She stopped at a little café on the concourse, collapsed into the white molded-plastic chair, and ordered a café au lait and a croissant, that was easy enough. She had nothing but time. She eased her heels out of the backs of her shoes even though she knew it was a mistake. Her feet would expand like bread dough and she would never be able to cram them back in. For the first time since she was in her twenties she thought about what a beautiful boy Bert Cousins had been, tall and sandy blond, with such dark blue eyes they startled her every morning when he opened them. His family was rich as Croesus, her grandmother liked to say. His parents had given him a little green Fiat when he graduated from college.
When they met he was in his second year of law school at UVA, the top of his class, and she was in her senior year of college. She slipped on a patch of ice one snowy January morning hurrying to class and had gone down hard, books and papers fanning out around her, the icy air knocked from her lungs. She was lying on her back, too stunned for the moment to do anything but watch the flakes of snow wafting towards her, when Bert Cousins leaned into her view and asked if she would allow him to help her. Yes, she would. He picked her up, a stranger, picked her up in his arms and carried her all the way to the infirmary, missing his next class to wait while they wrapped her ankle. A year later, when he asked her to marry him, he told her that he wanted them to move to California after he finished law school. He would take the California bar and they would start a whole new life together where nobody knew them. He wasn’t going to spend his days drawing up contracts for real estate sales, he was going to practice real law. And he wanted children, he said, lots and lots of children. As an only child he had wished for nothing but brothers and sisters. Teresa looked back and forth between Bert and the pretty ring on her hand and thought she must be emitting light from her entire body she loved him so much. It was unnerving to remember that now, at seventy-two, spreading strawberry jam on the tip of her croissant, how much she had loved him. She could barely hold the thought in her mind. She had loved Bert Cousins, and then grown used to him, then was disappointed in him, and then later, after he left her with four small children, she had hated him with the full force of her life. But in the Charles de Gaulle airport when she was twenty-two, her love for him had precluded all thoughts of ever not loving him. They held hands on the way to baggage claim, and while they waited beside the shining silver luggage chute he kissed her, full and deep, not giving a thought to who might be watching, because they were married, they were in Paris.
Teresa looked at all the people walking past her table at the airport coffee shop and wondered how many of them were starting their honeymoons and how many of them were in love and how many of them would not be in love later on. The truth was she had more or less forgotten about Bert. It took a long time but it was a fact that now entire years would pass when she failed to ask the children how their father was because she simply didn’t think of him. She had lived long enough that Bert and all the love and rage he had engendered were gone. Cal was still with her, Jim Chen was there, but Bert, alive and well in Virginia, was gone.
Revived by the coffee and the rest, Teresa stuffed her feet painfully back in her shoes and beat a slow path to her gate. Maybe she would stay in Switzerland forever, maybe she would become a Buddhist. She couldn’t imagine doing this again.
Holly had neglected to go into the tiny room that had once been a broom closet beneath the kitchen stairs to check the computer for the status of her mother’s flight from Paris. It was only now that she was at the airport in Lucerne standing in front of the arrival board that she could see the plane was three hours late. True, she didn’t have occasion to go to the airport very often, but what kind of an idiot forgets to check the time before making an hour-long drive? Because it was a rule that whoever took the car also had to take the phone, she was able to send a text to Mikhail and explain the situation. She knew he wouldn’t care. He told her they didn’t need the car but still, she felt like she was inconveniencing the community by keeping it for so long. Assuming that the time now listed was in fact correct, they would not be returning until after two o’clock. She had told her mother to take the train from Paris. No one flew from Paris to Lucerne. The train was a snap. But her mother had despaired at the thought of taking a train from the airport to the Gare de Lyon and then finding the train to Lucerne. And maybe it would have been impossible, with the jet lag and the luggage. Holly could have taken the train up and met her in Paris but she never suggested that. She didn’t want to be away that long.
Holly had completed her morning kitchen work early, washing and peeling ten pounds of potatoes, cutting them into chunks, and leaving them covered in cold salted water while at every moment striving to remain present in her task. She had gone to the guest-room where her mother would be sleeping to make sure there were towels and a washcloth beside the basin and a bottle of water and a glass beside the bed. She excused herself from morning meditation early, stepping around the cushions of others as quietly as possible to leave for the airport, though of course now she realized she hadn’t had to do that at all. She could have stayed. Her sense of irritation with herself was so ridiculously disproportionate to the event that she had to wonder if the problem wasn’t really that she didn’t want her mother to visit. While she understood the importance of letting all thoughts rise without judgment, to see them and to let them go, she decided it would probably be best just to squelch this one.
Holly bought a Toblerone bar at the news kiosk and then looked around the waiting area for discarded newspapers, as chocolate and news were the two things her life was lacking. And sex. Sex was lacking but she had enough sense not to look for that in the airport. She found copies of Le Matin, Blick (but she didn’t do so well reading German) and, wonder of wonders, a complete Tuesday edition of the New York Times. Suddenly she was soothed. The idea of spending three hours in the airport with three newspapers and Toblerone was nothing short of a miracle. She peeled back the tinfoil and broke off a piece of candy, resting it on her tongue to melt before she read the science section of the Times: Tasmanian devils were dying of oral cancer; there was reason to think it might be better to run without running shoes; and children living in poverty in the inner cities were as likely to suffer from asthma as children in war zones. She tried to figure out what she was supposed to do with the information. How could she save the devils, get them to stop biting one another, which appeared to be how the cancer was spread, and why was she worrying about a small, vicious marsupial in Tasmania and feeling next to nothing about the asthmatic children? Why had she read the entire article about running when she wasn’t a runner but skipped the piece about geothermal energy? Exactly how shallow had she become? She folded the paper in her lap and sat with the information for a moment. She thought that she should leave Zen-Dojo Tozan more often, or maybe leave it altogether, and she thought that she should never leave it under any circumstances, like Siobhán, whom Holly had never seen go farther than the mailbox at the end of the driveway.