Falling for June: A Novel (16 page)

23

T
HERE WERE HEAT
waves rising off the tarmac when the plane touched down. David shrugged his backpack over his shoulder and deplaned. He was prepared to answer questions about the purpose of his trip, but the immigration agent simply stamped his passport and said, “
Bienvenido a España.
”

It was a nine-hour train ride from Madrid to Santiago de Compostela, and David dreamed about June most of the way. There was something about the rhythm of the rails that lulled him to sleep. And after taking a red-eye from Seattle to London seated next to a crying infant the entire way, then nearly missing his connecting flight, he needed the rest.

David spotted him the moment he stepped off the train. Now he knew why Sebastian had said he couldn’t miss him, for the two cousins looked so much alike, David almost believed Sebastian had played some trick on him and come to meet him himself. But that was impossible, since Sebastian was taking care of Echo Glen for June.

“
Hola
, comrade Hadley.”

He even spoke like Sebastian. His name was Jose Antonio and he had driven over six hours from Aranda de Duero to meet David and start him on his journey. He handed David a map, a scallop shell for the outside of his pack, and a staff that
he referred to in Spanish as
suerte bastón
, which David looked up in his English-to-Spanish dictionary later and decoded to mean “lucky walking stick.”

“Have you walked the Way of St. James?” David asked as they climbed into Jose Antonio’s tiny Fiat.

“No,
señor
”—he shook his head, patting the dash of his car—“Camino de Santiago is good for pilgrims, but no walking for me; I have a
carro
.” Then he laughed. “I hear my cousin is paid to crash them. Only in America.”

When they arrived at the cathedral, the number of travel-weary pilgrims funneling into the ancient building surprised David. “If there are this many people on the path,” he remarked, “how am I ever going to find June?”

“Easy, comrade,” Jose said. “Just walk the Way in reverse and you’ll run into her. If she left from Pied-de-Port ten days ago, you should meet each other in a week or two.”

“A week or two?” David repeated.

“Maybe less, maybe more.”

“But aren’t there many routes? My book says there are. What if she took a different one?”

Jose shrugged. “
El que busca encuentra
.
”

David would look this up later too, and while it was a nice saying, he could only hope it would turn out to be true.

They had lunch together in a café. David battled his jet lag with several latte-like concoctions that Jose called
café con leche
. When lunch was through, David took out the Spanish pesetas he had exchanged traveler’s checks for at the Madrid airport, but Jose would not allow him to pay for their lunch, no matter how insistent he was. David eventually surrendered, accepting the Spanish hospitality with a hearty thank-you. Then Jose walked David to the cathedral. It marked the end of the Camino de Santiago for every other pilgrim, and the beginning for David.

“
Buen Camino
,” Jose said with a bow.

Then he shook David’s hand before disappearing into the crowds. Armed with little more than his lucky walking stick and a heart full of hope, David turned and set out against the tide of tourists, walking into the wild unknown.

June had been walking for ten days already, and still she could not bring herself to accept the news that she knew all too well to be true. She took comfort in the solitude of her journey, however, and she had always wanted to walk the Camino de Santiago.

It was not by chance that she had become such close friends with Sebastian. She had always loved Spanish culture. She met Sebastian on a Hollywood film set and they spent many Southern Californian nights together, sharing chilled wine and talking about the beauty of northern Spain, where Sebastian was originally from. And now here she was, having walked from the French Pyrenees into España, passing through the quiet countryside with only her thoughts and the distant, hollow tonking of grazing goats’ bells to keep her company.

She had stopped in Pamplona for a day, searching out the ghosts of characters from a great American novel she’d read as a girl, a book that had left her forever fascinated by the dichotomy of human beauty and cruelty represented in the slow artistic torture of bulls by brave and graceful toreros. But it was off-season, at least in Pamplona, and there were no bulls and no ghosts, other than those that had followed her. And these ghosts were equally beautiful and cruel. For such are all our memories, she thought, locked in the grip of the past, the rough edges polished by the tides of time. Is there anything as conducive to nostalgia as walking? she wondered as she strolled the Spanish highlands, thinking about her life.

“An inward-looking eye sees nothing worthwhile; vain and self-indulgent reflection produces only more suffering.”

That had been her mother’s favorite saying. And although it may have been the only thing about which her mother had been right, June knew it was high time for her to look at her past if she had any hope of finding the courage to continue on, and if one wants to wrestle with ghosts, what better place to start than with dear old Mom?

Her mother had nearly been forced into being a whore, or so she would always claim whenever June or her sister would complain about the labor they were made to do. “And working in the field is hardly whoring,” their mother would add. But it wasn’t just
a field
; it was many fields. The land was leased, the water rights rented, and the tools and machinery mortgaged. Try as they might, their family could not squeeze enough garlic out of the ground to ever get ahead. The only bright spot to these long days laboring were the Mexican migrant workers whom June got to interact with. It was here that her love of the Spanish language had been born.

Her sister was always in a world of her own, and as far as June knew she never said two words she didn’t have to say to any of the field workers. She hardly said more than that to June when they worked together long into the autumn evenings, peeling garlic side by side. But June loved the migrant workers like she might have loved the brothers and uncles she didn’t have. They’d usually break for lunch in the shade of an oak or an old cottonwood, and June would walk like family among them, swapping her meatloaf and bread for
pollo
and tortillas, telling them stories she’d make up about talking cloves of garlic that went hunting vampires in the night, learning jokes from them in Spanish as trade. When she was older and had become interested in boys, she had a string of failed first dates and could never understand why until one of the field workers informed
her that it might be the scent of garlic. He gave her a bottle of perfume he had planned to send home as a Christmas gift for his sister. She had smelled garlic her entire life; how could she have known?

For all the hours she and her sister put in, their stepfather matched them hour for hour at the local bar, drinking and gambling away the profits of their labor. And each evening when the girls came in from working, their dinner was waiting. But they would have to eat it alone. Their mother spent her evenings at the old piano, playing melancholy tunes in a minor key that mirrored the mood of their home. For all her lecturing to the girls about not looking back, their mother wasted her life away lamenting a lost chance to play professionally, and the house seemed always to be infused with the soft keystrokes of regret. Some rare nights even now, as June drifted off to sleep, she could hear that piano playing still, just down the stairs of her memory, beneath the sad portrait of her mother that hung forever in her mind as a reminder to live for the moment and to never forget the value of a smile.

June and her sister were physically close growing up but emotionally a million miles apart. June would have thought their shared suffering would have brought them together, but as she grew she learned that some pain wants to be experienced alone. Her sister was a year older and by far the prettier of the two, and their drunken stepfather would sometimes come to visit her in the sisters’ shared room. June would lie in the dark, listening to the quiet struggle and whispered threats. She cursed him in her prayers, wishing for his death, but would always regret not finding the courage to do something. Especially after her sister had finally run away for good, leaving June to take her place in the darkness that filled that farmhouse bedroom. The eve of her sixteenth birthday she followed her sister’s lead and left. Unlike her sister, however, she never looked back.

June got a call from her sister years later, while she was living in Southern California, to tell her that their mother was gone. Their stepfather was dead too. Murder-suicide, her sister said, but June never did bother to ask who had killed whom. It didn’t really matter, she figured, although she could probably guess. There wasn’t much in her family’s old farmhouse to leave—debt overshadowed their final tragedy—but what little there was they had left to Ingrid, and that was just fine with June. She was a substitute English teacher three hundred miles away by then and she skipped the funeral, saying she’d make it down some other time to pay her respects. But she never could bring herself to go. Her stepfather did not deserve her forgiveness, and try as she would she could find none for her mother either, for despite her private grief, June was sure that she had known.

It was that same year when she had first met Samuel. He was a teacher too: history and home ec, which seemed a strange combination to June. But what wasn’t strange was the way his dark eyebrows arched perfectly above his kind and gentle eyes. He had been just the man June had needed to meet, and they were engaged before he could even save enough for a ring. June said she’d marry him right then without one, that they should save the money for a home. But he insisted they wait and build a nest egg first. He taught that summer and all the others to follow, driving a berry bus to supplement what he already had set aside, until he could buy her a proper ring and a home. Both were simple but perfect, a small rambler in the burbs and a small princess-cut diamond set in a plain gold band. He had put that ring on her finger, saying, “Until death do us part.” It was on her finger when his motorcycle went off the road and she found him in that awful ditch. It was on her finger when she jumped off Yosemite’s tallest cliff. And it was still on her finger all these years later as she walked the Camino de Santiago, wondering if she had denied her heart love all these years to honor his mem
ory or to keep herself from having to truly live. For death had parted them, hadn’t it? And had she not been chasing her own death a little with every jump, with every stunt?

The funny thing was, she could no longer remember his face. She couldn’t be sure when it had finally faded. It had just stayed there in the past as her life went on, his features polished smooth by all that time until his memory was just a feeling. She had to laugh a little at her own sentimentality. If he were still alive, she mused, they could probably run into one another on this very path and neither would recognize the other, she having forgotten his face, he not knowing how much hers had changed. But here his death had haunted her all these years. It seemed strange how something so brief could cast a shadow so long.

These were a few of the many thoughts keeping June company on her walk. She was desperately trying to prevent them from adding up to something that felt like regret. She refused to fall into her mother’s brooding trap. Not me, she thought. I’d risk love over loneliness every time. I’d choose life instead of death, wouldn’t I? Isn’t that what I preach?

She stopped for the night at a roadside
albergue
.
Here at least she could stave off her loneliness by sharing a meal with fellow pilgrims, renting a soft bed to rest her weary head.

David was so out of place it almost made sense that he was walking the road in reverse. But still the faces of the pilgrims he passed hid little of their confusion over his direction of travel. It didn’t help, of course, that he was stopping each of them and making them look at June’s picture, asking if they had seen her anywhere along the way. Most just shook their heads. A few younger men, mostly from European countries, smiled and said they wished. “She’s a foxy older lady, mate. I’d remember running into her.” But none had seen her on their travels.