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He also had a way of making me think about what I was doing. It took me a little while to get my mind back on the trip. But when I did, I realized something that for some freaking reason I hadn't thought about for even a moment during my heady days with Vanessa Lincoln. My heart began to pound and I felt sick to my stomach.

You actually have to fly on an airplane to get to France!

SIX

IN THE AIR

I had the barf bag on my lap all the way. The actual flights—Buffalo to New York, then New York to Paris—took about nine or ten hours all told, and my face was as white as one of Vanessa's form-fitting sweaters every inch of the journey. I kept thinking about how high in the air we were, how ridiculous it was to be 50,000 feet up in the sky, or whatever it was.
In the air
, for God's sake, with nothing holding you up! And down below, at least most of the way, was the Atlantic Ocean. An
ocean
for Pete's sake, about a million miles across and about a million feet deep!

Most kids could show their fear in a situation like that, but not me. Not the grandson of the great World War II aviator and son of the decorated Gulf War fighter pilot and genuine hero. We were on an overnight flight, but I didn't sleep very much. When the sun came up I was just sitting there, pretending I was enjoying a movie, gripping the arms on the seat like I was going to rip them out. The only thing that got me through the flight was the thought of my mission in France.

When we finally reached Paris, I wanted to get down and kiss the floor of the Charles de Gaulle Airport. But we weren't in Paris for long. My parents had asked me whether I wanted to do the “Paris thing” at the beginning of the trip or at the end, and I opted for the end. I was anxious to get going. It wouldn't be possible for me to appreciate the Eiffel Tower or the art galleries that Mom would want me to see, with that first task waiting for me in southern France.

We traveled European-style and took trains to Marseille. First, we got on these red, white and blue subway cars (I don't know how the French get away with using America's colors) in the airport so we could get to the Gare du Nord (that means the Northern Railway Station) in downtown Paris. That station was very old and pretty cool, built about a thousand years ago (like everything in Europe) and made out of stone. It looked like a palace on the outside and had massive skylights with crisscrossing steel beams.

My choice would have been to take the TGV or
Train à Grand Vitesse
(that means “very fast train”) from there to Marseille. I saw one on a track, sleek and ready to roll, said to be able to travel at nearly 200 miles per hour and capable of getting us to our destination, nearly 800 kilometers away (for some reason, the French, just like Canadians, use kilometers instead of miles), in about three hours. But Mom wanted to travel on the horse-and-buggy train, which would take us nearly twice as long. She said I should “see France, not rip through it.” Ripping through it would have suited me just fine.

But the train ride turned out okay. As we rumbled along, I couldn't believe how small everything was, even in Paris, where there weren't any real skyscrapers that I could see, other than the Eiffel Tower. I actually didn't spend too much time working any games on my phone, which is unusual for me. I stared out the train window most of the way to Provence. (That's the “region” that Marseille is in. Kind of like a state, I guess.) Everything outside the city looked small and old too: the houses, the narrow roads, the cars. And they kept looking older as we moved south, like we were going back in time. Things in America were twice the size and twice as new. I hadn't heard of most of the places we passed through, though the countryside, I must admit, was nice to look at, full of green rolling fields, stone walls, blue rivers and lots of flowers. Mom called it “delightful.” The French themselves were a colorful lot too. The women (who looked awfully good to me) were slim and wore all the colors of the rainbow, and the men dressed a little on the feminine side for my liking.

But Marseille wasn't so delightful. First off, I couldn't believe how big it was, especially for a place I'd never even heard of before Grandpa mentioned it. It was probably even bigger than Buffalo. Secondly, it wasn't the cleanest or richest place, especially around the Gare de Saint-Charles (the train station), and it felt kind of dangerous there too. It wasn't entirely uninteresting though. It seemed kind of Arab and African in places, kind of mysterious. Marseille got a lot better when we took a cab through the city and ended up down near the water. The Mediterranean Sea, as blue as can be, is spectacular, and Mom and Dad had booked a really nice hotel, right near the water. It was kind of artsy inside, filled with weird sculptures and paintings that hung on walls that were scrubbed to look rough and old. By the time we got there, it was dark and we were all exhausted. Even though it wasn't much past nine o'clock local time, we were still on American time and we all just collapsed into the two beds.

My parents, especially Mom, were reluctant to let me go the next morning. We'd all slept about twelve hours and Mom tried to convince me to stay with them for another day or two to become adjusted to the time change. But I wanted to get moving. I was anxious from the moment I got up.

They bundled me into a cab. Mom told the Arab driver to take me to Arles and gave him the name of the hotel she had booked for me there. Dad clapped me on the shoulder and wished me good luck, his rock jaw firmly set, while Mom gave me a hug and a kiss, and kept the tears back. She's actually really good at that for a Mom. Still, she made me promise to text her every day.

And then I was off. Sixteen years old and alone in southern France, armed with some money (though Euros looked like Monopoly money to me) and a prepaid bank card with a $2,000 limit. I was ready for my mission.

It was about forty miles to Arles, and the cabdriver, who said nothing other than “
Américain
?” five seconds after we took off, drove about a million miles an hour to our destination, as if he couldn't get there fast enough. That suited me just fine, though the trip was a little hairy in places, since he didn't seem to pay a lot of attention to the road, humming away to Arabic music that blared out of his earphones.

On the way, I realized that I hadn't let Shirley know that I was across the ocean and safe and sound. I texted her four words: In France am OK. Then I dropped a few words to Leon. Then I thought of Vanessa. I should let her know too. But when I started to text I realized that I had a lot more to say to her, so I switched to email and really went at it. I must have written five hundred words before I realized it. I made the start to my adventure seem heroic, even though I hadn't really done anything yet.

Arles was very different from Marseilles. It was much smaller, really just a big town, with a historical and, I have to say, kind of magical atmosphere to it. The houses were yellow or light blue or red and jammed along narrow streets that wound around the beautiful Rhone River. It was what Mom would call picturesque. There was even a big Roman amphitheater, a real one from back in the day, in the midst of things. People moved at a slow pace; there were lots of tourists. Sitting at cafés drinking coffee or simply taking in the sights seemed to be the order of the day. Hardly anyone appeared to be working, except those who were serving at the hotels, restaurants and stores, and they certainly didn't seem to be laboring too hard. They were much friendlier here than in Marseilles.

My downtown hotel was very old and painted yellow, which I thought was perfect, since Van Gogh was so into that color. Before I left Buffalo, I had gotten a book out of the library about him and a lot of it had dealt with his time in Arles. I could certainly imagine him living in this town, in his rustic old “yellow house” with another great artist named Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh struggled to get by, hardly eating anything, painting all day (and I mean
all
day) in the countryside, drinking at night with working-class folks in the cafés, spending time with loose women in “houses of ill repute,” fighting with Gauguin…and cutting off his own ear. No one's really sure why. Throughout it all, he kept painting masterpieces (though no one back then thought of them in that way). He was a pretty crazy guy, but there was something about him that was truly cool, beyond the great paintings he did. He was a genius and he didn't care about being rich or famous. He just believed in his art. It all came from his heart. I like that. No one thinks like that anymore.

It was exciting to be alone in a hotel, especially in southern France, but I didn't spend much time thinking about it. Mom had bought me a sandwich and a drink to consume on the way to Arles, so I didn't need to eat right away. I checked in, settled into my small room with its old bed and desk and yellow stucco walls, and immediately started studying my map. Grandpa had said that the Noels' little farm was about halfway between Arles and a place called Nîmes, not far from the village of Bellegarde. I found Marseilles, then Arles and then Nîmes on the map. I found a road that looked like a pretty major one, running between those two places. And right there, right between them, was Bellegarde! My heart began to race. It looked like there was lots of countryside in the area. I imagined my grandfather being there long ago and felt as if I was about to walk around in a place from a story.

While I was looking at the map, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I stood up and checked out my look. Though I wished I could grow decent stubble, I was very tall for my age and really not so horrible-looking. My eyes were almost black and my hair was dark and I liked to keep it uncombed, so it had that rumpled look that I'd heard girls like. Shirley seemed to anyway. She liked just about everything about me. But I wondered, too, as I gazed at myself: was I capable of doing what my grandfather was asking of me? And what if I couldn't? What would I tell Vanessa? What if I couldn't even do the first task? That would be devastating.

I paced in the room for the rest of the afternoon, imagining what might happen tomorrow, and what, exactly, I should do. The Noels would be really old now, their two children about seventy. Maybe none of them were still alive, not even the children; maybe there would be no trace of them at all. Perhaps no one around here would remember them. Would this be a wild-goose chase? Was it ridiculous?

I went out and ate in the café next to the hotel, getting by on my fractured French, helped out by a good-looking young waitress, probably about seventeen or eighteen. She had short ragged blond hair, cut to look like it had been torn, and a big smile. She was wearing a long white T-shirt with the word
L'Amour
written on it, over black-and-yellow-striped tights. She had a bright orange scarf wrapped around her neck, looking like she had just tossed it there, and yet it was perfect. And very artistic. She asked “
Américain?
” before I even opened my mouth, and then giggled and pointed out what she thought I might eat. I wondered how she knew where I was from. I was wearing jeans (good ones, mind you, bought in an outlet mall in Buffalo) and my best Aéropostale T-shirt. I knew that was a French word, something to do with air, so I thought it made sense to wear it here. In fact, I had two of them and intended to wear them both a lot on this trip.

I went for a walk after I finished eating and tried to imagine what it must have been like for Van Gogh in the 1880s. Because the town was so historical—other than the cars and people in modern clothing, it didn't look like it had changed a great deal—it was easy to believe I was seeing what he saw. I strolled north along the river to the place where his yellow house once stood and found a plaque with a reproduction of one of his paintings on it, but little else. Just a park and some busy streets. It didn't matter; his art lived on. I went back to the hotel and got into bed early. Despite the time change and how exhausted I was, it was hard to sleep. I was too excited. I couldn't wait for tomorrow. I knew that it would change my life.

SEVEN

REVELATION IN THE COUNTRYSIDE

I got the concierge (I couldn't believe how they pronounced that in France, so weird) at the hotel, who spoke fairly good English, to hail a taxi for me and let the driver know that I wanted to go to the village of Bellegarde, and that I was looking for someone named Jean Noel in that area. My driver wasn't an Arab man this time, but a French woman, middle-aged and chain-smoking but as slim as a straw and dressed as colorfully and stylishly as my waitress had been. She talked all the way to Bellegarde, which thankfully was only about fifteen minutes away. She kept waving her arms as she spoke, popping her cigarette in and out of her mouth. I didn't understand a word she said.

I told her my plan was to start at the City Hall or a tourism booth, but she did me a favor by paying no attention and insisting that I get out in front of a café that looked like the most popular place in town. I immediately had the feeling that you could find anyone in this neck of the woods if you asked at this establishment. It was packed, even at this early hour, and they were all obviously locals—no fancy Paris or even Marseille styling was going on. They were plainly dressed, or at least as plainly dressed as the French could be, which wasn't all that plain and a lot fancier than most Americans. Many were sitting outside. The windows, which ran the length of the building, were wide open, so you could see everyone inside too.