The Map That Leads to You
J. P. Monninger
For Andrea and Christina
Acknowledgments
The Map That Leads to You has benefited from the kindness and work of many people, and no appreciation I outline here can adequately thank all those who had a hand in its eventual publication and in its journey to its readers. As always, my agents, Andrea Cirillo and Christina Hogrebe, encouraged me and supported me throughout the long composition of this novel. Andrea and Christina changed my life for the better from the day I met them. The team at the Jane Rotrosen Agency works with quiet grace in every aspect of my writing life, and I send out my thanks and my sincere appreciation to everyone there.
Thanks and gratitude to Jennifer Enderlin, publisher at St. Martin’s Press, and to all her wonderful staff. Thanks, also, to Marty Bowen and Peter Harris and Annalie Gernert at Temple Hill. Peter Harris advised me and read pages and made suggestions and kept me laughing. He has a keen eye for fiction and dramatic construction and this novel benefited more than I can say from his contribution.
To anyone involved in this publication I haven’t yet met or have inadvertently forgotten, forgive me and accept my gratitude. More than any other novel I’ve written, this was a collaborative process. I also want to thank Plymouth State University, our lovely little college in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, for giving me the freedom to write the books I need to write. Plymouth State University has been my teaching home for more than a quarter century, and I am grateful to the administration and students for allowing me time to pursue a writing life.
Finally, thanks to my family and friends and to my old, old faithful dog, who waits patiently for her afternoon walk while I fiddle with pages she will never understand. I have biscuits in my pockets, I promise.
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.
—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Prologue
Commencement Day
It’s your mom, of all people, who gets the perfect photograph of you and your two best friends the day you graduate from Amherst College in Massachusetts. Your mom is famously lousy with a camera and hates to be called on to snap a picture, but, channeling some final mommy voodoo before full adulthood sweeps you away forever, your mother comes through when all the vast lightning storm of flash shots falls short. Remarkably, it’s not one of the thousand shots that the parents demand, not one on the way to the stage, not one of you, all three—young, the world ahead, the gowns lifting in a soft New England breeze, the green Amherst oaks aching into the sun, your fake diplomas raised above your head—that are a must at commencements everywhere. None of those. Not the one with your parents, or the one with your friend Constance’s little girl cousins who are dressed sweetly in sundresses. Not the degree-conferral shot, not the staged handshake with the college president, not the final moment when people chuck their stupid mortarboards into the air and almost blind people with their whirling square Frisbees.
It’s something both smaller and bigger. It’s a profile shot, all three of you sitting in folding chairs, your faces tilted up slightly to hear the speakers, the sun making you squint the tiniest bit. People pretend to be unaware of a photographer, of an about-to-be-snapped photo, but in this instance it is real. Your mother got the shot like a ninja, you still don’t know how, but it captures Constance first. She is blond and hopeful, her expression so kind, so innocent, that you feel a swell in your throat every time you look at it. Then Amy, dark and broody, but the center of everything, the fun, the joke, the loud talk and the wild energy, the screw-yous, and the up-yours, and the sweet, always-kindness that rests behind her eyes. Yes, she is looking up, too.
And then you. You look at that girl, your image, a dozen times, a hundred times, to see what it is that lives in that face. Who is this girl, this economics major, this two-time summer intern, the girl with a fancy, lucrative job as an investment banker waiting for her at the end of summer? You hardly recognize her; she had changed over these last four years, grown deeper, perhaps wiser, a woman in place of a girl. In the same instant, it is unbearable to look at her, because you see her vulnerability, her shortcomings, her struggles. You are the third in a line of three friends, the one who gets things done, the one who is a bit obsessive about control, the one who will always be sent to herd Amy to wherever she needs to be corralled, to lend substance to Constance’s ethereal drive for beauty. Your color is halfway between Constance’s blondness and Amy’s wolf hair, the final ingredient in whatever combination you three form. You are bone to their cartilage, gravity to their flight.
One moment in four years. It captures everything. In a matter of weeks, you will all be in Europe for what used to be called the grand tour; you will be traveling and kicking ass all across the old countries, but for now, in this instant, you are on the verge of everything. And your mother saw it, and caught it, and you cannot glance even once at that picture without knowing your three hearts are linked together and that in a crazy world each of you has two things—two pure and limitless things—that she can count on for today and every day forward.
It is the last great minute before he walks into your life, but you don’t know that, can’t know. Later, though, you will try to imagine where he was in this exact instant, when he had turned and started to travel toward you, you to him, and how the world around both of you took no notice. Your life would not be the same, but that was all waiting, all up in the air, all fate and chance and inevitability. Jack, your Jack, your one great love.
Part One
Amsterdam