A World I Never Made Read Online Free PDF Page A

was not in Paris. He was in New Canaan, on the phone with eighteen-year-old Megan two weeks into her first semester at Bennington.
     
    I hate it here. They’re all elitist snobs. I’m going to Europe.
     
    And then he was sitting with her at an outdoor café on the sunny side of Prague’s Old Town Square, crowded with people enjoying a brilliant fall morning in November of 1992. The waiter had just taken their picture with Megan’s Instamatic.
     
    “I told you, I hated Bennington.”
     
    “There are other colleges.”
     
    “This is my college.”
     
    “Prague?”
     
    “Europe.”
     
    “What about money?”
     
    “I told you in my letters. I’ve got two jobs.”
     
    “That looks like a nice street you live on.”
     
    “It’s cheap here.”
     
    “How long are you planning on staying?”
     
    “I don’t know. I’m having a good time.”
     
    Megan’s strawberry-blond hair glinting in the bright sun. Her beautiful green eyes happy and determined. Very little sympathy in them.
     
    “When will I see you again?”
     
    “Let’s meet somewhere at Christmas, It’s only a few weeks away. How about Paris?”
     
    “Sure, Paris sounds good.”
     
    Pat taking his wallet out of his jacket pocket, thumbing through the cash in the billfold and drawing out a crisp hundred dollar bill.
     
    “Your grandfather Connie was away a lot .”
     
    “Your dad.”
     
    “Yes. In the merchant marine. He be gone six, seven months at a time. He used to say that when people are separated, only two things will bring them together again: love or money. Every time he went away he tear two dollar bills in half and give half of one to me and half of the other to Frank. ‘You know I love you laddies,” he say to us, ut this is to make double certain I’ll be back.” He make a big show of sticking the two torn halves in his wallet. When we buried him, Frank and I tossed the last two halves he gave us into his grave. Here, take this.”
     
    Pat tearing the hundred dollar bill in half and handing one of the halves to Megan.
     
    “Inflation.”
     
    Megan smiling, putting the torn bill in her wallet.
     
    On the street below, the band struck the first dreamy note of Moonlight Serenade. This sound, sad but insistent, reached Pat and pulled him back to the here and now, where he found himself staring down at his oversized hands as they gripped the balcony’s ornate wrought iron railing. He released his death grip on the railing and was examining his hands—and thinking of Megan’s empty wallet on the bed behind him, the same one she had had in Prague—when the phone rang in his room.
     
    “Hello,” he said as he picked it up.
     
    “Monsieur Nolan?”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “C’est moi, Catherine Laurence.”
     
    “Hello.”
     
    “Bonjour.”
     
    “What can I do for you?”
     
    “I was wondering if you needed help delivering Megan’s clothes to charity. You mentioned you wanted to do that:”
     
    “It’s already done:”
     
    “Ah, I see. Will you be staying in Paris?”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “Then perhaps I can make you dinner.”
     
    “Make me dinner?”
     
    “My father committed suicide when I was thirteen. He was a policeman. I thought we could talk:”
     
    “Sure.”
     
    “I live in Marais, on Rue St. Paul, number 221A:”
     
    “Is that in Paris?”
     
    “Yes, the Fourth Arrondissement. You take the Château de Vincennes line—the purple line—and get off at St. Paul. Can you make it at eight tonight?”
     
    “Yes,” Pat answered, looking at his watch. It was four PM.
     
    “Bien. Tonight then:”
     

~4~
     
    MOROCCO, JANUARY 3, 2003
     
    Megan Nolan sat in a compartment on the left side of the train as it steamed south, arrow straight, from Casablanca to Marrakech. She had taken this ride before and knew that there was nothing much to see except the ocassional man and mule or tin hut breaking up an otherwise monotonously flat and dun-colored coastal plain. The sun, setting