Wanderlost (6 page)

I'm in a
foreign land. With no itinerary of the tour I am supposed to be leading, much less the actual information I am supposed to be imparting to the six individuals entrusted to my care. The driver of my tour bus speaks only Spanish. I do not speak Spanish. I
do
have an English-to-Spanish translation app on my smartphone; however, my smartphone is apparently crisscrossing the Atlantic Ocean considering the hotel still has no messages for me regarding my luggage. The mother of the person who holds my sister's career in her hands is on my tour and about to bear witness to the mega-disaster that awaits me.

I really hope Elizabeth has a fallback career in mind.

Fortunately, about two seconds after Mrs. Shemkovich drops her bombshell, the waitress arrives to take our breakfast orders, so I don't have to wrap my brain around a response.

It turns out pancakes are kind of a “thing” in the Netherlands, at least according to our server. She hands me a menu with topping combinations I guarantee IHOP has never
even heard of. Um, shawarma pancakes? Pepperoni pancakes?
Rabbit-and-deer
-topped pancakes?! Swear to God. They're on my menu.

“Could I please have butter and maple syrup pancakes?” I ask the waitress. She looks disappointed.

Conversations swirl around for a bit as everyone plays the “Oh, my best friend's cousin's hairdresser lives in Texas, I wonder if you know him” game. It isn't until the waitress is placing pancakes in front of us that attention turns back to me.

“So what's on tap for you today, fearless leader?” Hank says in his freakishly loud voice, which guarantees everyone is now listening.

“Well, funny you should ask,” I say. I swallow my panic. “I was thinking we could take a vote to see what everyone would most like to do. I figured it might be a nice way to show right from the start that, as your tour guide, I care deeply about your input into our trip too. What do you think about that?”

“But it says here we're supposed to go on a dinner cruise through the canals at six o'clock tonight,” says Mary.

Says here? Where's here? I look down the table at the sheet of paper in her hand. I
must
get hold of that paper. In the meantime, I arrange my face into a carefree expression.

“Oh,
of course
we're doing the canal dinner cruise. I'm sure we've already paid for it and reserved the boat and everything. I mean, we have. I know we have. Now, what does your sheet have us doing this morning? Let's vote on that activity.”

“It's a free day until six o'clock,” Mary replies, sounding puzzled.

Oh. It's a free day. I busy myself with my pancakes and try not to acknowledge that my grand gesture of democracy just makes me look kind of idiotic. I steal a glance at Dolores to see if she's reaching for a phone to call her daughter yet. Fortunately, she's too busy sawing into plain, dry pancakes. Wow, that's even more boring than mine.

“Elizabeth?”

I rub the butter pat around with the back of my fork to melt it.

“Elizabeth?”

I drizzle maple syrup in a pattern across the top of my stack.

“Elizabeth!”

Hmm? Oh, whoops! Mr. Fenton is talking to
me
.

“Sorry. I was distracted. Actually, I don't usually go by Elizabeth. Um, I prefer Lizzie. If everyone would please call me Lizzie, it would be great.”

Okay, where the heck did
that
just come from? Elizabeth would one hundred percent throw herself off a bridge if anyone dared to call her Lizzie. But maybe a little distance from my sister is just what I need in this situation, and my brain somehow knew it.

“Oh, okay, Lizzie
,
” says Mr. Fenton. It's a little weird that he didn't give his first name when everyone else did, but he's definitely the most formal one here so it kind of suits him. “I was just going to say that it is quite nice of you to volunteer your free time to spend with us today. Did you have any suggestions for us to vote on?”

I gave up a free day. Drat.

I hold up a stack of brochures and begin to leaf through them. “There's the Van Gogh Museum, the royal palace, the Anne Frank House . . .”

“I want to see the tulips,” Emma chimes in.

“Unfortunately, you've chosen the wrong season for that. The tulip fields close to visitors in May. They won't be blooming now,” Mr. Fenton answers.

Emma looks disappointed. “What about windmills?”

“I suspect we'll see plenty of those tomorrow on our drive through the countryside,” Mary says.

We're going to the countryside tomorrow? Good to know. I have
got
to get my hands on that printout Mary has.

“This place has a sex museum, ya know. That's my vote.” Who else but Hank?

Surprisingly, Emma raises her head and says, “Well, now, that sounds fun.”

Wait, what? There is no way in Helsinki I am accompanying six senior citizens to a museum about S-E-X as their
guide
. I would rather drown in one of the canals before having to discuss positions and various aides with Grandma. Well, not my grandma, but I'll bet they're all
someone's
grandma or grandpa.

“Or we could go to the Anne Frank House? Lots of history there.” I smile to make my suggestion sound sweeter. I'm trying. Under the table, Bento slips a piece of paper into my hand. I glance at it, but it's just a name and a long string of numbers. I must have a confused expression on my face because he
mimes a telephone. Oh. It's a European phone number. Okay, I have no idea who I'm calling, but excusing myself to make a call to a mystery person is way preferable to staying here and getting roped into a sex museum tour.

“I need to run to my room for just a moment. Here, I'll pass around the brochures and we can talk more when I get back.”

I race to my room and dial the number.

“Met Corinne.”

“Um, hello?”

“Hallo?”

“Uh, hi. This is going to sound weird, but . . . do you know a man named Bento?”

“Bus driver? From Spain?”

The voice on the other end of the line sounds not much older than me and not all that surprised to be answering questions about a random Spaniard.

“Yes! That's him! He gave me your number and suggested I call you but, um, I don't speak Spanish, so I'm not exactly sure why. I know this is strange, but, uh, who are you?”

A sparkly laugh. “My name is Corinne. I've worked with Bento many times. His tour guide companies hire me when they want a local to lead a group around the city for a few hours. You know, get an insider's take on things.”

I can do that? I can bring in local experts? This was definitely not in any part of the binder I read. I really should have flipped through more of that thing. I feel a little thrill, like I'm
getting away with something; it's like a fire drill sounding two seconds after the teacher announces a pop quiz.

“Yes! Yes! I'd like to do that, please. Would you be available this morning? Oh, please say yes!”

Corinne laughs again. “I'm at my girlfriend's place now. Give me a bit to run home and shower and I can meet you in Dam Square in an hour and a half. Do you know where Dam Square is?”

I stifle a smile. “Pretty sure I can find it.”

“Tell me about your group. How many people, what are their interests, any physical considerations I should know about?”

I fill her in on the details and she gives me some suggestions. They all sound perfect.

“Oh, and Corinne? Is there any chance you speak Spanish?” I ask.

“Fluently.”

I just might do a happy dance in my hotel room.

Corinne was heaven-sent. She totally and completely saved the day today and I am not ashamed to say I needed major rescuing. Within two seconds she had everyone wrapped around her finger, and I'm fairly sure they would have followed her to the depths of hell (although some might term the Red Light District just that, and we certainly trotted after her there).

Well, everyone except Hank and Maisy, who excused themselves shortly after I announced our pending walking tour.

And I quote: “If we ain't visiting the sex museum, I'm gonna take my little lady there on our own.”

I sincerely hope he did not see how seasick green I turned, but I'm pretty sure Mr. Fenton did because he had a sudden coughing fit that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

Too bad for Hank, though, because Corinne started our tour by weaving us behind the hotel and into the Red Light District, where sex was amply on display. Or at least the promise of it. She subtly pointed out the women modeling their wares behind glass windows while I tried to hide the fact that I was blushing.

Then she made a few more twisty turns and we were at the flower market, where shops of every type of bloom made Emma say she wasn't sad about missing the tulip fields anymore. Corinne showed us the buildings that were sloping toward the canals and took us to a secret garden accessed by a totally ordinary door in a wall. It was once a convent, and even though a bunch of other groups had discovered the hidden door too, and clustered inside, no one in there spoke above a whisper.

Our foray through Amsterdam ended with plenty of time for a nap and was so good that when we took the canal dinner tour later that night, a bunch of what we learned was a repeat. Best of all, I am now armed with provisions that are dramatically enhancing my odds of getting through the first week of my tour with all of my limbs and my sanity intact.

The first came thanks to Corinne's superior Spanish skills.
I now know Bento is a total sweetheart who has my back one hundred and ten percent. In return, I have promised him my firstborn. He definitely doesn't know any more than he needs to—such as my real name, for instance—but he
does
know this is my first tour and that I accidentally lost all of the tour information
and
my cell phone (which still hasn't shown up, so fingers crossed extra hard it catches up with me tomorrow in Germany). Luckily, Bento has his own copy of the agenda with all the addresses we need and everything. It's in Spanish, so it doesn't exactly help me much, and Corinne had another tour she had to give, so she couldn't stay and translate the whole thing for me. But at least I know he can get us where we need to be when we need to be there.

The second piece is Mary's scaled-down itinerary, which
is
in English and is currently tucked into my back pocket.

So, yeah, I conned a sweet old lady. I'm not proud of it.

But it was a necessary evil. I convinced her to let me hold her pocketbook (her term, not mine) while she got Emma to take a picture of her in front of the penis statue. I
might
have then asked her for a hard candy, because I've visited Aunt Mira at the nursing home enough times to know that old people always, always have stashes of small candies. Once I had permission to dig through her purse, I pilfered the agenda. I felt
reallllllly
bad when she was searching all over for it later, but I figure she'd rather have a tour guide with more than just a vague idea of which country is next up.

Now I'm back in my room after the boat ride and I'm more than halfway in love with Amsterdam. Basically, I've
decided it's the most beautiful city on earth. Granted, I have only Cleveland and the suburbs of Chicago to compare it with, but still . . . What could possibly be more beautiful than all those little bridges over the canals with the flower carts on them and the picture-perfect bicycles propped against the railings and the condom shop just as you reach the other side. Okay, well, maybe the condom shop doesn't
quite
fit, but that's just Amsterdam.

I'm even a tiny bit pissed that I wasted my whole arrival day in the hotel room and definitely sorry that we have to leave the city in the morning. With Corinne to lead me around and the Kras providing room service, I'm betting I could even get a little comfortable here.

I'm lying in my bed, feeling more than a little comfortable already, when the phone rings and I jump.

My stomach twists into instant knots. It could be Elizabeth, who has already left me two “Call me right now!” messages today that I am pointedly ignoring because I don't trust myself not to blow up on her yet, or else someone from the tour company—God, please don't be Sam—because I'm supposed to check in with them every day and I forgot to get their phone number from Bento. I also forgot to get Bento's cell number, which is just . . .

I bring the phone slowly to my ear and squeak out a “Hello?”

“This is extremely important, so please take a moment before answering.”

Sam. It's Sam. Oh God, please, please, please don't let him
remember my sign-off yesterday. If there is any goodness in the world, he did not hear me tell him that I love him two-point-five seconds after “meeting” him for the first time.

I swallow. “Um, okay.”

“Good. Left side or right side? Of the bed.”

I sit up. “What?”

“Do you sleep on the left side or the right side of the bed? I know that's pretty forward of me to ask a virtual stranger, but since you went right to the ‘I love you's yesterday, I think you, actually, are the one who set a dangerous precedent, and the fact of the matter is, with those words on the table so early, I figure we're gonna be zooming up to marriage and kids before we know it. So I need to know at the outset . . . left or right.”

I am torn between sobbing and laughing. He totally heard me. He totally heard me and he's not even going to be polite and pretend like it never happened.

I stifle a moan and answer, “Neither.”

“What? How can that be?”

I puff out a breath. One: I haven't had anyone under the age of seventy who speaks my native language to talk with in two days (well, except Corinne, but she was too focused on making sure the seniors were entertained to chat much with me) and Sam is definitely, definitely under the age of eighty, judging by his voice. Two: sure, we share an employer, but would it be worse to shut down the harmless flirting (if that's even what this is) and be all business all the time, or would he respect me more if I played along and befriended him? I'm
thinking the latter. Three: he's just a voice on the phone and he's gonna stay that way.