There were fewer people at the breakfast table the next morning. Kathryn ran through the guests who’d departed the previous day or who’d eaten early and departed that morning, pointing out that it would be a full house again by the evening.
It was Lenny and Dee’s last day too. JJ went through the ritual of tea and coffee in the lounge with them, though without the papers this time, the couple talking instead about the trip home and how they couldn’t wait to see the kids again.
He saw them off when they were leaving, Dee hugging him, Lenny giving him a business card with their address and phone number written on the back, an open invitation to visit, all for someone they’d known perhaps four or five hours in total.
Once they’d gone he stood there for a minute, trying to decide whether to walk down to the village but not moving, preferring to enjoy the moment, another blue sky and the faint hollow chill in the air, the winter’s promise that was loaded into autumn mornings.
Suddenly Jem walked past wearing jeans, heavy boots, a flannel shirt, her hair hanging down over the back of it, almost flaxen in the early sun. After a few paces she stopped, as if realizing who was standing there. She turned and looked at him, covering her eyes against the sunlight. “Hey, JJ.”
“Good morning.”
“Are you walking?”
“Just to the village.”
“Me too. I mean, if you wanna tag along?”
“Sure,” he said and walked with her, saying, “No school today?”
“It’s Saturday,” she replied, looking at him like she couldn’t believe how out of touch he was. It was a shock to him too, that he’d visited Viner that Sunday and then lost himself afterward, time blurring, life blurring, a week falling away from him.
“So shouldn’t you be, oh, I don’t know, at the mall or something?”
“I hate malls. Honestly,” she said, glancing at him. “I’m like, so untypical of your average American teenager. I mean, what is this teenager thing anyway, right? It’s just like some kind of marketing thing.”
“I think the whole of life is a marketing thing.”
“I guess you’re right.” She pointed at a knotted old tree and said, “We used to have a tree house up there. One winter when I was like, ten or something, it just fell apart.”
“I had a tree house when I was a kid.”
“What happened to it?”
“It’s still there,” he said, thinking of it now, thinking how it didn’t even seem that long ago. There were still remnants visible in the tree Jem had pointed at too, hidden to strangers but there all the same, just as the whole of the surrounding area was probably filled with the markers of her childhood, places that were significant to her alone.
“So what’s it like,” she asked, “where you live?”
“Where I live now? Geneva. It’s a city but it’s okay. It’s on a lake.” For the first time since flying to London he thought about going back there, what it would mean, whether he still wanted to be there. He was pretty certain now that one way or another he’d have that option of return, that sooner or later it would be safe again, but the city itself suddenly seemed alien in his memory. “I’m thinking about moving sometime soon,” he added, the thought spilling out as it occurred to him, “maybe to the mountains.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No. I just broke up with someone, after two years.”
“Oh. That sucks.”
“Yeah,” said JJ, knowing that breaking up wouldn’t have sucked, that what sucked was Aurianne being beaten, abused, bruised with the cold metal of the barrel, a bullet thumping her down into the carpet; that was what sucked.
Suddenly he heard Jem say, “Are you okay?”
He laughed, responding, “Sorry, I’m fine, I was just thinking about something.” She smiled back at him, a smile that looked tinged with admiration somehow, a look he didn’t quite understand.
“I know how you feel,” she said. “I guess I’d feel the same way if me and Freddie broke up, which we will I guess but, you know, it’s like we’ve been together for, well, kind of forever really.” He returned her smile, amused more than anything by the stumbling delivery, by the perception of time. Yet as she talked on about Freddie he felt his earlier envy returning, a sense that for all the hassles of being a teenager, and despite the loss of her father, she was still living through halcyon days. He had a sense that she knew it too, a level of self-knowledge that constantly evaded him in his own life, a life that was lived blind, forever stumbling from one piece of furniture to the next.
They passed the first few houses, a woman waving at Jem from an upstairs window, Jem waving back like she hadn’t seen her in months. There was more traffic on the roads, more people too than there had been during the week, an occupying army that probably left the locals ambivalent about how picturesque their town was.
Jem stopped when they got to the church, set back from the road but with a handful of tourists wandering around on the lawn, staring, photographing it like it was an architectural wonder.
“Where were you heading?” she asked JJ then.
“Nowhere in particular.”