Page 9 of Where the Snakes Sleep

I wheel my suitcase across the cracked asphalt of the bus station, following the signs for Ligne Régionale with the same dulled focus I’ve been operating on since Harrisburg, and when the driver sees me coming, he gives a single nod that might be acknowledgment or might just be the way his face rests when no one’s talking to him.

The luggage hold is a narrow metal cavity beneath the bus. I heave my suitcase up and in, and the driver watches without offering help, which I’m grateful for. Help means conversation, and conversation means French, and I genuinely think I’m too fucking tired to even hold a conversation in English at this point. The suitcase lands with a hollow thud. I close the hatch and climb the steps.

The interior of the coach is exactly what eight hours of airports and customs have prepared me for—worn upholstery the color of dried blood, and windows clouded with a thin film of grime. I find a seat near the back, where the smell of diesel is slightly less aggressive, and drop my backpack onto the empty space beside me. The seatbelt is a lap belt only, frayed at the edges. I fasten it out of habit.

The driver pulls away without ceremony. No announcement, no passenger count. Just the grind of gears, the lurch of acceleration, and then we’re moving, leaving the airport behind in a smear of concrete and rental car lots.

I stare out the grimy window blankly for who knows how long, until Toulouse begins to give way to something else. At first, it’s nothing special—the same flat commercial strips you’d find outside any city, big-box stores with names I can’t read, gas stations, a McDonald’s with a sign in two languages. Then the road begins to climb, just slightly, and the landscape shifts. The buildings thin out. Fields appear, then vineyards—row after row of gnarled vines heavy with grapes that catch the late-afternoon light and hold it, turning the hillsides into patches of burnished gold. The vines are low and twisted, and between them, the soil is pale, almost white. Limestone, maybe. Or chalk. I don’t know or care enough about geology to tell the difference.

The bus follows a two-lane road that winds along the hills’ contours. I press my forehead against the window and feel the glass’s warmth through my skin. The engine drones beneath me. My body is heavy with travel fatigue, but my eyes won’t close.

I’m counting stops. The driver calls out each village name in a rapid, tonal French that I can’t follow. The first one sounds like Mon-pee-leer. The second might be Lodève. The third is a blur of syllables that dissolves before I can catch it. I count on my fingers: one, two, three. The bus slows for what I think is the fourth stop, and my stomach tightens. Saint-Luc-de-Vézian should be the fifth, according to the connection times scribbled on my folded paper. I reach for my backpack, ready to stand, but the bus doesn’t stop. It rolls through a small intersection and continues climbing.

I’ve miscounted. I’ve lost track. I don’t know where we are, or how many stops remain, or whether the driver will remember to call out the name of a village so small it might not warrant an announcement. Panic flutters at the edges of my exhaustion, familiar and unwelcome. I’ve been here before—the moment when control slips, when the world becomes a place where things happen to you rather than a place you navigate. It’s the feeling of Paul’s weight on my chest. It’s the feeling of driving through the dark with no destination.

I take a breath, unfold the phrasebook, and double-check the word. Arrêt. Stop.

I raise my hand. The driver catches the movement in his rearview mirror—a brief flick of his eyes, then back to the road. I mouth the word silently first, testing it. Then, louder, “Arrêt?”

The driver glances back at me again and says something in French. I catch nothing except what might be a question.

I hold up the folded paper I’ve written the address on. The driver squints at the paper, then nods. Says something else—shorter this time, with a downward inflection that might be reassurance. I nod back, though I have no idea what he’s said, and sink into my seat. My heart is hammering. The paper is damp where my fingers have pressed into it.

I smooth the paper against my thigh, pressing my palm flat across its creases, and try to calm my breathing. Why couldn’t my grandfather have property in a big city, preferably within walking distance of an airport?

The bus winds through another village, then we’re climbing again, the engine groaning against the grade, and the landscape opens wider. Valleys stretch out on either side, dotted with olive trees whose silver leaves catch the light and hold it. The hills are steeper here, more dramatic, rising into ridges covered in scrubby vegetation—garrigue, the guidebook called it. Rosemary, thyme, and wild lavender. The scent of it must be incredible in summer. Now, in early Spring, with the windows closed and the diesel pouring through the vents, I can only imagine.

In the distance, I can see a jumble of stone roofs and narrow streets climbing the hillside. The village is small, a tight cluster of buildings that from this distance looks almost like a natural formation, something that grew out of the rock rather than being built upon it. The afternoon sun hits the stone walls, turning them the color of honey. There’s a church tower rising above everything, its bell visible as a dark shape against the sky.

The bus slows. The driver downshifts, and the engine complains. We’re approaching a stop—a simple shelter with a bench and a timetable mounted on a post. The driver calls out a name. This time, I recognize the cadence, the rise and fall of syllables that match the scribble on my paper.

Saint-Luc-de-Vézian.

This is it.

I gather my things as the bus pulls to a stop with a hiss of air brakes, and the door folds open. Cool air rushes in, carrying the scent of dried herbs and woodsmoke.

I stand. My legs are stiff from sitting. The driver watches me in the mirror as I make my way down the aisle, and when I reach the front, he says something—a single phrase, too fast for me to catch—and gestures toward the luggage hold. I nod, though I once again have no idea what he’s said, and step down onto the gravel shoulder of the road.

I retrieve my suitcase from the hold, and the driver closes it with a metallic clang. The bus pulls away, leaving me standing alone at the edge of a village whose name I can barely pronounce, holding a piece of paper that contains the only coordinates I have for whatever comes next.

Above me, Saint-Luc-de-Vézian climbs the earth in a tangle of narrow streets and stone steps. Somewhere up there, invisible from where I stand, is my destination.

I adjust my grip on the suitcase handle and start walking. The gravel crunches beneath my sneakers, each step sending a small puff of dust into the warm air. The road curves gently uphill, flanked by low stone walls. My suitcase wheels catch on every irregularity in the pavement, and I have to lift it more than roll it, which defeats the entire purpose of having wheels in the first place.

The first building I pass is a bakery. A woman stands in the doorway wiping her hands on a white apron, and she looks up as I pass. Her eyes follow me. Not with curiosity, exactly. More like recognition of a thing that doesn’t belong.

I keep walking.

A cat watches me from a windowsill, motionless except for the slow blink of its yellow eyes. I pass a tabac—which, to my understanding, is kind of a tobacco shop slash corner store—with a faded awning, and an old man sitting at a table outside lowers his newspaper to stare. He doesn’t raise it again when I meet his gaze. He just keeps looking.

Oh my God, this is awful.

Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe I’m just the first stranger this village has seen in a while, and staring is what French people do.

A woman crosses the intersection ahead of me, carrying a woven basket of vegetables. She’s maybe sixty, with silver hair pulled into a tight bun and the kind of weathered face that suggests a lifetime outdoors. She doesn’t look at me as she passes, which is almost worse than the staring. It feels deliberate—a refusal to acknowledge my existence rather than an oversight.

I need to ask someone. I can’t wander these streets forever, and the sun is already beginning its descent toward the hills, and I have nowhere to sleep tonight except the cottage.