Finding Abbey Road (10 page)

We get off the train at Piccadilly Circus and make our way up to the street. London bustles around us, its streets arcing away in irregular curves. Throngs of people cross the wide plaza at all angles. Black taxis whir by, and we see our first actual double-decker bus, wonderfully historical and yet sleek and modern. The night swirls with the lights, and the horns, and voices.

It takes us a few wrong turns to get oriented, and it is immediately obvious that compass directions will be of little use here. Caleb is buried in our little map, using his phone
flashlight. “I think if we turn right . . . maybe?”

We walk in exactly the wrong direction for a while, but eventually we make it to the hostel. The guy at the front desk is named Teddy. He's a couple years older than us, with bleached hair and excellent tattoos. He takes twenty-two pounds per person per night, and shows us to the single-sex dorm rooms. We get a quick look at the spare metal-frame beds, hear the snores already droning away, and decide we need a few more hours to wind down.

“There's some food left down in the café,” Teddy tells us. “Stew. Free of charge as it's been sitting on the counter for a few hours. Still perfectly good though. I'll get you some?”

“Definitely,” I say. We follow him to the kitchen and sit at a long table. It's just us and a quartet of girls slightly older than us. They are at the table behind us, drinking tea and talking loudly with a map between them.

“I just felt like,” says one of the girls, “when we were in the Globe, I don't know . . . it's like I
was
Juliet, Helena, Ophelia. It was so . . . intoxicating.”

I glance at Val and she rolls her eyes.

“Here we are,” says Teddy. “Stew and bread. You want pints with that?”

I glance at Caleb and Val.

“Yes,” says Caleb immediately, “yes we do.”

“I'm good, thanks,” Val adds, frowning. When Teddy leaves, she adds, “Don't enjoy those too much in front of me, okay?”

We sip our beers and eat stew. With each bite, I feel sleep dragging me down.

Behind us, the girls chatter on.

“I think Shakespeare would have been a very attentive lover.”

The girls burst into wild laughter. One of them catches me glancing back. “Sorry,” she says, sounding very American, her face red. “This is what happens when you let a bunch of lit majors loose in London.”

It occurs to me that, in just a year or two, college me could be here, or somewhere, doing this kind of thing.

And without betraying my parents!

A voice inside wonders if I really had to betray them now.

But yeah, I really did.

The heavy stew and beer barge through my last defenses, and the pure exhaustion of these last few days starts to drag at my eyelids.

“I think I need to call it a night,” I say.

“Yeah,” says Caleb, yawning.

“I'm going to wind down for a little longer,” says Val as we stand.

Caleb checks his tourist watch. “So, let's meet by the front door at . . . nine?”

“Affirmative,” says Val.

Caleb and I stumble upstairs, holding hands. “I wish we were sleeping in the same place,” Caleb says as we reach the hallway intersection.

“Oh
do
you?” I press up against him.

“Just to sleep,” he says, “I swear.”

“I don't,” I say, putting my face against his neck. “But I am so, so tired. You can dream about me while you're sleeping with a bunch of dudes.”

“At least our parents would approve of our sleeping arrangements,” Caleb says. We kiss more, and then he squeezes me. “No matter what we find, it means everything to me that we did this, that you would believe in doing this.”

I nod against him. We kiss sleepily, and I fight off the urge to crawl inside his skin. Pull away . . . Push him toward his dorm. “Good night.”

I use the bathroom, then pick my way across the dorm to my assigned bed. With the snoring, the only way to sleep is going to be with earbuds in. I set my music to shuffle, take off my hoodie and jeans, and tuck into the narrow twin bed.

Orange streetlight draws trapezoids on the walls. I feel like I should consider where I am, just how far away I've traveled and why that feels as lonely as it does exciting . . .

But sleep has me in moments.

6:55 a.m., Wednesday

I'm awake by seven, like it or not. Bedsprings are sighing and floorboards are creaking all around me as everyone
rises for busy days being tourists. When I finally sit up at eight, I look around and realize that Val is not among us. It doesn't surprise me. What would, with Val? I think of her sitting down there in the café when we left her last night, and imagine all kinds of scenarios. Teddy was an obvious target for Val's interest. Or a late-night walk where, knowing her, she'd find a club or a party or something.

I tie my hair back, take a shower, and head downstairs.

Val is asleep in an easy chair in the living room. People bustle around her, drinking tea, consulting maps. She's oblivious to it all. I head down to the café and get us a scone to split, fix two cups of the complimentary tea, and place them on the table beside her.

“Val,” I say, shaking her arm gently.

“Mmm.” She half opens an eye at me. “It's not nine yet.”

“Well, no. I got you a tea, and if you wanted a shower or something . . .”

Val scowls. “What are you trying to say?” She turns and scrunches herself into the corner of the chair.

“Your friend and I were up chatting pretty late.” Teddy is stepping out from behind the desk and walking over. “When she finally fell asleep I didn't have the heart to wake her.”

“Oh, okay,” I say.

“Don't worry, I had my eye on her,” said Teddy.

I look up at him, mostly trying to get my half-awake brain to process what he's saying.

Teddy rolls his eyes. “
Not
like that.”

“Oh, I . . . Sorry.”

“Quite all right,” says Teddy. “This is a pretty plum job for meeting the ladies, I'll admit.” He holds up his hand and I see a wedding band. “Honestly, all that would be exhausting, never mind not at all cool. Your mate and I did chat though. She showed me the address you guys were going to check out.” He holds out a scrap of notebook paper. “London's twisty. I drew you a little map.”

“Oh, cool. Thanks.”

Teddy must see the worry on my face. “She told me why you're here,” he says, “about your sick step-cousin. Tragic. It's really nice of you to come all this way to visit.”

“Yeah,” I say. Not bad, Val! “We needed to be here for her.”

“I never would have pegged you two for sisters,” says Teddy.

“Half sisters,” I say quickly, holding back a smile. “We're pretty different.”

New arrivals ring the bell on Teddy's desk.

“Well, good luck today,” he says, and heads back.

“You're good,” I say quietly to Val.

She sits up and rolls her eyes. “Lot of good it did me. I thought I had him, but then he has to go and be married.”

“Scratch that. You're terrible.”

“The terriblest.”

Caleb comes down the stairs and spots us. “Hey,” he
says, giving me a kiss. “How was your night? Did you sleep?”

“Some of us more than others,” I say.

Caleb glances at Val. “Oh no, you didn't.”

“No,” says Val. “But not for lack of trying. Had to do something to take my mind off things.”

“How about you?” I ask Caleb.

He shakes his head. “I must have slept, but I barely remember it.” He glances nervously toward the window. “So . . . we ready?”

“Are you?” I ask him.

“No,” he says, “but let's go.”

Val slugs down her tea and the piece of scone. “Time to go find Dad!” she says, the enthusiasm oh-so-fake.

I'm reminded that while I've thought a lot about how this will be for Caleb, to confront the dad who abandoned him, Eli has no idea that Val even exists, does he?

How exactly is that going to go?

But then, if Eli researched enough to know about Caleb and the band's trip to New York, he might have figured it out about Val.

Or, it's going to completely blindside him.

It's a cool, misty morning. We make our way down crowded sidewalks, along winding streets, through trapezoidal intersections. The streets teem with cabs, double-deckers, and cars that are comically tiny by American standards. The gray and white and brick buildings
really do evoke a sensation of history that inhabits you, as if this city is a bleeding border where multiple eras still exist simultaneously. There is something immediate about London: the sounds and bustle and the cloak of low clouds, the sameness of streets over hundreds of years old. It makes you believe in past lives, in reincarnation, in magic and shadows. Around the bend of each canal or alley . . . doorways and moorings, gateways to lands exotic and far and all of this seems to be in the very molecules you breathe.

Los Angeles reinvents itself on a daily basis, always focused on what's next. There is no past, no history, or if there is, it's only because that block hasn't sold yet.

This place
is
history.

After about ten minutes, we are turning down Frith Street. It's quieter, narrow, lined by white and brown brick buildings with shops on the ground floor and two stories of flats above.

“It's just up here,” says Val, reading the map and the numbers on the doors.

Caleb has gone silent. I squeeze his hand. It is cool with sweat. “You can do it,” I say to him. “Do you know what you'll say?”

“After
Hey, Dad?
No clue, really.”

Val stops in front of a shoe store with an all-glass front. She points to the door to the side.

“This is it.”

A white painted door with a tarnished brass knob.

A small sign taped to the inside of the glass.

Flat for Rent 3/1. Inquire within.

“You ready?” I ask, squeezing Caleb's hand.

“No, but here we are.”

“Lead the way,” Val says to him.

Caleb swallows hard and grasps the handle. The door is unlocked . . . maybe so potential renters can get in. We head upstairs.

It's a narrow staircase. The whole thing on a slight angle. Each step whines and creaks. We reach the landing for the second floor, turn, and head up to the third.

My heart is hammering and he's not even my dad. Is Eli White at the top of these steps? The human, the dead man, the myth, will he be up here watching TV, sipping coffee, strumming a guitar? Whatever he's been doing each morning for the past sixteen years?

We reach the top of the stairs. The door to the flat is open, to welcome prospective renters.

I rub Caleb's back. He breathes deep. . . .

Val steps around him and peers in. “Shit.” She pushes open the door and we follow her in.

It's empty.

Dusty hardwood floors, a single floor lamp, its cord snaking to the wall. The windows are open, breeze blowing
in. I recognize them from the second videotape, when Eli referred to his summer Soho sessions and we thought he meant New York.

The place smells like disinfectant.

“We just missed him,” says Caleb. He stands there in shock. Val crouches down and runs her finger over a long rectangle of dust on the floor. The ghostprint of a couch.

I don't want this to be true. Need this to somehow not be true, and yet there is no changing the reality in front of us, the emptiness.

After all this, we were still too late.

“Be right there!”

It's a woman's voice coming from behind the bar that separates the narrow kitchen from the living room. It's a studio, with only a door into a small bathroom. I recognize the sound of scrubbing. Caleb and Val seem too stunned to move so I cross the room, my steps echoing off the bare surfaces, and peer around the bar.

An older woman is bent over the oven, scrubbing vigorously at the inside.

“I'll be just another moment,” she says breathlessly.

Her hair is steel and white, tied back in a ponytail, a bandanna on her forehead. She's dressed like she's twenty: faded jeans over square-toed boots, a gray concert shirt with black three-quarter sleeves. The print on the back is too far gone to know what band it is.

She leans back with a sigh, wipes her brow on her sleeve.
She wears pink rubber gloves. She turns to me, drops the scrubber in a bucket of soap, and looks me over.

“Name's Susan. You're here about the flat.”

“We . . . sorta?”

Susan's gaze stays on us for moment, then she nods, as if I've answered some big question for her. “I'd ask what you're doing here instead of being at school,” she says, “but in your case, especially given your accent, I'm guessing that's a bit of a long answer.”

It sounds like she might also mean something more. And the way she's looking at me . . .

But she stands and pulls off the gloves. “Old tenant moved out early,” she says, businesslike. “Just yesterday, in fact.” The front of her shirt says
The Kinks
.

She glances past me. “Thinking of splitting the place among three? It could be a little cozy.” She smiles and steps around me, patting my shoulder as she does.

“How are you,” she says, extending a hand to Caleb, then Val. She looks around, holding out her hands. “It's not much, but the bones are good. Solid plumbing. Better hot water than you could expect for this part of town.”

“We're not really here about renting the place,” says Caleb.

“I gathered.” Susan looks out the windows for a moment, in thought. “I told him there was no rush,” she says, her tone suddenly serious, “but you know how sometimes you feel like you gotta do something, and you can't rest until you do.”

“We're familiar with that,” says Val.

“Did you . . . know him?” Caleb asks tentatively.