Bought a ticket to Amiens, then wandered the city for one last night. At a bar in the Latin Quarter met a girl named Mireille. Stayed up all night with her and her friend — evidently in French this is called “une nuit blanche.” Today we are taking the 1pm train to Picardie together. If she shows up.
One thing bothers me most — I still have no idea why Imogen came to France.
I shut the light off and got in bed. I knew I had to let go of everything, but the more I tried the tighter I held on. I kept thinking about the week after my mother’s funeral, when my father gathered her clothes to offer to his sisters, and how they all went to the closet and looked at the shoes and coats and handbags, but none of them took anything. I remember picking up a pair of shoes and looking at them. They weren’t even real leather.
It was after two when I got out of bed. I turned on the light and pulled out the plastic file with Imogen’s letters and my research photocopies and the papers they’d given me at Twyning and Hooper. I took a cigarette lighter from the lid pocket of my pack and went into the tiny bathroom. I put my notebook and all the papers in the sink. The lighter was in my hand. The envelopes were getting wet from the damp porcelain.
After a minute I put down the lighter. I sat on the tile floor and cried.
Later that night I dreamt I was in Paris. I was meeting Mireille at a museum where her art class was sketching in an atrium filled with marble sculptures. I got there early and saw Mireille at the far end of the atrium, sitting on a bench beside Claire with a large sketchbook in her lap. I decided to walk around the museum until her class was over.
In a dark gallery upstairs there were long rows of portraits where everyone looked familiar, though some of the paintings were hundreds of years old. At the end of the corridor there was a picture of a woman I’d never seen before. I recognized her at once. I looked at the picture for a moment, then I walked downstairs. Mireille’s lesson was over.
It was raining this morning, but I was out on the highway by six o’clock. Twenty minutes later I was picked up by an electrician in a white van who was going all the way to Reykjavík. My luck had changed again. In the afternoon he dropped me off on the highway to Keflavík Airport, and with the steady stream of traffic it only took me a few minutes to get a ride.
By the time I reach the airport ticket desk I’ve missed the day’s flight to Paris. But the agent says she can get me there for 22,000 krónur if I change planes in Copenhagen. The flight leaves in ninety minutes. I have no idea if Mireille will come to meet me.
I unfold the banknotes from my pocket and lay them on the counter along with a ziplock bag heavy with coins. I count it all out, but I’m almost two thousand krónur short. The agent looks at me suspiciously.
— You don’t have a credit card?
— It’s maxed out.
I dig into my backpack and pull out a twenty-pound note I’d hidden in the lining against the frame. Then I run to the Landsbanki exchange counter and trade the note for 2,500 krónur. I buy the plane ticket and go through security. At a pay phone near the gate I call Mireille, but it goes straight to her voice mail. I leave a hurried message.
— It’s Tristan. I’m coming back. I’ll be at Charles de Gaulle at five fifteen, Terminal One. It’s the SAS flight from Copenhagen. I hope you’ll come—
I hang up the phone and run through the terminal to my gate. The airplane is half empty and I have a row at the back all to myself. A stewardess announces the safety procedures in Icelandic and Danish as I buckle my seat belt.
I’m glad there’s no one sitting next to me, because I’m dirty and unshaven and it feels like I haven’t slept properly for months. My skin is chapped from the Icelandic wind. My hair needs cutting, and my clothes are soiled and wrinkled from weeks stuffed in a backpack, everything scrubbed in hostel sinks with only a hard cake of soap. I wonder if Mireille will come and how she might look at the airport. But the more I try to imagine her the more I get a bad feeling about it, so as the plane lifts off I focus on the things I can be sure of. I try to picture Paris and its parks and boulevards, but it’s hard to ignore that in four hours I’ll be landing there with no money and nowhere to stay.
At Copenhagen Airport I call Mireille again. Again she doesn’t answer. I leave another message and type her an e-mail on a coin-operated terminal beside the food court. Then I sit at my gate and watch the plane to Paris being unloaded and refueled, my hand in my coat pocket. I can feel the cold silver of the brooch.
— Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce boarding for SAS flight 559 to Paris Charles de Gaulle—
I find my seat in the second row of the airplane. The middle-aged woman in the aisle seat watches me stuff my backpack in the overhead compartment and squeeze by her to the window. A few minutes after the plane takes off, she closes her magazine and asks me where I’m from. Her accent sounds Irish.
— An American in a German coat, she says, backpacking all over Europe. I’ve heard about these kinds of trips. If it’s Tuesday it must be Paris, that sort of thing?
— Sort of.
— It sounds exciting. What do you think of Europe so far?
I look out the window at the clouds below.
— Of course, the woman adds, it’s not for everyone—
— I love it here.
At Charles de Gaulle I’m the first one off the airplane. Outside the baggage claim there’s a dense line of people waiting behind the barricade. Mireille is there.
She leans forward with her elbows propped on the rail, her face in her hands. When she sees me she straightens up and her mouth opens, but she covers it with her hand as if embarrassed. She runs along the railing beside me, appearing and disappearing behind the families with strollers, behind the chauffeurs holding placards with names on them. Mireille comes around the end of the barrier and takes my hand.
— Suis-moi.
She leads me out of the terminal through the automatic doors. The autumn air is cool and we walk quickly down the sidewalk. Cars and buses go past us, stopping to pick up passengers and pulling out again. Mireille takes me to a niche behind a potted tree. I put my arms around her and pull her close. I kiss her. Her lips are warm. She smiles and wipes off a tear and laughs, whispering my name. I put my hand on her face and kiss her again. A line of Mercedes taxis go past us, then a worker pushing a huge train of luggage carts.
Mireille is holding my hand and she feels the thin cut on my palm. She frowns, stroking the wound.
— You hurt yourself.
— I fell down in Iceland. There was lava on the ground. It was pretty sharp.
Mireille lifts my hand and kisses it playfully.
— I’m sorry I wasn’t very good at waiting. I just worried you’d never come back. But you did. So you don’t have to explain anything—
— I didn’t get the money.
Mireille looks at me. Her hair has grown out in the last month and it goes over her ears now. Her gray eyes are pale in the sunlight.
— You were too late?
I shake my head. — It wasn’t mine after all.
Mireille nods slowly. She glances at the taxis going past and weaves her fingers into mine, turning back to me. We start down the sidewalk toward the RER trains for Paris. Finally she says, — Then you were right. You got your answer in the end.
— I guess I did.
— What was it?
I reach into my coat and pull out the rest of my Icelandic change, thick brass coins with the image of a fish on the reverse. I hand them to Mireille.