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CHAPTER ONE
MAREN
If you wanted to make me seem mysterious and magnetic, you could say I’m a woman with unfulfilled desires.
Or if you wanted to be more accurate, you’d say I was boring. I have a boring job, I have a boring apartment, I live in a boring place, I have a boring life.
I mean, I’m not boring—or at least I hope not—but I am so sick of the daily grind.
Four years of university plus three years of graduate school plus five straight years of teaching basic English composition to non-English-literature majors at a small liberal-arts college in Virginia has started to really wear me down. I’m not tenured, and I swear if old McCracken doesn’t retire soon, I’ll never move into a tenure track. I’ll never move my career, much less my life, to a place where I feel, well, fulfilled.
I have dreams.
I have dreams of writing fiction for a living. I have dreams of living somewhere exotic, and I have dreams of doing it with someone special.
So far that hasn’t happened, but I live in hope.
Last week I was grading yet another terrible freshman essay, rife with misspellings and grammatical failures, and wondering how these kids managed to get into college in the first place, where came a knock at my open office door. “Ms. Gregory, do you have a moment?”
It was McCracken himself. He came right in and plopped himself into the chair across from my desk. “Do you have a passport?”
Stunned, I’d just nodded.
“Are you free over Spring Break?” he asked, smoothing his white hair back from his forehead.
Free to do what?
I didn’t mean to say that out loud, but McCracken chuckled like my drunkest uncle setting up his worst joke. “To go to an academic conference,” he said. “I’d hoped to send Kemper, as he just made tenure this year, but his wife’s about to drop Baby #3, they moved up her due date.”
My heart sped up. I’m next in line for tenure after Kemper…and if I make tenure, maybe I can spare enough time to devote to my writing.
“Annnnyway,” McCracken said, swinging his feet up to my desk without so much as a word of warning, “Kemper can’t go. I can’t go because I’m invited to the state Secretary of Education’s banquet.” He smiles at me. “Lisa can’t go, Frank can’t go, Melinda can’t go…and the department’s got professional development funding that we really have to spend so we don’t lose it next year.”
“Okay,” I said, nonplussed.
“So pack your bags for Malta!” His smile was maniacally cheerful. “They speak English there, you know. You’ll love it.”
Malta?
I could only ask, “Why Malta?” I don’t know a durn thing about the place. The Maltese Falcon, the Maltese Cross, the Knights of Malta, something something World War II…
“The conference is multi-disciplinary, so there will be lots of people presenting papers on lots of different topics. You might learn something. Also, it’s during Carnival, which should be exciting. Take a costume. Everyone dresses up.” McCracken dropped his feet to the floor and leaned my way, his walrus mustache twitching. “It’s kind of rustic. You could rent a car, but they’re expensive, and I recommend the bus.”
“What the what now?”
“You can present that paper you did on teaching the grammar of quotes, that was a good one,” McCracken explains. “It’s next week. Chop chop. Better get packed up. The conference is actually on the island of Gozo, which is relatively rustic.” He creaked his way out of the chair, gave me a big shit-eating grin, and told me to go see his secretary to get all the details. “Don’t back out, Maren. I’m saving up departmental funds for raises to employees who give their all.”
Then he was gone, leaving me to frantically type “Malta” into my search bar and start speed-reading the results.
And now, after two airline flights, a bus ride, and a ferry ride to Gozo, I’m almost to my destination.
I’m exhausted. Screw waiting for the bus; it’s late. It’s dark. I take a taxi and pay the driver (probably) far too much in Euros to take me to the Plenty Hotel in Xaghra (which I can’t pronounce). By the time I get there, I’m starving but the hotel’s restaurant is closed, and the desk clerk tells me (in slightly-accented British English) that he’s very sorry, but if I want food, I’ll need to take another taxi back into the larger town of Victoria.
I can feel my face fall; I’ve been traveling for most of a day, nonstop. Tears come to my eyes. “Thank you anyway.”
The desk clerk’s face becomes sympathetic. “You are here for the conference, yes? At the university?”
I nod. I might have a granola bar somewhere in my luggage, I think.
