A Traveler's Guide to Belonging

Chapter 2

2

Seven days after Isabel died, Timothy walked down a stone path to a small house surrounded by trees. The baby was tied to his chest and he was breathing hard from the walk. He had been smoking too much lately, lighting one cigarette on the end of another; he was going to need to stop if it made him walk like an old man. The house was white, surrounded by red hibiscus bushes. In Timothy's opinion it was the best house in the valley, with gray stone roof tiles and large windows, and it belonged to Isabel's dearest friend, Anjali, a woman who long ago was from Bulgaria, though she had lived in India, teaching yoga, for many years. She had planned a memorial service for Isabel that would begin shortly. Already a group of about fifteen people milled about in a small clearing surrounded by boulders and tall trees. None of them were related to Timothy or Isabel, none of them were people that he really knew at all.

He hadn't called his family yet to tell them that Isabel was dead. He was stalling, he couldn't bear to say the words aloud. Anjali had called Isabel's parents, who were on their way to retrieve their daughter's body and take her back to France to be buried. Timothy thought if they had asked for the baby he might have just given him to them, he was so overwhelmed and confused, but they were elderly and Isabel had been an only child. Isabel's parents would arrange to get the death certificate for him, and sign the papers needed to show that he had full custody. Isabel's mother had been inconsolable on the phone, asking for all the details and mourning the fact that her daughter had died so senselessly, on the floor, with only Timothy and the midwife to see her go. Timothy agreed with her, it was stupid, senseless, and irreparable. But he couldn't bear her grief as well as his own, so he had handed the phone back to Anjali and gone out to smoke a cigarette.

For the memorial, straw mats had been arranged in a circle and a small campfire burned in the center, dim in the midday sun. Anjali emerged from the house and lit a candle on a stump at the opening of the clearing. She caught sight of Timothy, who had been fighting his urge to turn around and climb back up the hill. He felt a deep, sick anxiety at the sight of so many people. Anjali put her hand to her mouth and made her way over to him.

She reached him in a rush and took him into her arms, making space for the tiny sleeping baby.

"Timothy," she said. "How are you doing?"

She had visited him several times in the last few days. She called Isabel's parents on the phone, she held the baby, she and Sunita handed Timothy cups of chai. He was grateful to her, deep in his heart, though he didn't know if it showed; he was so numb, so tired. He felt exhausted by all of it, the kind of exhaustion that drove him into the ground, that made his heart feel like it was about to stop. It was a tiredness deep in him. It felt like a thirst with no possible quenching.

"I'm here," he said.

"And you brought him," she said rubbing her hand over the baby's curved spine.

"It felt like it would be wrong not to," Timothy said. "That's why I'm late, sorry. I had to wait for Sunita to finish nursing him and then he needed to be changed—"

"Don't worry," Anjali said, cutting him off and putting a hand on his arm. He looked down at her. She was wearing a white scarf around her dark brown hair, with long golden earrings and black kohl around her eyes. She was twenty or so years older than him, ten years older than Isabel. Timothy knew that she hadn't been sure about him at first, didn't know whether he was good enough to be a partner to Isabel, her dearest friend. She had worried that he was too young, that he'd take off and leave Isabel in the lurch. She had warmed up to him eventually. "Many others are late," Anjali said now. "We'll wait a few minutes and then begin. And I have some ladies here to cook for us, so don't leave before you eat something."

"It's up to him," Timothy said, cupping his hands under the baby. Timothy was wearing the baby in a stretchy piece of cloth that the midwife had given to the couple a few weeks before the birth. He had tied it around him several times and folded the baby into it. Liz, the midwife, had to show him almost a dozen times before he could do it for himself.

He saw her then, the midwife, walking down the path, looking extremely nervous. Timothy gave her a brief nod and looked down. The forest floor was covered in pine needles after the heavy rain, which had fallen hard, like pebbles on his roof, all night long. Timothy found a place to stand against a tree, just outside the circle of straw mats. As people trickled into the clearing, they found places on the mats, kicking their shoes into a pile of sandals on the outside of the mats. They sat cross-legged, in a loose representation of a circle, like a slack rope that has been thrown in the air and allowed to float to the ground. People pressed his hands or gave him kisses on the cheeks as they passed. He nodded and tucked his lips up in a ghost smile. Several urged him to join the circle, but he touched the baby and indicated that he couldn't sit. He preferred to be on the edges; he needed some sort of distance to distinguish him from the others.

Timothy and Isabel had been part of the rushing, seething stream of travelers; the international community that moved throughout the world like a school of glittering fish, following the weather, following the music, looking for an open space for themselves, for a simpler way of life. All of the people who sat in this circle were a part of this continuous migration, and Isabel was well known. She had been in the stream for ten years. Timothy was new, practically a baby in the scene. He was only twenty-three when he came to India and met Isabel, falling in love. Now he was left here in the mountains of North India, alone except for his small son.

But Timothy, unlike the others, really knew Isabel. He had been the one who married her deep in the Rajasthan desert, the one who loved the beautiful French woman better than any other. He was the one who would have stayed with her forever.

The rain had brought a chill that wanted to soak into Timothy's bones. He could have used a sweater, or even a vest. Instead, he had a warm sleeping baby. He curled his arms around the outside of the carrier to protect the baby from the cold.

The service began abruptly, and Timothy forced himself to pay attention. Anjali started by telling how she and Isabel met, eight years ago, in an ashram in the south of India. Timothy was fascinated with the story despite himself; he had never heard it before. Anjali wrapped her words up, tears running down her face, then another person told a story about Isabel. Timothy put his hand over his face and rubbed at the hot, tight place above his eyes that had been hurting for days. A Persian man picked up a guitar and began singing. He had long dark hair and a black beard, and wore a lungi, a piece of cloth wrapped around his waist like a kind of skirt, with a shirt and Himalayan wool vest. He sang the song "Rainbow Connection," and though it was a song Timothy liked, he felt a bubble of anger that started as a sharp pain in his throat and worked its way down to his chest. Somewhere I'll find it. A rainbow connection. Timothy didn't know what it had to do with Isabel. He didn't believe he would ever find a rainbow connection now; he would have been satisfied with the ability to sleep at night, but he didn't hold out hope for that either. The man's voice broke and people on either side of him reached graceful hands out to pat him on the back. He kept strumming the guitar without singing for a moment or two, then soldiered on, his voice warty with tears. Timothy could almost have laughed, but the moment was serious.

The baby squirmed on Timothy's chest, then relaxed back into sleep.

In the circle another man spoke, introducing himself.

"My name's Craig," he said. "I've been friends with Isabel for many years."

Timothy felt a rush of heat in his face. He knew the name Craig—an ex-boyfriend, one who hurt Isabel in those long years in India before Timothy came along. Timothy was simmering, then, trying to listen, but with senses pinging and attention drifting. Crows called to each other in the forest, a pack of dogs howled and fought in the distance. The people in the circle seemed unreal. They saw Isabel's death from a distance, like people exclaiming over an earthquake from miles away. "The whole room was shaking!" they said. "I thought my grandmother's vase would tumble off the shelf!" Meanwhile, at the center of the earthquake, people were fishing the dead from the rubble. Timothy didn't have any confidence that he would survive this. A multistory house had fallen on him. He was pinned beneath the beams. He was afraid to look at himself, scared to find out what the damage was.

Craig had short, tufty, dirty-blond hair and blue eyes under dark eyebrows. His clothes were white and he drew an invisible circle in the air with two fingers.

"The universe is perfect," he said. "It was Isabel's time to go."

The bubble of anger inside Timothy grew larger, causing his chest to ache even more, almost choking him. Her time to go. The words burned his ears, circled his brain, whirling. He took deep breaths, looked up at the trees, at the large pieces of sky between the topmost branches.

The people in the circle were restless now that the man in white had been talking about the perfect universe for more than a few minutes. Below their faces they seemed constructed of bits of scarves, flapping edges of cloth. There were bright and faded colors among them, a patchwork of people sitting in their scraggly line like a ribbon that's been lost in the forest. Somewhere I'll find it, a rainbow connection... the lines of Kermit's song echoed in Timothy's brain. He shook his head, tried hard not to focus on any one face. He didn't want to see anyone looking at him, didn't want to meet any eyes. Instead he looked at the small shrine that Anjali had set up for Isabel on a stump at the edge of the clearing. There was a framed photograph of Isabel, surrounded by candles and garlanded with roses. Anjali had asked Timothy for it two days before. In the picture, Isabel sat in a boat on the Ganges River in Varanasi, India, smiling. His stomach felt tight. She was smiling what she always called her big teeth smile. She wore a bright red scarf over her head and shoulders. She was beautiful.

The man in white was still talking. Timothy wanted to leave. People had abandoned their rigid, disciplined postures and now lay sprawled out, resting on their arms or lying down with their hands laced behind their heads. And still the man talked. The three Indian women who had been cooking in the courtyard, and now sat back on their heels, chatting while they waited to serve the food. Timothy could hear the gentle rising and falling of their language, words he didn't understand. One woman had something stuck in her finger. One of the others tried to get it out. Timothy felt an urge to walk over to them and offer help. He was great at getting splinters out. He was the oldest son of a carpenter.

"The only imperfect thing is that we don't realize how perfect the universe is," Craig was saying. He smiled at Timothy, pointed at him. "Isabel's son chose to come into the world this way. He chose this life because he knew he could do it without a mother." He smiled. "It is perfect."

The baby asleep in Timothy's baby carrier let out a whining sigh, as though protesting this grave injustice. Timothy felt heat boiling inside of him.

"Bullshit!" he said, his voice echoing in the grove. "This is such bullshit." Craig stopped talking and everyone looked at Timothy. He was hot from anger, and he felt his face burning hotter still. He was sure he had turned a bright red. "I'm sorry," Timothy said. "Sorry Anjali, but it's such a pile of crap. She didn't want to die, her son didn't want her to die, nothing about this is perfect. It's sad and fu—messed up."

He pushed away from the tree and glanced at the food. It smelled so good, but he had to leave, it was time to go. The two girls closest to him in the circle whispered together, their heads bent tightly together. Craig tried to speak again, but people talked amongst themselves now, stretching, muttering, standing.

"Thanks, Anjali," Timothy said. He turned to go, the baby still asleep but squirming like it would wake up soon. He walked away from the circle, heading for the path up the mountain, but at the last second he turned and approached the three women who still squatted in the courtyard, smiling and talking together, waiting to serve the food. He gestured to the woman with the splinter and she held her hand out reluctantly, her other hand covering her face. It took Timothy three tries, but then it was out. She looked up and smiled a brief, brilliant smile before she remembered to look away.

He turned to go again, but Anjali caught him and planted a hard kiss on his cheek, just above his beard.

"It's going to be okay," she said to Timothy. "You will be okay." He hugged her back but he couldn't even imagine believing that she was right.