Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (5 page)

M
onique’s experience with travel was defined by two trips: Louisiana, where she and Lenny had luxuriated in the balmy breezes
of his mother’s riverside veranda; and Trinidad, where after Lenny’s death, she and Kiera had indulged in island time, swimming
in warm salt waters. Because of this Monique was used to stepping off stuffy planes into the caress of humid breezes, usually
coming from a blinding blue sky. Not, as the automatic doors at Heathrow airport swooshed open, to the cold slap of an English
fog.

She raised her face to the sky. Moisture prickled her cheeks. Lenny had always been a hothouse flower, staying inside in the
depths of the New Jersey winter, eschewing air conditioning in the ripeness of summer. He would have taken one suspicious
look at this gray English sky and pulled his overcoat against his shuddering body.

“Cheeky London weather.” Judy paused just long enough to completely block pedestrian traffic. “Great for ducks and sherry
and tweed and mystery novels. When I was last here, it rained for a full week.”

Judy made this comment with a grin—a huge grin that set the skin crinkling at the corners of her clear, gray eyes. Her cheek
still sported a groove where the piping of the airplane seat had dug into her face while she slept. The woman could barely
contain herself, bouncing on the balls of her feet as she flexed her fingers over the handle of her luggage.

Monique led her away from the automatic doors and scanned the area for a taxi stand. “I can put up with a little rain. We’re
here for only twenty-four hours anyway. Look—there’s the line for the cabs.”

“It’s a queue,” Judy corrected. “It’s a
queue
for the
hackneys
.”

“Right.” Monique headed toward the line where travelers waited their turn for a black taxi. With her luggage clicking over
the pavement behind her, she slung her daypack onto one shoulder and tugged out the sheaf of papers rolled up in a side pocket.
“We need to be in London by noon, and Heathrow is an hour out, so I think we’ll make it. You exchanged that cash while I was
tied up in customs, right?”

“Right-o. Pounds and pence.”

“I can’t believe I forgot to get English pounds back home. Euros aren’t going to do us any good in pubs.”

“Pubs! Fish and chips.” Judy made a strangled little sound. “Crisps. Pints of ale. This is so much better than crew-team trips
to south Jersey.”

“Hey,” Monique said, glancing behind Judy as she took a place in the cab line. “What happened to Becky?”

“She stopped at the loo while I was changing money. Did you hear that bloke?” Judy swung around and gestured to a man in a
suit striding past them while talking into his cell phone. “It’s like the place is crawling with a thousand Hugh Grants.”

“You didn’t wait?”

“For Becky to come out of the bog? No.”

“Judy!”

“Hey, don’t get your knickers in a twist.”

Monique tamped down her irritation. It appeared that Judy was determined to use every one of the Unique British Expressions
on the list she’d printed out before she left the States. “How do you know she isn’t lost?”

“She told me she’d meet us by the hackney stand.”

“If she can
find
it.”

“Listen, last night she nearly went barmy when I offered to help her to the airplane restroom. So bugger it. She’ll find her
way here.”

Monique sighed. She couldn’t be angry with Judy—or Becky. Becky had been all but mute from the moment she’d climbed into the
sleek black limo Monique had ordered for their trip to the airport. Becky had slid into the car and waved good-bye to Marco
and the kids. She hadn’t touched the glass of champagne they’d thrust into her hands. The girl looked like she was going to
an execution rather than on a two-week vacation with friends, but she just closed up when they tried to get her to talk about
it. With a look of abject apology, Becky had wrapped herself in a blanket and turned a shoulder as soon as they’d found their
seats on the plane.

Just then Monique glimpsed Becky, head down, striding through the automatic doors. Becky paused, blinking and scanning the
area, and Monique couldn’t help but notice how anxiously she stood, so thin and uncertain in the frame of the open doors.
Monique waved her arm over her head in big sweeping movements, hoping to capture her attention.

Then, with the power of lungs that had been screaming five urchins down to dinner for twenty-five years, Judy shouted, “BECKY!”

Monique shook the ringing from her ears as Becky turned in their direction. With a quick wave, she strode to join them. Becky
moved arrow-straight, her gaze fixed on her destination. So when a young woman in a suit, swinging a briefcase as she spoke
on a wireless ear set, crossed Becky’s path, Becky reared back a fraction. Her action, unexpected by the other travelers,
threw off the whole tenuous commuter equilibrium, and Becky’s progress for the last ten feet was an awkward series of shuffled
steps and cringed shoulders, of muffled apologies and rolled eyes.

“Freakin’ Londoners,” Becky said as she joined them.

“Bunch of wankers,” Judy added.

Becky grunted. “Worse than walking down Fifth Avenue in December.”

At the sight of the dark blue challenge in Becky’s gaze, Monique let the incident go. Everyone was cranky and off-kilter.
Right now the cloudy sky said it was mid-morning, but her body screamed that it was four thirty a.m. and why the hell wasn’t
she lying under warm blankets, serenely asleep? Her eyeballs were itchy. She couldn’t even think of resting. The three of
them had too much to accomplish before she could consider a nap.

She moved up in the cab line and bent over the first page of the itinerary to protect the paper from the drizzle. So many
details. She’d tried to take care of everything in the two weeks they’d had before their flights—the international driver’s
license, the money exchange, the reservations for the Paris-to-Zurich flight as well as nailing down reservations at various
international hotels—all while checking the bucket list to make sure everything she needed to do was actually
open
and
available
during the short window of time she’d be in each country. There was only so much she could do while working full-time, especially
when two weeks ago an abandoned preemie landed in the NICU. Monique had taken an extra shift after she’d been handed the curled-up
little boy, whose body nearly fit in her palm.

And then there was Kiera at home, just as tightly curled-up. Her daughter had only grudgingly given her a dry peck good-bye
last night. The girl had been closed-off and moody and uncommunicative, her dark chocolate eyes flashing accusations whenever
Monique tried to broach the subject of this trip. The arrival of
Grand-mère
yesterday—with her bags from a Caribbean grocer—had sent Kiera into theatrical paroxysms of joy and affection. The very affection,
Monique figured, that Kiera had so intentionally been holding back from her.

Monique pulled out her phone. It was the wee hours of the morning on the East Coast so she chose to send a text.

Arrived safely at Heathrow. Miss you already, baby girl.

“Look sharp, Monie.” Judy stepped off the curb as they reached the front of the line, and the hackney driver came around to
open the trunk. “Time to put your luggage in the boot.”

Monique rolled her eyes as she slung her rolling luggage into the trunk. “King’s Cross,” she murmured to the cabbie. She slipped
into the backseat after the other women then rattled off the address of the hotel.

“So,” Judy asked, “when we get to the hotel, do you think our room will have a loo?”

Monique frowned as the cab rumbled into traffic. “Why wouldn’t it?”

“Well, at some of the finer places I stayed when I was last in London, the loo was down the hall, shared by at least twenty
smelly backpackers.”

“As long as it has a bed,” Becky muttered, sinking down in the wide leather seat. “A nice, soft, comfortable bed.”

“The hostel I stayed at had a thin mattress and no sheets.” Judy sat in the middle of the wide seat, with her belly pack loose
on her thighs. “I shared the room with a twenty-six-year-old busker and a group of flamenco dancers from Salamanca.” Judy’s
smile was slow and wicked. “The hookah was smoking all night.”

“There’s a story,” Monique murmured, “that you never told during the last overnight Girl Scout camp.”

“Tell me later. I’m so tired right now,” Becky said, as she fished her special amber sunglasses out of the depths of her purse,
“that I’d sleep right on the sidewalk.”

“That’s pavement in London.”

“No one is sleeping for hours.” Monique rattled the papers on her lap. “We’ve got to do the London Eye today. It’s the first
thing on the list.”

“Look! There’s a lorry.” Judy leaned over Monique, pointing to a truck on the road. “And it’s about to go on a roundabout.”

Monique frowned at her. “Are you going to be doing this all day?”

“It’s bleeding likely! We’re on holiday.”

Becky groaned. And Monique thought, as the black cab headed toward London, that it was true what they said about travel: There
was no better way to really get to know your friends.

The London Eye was a one-hundred-and-thirty-five-meter Ferris wheel sitting on the south bank of the Thames River between
Hungerford and Westminster Bridge, opposite the Houses of Parliament. As Monique glimpsed it, as she emerged from the tube
at Waterloo, she was amazed that it had originally been built as a temporary structure for the sole purpose of ringing in
the twenty-first century. The enormous, spindly, once-doomed wheel now towered over the city buildings. It had become such
a favored landmark that it had made the travel section of one of the newspapers she and Lenny had perused during those last
weeks of his life.

“I’d like to go to the top of that someday,” Lenny had said, tapping the paper with the corner of his glasses. “I bet from
all the way up there you could see the whole wide world.”

She craned her neck to take in the sight, his words ringing in her ears. She wished she could will Lenny back to life for
just this one moment, to stand beside her and experience the same rush of excitement and expectation.

Instead it was Becky who stumbled against her, letting her head fall onto Monique’s shoulder as they walked. “Sleeeeeep.”

Monique gave her a squeeze. Once they’d all dumped their luggage at their hotel near King’s Cross Station and ordered up strong
coffee and a full bangers-and-mash English breakfast in the hotel restaurant, Becky’s mood had improved.

“We’ll see castles from up there,” Monique promised. “I read that, from the top, you can see all the way to Windsor.”

“Bloody unlikely.” Judy tipped her head toward Becky and gave Monique a wide-eyed look. “Windsor’s got to be twenty-five miles
away.”

Becky intercepted the look with a sigh and a roll of her eyes.

 “You do know that Buckingham Palace is only a Tube ride from here,” Judy added brightly. “We missed the changing of the guard,
but we could go and torment a Beefeater before dinner.”

“First things first.” Monique reached back and gave her daypack, with its rolled-up itinerary, a little pat. “We’ve got to
stick with the plan.”

The crowds were thin, due to the weather, so they didn’t have to wait long at the ticket counter to purchase three passes.
Soon after they were waiting in the line for the Eye itself. Each of the closed-in, climate-controlled “pods” could carry
twenty-eight people, and the wheel moved slowly enough that people embarked and disembarked as it was moving. As they neared
the front of the line, Monique glimpsed one pod full of wedding revelers with waiters pouring champagne and another empty
but for a single rider, sitting alone on the center bench.

She watched that solo rider’s bent back for a long time. Maybe she should have reserved a pod for herself. Away from the crowds
and the noise, she might have been able to summon Lenny to sit beside her. She needed to feel Lenny close, now that she’d
started the list. An uneasy feeling had crept over her these past weeks, sparked in part by Kiera’s angry outburst, but also
by something else, some long-suppressed resistance now elbowing its way into her consciousness. She’d only just begun to understand
why she’d avoided doing this bucket list for four long years.

She didn’t want to lose any more of Lenny.

“Hey,” Judy said, her head buried in the London Eye mini-guide, “what time is our train to Amsterdam in the morning?”

“Noon,” Monique said, shaking off her gloom. She clutched her arms as a chill breeze swept off the Thames. “We’re taking the
Eurostar through the Chunnel, going straight to Brussels, and then we’re hopping some inter-city train from Brussels to Amsterdam.”

“Maybe we can slip in a trip to the Tower of London tomorrow morning before the train.”

Becky perked up a bit. “That’s a castle.”

Monique said, “Is it even open on Sundays?”

Judy shrugged. “I’ll call when we pop back to the flat. Those yeoman warders that work as guides tell the goriest stories.
They lick their lips as they talk about medieval torture devices. I love the British.”

The doors swept open, and the attendant guided them into the glass pod along with about fifteen other people. Monique took
up a position standing by the glass, gripping the rail as the door whooshed closed and the pod began its steady rise. As they
escalated above the surrounding buildings, the great Dickensian sweep of the London roof-scape stretched before them. Judy,
with the guidebook open on the rail, looked through her reading glasses and then over them, seeking landmarks. She pointed
out St. Paul’s Cathedral, and a bunch of other spires built by Christopher Wren, nudging Becky in the ribs with each discovery.
Becky squinted into the distance to ask the identity of a particular tall, strange building, and Judy read from the guidebook
that it was called the “Gherkin,” for its resemblance to a pickle. Becky dug out her camera to take a photo.