Chapter Thirty-Three
There was a lot to like about a walk along the Esplanade.
The Charles River Esplanade, that was.
Esplanade was a French word, or at least it came from French. Middle French, if she was remembering right from looking it up this morning, when she’d agreed to meet Cara here.
She did that a lot these days: look up words. English ones she wanted to know the French for, or French-sounding words she wanted to know the origin of.
She had a new app, a better one that her conversation partner told her about during their first FaceTime meeting, back when Layla was still at her placement in Chico.
That had been challenging, what with a nine-hour time difference between there and Paris, but for five weeks they made it work.
When Layla got back on Eastern time, the lessons became much easier to schedule.
They also became easier to do.
After five weeks, she’d broken herself of the habit to apologize for every clumsy pronunciation, every botched verb tense, every dropped word or failure to remember the French one.
Her conversation partner—a forty-two-year-old woman named Sabine who had the best shag haircut Layla had ever seen in her life—had helped with that, since she did something like seven French lesson FaceTimes a day and did not have a lot of patience for Layla’s repetitive I’m sorry!
By the time Layla left Chico, she’d dropped the apologies. She’d even incorporated some French curses for when it all got too frustrating.
She worried, at first, about taking the French lessons. Worried it was way too MacKenzie-adjacent.
But no, she decided.
No, it did not have to be MacKenzie-adjacent. It did not even have to be Griffin-adjacent.
It only had to be Layla-liked-learning-it-adjacent.
And so far, she found that she did.
“These runners,” Cara said, clucking her tongue.
Layla thought of the word courir, but she did not know the word for runner.
Courier? Probably not, too easy. Next week she would ask Sabine, who would probably make that funny p-heavy noise of exasperation and say, We say jogger, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“Like what are they fucking doing?” said Cara. “It’s four o’clock in the afternoon on a Friday! Not working, I guess!”
Layla smiled and took a sip of her coffee.
Complaining about people running for exercise was a very Cara thing to do, one of the many things she’d missed about her friend.
Layla happened to know that Cara had a Peloton (also a French word: small ball) in her apartment, which she rode at weird hours to accommodate her working, which was not always in the middle of the afternoon.
“It’s a nice day for it,” said Layla.
Cara snorted. “You would say that.”
Layla smiled into her to-go cup. Cara was grouchy today, sleep-deprived after too many long shifts in a row. But she’d been the one to suggest the Esplanade, texting Layla that the hospital had turned her into a fluorescent-light, stale-air gremlin, and she needed to get outside.
And Layla, who had two whole weeks here with no work schedule, was happy to oblige.
“I mean,” Layla said, gesturing toward the water. “Look at this. The trees, the boats, the city. It feels almost…”
She trailed off. It did not really feel Parisian, which was fine. It was nice enough on its own. Though sometimes, if she squinted at that bridge up ahead, say, the curving arch over the water, the—
“Let’s talk about your shitty apartment,” Cara said. A mercy.
Layla left a beat of silence, building the suspense before saying, “In ten days, it is officially no longer my shitty apartment.”
“Layla!” Cara exclaimed, grabbing her arm and shaking her, nearly upsetting Layla’s coffee. “That’s so good! So, you decided?”
Layla nodded, looking up ahead at the bridge, not squinting.
She did love Boston. Or liked it, at least. But over the last couple of months—since Paris—she’d been thinking about whether Boston was really her home base.
Whether keeping a shitty apartment here for in between her placements made any sense, or whether she had done it as some kind of deferent, amicable monument to the fact that her home with Jamie had been here, to the fact that the MacKenzies were here.
“And you re-signed your contract?”
Layla swallowed, nodding again. This, she was less sure about: one more year, at least, as a locum tenens, though she had negotiated fewer total placements, with more time in between.
Her salary was still more than she needed, certainly as a single person, and enough to make the most of the time in between with travel.
But not enough to keep renting a shitty apartment she didn’t even want anymore, in an expensive city she didn’t think she wanted to call home.
“C’est bon!” Cara said teasingly, knowing about the conversation-partner stuff. “How do I say I’m proud of you in French?”
Layla rolled her eyes and didn’t answer. But she thought, Je suis fière de toi.
Je suis fière de moi.
She linked her arm with Cara’s, and said, “Thank you. For everything.”
She said it seriously, quietly, squeezing Cara’s arm as she did, so her friend would know the depth of it.
It wasn’t the first time she’d said it to Cara since she’d been back from Paris, and it was the short version—the one that held all the other thank-yous Layla had offered to her friend in recent weeks.
Thank you for still being my friend for all that time, even when I couldn’t be a good one back.
Thank you for waiting for me to stop being so amicable.
Thank you for being there when I could finally admit that Jamie was not actually as good as I always said he was.
Thank you for not saying I told you so.
Merci, merci, merci, merci.
Cara was the first person Layla texted when she got back from Paris.
Cara had been there through it all. Not often in person—that was not how their friendship worked, not with their jobs and their schedules—but so often, in long text threads, voice notes, occasional calls.
It was clear that Cara had, until then, actually been practicing great restraint when it came to Jamie—to the MacKenzies in general—and sometimes, she set forth with a torrent of complaint that truly made Layla laugh.
And that reminded her of someone, too.
Someone else who could be grouchy. Tilting toward cruel, at times, but only ever out of fierce, focused protectiveness. Kinder than most people could see.
She took a breath of fresh air—not even a trace of cigarette out here, not that she should be disappointed—and focused on Cara.
She did not want to be thinking about a man when she was out with Cara, not after all the times she’d done that in the past, and all the harm it had caused their friendship.
Layla was learning how to be a better friend now. A friend who knew better what family really was.
So she said, “Do we have a destination today?”
Cara gave a dramatic scoff. Dramatic.
“What?” Layla said.
“A destination, Layla? Really?”
“I’m—yes? Like do you want to go eat, or shop, or—”
Cara groaned. “Here I am, trying to show interest in your interests, and you ask me if we have a fucking destination, I can’t believe it!”
“My interests?”
Cara stopped and took out her phone, swiped and tapped at the screen for a few seconds, then turned it and held it up in front of Layla’s face.
It was a translation app.
The one Layla used to use.
The word on the screen was flaner.
Layla flushed.
“To stroll, right?” Cara said, still exasperated. “Like, without a destination? That’s what it means?”
Only sort of, she thought, but she nodded.
Sabine had been the one to teach her the word, only a few weeks ago now.
The funny thing about having Sabine—well, maybe not Sabine specifically, but having a French conversation partner in general—was that sometimes, Layla ended up telling her more details about her days in Paris than she actually told Cara.
They were good conversation prompts: She could describe, for example, a boat cruise, the sights seen, the food served, the disastrous moment when someone threw up over the side, and work out how to say it all in the tongue of the place where it had all happened.
And one day, only a couple of weeks ago now, when Layla’s conversation appointment had coincided with a particularly aching, lonely feeling, a restless impatience, a worry—she’d told Sabine about that day alone with Griffin.
The walking, the shops, the random restaurants, the people-watching, the complete abandonment of the itinerary for the day.
And Sabine had said, “Ah! You are une flaneuse!”
It didn’t really mean someone who strolls. It meant more than that, a French something, something Layla suspected would be difficult to be anywhere else. It meant…
Well.
To her, it meant someone who wanders.
Flaner, the verb form. Wandering.
To her, it would always mean wandering.
With a specific person.
With whom she still, absolutely, would.
She swallowed, unexpectedly emotional. Grateful and also heartachy. Cara was not making it easy to focus right now.
“You remembered,” she said to Cara, then added, “Je suis fière de toi.”
Cara linked her arm through Layla’s again, moving them back into their walk. Their stroll. The truth was, it was a little too fast-paced to be called that. Cara—and also Boston, and all these runners—had limitations, when it came to being without a destination.
After a few minutes of walking quietly, Cara said, “I know I’ve talked a lot of shit lately. About your ex-in-laws.”