Read Online The Best Women's Travel Writing by Lavinia Spalding - Free Book Online Page A

were pelting a torrent of pebbles that leapt across the glassy surface in the late afternoon light.
    Then, when we gathered our things to head for the car, Samir already ahead on the path, Fareed took my shoulders in his hands and looked at me eye to eye. “Thank you,” he said.
    There was no false bravado here, no denial of what had happened. Yet if I had to choose a moment when I knew without a doubt that our relationship would end, as it did a few months later, it was there at the pond, Fareed drawing me in too tightly, his voice resonating off-key in my ear.
    Later I would wonder: was it all too much? Had what happened somehow tipped a balance between us that could never be set right? Fareed’s voice full of relief and apprehension, thanking me as if I’d had a choice. And here’s the truth: before that day, though I’d have liked to believe I would help someone in danger, secretly I doubted that I actually could.
    So while Fareed was thanking me, what I couldn’t articulate was the wonder I was feeling inside. Truly surprised wonder, at myself. I wouldn’t have wished on anyone what Fareed had been through. But it did happen, his near-drowning, and as a result I felt something I can only describe as gratitude: that day I’d been given a chance to find out what I could do.
    Still, for a long time I dreamed of drownings. One night I pulled Fareed from the water by his hair.
    After he finished grad school, Fareed worked a few years for a Boston consulting firm. But then 9-11 hit, and the Patriot Act, and he began to find life in America so difficult that he returned to Pakistan well before his visa ran out. Today he’s consulting again, based in London and traveling, as he’d always hoped to do. And every few months I’ll get one of those international calls that sound like the person’s in the very next room.
    On a trip to Boston not long ago, Fareed met my husband and my small daughter, Hannah. He smiled down at her, and then like a gentle giant he scooped her up and swung her high in the air as she squealed. After awhile, as he almost never fails to do when I see him, Fareed mentioned Walden. Had I taken Hannah to the pond yet? he asked, and I said I had.
    We smiled silently at each other a long moment before Hannah was asking to be lifted into the air again. He reached for her, and I found myself thinking back to that day. While trying to cross the pond we also had crossed into a place apart: a threshold experience that changed the course of things forever. A life—or two, even three—might have been taken. Fate chose otherwise. Yet in the same moment that we were spared, who we’d been to each other was lost.
    I had always thought of that loss in a negative way, as something from which, I once believed, I would never quite recover. But watching Fareed lift my daughter in the air, I began to understand differently what happened. The drama of his near-drowning had simply brought to the surface an inevitable parting, the cool water of the pond slapping us awake from illusion. Until that day at Walden I had tricked myself into believing that we could traverse the barriers between us without a price.
    But there was Fareed in my living room, and I looked at where his life had taken him and where mine had taken me—each of us having found our way toward what we’d wanted most deeply. And in that moment it was as if some unclosed wound I’d nursed far beneath the surface was gently and finally coming together. My daughter was laughing, and Fareed was twirling her around and around in the air, and something inside me grew whole.

    Lucy McCauley is a writer and editor whose essays have appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly, The Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, Fast Company, Harvard Review,
and
Salon.com
, among other places. Her first documentary film,
Facing the Nazi Era: Conversations in Southern Germany
, premiered at the end of 2011 in Canada