“You’re going to take a left in about four kilometers,” Paul says.
Twenty minutes ago, after some initial bickering, Paul, his sister, and his mother agreed to stop for lunch at one of the places Eloise had suggested, some Ye Olde Inn ten kilometers off the main road in the New Forest.
“You mean I’m going to exit the M3 and then take a left.” Alice glances at him in the rearview mirror.
“Yeah, sure.”
“No, not yeah, sure, Paul. I have no idea where I’m going. I need specific directions.”
In the passenger seat, Donna begins flipping through the road atlas.
“Hold on.” Paul zooms in on the map. “It’s like none of these roads even have names.”
In the past twenty minutes, the traffic has opened up; they aren’t freely moving, but there is enough space now between the cars for Paul to see a series of lazy bucolic hills to their right and a thick green forest to their left. On Alice’s phone, the blue dot jitters, correcting and recorrecting its position on the map.
“I think the road that you want is called Old Forest Lane,” he says. “But just … just give me a second.”
“That road isn’t on my map,” Donna says.
Paul squints. He just wants the goddamned dot to stop moving for a second. “Your map was published alongside the Magna Carta,” he says. “The roads have probably changed.”
“It’s the 2005 edition.” Donna holds up the atlas so Paul can see its cover. “Certainly things haven’t changed that much?”
“Get that thing out of my face.”
Now she’s handing it back to him.
“Maybe just look at it, sweetie? Just to double-check what your phone is saying?”
Traffic stops again, and Alice nearly rear-ends a minivan. Donna drops the atlas, and it falls between Paul’s knees. Behind them, someone honks.
“Oh, geez.”
“I don’t need to double-check it. It’s a satellite. Satellites don’t need to be double-checked.”
Alice thuds the steering wheel with the heel of her hand. “Can someone just please tell me where I’m fucking going.”
“The next exit,” Paul says. He’s not sure if that’s right, but he can’t stand the prospect of prolonging this discussion regarding the merits of GPS with his mother any longer. Besides, each of the one-lane roads leading into the New Forest seems as good and worthless as the next, and he imagines that they all lead to the same, predictable destinations: a cow blocking traffic, a village of thatched roofs, a gastropub that’s been serving the same watered-down ale since before the American Revolution.
“Take the next exit—yes, this one—and then bear left.”
They crawl down a lane walled in by thick shrub hedges. Above them, branches of elms wrap together to form leafy tunnels perforated by pinpricks of sunlight. Hugging the steering wheel, Alice balances her sunglasses on top of her head and leans forward. The road’s hardly straight—every hundred yards or so it inexplicably and carelessly banks around a sharp corner of nothing, and it’s only blind faith that promises Paul that they won’t smash into something head-on once they clear the curve. After ten kilometers they emerge into a small hamlet, an afterthought of a village with a few houses, a gas station, a chemist’s, and a smattering of other single-story buildings. Alice parks the car in a gravel lot behind a pub, and once Paul’s extricated himself from the back of the Peugeot, he tells his sister and mother that he’ll meet them inside in a few minutes.
“Are you sure?” Donna asks; Alice has already gone inside.
“Yes.” Paul does his best not to sound irritable.
He waits for her to leave and reaches into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. Fishing one out, he lights it and leans against the car. Mark used to hate it when he smoked. Not because of the smell, or for how it was crippling Paul’s health, but because he thought it looked trashy.
“There are smokers you know, and smokers you don’t know,” he would say. The smokers you know—or, as Paul thinks now, the smokers Mark thought he knew—were people like Audrey Hepburn and Clark Gable, people who managed to turn puffing a cigarette into high, erotic art. The smokers he didn’t know were Paul and everyone else.
“Honey?”
Hearing his mother’s voice, Paul moves to drop the cigarette, but Donna stops him.
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she says. “In fact, you mind if I have one?”
“Yes,” Paul says.
“Yes, I can have one, or yes, you mind?”
“Yes, I mind. You’re trying to turn this into a moment.”
“I’m not sure I know what that means.” Donna scuffs at the gravel with her toes. “Alice forgot her wallet. And I wanted to check on you.”
“I’m fine,” Paul says, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke. “I’ll be there in a second.”
Donna pulls him to her and kisses his forehead. “Oh, Pauly.”
“What did I say about calling me that?”
“I know how hard it is,” she says.
Across the street, a small pickup truck pulls into the gas station. Pigeons coo atop sloped roofs.
“You don’t, though,” Paul says. “Your husband died. He didn’t just up and leave you in the middle of a foreign country. It’s not the same thing.”
“I wasn’t talking about your father.”
“Who, then? Henrique?” He ashes his cigarette and stomps sparks into the earth. “He was a prick. Good riddance.”
Donna sighs, dramatically, and Paul’s blood boils.
“All I’m trying to say—”
“I know what you’re trying to say,” Paul says, “and please—I’m begging you—just keep it to yourself, okay? Do me a favor and just keep it to yourself.”
Dropping the cigarette to the ground, he adds: “The only person I want to talk to is Dad, and he’s fucking dead.”
*
He first catches sight of the coast around three o’clock when, on account of some roadwork, they’re forced to take a detour on the A338 and dip through Bournemouth. He’s staring straight forward to ward off carsickness—the fish and chips and beer he had for lunch are somersaulting in his stomach—so when they crest one of the gentle hills that carve through the English southwest, he’s able to see it immediately, the sea. It lacks vastness, is the first thing he thinks. It doesn’t have the sort of oceanic interminability that he’s used to. Rather, this—all this blue and gray and dull green water—somehow feels reasonable, digestible. Maybe it’s because he knows that France is right there, just out of eyeshot, or maybe it’s because right now, crammed in the back of the Peugeot, suffering through Alice’s Fiona Apple album for the umpteenth time, he knows that vastness is something that he lacks the mental capacity to confront.