What are you writing? she whispered. He held it up, as if by its cover she’d know. It’s my “back” journal, he said. That’s what the Russians call it. For everything else but the main story.
How would he even know that? What Russians?
Chloe didn’t want to tell him she wasn’t okay, because there was no way to explain why she wasn’t, since she didn’t herself know, and so she nodded and closed her eyes, and then quickly opened them again because she didn’t want to miss the food trolley. Chloe loved to eat. Hannah missed it. She didn’t care about food at all. She once said to Chloe, maybe if you stopped with all that cereal and milk, your boobs wouldn’t have grown so big.
The lights were turned off, the movies came on, the headphones came out. Most people slept, or played computer games, or leafed through magazines. Chloe tried to read a book, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but couldn’t concentrate. She left to go to the bathroom, and Blake somehow hurled himself over a fake-sleeping Hannah and followed Chloe down the aisle.
“You can’t sleep either, right? It’s too exciting.”
“It’s many things,” she said.
“Exciting is definitely one of them, right?”
“Many things.”
“But exciting is one of them?”
It was pretty far down the list. Chloe didn’t say it. They waited for the bathroom.
“I think I packed too much stuff,” he said. He sounded so chipper. “Too many T-shirts and jeans. Where are we going to do laundry? I didn’t bring twenty-one pairs of jeans. Mase and I brought five hundred dollars spending money. You think that’ll be enough?”
“If you don’t eat, yes.”
He laughed. Sleeping people opened their eyes and glared.
“I’m glad we’re staying with your grandmother,” Blake said, only a notch quieter. “She’ll feed us.”
“She’s not my grandmother,” said Chloe. “My grandmother is in Fryeburg. Moody. You know her.”
“What about the other one—in Peking?” He tilted his teasing head.
Why? Why?
“It hasn’t been called Peking in over twenty years, one,” Chloe said, swatting him like a harassing fly, “and two, my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother never set foot in China. How many times do I have to say it?”
“What? No. I’ve never heard this story. Do tell.”
They didn’t want to go back to their seats so they loitered near the food cart and verbally abused the awful cookies to pass the time.
The flight dragged on. When Chloe thought they must be halfway around the world, in Singapore or someplace, they finally landed—but not in Riga. In Paris. Hannah was excited, but did they see Paris? No. They saw a Parisian airport. Four-hour layover. They wandered around, washed their faces, split two breakfast buns and two coffees, perused the duty free, put on some makeup (girls) and examined the liquor bottles (boys), then checked how much time they had left: three more hours. Having slept on the plane, Mason was refreshed, having fake-slept, Hannah sore and silent. Blake was exactly the same as he had been seven hours earlier, fourteen hours earlier, nineteen years earlier.
They bought a newspaper and Hannah pretended she could read French. Five minutes of mocking her passed the time. It would have been longer if she’d had a sense of humor. They checked out the naughty magazines, not even decorously covered up by brown paper. They were so progressive in Europe, Blake said, so advanced. Bless them, said Mason.
The girls were getting more and more impatient. “You’re looking at it all wrong,” Blake said. “It has to take a long time to get where we’re going, because we are leaving our old life behind. By the time we arrive in the new world, we are reborn. It’s supposed to take a long time, don’t you get it?”
“This is torture,” Hannah said. “What’s wrong with you that you don’t see it?”
“This is fantastic,” Blake said. “I’ve never been on a plane before. Or in an airport terminal. Never met a French person. Or seen a French blue magazine.” He winked with delight. “I’m writing down my impressions in the back journal. Who has time to be ornery?”
Hannah asked if Blake could write down his impressions silently, mutely, off.
Blake didn’t think he could. On the flight from Paris to Riga, the brothers sat together and the girls sat in front of them. The guys kept throwing paper over the seats, pulling the girls’ hair, whispering, laughing.
Questions of Punishing Stupidity Part II: Customs control.
Are you bringing anything into Latvia? Are you carrying contraband? She didn’t even know what contraband was. How could she know if she was carrying it? Are you carrying drugs?
What is your business in Latvia?
What is your destination?
The Latvian customs control were philosophers! Did they mean today? Where was she headed after she left the airport? Or did they mean the destination from which she would fly home? Or the destination to which she was headed in five short weeks, not in Riga, not in Maine, not in Spain, but far far away, in a distant land of saints, palms and stucco. What was her destination indeed, damn them.
Mason
Last month when Blake and I went to fix Lupe’s rotted-out pantry shelves, she said to us that we all float on a boat down a river of Truth that keeps dividing and dividing into tributaries that reunite, and once we reach the sea, we die. We spend our whole existence arguing with each other about which tributary leads to the main stream. “But they all lead to the same place,” she said.
I saved it for later to understand. The later is now. Because I’m trying to look out the window, and all the others are doing is arguing.
Lupe also told Blake that a wise man does three things. First, he does himself that which he advises others to do. (I don’t know if I do that.) Second, he doesn’t do anything that contravenes the Truth. (What is this river of Truth?) And third, he is patient with the weaknesses of those who surround him. (I am definitely not that.) She said Blake was all three.
Blake says he loves that woman. But I don’t know if I agree with her. He keeps borrowing Mom’s car to drive over there and take her to the doctor. There’s always yelling at home now because the four of us are trying to make do with one car and a loaner, a beaten-up jalopy with pistons that misfire in two of its four lousy cylinders. Blake causes strife in our house. I ask you, how wise is that? And how tolerant of it am I? He says Lupe needs a new fire pit. I tell him Mom needs her car, Dad needs a new back, and I need to get to a varsity reunion. Everybody needs something.
I thought that in Europe there’d be no yelling. Silly me. Here I am, in the cab from the airport, my face to the window. Please tell me I will find something here other than strife.
Hannah doesn’t like to travel. Oh, she talks a good game about how she’s going to travel all over the world for some job, translating or something, but I truly believe it’s a fantasy. She hates to go anywhere. I don’t know why she wanted to go to Europe with Chloe. When Chloe told me she and Hannah were heading to Barcelona, I wanted to remind my girlfriend of the few days the previous winter when the four of us went to Franconia to ski. The lift had broken after our first run. There was a blizzard, followed by an avalanche. We were snowed in for four days, with no power, no TV, no radio. Hannah nearly went mad, and we were an hour away from home.
No one lost a limb. No one starved. No one froze. We were just stuck. It hadn’t gone as we planned. But we had a fire, we shoveled