The Map That Leads to You

by J.P. Monninger

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

“A book is a companion, though. You can read it in a special place, like on a train to Amsterdam, then you carry it home and you chuck it on a shelf, and then years later you remember that feeling you had on the train when you were young. It’s like a little island in time. If you love the book, you can give it to someone else. And you can discover it over and over, and it’s like seeing an old friend. Can’t do that with a digital file.”

“Jack Quiller-Couch. That’s going to require some getting used to. I’m not sure I even believe you. Are you joking right now?” “I think it’s too much last name for a simple first name. That’s the problem. It’s out of balance. I like your name better. Heather Mulgrew. What’s your middle name?” “Christine. Mulgrew always sounded to me like a mushroom you find in your basement. Oh, there’s a Mulgrew.” “You’re very strange. Heather Christine Mulgrew. I like it. So when we get married, you would be Heather Christine Mulgrew Quiller-Couch. You would be your own law firm.” “We’re getting married now, are we? And I’m taking your name? It’s all established?” “It’s inevitable.”

“The thing is, I do want that. That’s why I said I didn’t want to meet someone like you. Not now, maybe not ever. Part of me is drawn to everything about it. About you. And another part, the one that I can’t quite understand, that part wants me to keep moving and keep experiencing things. New things.”

“I had a friend named Tom, Heather. He was an older guy, but not that old. Maybe midforties. Great guy. He was a bit of a mentor for me. I worked with him on that newspaper. He wanted the same things I did, more or less. Wanted to be a journalist, all of that. Then one day when he was shaving, he found a lump right above his collarbone. He went to the doctor, the doctor diagnosed it as cancer, and nine months later, he was dead. I don’t know if I’ve ever fully acknowledged what it did to me. Mentally, I mean. He went from being a fortysomething-year-old in perfect health to a cancer patient in a matter of weeks. You don’t just get over that. Seeing that happen to someone. So I made promises to myself, and one was to see as much of the world as I could, to experience as much as I could as fully as I could. I know that’s impossible, I do, but I also know we are going to die one day, and it won’t be as long off as we imagine. It can happen anytime. Trust me, I heard the mortal knock when Tom got sick. It’s one thing to know that in the abstract, sure, sure, I’m going to die someday, but when it suddenly becomes a possibility that you might die now, this week, tomorrow, then something changes. It changes, Heather, believe me. I know that I am dying. Tom taught me that. This is my problem, Heather, not yours. It’s my worry. You’re perfect. You are. If there’s anyone in the world I want to be with, it’s you. But I’m not sure what I can give you.”

“I’m sorry I was ambivalent about going to New York with you. I don’t want to lose what we have. I’m drawn to you, Heather, but I’m scared of what that means. Here’s what I want to say: I was like you a couple of years ago. I cared about promotions and climbing the ladder, but one day Tom came to me and explained what had happened. I realized through his death that I hadn’t done the things I wanted to do. I know that sounds melodramatic, but I promised myself that I would never spend another day in an office. I asked myself if I wanted to change my life, if I could change my life. I took this trip, this mission to follow my grandfather’s journal in the hope that it would restore me somehow as it restored him. Then I met you.”

“We talked about a lot of things. I won’t kid you, Jack. I’m falling for you. I know it’s a cliché, but you take my breath away. You do. I don’t know if we would have been perfect, but I was willing to try. I didn’t see getting together with you as the end to anything. I saw it as a beginning. An exciting one. I want to keep traveling, Jack. I’ll be going to Japan and Indonesia … all over the world, really. Yes, I’ll be working, and yes, I will have to pay my dues at the office, but I’m happy to do that. It’s part of my life. I thought you might be part of that life, too. I hoped, anyway. But if it’s not meant to be, okay. It hurts, but I can accept it. I still love what we’ve had here.”

“I choose you,” he whispered and stroked my cheek. “I do. I choose you. You’ve given me back some hope I lost along the way.

“We’ll meet in the middle.”

“Yes. As much as ever. More in some ways. You know what adds to it? Because he was so adamant about not taking pictures in important moments, I have next to nothing to look at. It’s like a dream. I mean it. Was he real? I can’t even go back and look at him, really. It’s almost as if he planned to disappear right from the start.”

And Hemingway, your Hemingway, lived here in deep love with his Hadley, and you hate the bastard for leaving her, as Jack left you, and you love him for feeling life so deeply, as Jack also felt life deeply, and you feel fluttery and wild and happy being in this wedding, being beside your friends, waiting for the day. In Paris. Always in Paris.

I hated that I thought of him, that I placed him beside me, mentally, a thousand thousand times;

“What exactly is your type? I’m looking around, and I’m not seeing him. You no longer have a type, Heather. You have an ice cream flavor that you like to eat late at night by yourself, but no boy type anymore.”

I wanted him to see me with this gorgeous child, my maternal impulses on full display, though why I thought that would be attractive to Jack I couldn’t say.

Jack was a virus that I couldn’t shake.

Great love inevitably carries with it great loss.

Jack is your type.

to get over a man, get under a man.”

“He’s actually quite a good man. We’ve been friends a long time. Since boyhood, really. You two would make a nice couple.”

But he's not Jack.

“That’s just the thing. That day when Jack and I went off on a mysterious mission and we joked about it and refused to tell you two about what we were up to … that day we went to a hospital.”

“I think Jack’s symptoms had reappeared. He was sick before he came to Europe. I think that’s it. He never came right out and explained everything. I can’t say whether or not that was the reason he decided not to go home with you, but I’ve always thought it was. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. I reckon he wanted you to think poorly of him, to let him go, because whatever he found out at the hospital maybe confirmed something he suspected. I don’t know the timing on all this, but he had to wait for some test results to come in. That’s what he told me.” “But Jack wasn’t sick,” I said, though now doubt had begun to spill into my brain. “He told me about his friend Tom, but he never—” “It wasn’t Tom. There was no one named Tom, Heather.” “His friend. A man he worked with. What are saying, Raef?” “There was no friend named Tom. Sometimes he referred to his condition as ‘old Tom.’ He turned it into a joke. He’d say things like, ‘Old Tom’s not letting me sleep.’ I don’t know where he dreamed that up, but that was the name he used.” “I can’t understand what you’re saying to me, Raef. I hear the words, but they don’t add up.” “Tom was something he made up so that he could talk about the need to experience everything without going into the exact reason. He gave the illness to an imaginary friend. Maybe it wasn’t fair. I don’t know. He didn’t want people to pity him. He didn’t want to be treated differently, to answer all the questions his condition would raise. I’m sorry...

I think it was leukemia. Probably whatever symptoms he attributed to Tom actually belonged to him.

“You should take a minute to absorb this. A lot of minutes, actually. I’m sorry, Heather. I hope you don’t think I was cruel to withhold this information. It was Jack’s story to tell, not mine. That’s what I told myself. Then I saw you dancing with Xavier, and I saw that you were unhappy, and I knew I had to say something.”

“I know Jack pretty well, Heather. He loved you. He told me that more than once. He refused to be the sick invalid with you. He wouldn’t want to put that on you. That’s how I put it together, anyway.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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.

“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. 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 should never have let him go.”

“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.”

“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.”

He had given me hope and taught me to trust that life held surprises if you allowed it to reveal itself. You did not clutter it with camera shots and Facebook postings. You gave yourself to the situation. That was Jack’s great lesson.

Jack had been teaching me to do it, but I hadn’t been able to take the final step.

destiny would have a hand.

“You’ll find him, Heather,” she said.

You are the wild, new, freer Heather. The one who takes off and tells her employer to fuck himself.”

“And it’s not just about him, Amy. You know that. It’s about what we had. If what Jack and I had wasn’t real, didn’t mean as much to him as it did to me, then I need to know. I need to know life can fool you that profoundly. If it does, then okay, I’ll keep going, but I’ll have a different feeling about it all. It will hurt, but it will be a lesson learned.”

Destiny did play a part after all.

Jack Vermont. The man I loved beyond all hope or reason.

“I couldn’t come with you,” he said, his lips near my hair, near my ear. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Forgive me.” I kissed him a dozen times. A thousand times. I nodded. “I know. I know it all. I know about Tom.” “The leukemia is back,” he said. “That’s it in a nutshell. I had tests done before I met you, and the results came back in Paris. Not good. None of it is good.”

I loved him in every part of my soul.

We danced apart from the world, our foreheads together, our breaths mingled, our bodies finding the charge from each to each.

He said he would be in Paris always, our Paris.