Fin & Lady: A Novel Read Free Page A

were about to say, God knows why, but he didn’t, just shook his head, patted Fin, and said, “Don’t mind me.” By which he meant, Fin knew from experience, just the opposite. Mind me. Do as I say. Before I say it. As in, go away now, Fin, go away and play.
    *   *   *
    They were off in search of Lady. His mother said it was an adventure. In an airplane. Like Sky King, Fin said, but she did not watch television with him and just nodded vaguely. The airplane lurched off the ground and into the clouds. Fin was too excited to eat his dinner, but he put the packet of sugar printed with the letters TWA in his pocket, a souvenir. It would take an entire night to get to Paris. They were going to rescue Lady. Fin did not understand what they were rescuing her from, and he did not care. He was in a plane and the clouds were below him.
    The elevator in the hotel in Paris had no walls, just ornate wrought iron you could see through.
    “It’s like Babar’s elevator,” he said.
    “I thought Babar was an elephant,” his father said, and Fin and his mother exchanged a look of superior knowledge.
    The milk in the morning was sour and warm, like no milk he had ever tasted, and he refused to drink it. He ate a croissant, a revelation. He and his mother walked through a park where no one was allowed to step on the grass. They saw a puppet show, which terrified him. The puppets screamed in high-pitched voices and hit each other over the head. The loaves of bread in Paris were as long as baseball bats.
    But Lady was not in Paris.
    “She skipped town,” Hugo said.
    And they took a train to Nice. They stayed overnight in a hotel across the street from a rocky beach. In the morning, while his father was looking for Lady, Fin and his mother saw a camel on the beach, and Fin’s mother lifted him up so he could have a ride.
    But Lady had skipped that town, too.
    “At least,” Fin’s father said, “she hasn’t moved on to the casinos.”
    “She has no sense,” he said later.
    “She’s just a child,” Fin’s mother said.
    “She’s certainly behaving like one.”
    They took another train that night.
    “We’re going to another country,” his mother said. “To Italy.”
    The train rocked and rattled, and Fin slept on the highest bunk of the triple-decker. Their cabin had a tiny sink. The sink folded up, like the beds. Would they ever find her? He was curious about his half-sister who had skipped two towns and skipped her own wedding. “But when we find her,” he said sadly to his mother, “the adventure will end.”
    His mother hugged him and said, “I hope you’re right, my love. But I wouldn’t bet on it.”
    *   *   *
    They arrived in Rome early in the morning and searched for Lady there; at least Fin’s father did, making phone calls from the hotel, setting off on “wild-goose chases.” Fin and his mother took a walk and ran up and down wide steps and threw pennies into fountains guarded by naked marble men. But Lady was gone again, and that afternoon they took a train to Naples and from there a ferry to Capri. Fin sat on a wooden bench, tired, his hands sticky from an ice-cream cone he’d successfully lobbied for in Naples. He watched the shore recede, his eyes half closed. His mother pulled him onto her lap. That’s a volcano, she said. Would it erupt while they were in Italy? Oh no, it was extinct.
    “The only one who’s going to erupt in this place is me,” Fin’s father said.
    The ferry landed, and Fin was so sleepy his father had to carry him off.
    “Wait’ll I get my hands on her,” he heard his father say.
    “Hugo,” his mother said. “The boy.” Then: “Look, Fin. We’re going in a funicular. Up the cliff.” And: “Look, Fin. The taxis have no tops, just awnings.”
    She began humming “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” until Hugo shifted irritably in his seat. “Never mind,” she whispered then, her face against Fin’s, her arms around him.
    Another hotel, another man