Last Message Read online

  But we are talking about Vanessa Lincoln here. And I wasn’t actually doing anything with her anyway. I wasn’t even touching her. I certainly didn’t make any commitments—until that last day.

  We had booked our flight for France for the week after school ended, so my last day at McKinley High was a pretty big deal. I’d let all my buddies know what I was doing (though I didn’t tell them as much as I told Vanessa, and I told her that I didn’t tell them as much, which was a smart move, tactically). So I was a pretty popular guy that last day. I’m not proud of the fact that I found a way to elude Shirley for just the right amount of time after the last bell rang, so I could have some V-time. I eluded Leon too. I wasn’t proud of that either, most definitely, but I couldn’t be with him and Ms. Lincoln at the same time. Vanessa had actually asked me to come and talk to her that day.

  While we chatted, I looked around to make sure Shirley was nowhere in sight. Vanessa talked about my trip to France. She was touching me too, doing that thing that girls do when they like you—“accidentally” putting one of their soft hands on your arm. We exchanged (get this!) our home and email addresses and our cell numbers. I couldn’t believe it! She asked me to write to her when I was in France, and gave me her details on a little sheet of pink paper, in that looping, flowery handwriting all girls have. And then she drew a happy face at the bottom (like I’ve heard she always does when she signs something) and a heart! Then she kissed me.

  Well, it wasn’t like a kiss kiss on the lips. It wasn’t remotely like the kind I was looking forward to getting from Miss Sandoval the night before I left, but it was a genuine kiss, right on the cheek and pretty close to the lips. She did it real fast and unexpectedly, and I almost fell over.

  “Write to me, Adam, write to me lots. I want to know everything! And when you come home, when you’ve done all those tasks, we should…maybe… start seeing more of each other.”

  Shirley came around the corner at that moment. She had Leon with her. I don’t think she saw the kiss, and there wasn’t any evidence of it on my cheek since the Big V wasn’t wearing lipstick that day. She goes for a “natural look.” I’ve heard other girls say that about her in kind of bitter voices. It means she looks like she’s got no makeup on when, I guess, she really does. But she sure smelled good up close, kept her eyes open, looking at me when she kissed me, and left a little bit of something on my cheek, something see-through and a bit sticky. I think girls call it gloss…lip gloss? I rubbed it off and jammed the piece of pink paper into my pocket before Shirley reached me.

  We were kind of quiet on our walk home that day. She took my hand but didn’t squeeze it like she often does. I kept worrying about what she’d seen. We live in a pretty nice part of Buffalo called Delaware Park, not far from our school. It has museums and parks and is full of beautiful houses. Most people think my city is a bit of an armpit, but that’s just because it’s cold and snowy in the winter (and that’s only because it’s so close to Canada). Our area has lots of trees and boulevards and trendy restaurants. Mom and Dad say they wouldn’t live anywhere else. She can make some big sales here and he can get from our “leafy street” to the airport in fifteen minutes.

  But the neighborhood didn’t feel comforting to me as we walked along the street that day. There was a bit of a frost coming from my girlfriend, and it was hard to blame her. Even though she didn’t see the kiss (at least, I don’t think she did), she somehow, without saying a single word (strange how girls can do that), made it crystal clear that she was bummed out about my spending some of my last minutes at school with the best-looking girl in the place. Her hand was limp in mine. I didn’t know how to respond. Guys never do. It seems like girls spend all their time, from the moment they are young and playing with Barbie dolls, figuring out relationships, learning how to react to certain situations. Guys don’t do anything like that. We don’t have any practice whatsoever. So when there is a romantic crisis, when the shit hits the fan, we don’t have a clue. We are always just running on autopilot.

  But I still think I did a pretty good job of making things up to her over the next few days. I bought her a teddy bear. Girls like them from guys. She wasn’t much for showing emotion, but she started to cry when I gave it to her. That kind of shocked me, since she wasn’t like most girls that way. When she started crying, I moved in for a hug, which seemed to work just fine. She hugged me back like we weren’t ever going to see each other again. It felt awfully good. I let my guard down and really hugged her back.

  “You know I like you for who you really are, Adam,” she said quietly.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Like right now, when you aren’t trying to impress anyone. It’s just you and me, and no bull.”

  I knew there was some criticism mixed in there, but it went along with a pretty tight snuggle from a really great girl. All my worries melted away for a moment.

  That was how we parted. I spent the rest of the evening reading over Grandpa’s letter. Then I turned to the other two and that small white one. What if I just opened them all up now? He’d never know. I was dying to know what was in them. The first task was pretty hard and involved all sorts of cool secrets. I couldn’t even imagine how interesting the other two might be. But I held myself back. Something told me that I’d ruin everything if I cheated. I just stared at the outside of the other letters. The two big manila ones were thick, obviously containing long letters just like the first. Then I glanced at the last one. That was the letter I really wanted to open. What in the world was in it? Was it the secret to my grandfather’s entire life? Was it something even bigger than that? Something he’d discovered long ago and had told no one? I couldn’t resist holding it up to the light. But I couldn’t see anything.

  I was going to do everything in my power to open that last little white envelope before I returned from France.

  Before we left the next day, I made sure I had Vanessa’s info. I looked at the piece of paper for a while, following the beautiful, flowery, feminine lettering. I smelled it, like I had about fifty times already. I put on the clothes I was going to wear on the plane and made sure her note was in my wallet in my pocket. I wanted it safe, even though I’d also put her information into my cell phone.

  At the last moment, I gave Leon a call.

  “Hello, Mr. Murphy,” his squeaky voice said over the phone. “You have reached me on my distant planet.” He likes to say that whenever I call him. He often slurs his words too, and a lot of people can’t understand him. But I can. And he always refers to me as “Mr. Murphy.” I think he’s making fun of me.

  “I, uh, I’ll miss you, buddy.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  He has this terrible way of always knowing the truth or at least most it. I was going to miss him, but I probably wouldn’t be thinking about him too much. I imagined his face on the other end of the line, his smile, his bright blond hair.

  “And forget about Vanessa Lincoln,” he added. I thought I’d hidden my interest from him. “Leave her to me. Shirley’s your girl. She’s the best. And you know it.”

  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 milli
on 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 co
untryside 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.