Page 31

AUSTRIA

TWO WEEKS LATER

KLAUS

Natalia and I flew in separately to Vienna, coming respectively from London and Paris, where I attended an FIA meeting with major partners and several team principals.

She and I hired a car with the aim of driving to my hometown—about an hour south of Vienna near Lake Neusiedl—before we proceed to Spielberg for race week.

I haven’t been “home” in nearly twenty years. But I’ve felt guilty and sad about having to hide some things from Natalia lately, so the trip was a sort of offering, to satiate the curiosity she rightly has about my past.

She’s been asking a lot of questions as we wend down the A3. I find myself slow to reply, turning each question over in my mind, examining for pitfalls and being somewhat vague.

“I’m not interviewing you right now, Klaus,” she says dryly. “Fascinating as you are, I doubt I can get a story out of your favorite sport as a boy or the name of a girl you kissed when you were twelve. Quit being so uptight. I just like knowing more about you.”

“Forgive me,” I say with a tired smile. “I need to switch gears into holiday mode.”

“Seriously,” she teases. “Lighten up, pal.”

“I did save a joke for you, come to think of it…”

She chuckles. “Still practicing for that career in stand-up? Okay, lay it on me.”

I glide through a patch of slower-moving cars, then send an expectant grin Natalia’s way. “What is a zombie’s favorite part of the newspaper?”

She lifts an eyebrow.

After a pause, I deliver the punchline. “The head lines.”

I’m gratified at her helpless burst of laughter.

“Wow, no . Points for trying, but that is… honestly terrible. Dad jokes, without even being a dad.”

She lays a hand on my leg fondly, and I entwine my fingers with hers.

“Someday, perhaps,” I say lightly.

We’re still holding hands when we get to my hometown.

Natalia gawks out the window as we cruise along the narrow main road. “This is insanely cute. Look at these colors! I feel like I’m in a Wes Anderson film.”

Though I was an adult the last time I was here, everything looks smaller. Maybe it’s only that my life has grown in scale. We pass bicyclists, people sitting at umbrella-covered tables outside a restaurant, an elderly couple walking, each carrying cloth market bags.

“I wonder if you knew it was this special when you lived here,” Natalia muses, gazing at an old church as we pass. “It’s so easy to miss what’s right in front of you.”

I’m unsure how to reply. In my youth, I noticed the town’s appeal chiefly through the eyes of others. I wonder if there’s a subtext to her observation.

Two weeks ago she forwarded me a link to a website with a photo of us in Monaco. She seemed concerned about the online reveal, but really, who is interested in the romantic life of the third-place Formula 1 team’s principal? I’m hardly “news.”

What is news is the troubling situation I’ve hidden from her about the new grand prix location. It’s still brewing and has expanded to nothing short of a crisis for the sport.

My phone buzzes in my breast pocket and I slide it out to look when we come to a four-way stop.

As if summoned by the worry simmering at the back of my mind, a message from Phaedra is there, the preview on the screen reading, This is a fucking shitshow.

Another follows close on its heels, then a third.

“Ooh,” Natalia says, gazing out the passenger side at a shop on the opposite corner. “Local glassware. Look at that decanter in the window! Gorgeous.”

I take advantage of her admiration for the object and pull the car over once I’ve cleared the intersection. “Go ahead and look—I’ll catch up with you.” I lift my phone, its back toward her. “I must reply to this.”

“Okay, perfect.” She leans to give me a peck, then wipes a smudge of lipstick off me. “See you in a few.”

She climbs out and I open Phaedra’s messages.

Phaedra: This is a fucking shitshow. Ben from Allonby threw a fit in the lobby after you left for the airport, leaned on the other teams to take his side, saying they “shouldn’t have to suffer bc of Emerald.”

Phaedra: What if this blows open before we get it under control? Terrible timing for you to be dating a journalist, haha.

Phaedra: Anyway, hate to rain on your parade. Enjoy the getaway with Nat. But an announcement needs to be made soon, either denouncing or reassuring. PlatiNumeric say they won’t have their name on our fucking car if this goes forward, so I’m not feeling great (though I agree with them in principle)

I scrub a hand over my face with a groan. The passenger door opening startles me as Natalia gets back in. I shove my phone into my pocket, and her eyes follow the movement with a glint of suspicion.

“Back so soon?” I ask lightly.

“They were closed. That is, the door was locked, and the old woman inside was way too into eating a sandwich to acknowledge my knock.”

I glance at my watch before starting the car up. “Ah. It’s the lunch hour.” We ease back onto the road, headed for the end of town where my childhood home is.

“Everything okay?” Natalia asks.

“I’m fine. Just a bit tired. It’s odd to be here, perhaps, after so long.”

She’s quiet for another minute. “Did you ever… come here with Sofia?”

“Once, a few years after we married.” I give Natalia a weak smile. “There was scant reason. My mother was long gone, and my father… he wasn’t an easy man. He was unkind to her. Called her ‘das Bücherwurmm?dchen’—the bookworm girl.”

Natalia runs her finger along the windowsill. “I wonder what he would’ve thought of me,” she says, her voice tentative.

“He’d have been glad you’re beautiful. You’re more spirited than he preferred in a woman, however.”

“Was your mother pretty and deferential?”

“Pretty, yes. But not deferential enough for them to be happy together.”

Natalia puts a hand gingerly on my leg. “You’ve never told me how, um… how your parents died. Or when.”

“My father had a stroke when I was in my thirties. My mother was only twenty-nine when she died. I was six.”

In Natalia’s long silence, I can feel her shock at this revelation, her uncertainty in how to proceed. “What happened?” she finally manages.

“She drowned.”

“Oh, Klaus.” Natalia lifts my hand and kisses it. “I didn’t realize you had so many tragedies.”

“Life is a house constructed of tragedy. We decorate it with our fragile joys to make a suitable home.”

Hugging my hand against her heart, she laughs. “I don’t think you’ve ever said anything more Austrian. We should start a social media account where you offer grim quotes every day. Like gloomy poetry.”

I stop the car in front of the house that was once mine.

“Here it is,” I say quietly.

It’s a different color now. A cat is curled on the stoop. In one window a plant hangs, in another—the kitchen, I remember—a dangling prism. It comes back to me, the scent of my mother’s baking. Linzer pl?tzchen. Icing sugar dusted across the table, and my fingerprints walking through it.

These small details before me now—the cat, the plant, the winking crystal teardrop—are the fingerprints of someone else’s life. The seeds of their future memories.

Natalia and I watch the house in a close silence. Her hand repositions, dovetailing more firmly with mine, and the connection seems to align like a battery I’ve been installing incorrectly for many years. An intense wave of complex feeling lights up and moves through me.

I’ve left so many things behind in life and been left behind by so many. This cocktail of emotions I’m experiencing is overwhelming: tenderness, communion, fear, expectation, hope, a passion somehow both physical and spiritual.

It’s soon, maybe too soon… but I can’t risk leaving this behind.

“Not all my poetry is dark,” I say. Turning in my seat, I pull her toward me for a lingering kiss. “The loveliest poem, perhaps, is one of the simplest.” Her eyes are bright with earnestness and desire as we realign and kiss again. “Three words—short and sweet, but certain as sunlight.”

Her hand on my face is warm. She smiles against my lips. “It’s not always sunny.”

“Sunlight is always there, even when obscured by clouds, or on the opposite side of the globe.”

She ducks her head on my shoulder as if shy. “And just what is this mysterious three-word poem?”

I sweep her hair around her neck and put my lips against her ear. “ I love you, Natalia Jane Evans ,” I whisper.

“Oh my God.” She combs one hand into the hair at the back of my head, and the other grasps the fabric of my trouser leg. “I love you too…”

Where I’m touching her back, I feel her heart pounding. My own drums in echo.

It’s been years since I said these words to anyone, even in a casual sense. And nothing about this is casual. It’s a full commitment. I’ve been standing at a cliff’s edge, and a prescient gust of wind has toppled me into the void, knowing I will fall only long enough to remember my wings.