Mark grudgingly took a photo of me with the man, who asked me, “Are you in town for the Canine Supporters World Education Conference?”
“I wish,” I said. My ticket home was for very early the morning of December 26. If the week before Christmas was one of my busiest workweeks, I could still eke out escaping to London for it. But the week between Christmas and New Year’s is the highest of high seasons for dog-walkers. I couldn’t be away for that, which was when the GOADC (Greatest of All Dog Conferences) in London was taking place.
It was all I could do not to blurt out what I hadn’t even yet told Dash, or my parents. The organization that sponsored the conference, Pembroke Canine Facilitator Institute (PCFI), was the very learning institution that had offered me admission for next term! PCFI is like the Harvard of dog education schools and if I hadn’t told anyone yet, it was because I wanted to see how I’d like London first—and also my parents will kill me. They were super not into me deferring Barnard for a year and they will see the PCFI program as me trying to stall college, if not outright kill that prospect.
They’d be right.
6:20 p.m.
“I need to start, Lily,” said Julia. “Sorry.”
Where was he? “I understand,” I said, frustrated. I’d put so much expectation into this moment of Dash discovering me here at this event. And he hadn’t bothered to show. I was determined not to ruin the moment of surprise by texting him: Where ARE you?
Julia spoke into a microphone to the gathered crowd. “Thank you for coming, everybody! I’m Julia Gordon, the marketing manager here at Daunt, and this is our first-ever, hopefully annual, Daunt Books Bibliophile Cup Challenge!”
No one said anything. “Why aren’t people cheering?” I whispered to Mark.
“British people don’t cheer. That’s so American.”
“But what about soccer?”
“Okay, they cheer then. But there’s usually a lot of beer first.”
Julia continued, holding up an iPad. “I have your team names collected here. When your team name is called, please send a representative up for your first clue. You’ll get points for finding each destination, with bonus points awarded to members who answer trivia questions at each spot. Once you complete each clue, another one will be emailed to your team leader. The last clues will be emailed the morning of the twenty-third. I’ll be tallying your scores here on my iPad based on my team members’ evaluations at each destination. On Christmas Eve, the two highest-scoring teams will receive Daunt gift cards commensurate with their tallied points. Good luck, everyone! And thank you for participating.”
Mark called out, “And that other thing!”
Julia sighed ever so slightly. “Yes. My American husband insists there must be an actual prize for people to show off, so …”
Mark pulled something from beneath a table of mystery books and brought it to where Julia was addressing the crowd. It was a giant trophy, taller than my very large dog, shaped like a stack of books instead of a more typical trophy cup. “The Daunt Books Bibliophile Cup!” said Mark, to no one’s applause.
Mentally, I was cheering Mark on, like, Yes, a trophy! But I could see the British crowd was unimpressed. Or if they were impressed, they bloody well weren’t going to show it.
Julia handed out envelopes with the first clues to each team as Mark returned to where I was standing, holding the envelope meant for me and Dash. We were supposed to be Team Strand. “Guess it’s going to be you and me on this hunt, kid,” Mark said.
He opened the envelope and we read the first clue:
Near the heath
Where the bathers find their ponds
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
“Too easy,” said Mark.
“You’re right,” I said. I didn’t think the clue was easy at all; I had no idea what it meant. I meant Mark had been right about Dash. “I shouldn’t have tried to surprise him.”
I love my cousin. But I traveled all this way for a treasure hunt with my boyfriend, not Mark.
I’d waited so long. I wanted to see Dash’s scruffy hair and beard. His scowl. His skinny black jeans and whatever excellent sweater he favored at the moment. I assured myself, Christmas is not ruined. It’s no big deal. I’ll find Dash and it’s all a big mistake and—
Suddenly the front door of the store swung open with a flourish, and in walked an older lady wearing a fancy suit, walking a cat on a leash. Ugh. Cat people. “Are we late?” she asked loudly in a regal British accent, but like the kind that possibly could be a fake accent adopted by someone who is really from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. A gentleman dressed in an elegant suit with a top hat followed behind her. He took off his hat with a flourish and tipped it in her direction. “Never, my dear,” he told her. “The world waits for you.”
The gentleman was Dash. DASH! My sweetheart! His long hair was gone, and his face was clean-shaven. Looking cheerful. Smiling.
And suddenly I realized: That person I thought I knew best? I didn’t know him at all.
two
December 21st
This is the story of a boy who lost something, then found something, then had to figure out what to do next.
It starts off, strangely enough, with a sweatshirt, child’s-size medium.
I was seven, maybe eight. I got home from school, went to the kitchen for a snack, and found a box waiting on the kitchen table, covered in stamps that featured a woman I vaguely recognized as a queen. Even though she’d been postmarked and run a little ragged from the journey, her regal countenance didn’t waver. I admired that, and studied the package further, realizing with a shock and a thrill that my name was on it, which meant that it was for me.
“It’s from your grandmother,” my mother said when she caught me examining it. She said this with much more shock than thrill.
Immediately my young mind sizzled a connection, and for at least a few years after that, my mental image of my grandmother matched the face on the stamp. This was my father’s mother, a woman I couldn’t remember meeting in person. The things my parents said about her were not things I could fathom, starting with the fact that she’d left my grandfather because she’d fallen in love with a stone. I heard my mother explain this to her friends when my father wasn’t around; my grandmother had landed in England because she’d fallen in love with a stone. She hadn’t ended up with this stone (this made more sense to me), but it had been the reason for her to move to London, to start what my mother called “a new life.” People always asked my mother which stone, and she said she wasn’t sure, that this had happened long before she came into the picture. It was only when I overheard one of these conversations later in life, in my early teens, that I understood what had happened. It wasn’t a stone she was chasing, but a member of the Rolling Stones.
She called every year for my father’s birthday. He answered dutifully, not enthusiastically. The phone would get passed to my mother, then to me. My grandmother always seemed delighted to talk to me, but I never knew what to say.
She had sent toys and stuffed animals when I’d been born, and later I would uncover a photo of her holding my bundled baby body in her arms. This photo was not on display in our apartment; I had to dig into a baby book to find it, just like I had to dig into my parents’ wedding album to find another photo of her, beaming in a pink paisley dress as she gave my father away. (My grandfather and his new wife had skipped the wedding because of extensive golfing plans and a vague disapproval of my father’s ability to choose wisely.)