Everything Beautiful Began After (27 page)

“Sorry,” you say to the monitor. “But I don’t understand anything you’re trying to tell me.”

Then you say, “Reset, reset,” in a French accent.

“Reset.”

“Okay.”

“Goddamn it.”

After two more hours you stop at some roadside services to use the restroom. Families sit on the grass chewing baguette sandwiches. It’s quite windy.

There is a restaurant inside a bridge that connects one side of the A11 motorway to the other side. People going in opposite directions sit beside each other and eat.

In theory it’s a brilliant concept. The bridge has glass sides. But the salad you ordered gave up long ago. Leaves hang off the plate as if drowned. After, you sit outside and listen to the sound of laughter. There are children climbing all over the swings, some hang off shouting.

None of them know each other in real life.

You look around at the world—at all the strangers and all the cars lined up and packed up with tents and coolers and bicycles and sleeping bags. It’s wonderful. And your journey is one of many.

And there is no real life, except what we imagine.

Maybe the little Rebecca you so desperately wish to find watched you circle the city from a concrete tower of small rooms and boiling pots. It’s impossible to know if you will ever find her.

You drive another hundred miles, then stop at a gas station.

The hand dryer comes on by itself. There is also a vending machine for balls of toothpaste that you are supposed to chew and then spit out. You buy five to give yourself something to do in the car.

You learn quickly that the toothpaste balls are a big mistake. You put two in at once and within a few minutes, a dense cloud of minty foam is flowing from your mouth and into your lap. You open the window and spit everything out. Then you scoop a few handfuls of foam out the window. You haven’t seen any other cars for some time.

After another hour of silent driving, the car starts talking again:

“Thank you for saying that, car—you’re right, it has been very hard for me over these past two years.”

“I still don’t know, but at least I’m trying.”

And then finally you reach your exit for the road to Linières-Bouton.

It is very late in the afternoon. You’ve passed several rivers. The headlights have come on by themselves. You are on a narrow road, the sort that was designed for horses and people waving—not supercharged German automobiles.

You drive for another hour, slowing down for very long curves and speeding up for hilly straights. There are no other vehicles but for the occasional tractor, throwing up dust as it grinds home through afternoon fields.

You enter Rebecca’s village at dusk.

You plan to sleep in the backseat of the car, which is large enough for two.

You drive slowly past a small church and a
boulangerie
with the shades pulled down.

The village of Linières-Bouton is nothing more than an open mouth of crooked houses, a few blowing trees, a slow high river, and a café–post office.

Old people in gardens wave to you. They are picking things for supper.

Their lives are slow and calm.

Nothing but the quiet fantasy of guessing what comes next.

Long walks through changing fields, and that softly falling question: where are the hearts that once loved us?

There are early lights on in some of the houses. Others look abandoned—their shutters closed like blank pages for night to fill.

You cross a railroad track overgrown where it extends past the road. Then you notice how it ends abruptly at the edge of someone’s garden.

Then 1930s advertising in fraying sheets on the side of an obsolete barn.

Little Rebecca might be at home in any one of these houses.

She has inherited her mother’s ability to wait.

You imagine a girl at the edge of hayfields, thinking about her mother in the last golden moments of day. You see her small shoes—dirtied at the toe from running. In the morning they sweep the grass with dew.

You know you must be tired because these thoughts make you stop the car and open the window.

You haven’t smoked much in the last few years but wish you had a cigarette now.

You feel your own pain shrink in the presence of this child’s.

Such relief in humility.

You think of George, how difficult his life has been. You want to drive to his boarding school in America and eat ice cream sitting on the wall with him. You want to give him a scarf and gloves, his first Latin dictionary, a winter coat.

And then you toy with the fantasy that if there is a child you could become its father.

When you touched down in Paris, you sent George a quick fax to tell him what was going on. He wrote that he was coming—but you told him to stay in Sicily with his parents and wife and keep swimming.

Another hour of driving around you decide to find an empty field outside town. As you pass a sign with a red stripe that says you’re leaving the village two bloodhounds run out and stand in front of the car. You brake hard. Their eyes, like marbles, are held steady by the Audi’s blue headlights.

The dogs won’t move.

Then the car says something to you.