Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor

launched him, sent him across the world to escape the vacuum of grief. To escape the palpable sense of guilt that emanated from his father at the funeral and in their few abortive conversations that followed. He had fled, Jeremy knew, and fled successfully, although now he heard the silence between them ringing. He sent a letter, a note really—part warning, part reassurance.
Coming home. Things are fine
. He enclosed the Polaroid from the source de la Seine, hoping it would help rebuild bridges.
    “Well, you must go home then,” Patrice said, looking out the window when he finally told her.
    They went on one more long walk together, his last day in Burgundy. He suggested a parting visit to the source de la Seine, and Patrice looked at him curiously. It had just occurred to her that Jeremy thought that little park captured the region, with its gurgling brook artificially routed between the green benches, its gaudy statue and tour buses.
    “Oh, no,” Patrice said. But she laughed. She could let him take away this false impression. But he had a sweet way of looking at her, and he had lived here long enough that he deserved to know the truth.
    She explained the geography of the area as they walked from the car down a small road, just a few kilometres north-west of St. Seine l’Abbaye. The ridge formed a break point in the countryside, like a continental divide on a small scale. To the west, the Seine ran its course to Paris, to the Atlantic, to places beyond. To the east, down the other side of the ridge, ran the Ignon River.
    “The Ignon?” Jeremy said.
    He hadn’t even heard of it. He was, Patrice thought, such a boy. She took his hand and led him down an embankment next to the road.
    It was quite different from the other side of the ridge. There was no signage, no park or statue. But at the bottom of the hillside, water emerged from the soil. From a hundred spurts and eddies coming out under roots and stones and a carpet of white flowers. The ground flowed with water that gathered and gathered again until it formed the top of the Ignon River flowing northeast and into the Burgundy countryside.
    “The water of this region,” she said, looking at him. “All around you.”
    The blood, thought Jeremy.
    They stopped by the restaurant to say final goodbyes. Claude pumped his hand in the militaristic way he had, once up, once down. Chef Quartey clapped Jeremy’s head in his hands and kissed him on each cheek.
    “You will be,” Chef Quartey said, looking for the English word, “exceptional.”
    Patrice drove him to the train station in Dijon, where they kissed a final time. She surrendered no tears, but said only: “Bonne chance, Ger-ah-mee.”
    The cheapest flight from Paris had a twenty-four-hour stopover in Amsterdam, where he wandered the streets without purpose. He drank glasses of beer at a string of cafés until he could feel nothing but a light humming throughout his system. He sat on a bench near the Prinsen Gracht, thinking ofthe
relais
but watching the trolleys. One after another they would arrive, brilliantly lit in the night air, the entire length of the train an advertisement for Nike or Panasonic or Kit Kat chocolate bars. People spilled from each car and joined the traffic tumbling down the canal roads into the bars and restaurants and smoky cafés. Amsterdam was teeming: slackers and clubbers and queens; the Euro-homeless now free to wander and be poor on the streets of any city in the union; businessmen in French blue shirts and gold ties; Amsterdam women who looked like whooping cranes, all hips and shoulders mounted high on gaunt black bicycles. And every three minutes, another train with another load of people, and another marketing message designed to address the tumult.
    He felt sick. He imagined he had macroscale motion sickness that came from moving between St. Seine l’Abbaye and Amsterdam, such a great distance in so short a time. The next morning he hid in the Rijksmuseum for relief. He