73

ZOE

I walked alone for the rest of the day. My first reaction to what Martin told me had been anger. It had surged inside me with such intensity that I wasn’t sure anyone else was safe to be near me. It scared me. I don’t do anger. Anger belonged to my parents.

On the Camino de Santiago I had raged at God and Keith and then myself as I had grieved—but the flash of anger I had felt when Martin told me that Camille blamed me for her abortion was different. It was white hot. Like my father’s before he’d hit my mother and my brothers and me.

I wasn’t sure why. Or who it was directed at. Martin would have probably suggested I get therapy. Instead, when I got to San Quirico d’Orcia I sat in a church, alone, and meditated. After screaming and crying and kicking trees.

The universe didn’t give me all the answers, but eventually I made sense of my anger at least. Camille had brought me to this walk on a false premise. She had roped me into her belief system and wanted me to be ‘saved’ when I hadn’t done anything wrong.

My anger was again at the Catholic Church—or Camille’s acceptance of its doctrine—that had made her feel guilty all these years for doing what was the most sensible thing. But it was also at Camille for deceiving me about the reason she wanted me to come. I guess that was the Big Lie.

Martin probably felt he’d given me the key to unlock my motivations. He figured that if I understood what was driving me, I would resolve my relationship with Camille—without having to become her carer. But what calmed me now was that I’d chosen to come on the walk, even if I didn’t know the facts, and I believed the universe intended me to be here. It had brought me time to reflect on my life—and it had brought me Martin.

The rest wasn’t that easy. The opposite: hard to accept that Camille and I didn’t really love each other; harder to accept that she’d taken it upon herself to save my soul; hardest of all that I had pushed her into doing something—a terrible thing, in her eyes—that had left her with lifelong guilt.

Lisa. She had called me that. She and the crétin and Mary-Lou. I felt a rush of shame recalling it—something I had somehow repressed all these years. I had so wanted to be part of their crowd, the cool group that everyone wanted in on. But I had just been Camille’s nerdy roommate. Her pious roommate.

I’d walked nearly a thousand miles with her, for her, but right now I wasn’t sure how, in a couple of hours, I’d face having dinner with her.

We went to a restaurant with an open fire and a bicycle hanging from the ceiling. Camille didn’t seem to notice that I was quieter than usual. Martin looked worried and sad but gave me space. I was at least steady and holding.

The next morning, we said goodbye to the tau and dove that had taken us from Cluny and over the Alps, as that path went east to Assisi and we now headed due south. I was going to need time to process everything, and Martin was incredibly restrained in not pushing me for answers or even asking where I was at. We talked a bit about day-to-day stuff: the track, the scenery, how Gilbert and Camille seemed to be doing.

It was the same the following day. And the next few. There were more rolling hills with silhouetted cypress trees and green farmland, unforgettable views of vineyards, olive groves and ancient oaks, intermingled with smaller towns each with their own ancient history and attractions, many of them now ruins. Just when I thought I had found the most perfect hilltop town, another appeared on the horizon and was soon looming above us.

Most days I had a bowl of ribollita, the Tuscan bread soup thick with vegetables. It made up for breakfast, which was basically desserts: pastries and cakes. Always della casa—homemade—so I couldn’t say no. And there was no way I could rely on salads. Not a Tuscan speciality. Otherwise, it was pasta: avoiding meat in the sauce or inside was a constant challenge.

Bernhard was in his element. Most evenings he seemed to eat half a cow; the German—or young male—love of meat was apparently trumping his environmental concerns and Sarah’s example. I even spent time walking with Sarah and enjoyed it more than I expected. It took my mind off Camille.

‘We had an amazing time between Aulla and Siena,’ she said. She looked lighter, younger somehow. I was envious but pleased for her.

‘Sarah has been awesome,’ Bernhard added. He looked… older. More settled. Maybe I was imagining it all.

‘We met these guys who had worked in Africa…’

The two of them were bubbling with ideas. The people they had met had been volunteers who had helped dig a well in the Congo. Bernhard talked occasionally about the engineering side of it but that didn’t seem to be in Sarah’s head.

The towns were now smaller—and, though quaint and full of history, not jammed with tourist shops. There were suburbs too, with their canine serenade, each dog seemingly handing a baton to the next as we passed. But the rhythm of days was more like the original Camino. I had time to think. I had a lot to think about.

Camille hadn’t told me she was trying to save my soul, or that she needed to deliver the whole sinning package to the Pope. She knew that if she’d told me, I wouldn’t have come, given up three months of my life for something I so didn’t believe in.

Most of all, I went over that crazy time back in St Louis, looking at it with fresh eyes. There was one moment I kept coming back to. The right-to-lifers were picketing the clinic and Camille couldn’t deal with it. She had walked away. That should have been the sign, but instead I’d tracked down this guy in LA that someone knew, and organised to drive there, and Camille went along with it. I’d had to do everything, because she was so distressed. Because she was so distressed. Camille hadn’t wanted a hero. Or she’d wanted a different kind of hero.

I analysed my motivations, turning them over and over. I couldn’t be that twenty-year-old again, but I could see that I’d acted partly to prove something.

And then, afterward, I’d gotten pregnant and had the baby. Camille had called me on that, drunk in the bar. How had that felt to her, back then? I could help her have an abortion, but the same didn’t apply to me. I know I’d have kept the baby—Lauren—even if Manny hadn’t stuck around.

I wondered if Lauren knowing she wasn’t planned had affected who she was as an adult. Had her need to win every point, to prove herself worthy, come from that? And what about her disconnection from Tessa—and me? I hadn’t expected my reflections to take me there, but once they did, it felt like a place I had to go.

Martin broke his silence about my angst just once: ‘Don’t beat yourself up for your part in something that happened so long ago. None of us know our unconscious motivations at the time—by definition. And we can’t hold ourselves responsible for the unintended consequences of them.’ All engineering-analytical, but it helped.

Sutri marked nine weeks on the trail and Camille’s forty-ninth birthday. Another ancient Roman town, with a church cut from the rock of Etruscan tombs and an amphitheatre I explored with Martin when we arrived. We’d travelled from late summer deep into fall and were now only three days from Rome. I don’t think either of us wanted to break the bubble; we would have to make decisions soon enough.

Though I was still shaken by it, I felt I’d come to terms with what Martin had told me.

My anger toward Camille had gone; it had always been anger with myself, anyway. What hadn’t changed was my need to care for her. Whatever science might say, Camille’s truth was that the multiple sclerosis was divine punishment for a sin that I should never have helped her commit. It didn’t matter that I didn’t believe in her church: Camille did. And if, as Martin had said, when Camille prayed there was no one at the other end, then God’s instruction that I should care for Camille was an expression of her own deepest wish.

Before we set out in the morning, we showered Camille with birthday gifts—flowers (Bernhard), breakfast in bed (Sarah), and the gold dove I’d bought for her in San Francisco. My dove had brought me here, for better or worse; this was a more elegant version.

Martin gave her a small gift-wrapped box. She opened it, and broke into a huge smile. It was a stamp and pad. He must have ordered it online and collected it, I guessed in Siena. She pressed the stamp into the ink, then onto the back of her hand and showed us all the outline of a dove.

‘For your hostel,’ said Martin.

She slipped the charm I’d given her onto the chain next to her wooden tau. We hadn’t talked about our pact, but I thought of the warmth between us as we had lit candles together, warmth that hadn’t been there before. Perhaps, like me, she felt this was something that had to happen and we were now reconciled to it. We’d be okay. The Chemin, like the Camino, had shown me I was strong and capable. I would find the courage—the luck and the strength and the love—that I needed to get us through.