Girls Who Travel (2 page)

2

W
HEN
I
FI
RST
came back from my grand backpacking tour around the world, I used the commute from my mom's house in suburban Long Island to the office to write out my memories from my year spent abroad.

The stories were for my website, Gypsies & Boxcars. Throughout my year overseas, I created the site for friends and family to follow me. I'd share stories and post pictures whenever I could, in the frantic but fruitless hope of remembering everything.

I didn't travel with much that year, so most of my wardrobe and possessions were acquired on the road, and something unexpected started to happen: People—strangers, even—began asking me questions. They wanted to know where I got the hand-painted glass bead bracelets or my bohemian leather belt. I got compliments on my jaunty hats and the patchwork,
tasseled summer scarf, and the fabric journal I always carried with me. My mom always said I had an eye for that sort of thing, but I never truly believed it until the comments started rolling in.

In hopes of supporting local businesses, I began offering to buy the items and ship them to readers. For example, I blogged about my time in South India with Lochlon, and then sold a small inventory of sandalwood bead necklaces that I bought from the seaside shops near our beach hut.

My makeshift online shop was very Anthropologie—sans the inauthenticity and astronomical price point. Orders started coming in, and even with a minimal markup, I started making a small profit—which of course I promptly spent.

Regardless, it was then I realized that I could do this as, like,
a job
. I could travel around the world, tell my tales, and sell a small collection of local handicrafts that I personally scouted. There was a real market for authentic goods, for things not everyone had, for things not just “Made in China” or H&M.

Yet as soon as I got back home, business dwindled. I had no new goods to offer, no new tales to tell. And so until I made enough money to get back on the road, here I was, stuck playing the role of Cubicle Dweller in Corporate America. It was the part you had to play when you were in your early twenties and one teensy step away from financial destitution.

About to exit Penn Station, I crowded my hair into my wool beret and braced myself for the cold, but it still thwacked me with an unexpectedly cruel bitch slap.
And good freakin' morning to you, New York City.

I hopscotched between honking yellow cabs and irritated businesspeople. New York was fuming with energy, the winter-white sun high and dazzling.

Despite being the obligatory plucky young girl in the big, sexy city and all that glossy sitcom setup, there was no promenading past the Chrysler Building in cute tutu dresses for me.

I reached my office building windswept and frazzled, my shoes click-clacking through the marble lobby as I juggled two venti coffees in one upturned palm.

According to my business card, VoyageCorp was a “corporate travel management company,” which basically meant we planned business trips for CEOs more interested in high thread counts than high art. The only time I saw any desire for indigenous culture was when a client wanted a local high-class escort. Thankfully, those types of requests were usually reserved for my boss, Stephan Holland.

Placing Holland's venti in his office, I let the cold sunshine linger on my face and daydreamed of the beach again. My stomach panged at the thought of Lochlon—for the second time today, and it wasn't even 9
A.M.
yet.

Plopping down at my generic desk outside Holland's office, I clicked through my email with Monday-morning indifference.

There was an all-hands-on-deck meeting in Dubai next week for our primary client, the Richmond Group, and every email contained yet another amendment to it. Holland was in a special sort of tizzy over the meeting, but it was hard to take him seriously when he considered missing the elevator a stage-one disaster.

“Aren't you looking fierce today,” I catcalled Holland as he marched into the office, rattled and pink cheeked.

Holland sent his eyes toward the heavens. “Kika, not today.”

“You're the one sashaying by me,” I shot back.

Holland looped his coat onto the hook in his office and
looked as if he was about to say something biting, when he noticed his thick-foamed coffee sitting on his desk and thawed.

“Kika, you're a peach,” he purred, switching gears. “Now, what is going on north of your forehead?”

I slinked off my knit hat and smoothed my hair. “There. It's gone.”

“No, I actually like it. It's not at all office appropriate—what do you wear that is?—but it's très cute. Makes you look a little French.” He ran his eyes over the mess on my desk. “And everyone knows that French women do everything better than us.”

“Actually, it's Scottish. It was hand-knit by a brooding Highland granny—”

Holland outstretched his arm and wagged his finger
no, no, no
like he was in an R&B music video. The man had a flair for the theatrical and was an unfortunate over-actor. Holland wasn't interested in hearing the story about my trip to Scotland. He never was.

“Kika, you cannot get me off task today. I need everything confirmed for the Dubai conference—flights, airport pickups, dinner reservations, happy-ending massages—everything. If anything goes wrong with Ronald Richmond's trip, it will be my head on his plate.”

“Richie Rich? Oh, he'll be fine,” I said with a shrug. “I got it covered.”

“Stop calling him Richie Rich. I almost called him that to his face the other day because of you. Ronald Richmond is very sensitive about his name—you know that.”

I conjured the image of the perpetually red-faced man who owned the Richmond Group. Ronald Richmond was a full-
name sort of fellow who could never be dwarfed to a friendly “Ron” or even the simple and bro-y “Richmond.”

“Oh, please. He's offensively rich. Everyone knows his name,” I reassured Holland.

“Yes, but the Richmond Group has more problems than Syria right now, so let's not contribute by screwing up the conference. I mean it, Kika.”

I gave Holland a fake-serious salute and directed my vision back to my laptop with the intention of ensuring that the conference was scheduled down to the minute, but I got distracted by some uber-luxury travel porn on Barcelona—which was where Lochlon and I first met.

3

T
HE
K
ABUL
Y
OUTH
Hostel in Barcelona was an acknowledged party spot located right in the palm tree–studded Plaça Reial, a plaza sporting a bubbling bronze fountain and drippy curlicue lampposts designed by Barcelona's own artsy kid, Gaudí.

My first morning there, I sat at a rustic table in the hostel's common area with a map and a cup of cold complimentary coffee. I had heard about a group of nuns who sold hand-painted flamenco fans, and I was trying to find their convent among the spiderweb of streets in the hopes of buying some for my website.

Just then, a crowd of people came rushing down the stairs, dangling bottles of cheap cava and cans of beer in their swinging grips. Lochlon was leading the pack. When he noticed me, he froze in front of my table, causing a human traffic pileup.
The group jammed up behind him in a cartoonish way, each person slamming into the one in front.

“Oi, mind yourself, lad,” said the kid behind him with a moody shove.

Wheeling away from the pileup, Lochlon sat down across from me at the table, staring at me the whole time.

I stared back as boldly and unflinchingly at him.
Who the hell is this guy? Do I know him?

When he didn't speak, I leaned in and with a lilt of humor said, “Close your mouth, you big creeper.”

His whole face lit up when he smiled.

“Can't help it, so. You're just . . . stunning, like,” he said stupidly. “A natural knockout.”

I couldn't help but blush at this straightforwardness, his informal charm. Before I could react further, his friends called out to hurry him along—they were already halfway out the door.

“Sure, I'm not bothered. I'll meet you there,” he hollered back without looking in their direction. And so in the same swarmlike haste as their arrival, the group exited. It was abruptly peaceful again.

We sat face-to-face in a strange sort of staring contest. He looked away first and flipped up the corners of my map.

“Where you off to, then? I've been here two full weeks, so if you're in need of a bit of help, I'm your man,” he said in a flirty flash of romantic foreshadowing or dumb hope or mere coincidence.

“Are you?” I laced my tone with playfulness.

We walked around the city for hours that day. He had no
clue where he was going, but that didn't matter anymore. I never did find those flamenco fans.

Instead, he taught me how to pronounce his name (
Lok-lun O-Ma-hoon
) in the animated Boqueria market. We talked of the cities we had come from while eating sugared churros on the steps of formidable churches with gargoyles for chaperones.

I had just come from Latin America and had a few months of travel left. But Lochlon, a serial backpacker, had just started a new journey and would be on the road for at least a year. He traveled until the money ran out, went home to Ireland to work, and then went back on the road. He was Peter Pan with dirty jeans and a brogue.

By the time night fell, we were talking of the places we would go to next while slipping through the side streets and back alleys of Barcelona's underbelly. I don't remember where we were going that night, but I can still remember the buzzing rush low in my stomach whenever I think of it.

The next week we would be on a train to the Pyrenees together, the pastoral countryside tumbling past us. Fallow yellow fields; stone ruins; farmers' cottages; dusty soccer games; sky, sky, sky. It was the beginning of a four-month-long “roadmance” where we traveled and, in effect, lived together. If he was Peter Pan, then I was Wendy.

After Spain, we went on to jump turnstiles on the Paris Métro; got kicked out of a glitzy, ritzy bar in Monte Carlo; and spent nights kissing over bottles of cheap Chianti in dreamy Florentine piazzas.

In Rome, he taught me it was okay to be a tourist and take pictures with the men dressed as gladiators. “If you act like you're above it, you're going to miss out,” he told me. And he was right.

We splashed fully clothed in a public fountain in Zurich,
La Dolce Vita
style; climbed trees in a Berlin park, skinning our knees; and stayed up all night playing poker on an overnight diesel train to Greece with teenagers from Israel. We made love for the first time, hot and desperate and carnal, in Istanbul; and played “Never Have I Ever” on a budget airliner to Mumbai. He first admitted that he was hiding something from me on the Konkan Railway down south to Goa.

“There's stuff about me that you don't know, Kika,” he told me as the train wheezed and jangled us along the thin railroad tracks that drew a line between the Arabian Sea and the Sahyadri Mountains. We had been on the train for five hours, and we still had more to go.
What is it about long journeys that breeds confessions?
I wondered then.

The sun shone through the window highlighting the freckles on my thighs. “Like what?”

“I've done some things in my past that I'm not proud of,” he whispered, staring out the window greasy with fingerprints. Sweat oiled his temples.

I shrugged. “So has everyone.” His words didn't worry me. By this point I had already made up my mind about him. This wasn't just vacation sex; he was really someone to me. And it would take a lot to change that.

But he creased his forehead seriously.

“No, you're not understanding me. You'd not be able to look at me in the same way if you knew.” He looked deeply uncomfortable and tented his sweat-stained T-shirt off his chest.

“Why don't you tell me and let me decide that,” I said without flinching.

But then, it was as if an emergency alarm had been pulled
in my brain. A warning image of my mom's face flashed in the speed of a strobe light:
Caution! Caution! Caution!

“You're not married, are you?” I blurted, abandoning all casual coolness. My insides rippled at the thought.

That was mom's one rule: Don't fall in love with a married man. She had that rule because it happened to her. My father was a tremendously handsome (and tremendously married) Roman man she met while living in Italy. They no longer speak.

We didn't spring for the air-conditioned cabin, and my thighs suctioned to the seat as I shifted my legs.

“Jaysus, no, I haven't a missus.”

I closed my mouth, but the alarm didn't subside. “Not even a mad wife locked in the attic? That still counts, you know,” I prodded. This was one thing that my usually chilled yogic mother would panic over.

His head shook like a swinging door. But then a moment later he asked, “Wait, is that not the story of
Jane Eyre
?”

“Girlfriend? Boyfriend? Illegitimate children?” I fired, my brain whizzing faster.

“Would you stop? It's nothing like that at all.” He fidgeted with a loose thread on the hem of his shirt, wrapping it around his finger until his skin went colorless.

“Was it something illegal?” I asked. “Were you in jail?”

“'Course not,” he said, pinching his face like he'd just smelled something sour. “Is the question-and-answer period of the program over now? Look, I'm sorry I mentioned it. Forget it, yeah?”

He looked up at me with expectant, childlike eyes; this look was a departure from his usual self-assured swagger. His Adam's apple dipped in a hard swallow. My shoulder blades unclenched when he looked at me like that.

“Okay. One more question,” I said. “Whatever you did, whatever happened—is it truly in the past?”

The train snaked through a mango grove, and the air grew sticky with the scent of rotting fruit and noxious diesel fumes.

Lochlon didn't even glance at the luscious, waxy mango trees and instead leaned forward, supporting his elbows with his knees.

“By God it is,” he assured me emphatically.

A freight train going the opposite direction clattered parallel to us, momentarily blocking the view in filmlike flickers. In that moment, the worry burned away like a puddle in the blistering Indian sun.

“Then it doesn't matter to me. If this is the real you, then I don't care about what happened back then.” The train plunged into the black shadow of a tunnel.

“You say that now. But once I tell you, you won't want anything to do with me.”