That January, I flew to Paris on a red-eye and took a bleary taxi ride to a crooked street in the 11th arrondissement. That old picture of my mother at Wellesley came with me in my suitcase, and I tacked it to the wall above my narrow bed in my homestay. My host was young and gamine, with bad teeth and great hair. She was a costume designer for the national theater. She hosted students in her spare bedroom to make extra money, she explained, so that she could spend her summers traveling with her boyfriend. Her hours ran long and late, and I rarely saw her, but the apartment always smelled like her—strong coffee and clove cigarettes.
Except during our weekly Skype dates, I didn’t think about Evan much. I was too consumed by what was in front of me: the bottles of wine on the banks of the Seine, the afternoons in the Luxembourg Gardens, the yeasty scent of the bakeries when we rambled home from the clubs at dawn. I sank into it, like a deep bath, and I felt myself letting go of something for the first time. Evan and I planned that he would meet me in Paris after the semester ended. But when that day arrived, on the Metro ride to the airport, I felt sweaty and nervous. What if, these past months, I had changed—or he had changed—so much that we wouldn’t have anything to say to each other? I scanned the crowds at baggage claim, anxious not to miss him; he didn’t have a phone that worked in Europe. We’d spent time apart before, the previous two summers, when he’d gone back to Canada and I’d gone back to Boston. But this stretch was different. I’d learned to live in another country. He’d learned to live without me. Suddenly our plan—traveling through Europe for two months before senior year—struck me as foolish. What if he arrived and everything was all wrong? What if it was over?
Then I spotted him, towering above the rest of the crowd, in a ball cap and T-shirt. He saw me and smiled. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be wrapped in his arms, to feel the vibration of his laughter in his chest. Things did feel different. Evan felt like an old friend, an old lover, one whose reappearance in my life was sweeter for giving me a link between past and present. I was known; I was remembered, even far from home.
We flew back to Boston in August, pausing for a night, and then we got on a plane to British Columbia. It was my first time out there, my first time meeting his parents after more than two years of dating. His hometown was tiny, like a grain of sand on the map. That first night, in Evan’s childhood bedroom beneath the slanted rafters, in the modest house tucked among the tall pine trees, I realized that I had never experienced so much quiet in my life.
“Have fun, kids!” His mother saluted us with her thermos as his parents drove to work the next morning. She leaned through the window as they backed out of the driveway. “Oh, and Julia, my bike’s out back if you want to borrow it.”
We rode through town that first day, Evan pointing out the landmarks of his childhood: the high school, his first girlfriend’s house, the hockey rink where he’d spent so many hours practicing. Weeks, months, years of practice. Someone called his name as we were pedaling away from the rink. “Peck? Is that you?”
“Coach Wheeler?” Evan called back. The two of them hugged, the coach clapping him hard on the back. “Julia, this is my old coach, Mr. Wheeler. Coach, this is my girlfriend, Julia Edwards.”
“Where are you from, Julia?” He knew right away I wasn’t a local.
“Boston,” I said. “Evan and I go to college together.”
“How is it out there? Been meaning to ask your folks how your season was. He was the best player I ever had.” He winked at me. “No one ever worked as hard as Evan Peck. I knew this guy would go places.”
Evan beamed from the praise. They talked for a long time, catching up on Evan’s college career, on how close Yale had come to winning the championship that year. His coach asked whether he knew what he was going to do after graduation. “You going to try and play in the minors, maybe?” he said. “Or you could go over to Europe. You’re good enough for it.” Evan shrugged, his smile slackening, the light dimmed. I couldn’t read the expression on his face.
The next day, we biked over to the river to meet up with some of his friends. Most of them had stayed put, working construction or other odd jobs in town, still living in the houses they grew up in. They brought along beer and a waterproof boom box, and we went tubing down the river. It felt like something out of a movie. We floated with our inner tubes lashed together, our toes trailing in the cold water, the beer light and fizzy on our tongues. Evan traced circles on the back of my hand. He tilted his head back to look at the summer sky, a bright blue banner framed by the soft green fringe of the pine trees. “God, I love it here,” he said.
“Why did you ever want to leave?” I asked, with genuine curiosity. He seemed so happy, so comfortable.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it never seemed like enough.”