His first miscalculation was the pizza. He realized it before he even got off the bus. What an idiot he was to think that Magdalena’s mother would be opening Vilnius’ first pizza restaurant, as if Lithuanians were still standing in bread lines behind the iron curtain. He saw twelve pizza places before the bus got to the station. While he was looking for the city bus that would take him to Professor Uzdavinys’ house, he saw three more. In fact, he had never seen so many pizza restaurants in his life. They were everywhere, with big color photos outside advertising the spicy chicken pizza, the egg and pickle pizza, the chunky chili pizza.
Professor Uzdavinys’ house was actually near enough to the station that he walked rather than trying to find the bus. Professor Uzdavinys’ wife, Renate, was there, just getting ready to go out. She was a professor too, and in perfect English she told Neil to make himself at home and go right ahead and take a nap, he was sure to need it after that long bus ride.
But Neil had no intention of sleeping, when there were so many pizza restaurants to search, looking for a particular person with her light eyes and her one gray tooth. He started by going from pizza place to pizza place, peering inside.
But that couldn’t go on forever. After an hour or so he was getting really hungry, so he went into one of them. Just for kicks he ordered the American pizza—it came covered in barbecue sauce—and purposely looked the other way until the waitress was right there at his table, still holding out hope that it might be her. It wasn’t.
After the pizza his head was clearer, and he realized how ridiculous it all was. He also thought of something he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of before. He still had Magdalena’s number in his phone, on his missed-calls list from when she’d left the message about meeting him in Paris. He could call her, just to ask if she’d arrived okay, and then he could say, sort of casually, “Actually I’m here in Vilnius, maybe we should meet up.” It wasn’t quite the scene he’d pictured, but it would have to do.
But when he called the number it went straight to voicemail, as if her phone had been turned off. “Hello and please to leave a message,” it said. “Hey, Magdalena, it’s Neil. I just wanted to—sorry, this is Neil from the train station, in case you know, like, several. I just wanted to make sure you got home okay and everything and actually, well, ah, just call me back when you get this, yeah, so I know you’re okay. I mean if you want to. Call me. So yeah. Okay, um, bye.” In a lifetime of sounding like a loser on the phone it was the worst message he had ever left.
He called her again a little later, and then, not wanting her to have a list of missed calls from the same number, he bought a phone card at the post office and called from a pay phone. He wondered if maybe her phone didn’t work in Lithuania. If he knew her last name, he could try to look her up in the phone book. He called his mom, thinking that maybe she could google grand opening pizza Vilnius for him, which might at least narrow things down. But he’d forgotten that she was away on a yoga retreat in Utah. Finally he called his father, which was what he should have done in the first place. His dad would know Magdalena’s mother’s last name, and he might even know the name of her restaurant. Next to the possibility of a completely wasted trip to Lithuania, all the reasons he’d had for not calling seemed less important. But his dad didn’t pick up.
Maybe it was because he couldn’t reach him, but the thought of his father’s phone ringing in the big empty house made Neil sad. Even though he’d gone months without thinking too much about it, he started to miss his dad, wishing he could at least say hi and give him ten tries to guess where he was calling from.
His father had never changed the answering machine, and it still had Nan’s voice pronouncing each word slowly and clearly as if she were talking to someone on the moon. “You have reached Walter and Catherine Hurley. We probably couldn’t make it to the phone in time, or else we’re out in the yard.” And then, because she hadn’t known how to stop the tape, Neil heard Pop’s voice, saying, “That oughta do,” and Nan saying “Well, if they’ve got something to tell us, they can go ahead and say it,” and the sound of water running in the sink.
Hearing their voices just about did Neil in. He hung up without leaving a message and stood for a while in the telephone booth, which someone had peed in pretty recently, thinking about Pop, who could do the fly-away-birdie trick with a bit of newspaper so that it fooled Neil and his cousins every time, and Nan, who once showed him a fish brain that looked like a piece of chewed bubblegum. He was sad for his dad, all alone in that big house, and for himself, all alone in a telephone booth in Lithuania. Naturally he wound up wondering what had made him think he ought to come all this way to stand in pee and broken glass and hear the telephones of the people that he loved just ring and ring. He used up the last of the money on the phone card calling the cell phone his father kept in the car for emergencies, but his dad had probably forgotten to charge it, and it rang straight to a message saying the voicemail had never been set up.
Then, because it was starting to rain and he’d never been so lonely in his life, he called Veejay. He had to use his mobile, but he didn’t even bother leaving the phone booth. He was getting used to the smell, that’s how depressed he was.
“Yo yo, wassup,” Veejay said.
“Hey,” Neil said.
“Hey.”
“So guess where I am.”
“In jail.”
“No,” Neil said.
“In bed with Amanda.”
“What? No,” Neil said. “What are you talking about?”
“Dude, you love her,” Veejay said.
“No I don’t,” Neil said.
“Hang on a sec,” Veejay said, then, “ ‘Her fingers chase the shadows, leave her shoulders bare. Her hands brush imagined breezes from her hair—’ ”
“Jesus, is that my notebook?” It had been missing since before Neil left for Paris. “Where did you find that? I was looking everywhere.”
“Wait, it gets really good. ‘Her fingertips against her pasted lips—’ ”
“Parted lips. Come on Veejay, what the fuck?”
“It really looks like pasted here. Man, you have terrible handwriting.”
“You are such an asshole.”
“Well she loved it. She thought it was really sweet.”
“What?” Neil said. “You showed her?”
“She thinks you have a gift.”
“I’m going to kill you,” Neil said.
“Okay, dude, I’m joking,” Veejay said. “She went home for the summer, remember? Chill.”
“I can’t believe you stole my notebook,” Neil said.
“I didn’t steal it. I found it in the couch.”
“Whatever,” Neil said. Then he had an idea. “Hey wait a second, Veejay,” he said. “Will you look a few pages back? I think I wrote this girl’s name down there.”
“What girl?”
“That girl from Swindon.”
“The one in the pornos?”
“They weren’t pornos. She said he wasn’t even recording.”
“Uh-huh,” Veejay said. “Okay, is it Magdalena, like, Bike-o-skatie or something?”
“Yeah, exactly. How’s it spelled?”
“M-A—”
“The last name,” Neil said. “Just spell the last name.”
“B-I-K-A-U-S-K-A-I-T-E,” Veejay said. “And there’s a dot over the E. Or it might be soup. I’m kind of eating right now. No, it’s definitely a dot.”