hard as I had ever been hugged in my life. For the life of me, I could not stop weeping.

  * * *

  “That’s the letter?” Amy asked. “He left that in your secret place? The tree that you two planted?”

  “He knew I would come to look for it someday. Only I would ever know where to find it.”

  I sat hunched forward from the waist. I still had trouble breathing; I had almost begun to wonder if I would ever catch my breath again. Amy kept her arm around me. The long, slow shudders that come after a cry trembled up and down my body.

  “Raef should have told you before. I’m super angry at him right now.”

  “He had given his word to Jack. You should like that Constance married a man who keeps his word. I don’t blame Raef. He was in an impossible situation.”

  “Then why tell you now?”

  “I think he thought I was in too much pain.”

  We sat in a small love seat in the corner of the hotel lobby. A forest of potted ferns hid us from direct observation. Across the lobby, two sleepy kids worked at getting a tray of pastries displayed for the coffee shop. Now and then an older woman, apparently in charge, swung by to speak to them and to push them to hurry up. The smell of coffee filled the lobby.

  “So you think he’s sick?” Amy asked. “Is that it?”

  “I think he’s dying. I know he is. Jack is dying.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said, and she reached across to grab my hand. “You don’t know that.”

  �
�He was sick. Raef told me. He has leukemia. He went to a hospital with Raef to check on a condition. Don’t you see? He came with me to the airport because he wanted me to know that he had made a choice to go with me. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t cross that line. It wasn’t about New York or jobs or anything like that. He just let me think that.”

  “And that’s why he didn’t come with you?”

  I nodded.

  “Yes,” I said. “That would be the way Jack would handle things.”

  “That’s a bunch of bullshit, though. Why wouldn’t he tell you what was going on?”

  “Because that’s not how Jack lives. He wouldn’t want my life to be diminished by his.”

  “It wouldn’t be diminished.”

  “He wouldn’t see it that way, Amy. What would he do? How would it go? Was I going to be his nurse? Is that the life he wanted me to have? Think about it. Would you want that for someone you loved? If we had been married for twenty years, okay, then that’s part of it. But we had just met. We were just finding out about each other. He didn’t want to be a patient.”

  She weighed that. Despite Amy’s sometimes wildness, she saw the world as an orderly place, and this did not fit into that mold.

  “And that’s why you loved him,” Amy said. “That’s part of who he is. That’s who Jack is.”

  “Yes.”

  “The world is just too damn complicated for me,” she said. “Do you want some privacy while you read the letter?”

  I nodded.

  She squeezed my hand and then leaned over the table to kiss me.

  “I’ll grab us some coffees if it’s ready,” she said, leaving. “Remember to breathe.”

  I nodded again.

  I put the letter on my lap and stared at it. It took me a long minute or two to force my hands to touch it.

  52

  I slid the letter out of the envelope carefully. I separated the two pieces of paper—the envelope like a pursing bird mouth—and placed them side by side. I wanted to absorb every detail. The two young people arranging the pastry display paid no attention to me. I smelled coffee still brewing and the faint odor of cleanser. Far away, a clock chimed. I didn’t count the chimes.

  I looked inside the envelope to make sure nothing remained inside it. It was empty. I bowed it open farther so that I could be sure, then turned the envelope upside down over the table. I shook it several times. Satisfied, I placed it carefully back in its position.

  Then I unfolded the letter and read:

  Dear Heather,

  I am writing this after leaving the airport. I’m sorry. I know I caused you pain, and I grieve about that. If your pain matches mine at this moment, then I am doubly sorry.

  I couldn’t follow you to New York, because I am not completely my own to give. I’m sick, Heather, and I’m not going to get well. I can’t—I won’t—shift that onto you, onto us. Believe me when I say I am not being melodramatic. I am being as hardheaded as I know how to be. Call it what you will—fate, a roll of the dice, a bad card. It came up against us this time. Our luck didn’t hold.

  But it was pretty to think so for a time, wasn’t it? It was for me.

  You made my days rich, Heather. I loved you from the bottom of everything. Love finds us, passes through us, continues.

  J.

  I read the letter three times, ten times, read it until my hand shook so hard I could no longer hold the paper steady. I placed it back on the table and held my breath. I looked up through the deep blue of the pool water and tried to empty myself. I held my breath for a long time.

  Then I went to Amy.

  “Will you do me a favor? Will you run up to our room and bring me down my book bag? You know the one.”

  “Sure, honey. Can you tell me what the letter said?”

  “Bring me the bag, please, and then I’ll know. I’d go myself but I don’t trust my legs right now. The bag. It’s on the table.”

  She nodded, touched my hand, then left. She returned in no time to our tiny island behind the ferns. She put the bag in front of me. I slid out Jack’s grandfather’s journal.

  “You have it here with you?” Amy asked.

  “I carry it everywhere. I carry it to work sometimes. When I have it I can almost believe I will run into Jack.”

  “Oh, you poor lamb. You’ve got it bad. So bad.”

  I pulled out the journal. It had a familiar, kindly feeling in my hand. I knew the passage. I opened to the beginning of the journal and found it almost immediately.

  In the square they danced with cowbells draped around their necks. The sound was riotous and unendurable. I saw a woman and man dancing together, and they danced with something akin to fury. The man stood tall and angular, and something had happened to his face to remove a divot from his forehead. He wore the half mask of a wolf. The woman danced with her skirt trailing out like the blade of a mower, and she spun and spun, her beauty heightened by the way she appeared as a wick in the center of her own candle. I watched them a long time. Evening came on, and they continued to dance, their movement absorbed and sent back by their compatriots and fellow townsmen, and for the first time since the war ended, I felt my heart lift. Yes, they danced to send winter back into the mountains, but they also danced because winter always ends, wars end, and life is victorious each and every time. Watching them, I learned that love is not static; love does not divide. What love we find in this world is coming toward us and traveling away from us simultaneously. To say we find love is a misuse of the word find. Love finds us, passes through us, continues. We cannot find it any more than we can find air or water; we cannot live without either thing any more than we can live without love. Love is essential and as common as bread. If you look for it, you will see it everywhere, and you will never be without it.

  “I know where he has to be. It’s spring, and he’ll be there. It’s here in the journal. I know where he has to end up. The journal begins at a place in spring. That’s how his trip will end. It just makes sense.”

  “You’re starting to spook me now, Heather.”

  “Look at the date on the entry. It’s now. It’s two days away. And the phrase he quotes in the letter—it’s from the journal. Love finds us, passes through us, continues. Do you see? It’s right here.”

  “But that doesn’t mean he is following the journal exactly, does it? Sorry, Heather. I’m trying to go with you here, but it’s just a line from a journal.”

  “It’s the last entry. It’s where the journal begins. It’s a festival. He’ll be there. I know he will. He told me about this place. He said the night before the Nazis invaded, the entire town went out and danced. They danced in the face of death. That’s why he’ll be there. He wouldn’t miss it. He wants to dance in the face of death. That’s Jack.”

  I stood.

  “I’m going to pack now,” I said. “I’m going to go to him.”

  “Heather, hold on. This is crazy. You can’t know that he’s there. And you can’t know even if he was going that he’s going to be there this week, or in a few days, can you? Come on, think. Are you sure? Are you sure you know where he is?”

  “You’re right, of course. I know that. I know I’m being irrational, but I can’t let it go, Amy. Don’t you see? I’ve tried to let it go, but I have to see him. He has to be there eventually. He will be there. It’s spring, and he has to follow the journal to the end.”

  “What about your job?”

  “Fuck my job.”

  “You’re not saying that. You’re not thinking clearly.”

  “Maybe not. And maybe I am thinking clearly for the first time. I should never have let him go.”

  “You didn’t have a choice.”

  “I am going to stay until I find him. I don’t care anymore. I can’t live this way. I have to see him again. One way or the other, I have to know I wasn’t crazy to believe in what we had.”

  Amy took a breath. I saw her weigh things again in her mind. I saw the old Amy, the wild Amy, return and take poss
ession of her soul. Her eyes became bright, and she grabbed my forearm and squeezed it.

  “You go to him,” she said, her voice irresistible. “You go and find him, and you don’t stop until you have what you need. Do you hear me? You’ll regret it all your life if you don’t find him and know, once and for all, what happened to him. He’s your great love.”

  “He’s sick. And he went away to let me be free.”

  Amy squeezed my forearm harder.

  “I believe you,” she said. “Either that, or you’re having a nervous breakdown.”

  I hugged her. I hugged her hard. I laughed, but it was a short, abrupt laugh more like a cough than anything else.

  “I can’t live halfway. I can’t go forward until I understand what happened. I can’t.”

  “And if you have it wrong?”

  “Then I’m love’s fool. That’s not such a bad thing to be, is it? To be a fool for love?”

  She let me go. She nodded. I nodded back at her. Then I ran upstairs to pack.

  Batak

  53

  Batak, Bulgaria, April 1946

  The man tilted the bottle back into his mouth and squinted. He staggered from his drunkenness; now he had collected a crowd around him with the promise to empty the bottle of “savage gin.” The gin, I knew, was anything but gin. It was a combination of rubbing alcohol and barley. Clearly the man no longer cared. Several onlookers rushed forward to pull his arm down, but he fought them off, pushing them away and dodging until he could get his lips around the bottle’s neck again. I would not have noticed his tears if the last light hadn’t caught him in profile. He was an ugly man, made uglier by the bestial face trapped to the bottle that fed him, his jacket torn, his pants bare at the knees. He appeared desperate to have the liquor inside him, desperate to forget, and each nod of his Adam’s apple declared a victory of suicide. At last he tossed the bottle to one side and held out his arms, ta-da, and no sooner had he made a small bow to the crowd, he collapsed in a pile on the ground. Even in war I had never seen a man go down so heavily. He collapsed in a pile, as if a force above him had driven him into the ground, and I turned away so I would not watch him vomit. But he did not vomit; he rolled on the ground, seizing his stomach, and one of his friends got him onto his knees and pounded on his back until the man finally disgorged a clear arc of liquid. The crowd cheered, and the drunken man sank onto the earth once more and looked up into the evening light. His tears had left a trail down his dirty face, and his mouth, glimmering with vomit and drink, glowed in the last light. The two marks of moisture connecting at his lips looked like an hourglass.