Two for the Road, page 30
Tears soak my cheeks. How could Zane do that? Why would he do that? But of course I know why.
Francis looks at me, scratches his curls. “I’m sorry, Gigi. But I thought you should know what he said. He may be a fine tour guide, but saying those things about you—he’s not a kind person.”
I want to scream. I want to throttle Zane. I also want to curl up and hide from the world. My head hits the seat in front of me. None of this would’ve happened if I hadn’t come on this trip. If I’d just kept the whole thing a fantasy, never allowing myself to take action, I wouldn’t be feeling any of this right now.
I reach down into my bag for my phone. I hit the entry for the shop’s voicemail, listen to my own voice and then press the # button to listen to the saved messages.
The robotic voice announces, You have no saved messages.
I pull the phone away from my ear and stare at the screen. “What?” I say aloud, looking for a mistake—that I’ve called the wrong number.
“Gigi?” Francis says, sounding concerned.
I slide back to my original seat across the aisle. End the call, then try again, going through the prompts, pushing the buttons I memorized years ago. But when I enter the password, it’s the same thing. No new messages.
It doesn’t make any sense. Where are the messages? Where is their message?
And then realization comes. The most plausible answer. I hang up and call Lars. I barely wait for him to say Hello.
“Did you”—and I stop. I try to catch my breath, but all I can get is a shallow gasp of air. “Did you erase the saved messages on the shop voicemail?”
Please say no. Please say no. I hold my breath, waiting for his answer.
“What? Sorry, what’s going on, Gigi? You sound weird.”
“Did you erase the saved messages? Did you?” My voice is high and panicked. I’m rocking back and forth, shaking. “I need you to think it through. Lars, the voicemail for the shop. Did you check the messages?” My fingers are shaking so badly I can barely hold on to the phone.
“I-I,” he stutters, sounding rattled. “I definitely checked the messages. It was on the pad you left, right? I was supposed to.” He sounds confused. “Is this about an order? Because if it’s that woman—I can’t recall her name—Bette, maybe?—she placed an order by voicemail, but she came in because I hadn’t filled it. She was upset but I dealt with it. Did she complain to you?” He’s talking it out, and I keep trying to interrupt him, but no sound is coming out of my mouth.
“Did you erase them?” I croak out.
“Yeah?” he says, still sounding confused, but there’s a tinge of nervousness to his voice now. “I don’t know. Geeg, what’s the matter? There were like five new messages, and they were all people asking if the store was open, and they felt pointless to save, then that woman and so I figured I’d heard them all, so yeah, I guess I erased them. But like I said, I filled that order, so…What’s the big deal?”
The air is slowly being squeezed out of my body. Their voicemail—the last tie to their voices—is gone. I will never hear them talk to me again.
My stomach heaves as though I can’t get the tears out fast enough.
Lars keeps saying my name, like it’s a question. Gigi? Gigi? He has no clue what’s going on—and that’s part of the problem.
Finally, I choke out the words.
“I did everything for you, Lars,” I say into the phone. “I’ve run the shop for eight years. You haven’t helped at all since they died—just like you never helped when they were alive. And all I asked was for you to run the shop for me so I didn’t have to think about it for ten days, and you ruined everything. They’re gone now and it’s all your fault, Lars!” I shout with frustration.
“Gigi, what are you talking about?” Lars says, his voice full of concern. “What do you mean I ruined everything?” Then his voice changes and he sounds angry. “I’ve been here every day, running the shop, just like you asked. I’m not going to be bitter about that because I said yes, but you haven’t been grateful, you’ve just nitpicked at every little thing I didn’t do your way. I don’t know what you’re talking about, this whole message thing, and I don’t even care.” Now he’s shouting at me. “But let’s get something straight. If I never ran the shop before it’s because I didn’t want to. Big deal. You chose to keep the shop, and that was your choice, Gigi.”
I think back to those first days, how nervous I was to manage the store without Mom and Dad. “No one made you do that,” Lars says, lowering his voice, though it’s still full of anger. “Not me, not them. You kept the shop because you wanted to keep the shop. Don’t put that on me. You turned it into a romance bookshop because you love romance novels.” If Lars were in front of me now, I know he would be pointing his finger, jabbing it into my chest. “So whatever grudge you’re holding, you should first get your own story straight.”
My heart pounds in my ears. I want to speak, but I can’t hear my voice. He’s right, all of it. I wanted the shop. And sure, I wanted Lars to run it with me, but he didn’t want to. He had other ideas. His prerogative. I changed the story—to be mad at him for not helping out. Because it was easier to be angry with him than to feel hurt by him.
Lars’s voice softens. “What was the voicemail?” When I’m silent, he tries again. “Breathe, Gigi. Come on. Just take a deep breath.”
Eventually I get the words out. “It was Mom and Dad. They left me a message, the night they died. On the shop’s voicemail.”
Lars doesn’t say anything for a minute. Then he speaks. “I remember that message. You played that for me. You played that over and over again—for days after. Oh, Geeg, you kept that? All this time? Is that healthy?”
“Lars, who cares whether it’s healthy?” I hiss. It was the only real thing I had of Mom and Dad. Their voices, keeping them alive. And now I have nothing and Lars is focused on whether it’s healthy to keep a voicemail for a few years?
“Geeg, calm down,” he says, which makes me even more infuriated with him.
“Ugh, Lars. Don’t tell me to calm down. That’s so irritating.”
Lars exhales loudly. “You keep shit like this.”
“Like what?” I say, because as much as I want to end this conversation, I’m curious, about what he means.
“You hang on to things, people, places, ideas, voicemails. You can’t bring them back. Nothing will bring them back. Not even staying with David simply because Mom and Dad knew him.”
“David?” Where did that come from? “I’m not with David. I’m not getting back together with David. I broke up with David,” I remind him.
“But it took you five years,” he says loudly. “You never should’ve gotten together with David in the first place. Everyone could see he was wrong for you. And you had to know it, too. But you kept thinking you could make your relationship something it wasn’t. You can’t preplan life, Gigi. It’s never going to work out the way you think it should because life isn’t like that. If you want a life, you’ve got to fucking live it. It’s that easy. So yeah, I guess I deleted your voicemails. Because it never crossed my mind that you were holding on to something like that for all these years, Gigi.”
He says “all these years” as though it’s a bad thing, but it only highlights how long I was able to keep the most special thing I had left of Mom and Dad. Eight years I protected that voicemail. And then in eight days without me at the shop, it’s gone.
“I hate you.” My voice is low. “I hate you so much right now.”
“Great. Hate me. At least it’s a real emotion rooted in something that happened in the present. In real life.”
I throw my phone, and it lands on the floor of the bus with an unsatisfactory thud. I pick it up.
“Gigi,” Francis says softly. I look up. Everyone’s looking at me with concern in their eyes.
I need to get off this bus. I grip the armrests, my hands turning white.
“Stop the bus,” I say softly, my breath catching, like the words are stuck in my throat.
I stand. “Stop the bus,” I say again, finding my voice. Zane’s face, in the rearview mirror, turns to me.
“STOP THE BUS!”
Zane holds up a finger. The bus turns into a parking lot and lurches to a stop.
I fly forward, grabbing the tops of the seatbacks to steady myself, then make my way to the front. “I’m getting off,” I say to Zane.
“Everyone’s getting off,” he says drily. “We’re in Bristol.”
He pulls the lever to open the passenger door. I rush down the stairs and look around. The sky’s dark, like my mood. Jenny’s off the bus next. “What’s going on with you?” she asks. I shake my head and focus on the doors, waiting for Zane to emerge. He’s last. Everyone else seems to skitter away, as though I might blow at any second. They’re not wrong. I march over to him.
“How could you?” I say, trying to keep my voice calm.
He stares at me blankly. “Hmm?”
I cross my arms over my chest, my heart pounding in them.
“Could what?” His voice has an edge.
“How could you say those things to Taj?”
He raises his eyebrows. “What? That you came here for me?” His eyes are locked on mine. Don’t look away, Gigi.
“I thought he deserved to know. Wouldn’t you want to know?”
My eyes sting, and yet, I refuse to break his gaze.
“But it wasn’t your place, Zane,” I say quietly, aware that everyone else, who’s now filed off the bus and is standing around, presumably waiting for Zane to lead the tour, can probably hear our conversation.
“When did you decide you liked Taj?” Zane asks. The edge is still there. Now, Zane looks away. “Before you kissed me, or after?”
His voice is as smooth as ever, but the edge has been replaced by what I think is hurt. I open my mouth but the words don’t come.
He looks back at me, and his eyes narrow. “You crossed an ocean for me, Gigi. That’s what you said.”
He’s right. That’s exactly what I said.
I feel like I’ve been trying to hold up a bookcase that’s leaning forward. It’s too heavy, it’s too much. The books are—one by one—falling to the ground around me. I can’t keep the bookcase and the books together any longer. The only thing left is to let the bookcase fall, too.
“You’re right, Zane. I did.” Maybe it’s OK to let the bookcase fall. Maybe the way out isn’t by holding the bookcase up, but by letting it fall and stepping over it. So that’s what I do. “I guess some things don’t go according to plan.”
I turn and walk away, past one other tour bus in the parking lot. Then I realize I need my bag. So much for my grand exit.
While Zane opens up the luggage compartment, I turn to Jenny, who’s closest. “I’m leaving. But I’m really glad I met you.” Her eyes widen.
“What do you mean, you’re leaving? You can’t just leave.”
Everyone gathers around me, firing questions at me, but there’s no time, or need, to get into it all. I turn to Francis, who’s appeared at my side. “Thank you. You didn’t have to do what you did, and I’m glad.” I throw my arms around him. He looks alarmed but hugs me back anyway. “I’m going to miss you,” I whisper. “If you ever want to remember anything about this trip, make sure you do call me, OK?” He pats my back and pulls out his recorder. “Gigi’s leaving. She just hugged me goodbye. I’m going to miss her, too.”
Then I say goodbye to Violet and Nelle. “You’re a good mom,” I tell Nelle. “Jenny is lucky to have you.” I turn to Violet. “You too.”
To Sindhi, I say I’m going to call her one day, if I’m ever married with kids and things aren’t going well.
“I’m not sure I’ll have very good advice for you,” she says. “Except this: things change. Don’t hold on to the way they used to be.” Roshi rips out a page from his crossword book and hands it to me.
“For posterity,” he says. I slip it in my bag, then hug him, too. Jenny whistles to get everyone’s attention. “Come on, come on.” She holds up her camera. “One for the street. Don’t look at the camera. And don’t smile too much. Just act natural.” We all look at each other, then laugh because she’s just made this moment anything but natural.
“OK, OK, that’s enough,” she says, once she’s taken her photo. I look around one more time, wave goodbye and then lead my rolling suitcase out past the tourist parking lot. I have no idea where I’m going, and I’ve never felt more sure of my decision.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Day 9, Monday, 3:30 p.m.
London
The train trip from Bristol to London takes two hours, and I use them to think, to consider what Lars said. Was he right—did I think that if I found a story similar to my parents’, I’d somehow bring them back? They met each other accidentally, in the real world, not matched together by an algorithm. And then they worked really hard at their relationship to keep it strong. There were times when Mom wanted to give up the shop, wanted Dad to get a different job. There were times she wanted to stay home and take care of Lars and me, without the distraction and stress of book sales. There were fights and there were tears and there was laughter and there was love. There were times they hated their life together and times they loved it. And that was their life together—not mine. I understand that now, I think.
The high arched-glass ceiling of Paddington Station allows natural light into the cavernous space. People bustle past along the platform in both directions. The floors are shiny and the speakers blast arrivals and departures. The pace of the place is mesmerizing. But there’s no time for mesmerizing.
I stow my luggage in a metal locker, then follow the crowds through the main atrium and out onto Praed Street. Red double-decker buses line the street. Tourists carry maps and hold out phones to take pics. They pack the sidewalks, wandering this way and that, while locals walk quickly in straight lines.
A red hop-on hop-off bus passes. I run to catch it at the next stop. The entrance steps are steep. At the top, in the open air, I find a seat alone. It’s a warm day but the wind is cool. As the bus ambles past a commons, a guide appears at the top of the stairs. He’s young—maybe twenty—and full of energy. He’s trying, cracking jokes, waving his arms—but he’s no Angus. As the bus makes its way down Oxford Street, I study the pedestrians, the shoppers, the tourists and locals on the sidewalk below. I’m searching for Taj’s mess of brown hair. As we wind our way through Soho and Mayfair to Marylebone and Regent’s Park, apartment building after apartment building taunts me. Is he inside one of those apartments—er, flats, I should say—right now?
Mishaps might make memories. I made a mistake, not telling him the truth. But I don’t just want memories. I want the present.
That’s easier said than done. I call Charlotte, hoping she can get Taj’s number from Angus’s phone, but it rings and rings. I try the Wilkenson Tour Company general line, hoping there’s a directory to their cellphones that hasn’t yet been disconnected for Taj, but no luck.
“This is one of the best places to get great street food in the city,” the guide says, and something about that gives me pause. Taj mentioned something about some sort of street food he loved—butter chicken, fried chicken, what was it? An acronym. Chicken Fingers Fried in Fat? There was a B, definitely a B in there. He would get it while he washed his clothes at the laundrette. It’s the first thing I do when I get home from a tour. In Chelsea. My hand shoots up.
“Ah, we have a question from the lovely lady in blue.”
“Are we going to Chelsea?”
“Ah, sadly, we are not. Fancy a football game, do you?” The bus stops and over the edge I see a line of new passengers waiting to get on.
I stand and hurry to the front of the bus, down the steps and out the doors, pushing my way through the people to the sidewalk.
FCB. CBD. It was definitely chicken, a fried chicken sandwich. FCS. No, not a sandwich. A wrap? And there were four letters. To my right I pass a salad shop and I scan the menu looking for clues, but there’s nothing and I keep moving, past an electronics repair shop, then a shawarma stand. Shawarma. That’s it! Butter Fried Chicken Shawarma. But not here, in Chelsea. Near a laundrette. How hard could it be? I spin around. Cars are bumper to bumper, crawling an inch a minute, and there are people going in every direction on the sidewalk. I walk, then run and weave through the crowd. At the next intersection a cyclist cuts me off, and I look around for a bike-share stand. Two blocks away, three bikes are lined up at one of those automated bike dispensers. I push my credit card into the machine and tap the screen, waiting impatiently for the page to load. With the slip of paper I race over to the first bike. The light is red. The second bike’s light is red, too. The third is green. I punch in the number and the bike releases. I type Chelsea into my maps app, then slap my phone into the holster on the handlebars, throw my leg over the seat and start riding.
The bike is clunky and the gears won’t shift, so I have to pedal as hard as I can to make it go. Where’s an e-bike when I need it? A round of pedal-mashing follows, through Hyde Park, past the Victoria and Albert Museum, through South Kensington to Fulham Road, following the directions to get to Stamford Bridge, the stadium where the football team plays, as legendary in its own way as the Big House. Taj said that some nights he’d fall asleep to the roar of the teams when they were playing.
Larger-than-life images of Chelsea FC players line the road. Every bit of my body is covered in sweat. Plenty of food stands line the streets but none that look anything like what Taj described, and I don’t see any laundrettes. I turn my bike around and head back in the direction I came, veering to the right, onto King’s Road. Up ahead is a small block of grass dotted with people basking in the summer sun. As I stop at a light, I try to imagine Taj walking through the park. I look up at the three-story buildings surrounding the green. Trying to guess which one might be his feels pointless. I put my foot down on the curb and then turn, and there it is. Right beside me. A Middle Eastern joint with a green sign that’s flashing the words I’m looking for: Butter Fried Chicken Shawarma. I haul my bike onto the curb and lean it against a lamppost, then rush into the small storefront. It’s empty, except for a guy behind the counter, wearing a backwards baseball cap.
