The clock ticks past five in the morning, but sleep continues to play its wicked game of hide-and-seek. Light from the streetlamp carves a channel through my bedroom, trailing across my comforter, settling on the books stacked on my nightstand, but I refuse to surrender my day to sleep deprivation yet.
Flinging the pillow over my head, I roll away from the light, hoping to find rest in this space. But waves, a midnight wash of blue, slip through the darkness of my mind, stirring up the silt on the banks. My thoughts, they won’t let me rest. And the rush of water begins to build, a flood of pictures about to crash against the banks.
A girl dumps something near the edge of a lake—a rope made of gold, like one of the necklaces recorded in her book. Smiling, she is oblivious to the threat streaming toward her.
I open my eyes, afraid of what my imagination might do against my will.
Dr. Nemeth’s face appears in my mind, replacing the girl, his eyes curious about Annika’s list and later appalled at the magic balloon book for children. He emailed when they landed in Salzburg on Monday, but he didn’t have any more information yet about Annika. His team is diving in two other lakes before they travel to Hallstatt.
Did Mrs. Nemeth join her husband in Austria? We would be friends, I think, enjoying tea together while the others are scuba diving. But then again, Mrs. Nemeth probably likes to scuba dive. And travel around the world instead of stay at home.
Dr. Nemeth looked at me as if I were an oddity when I said I’d never been on an airplane. I don’t understand what’s wrong with being content at home, blooming right where I’m planted. Of course, some might argue that while I was planted just fine, I’m not exactly blooming. Some days I might even argue that as well.
The truth is—and I can only confront the truth in these early hours—I’m not as content as I would like Dr. Nemeth and others to believe. I love my apartment, the security of being grounded in this town, but some days I long for the courage to get on an airplane and experience another place outside my books, just for a week or two. Like my sister’s birthday card said so eloquently, to write a chapter or two of my own story.
My passport is unstamped but ready to use, tucked far back in my filing cabinet alongside the receipt for my wedding gown and a brochure from the Quarry Chapel, the place where I’d intended to become Mrs. Faulkner.
Scott planned to take me on a grand excursion to the Cayman Islands for our honeymoon, saying he never wanted me to forget our wedding day or the week following.
I’ll certainly never forget either.
The month before our wedding, I spent a long weekend with Brie in Columbus shopping for shoes and jewelry and flowery summer dresses made for the islands. While I was gone, Scott visited a friend in Fredericktown who introduced him to Kathleen. It must have been quite the introduction because three weeks later, after our rehearsal dinner, Brie saw Scott and Kathleen in his Mustang. Deep in conversation, she said.
Brie confronted him. He called me. And in seconds, everything changed.
Instead of swimming in the Caribbean, I spent the next week balled up on my bed, Charlotte and Brie both heating up bowls of chicken soup as if I had a cold or the flu. Chicken soup, to my knowledge, has never healed a broken heart, but their love for me, poured into that soup—and Charlotte’s steady reminder that God loved me even more—eventually brought me out of my state of shock, back into a new reality. As the months passed, I tried—and continue trying—to embrace God’s love on my own instead of relying on Charlotte to remind me.
Inching up on my mattress, I hug a pillow close to my chest. I don’t want to think about the Cayman Islands or Scott or those days of despair, but this room sometimes sparks the theater of my mind, looping memories in slow motion, pausing on frames I’d rather not see yet again.
Capture every thought, that’s what it says in the second book of Corinthians. Lock the fugitive ones away in captivity.
A new picture begins sketching itself in my head. Thoughts—hundreds of them—going rogue. Bent on destruction. I want to imprison them, but I can’t seem to cram them back into their cell.
The best place to round them up is on my feet, dressed for battle. Or at least dressed to move.
I change quickly into yoga pants and a T-shirt, lace up my bike shoes, and tie back my shoulder-length hair. About a mile from the shop is a paved trail for cyclists and walkers alike, fourteen miles to pedal out my thoughts.
A water bottle in hand, I retrieve my road bike from the storage unit behind the shop, attach my cell phone to the mount between the handlebars, and begin pedaling south and then east on the empty roads, past the manufactured house on Howard Street that was once my home. I’ve only moved four blocks since childhood, but it feels as if I moved a thousand miles away.
In minutes I’m biking along the Kokosing, a much more placid river than the one that plagued my mind. Sunlight flickers through the oak and maple leaves, sprinkling light onto an asphalt path that was once a railroad track. Hope—that’s what I experience every time I take this river trail, basking in the reminder of something old and abandoned re-created into something new. Progress is what they might have called it when the workers first laid the track, but no one calls this trail progress now. More like conservation.
Today is June 6. My thirtieth birthday.
This hits me as I embrace the rhythm of cycling, the pedaling a comfort as it empowers me to fight the thoughts in my head. In my work, the fugitives begin to cower back in their cages, giving me the strength to embrace this new decade of life as well.
The river flows quietly beside me, soothing my mind. The water is going somewhere, sometimes in a rush. Other spots it’s almost still, more of a pool than a forward thrust. On a journey and yet content to be settled in one place at times. Home.
It’s never occurred to me before, the quest of life being one of rapids and quiet pools. The same journey with both highs and lows. Is it possible to be content both in travel and at home, deeply grounded in something far beyond a place?
“On your left,” I call before passing a runner. Someone else, perhaps, who wasn’t able to sleep.
Another image plays in my mind—one of a Bavarian village and mountain water that hides treasures of its own.
What would it be like to use my birthday money for a real adventure? To celebrate, even, by spending a week or two in Austria instead of Hawaii or Paris? I could go to Vienna, finish my research on Felix Salten, and then join Team Nemeth for a few days, inquiring about Annika as they work.
Team—it’s a cozy word to some people, but being part of a team has never been in my comfort zone. Leagues away, actually. I’ve always felt a bit awkward, as if I wasn’t sure of my place inside the boundaries.
It wouldn’t take a crackerjack psychologist to figure out the root of that issue. Most kids, I assume, learn how to find a place in their family first, learning how to work together. My early years were about survival, not teamwork.
I failed miserably to partner with Scott, but I partner with my sister every day. We are a small but mighty team. One built on a mutual history, respect, and hope for the future.
Small teams, perhaps, are my forte.
A white-tailed deer leaps across the asphalt, followed by a fawn. When the deer stops to look at me, the fawn stops as well and waits for his mother’s cue. Danger, in this fawn’s eyes, is only danger if she signals to him. He has complete trust in this doe that cares for him.
Trust, I think, is the greatest gift someone can give.
I cycle past a cornfield, the green stalks already several feet taller than the coveted knee-high by the Fourth of July, and turn left at a cross path that leads into Gambier, an exclusive college town built of clapboard and stone.
Distracted, I’ve taken the wrong turn off the trail; I realize it the moment I see a sandstone chapel beside the road instead of the college buildings. I bicycle often into Gambier, but I haven’t been on this country road, visited this chapel, since Scott and I rehearsed our wedding vows.
Initially I look away from the old church, trying to avoid the memory of the man I trusted completely, the man I thought loved me for exactly who I was. He didn’t love me, at least not for a lifetime. I helped him pass the time. Kathleen stole his heart.
I stop in front of the chapel, every stone in its walls excavated from a nearby quarry and laid by the masons who relocated from England in the 1800s to build Kenyon College. A revival swept through the college, stirring students and town residents alike, and together they built this place of worship that has lasted for a hundred and fifty years.
Maybe it’s finally time to leave my memories behind, the ones that seem to keep me chained to the past, and start on a new journey. Build something new.
My phone flashes, notifying me of an email, and I tap the screen to read a note from the bookseller in Boise.
Dear Ms. Randall,
Thank you for your purchase of Bambi: A Life in the Woods. This book was from an estate sale near Sandpoint.
I’m sorry that I’m not able to provide you with more information. Unless something of a critical nature is found in a book, it’s our policy to keep our client names confidential.
Sincerely,
Leah Lowe
Annika’s notes are more intriguing than critical, I suppose, but if the list recorded some sort of treasure hidden by the Nazis . . . Ms. Lowe might consider that critical.
A quick search on my phone reveals that Sandpoint is a small town in the mountains of Idaho, on the shore of Lake Pend Oreille—pronounced Pond Ah-Ray according to the website. I hunt for someone with the surname of Knopf in the area, but no results are shown.
Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking, but I want to believe that whoever sold this book might have known Annika. Or at least known about her.
The meaning of this list might have been family lore, passed down through her relatives in Idaho. Answers easily resolved if only I can find the right person to ask.
Ms. Lowe, I hope, is one of those booksellers who can’t resist a good story.