Lyndie reached home yesterday. Now, no doubt, she is resting in the quiet and the comfort of familiar surroundings.
I gave her a hug at her building entrance and said a quick farewell. She was tired and not yet entirely well. I was gratified that she had been able to go, and relieved at her return.
Lyndie and I spoke several times while she was on the boat, where the staff were kind enough to let her use their phone, and again while she was at the Bucharest hotel. We talked very little about her experience. “Save it for the journal,” I said. I fussed about how she was feeling, and how she would endure the trip back from Bucharest.
In the last of the calls, she told me that she was exhausted, probably from too much walking, that she had caught “some Eastern European bug” and couldn’t stop coughing.
She had run out of zinc tablets and ibuprofen. People had been lending her cough drops.
I was worried. There were echoes of her friend Graciana, who had been so ill on the earlier cruise. Had it all been a grave mistake, sending the Outrageous Older Woman halfway around the world on her own? (Then I reminded myself that she had been determined to go.)
During one of the last calls, Lyndie had good news: A couple from Montana whom she had befriended on the boat would be taking exactly the same flights and would help her navigate the trip. So I stopped worrying about that, and just prayed for her health.
Then, mercifully, there she was on Thursday evening, sitting in a wheelchair near the baggage claim at the Denver airport, waiting with the young man who had pushed her all the way from Gate A31. I saw her before she saw me in the crowd, and she looked defeated. “I don’t know where I am!” she said. “This airport looks completely different than it did two years ago.”
But in the next breath, weary as she must have been, she took time to praise her wheelchair navigators. (The latest one was still standing behind her.) “I don’t know what strings you pulled or how many hours you had to spend on the phone,” she said to me, “but I have been treated like royalty from one end of the trip to the other. Kate and William don’t get better treatment. It was amazing!”
As soon as she was safely settled in the passenger seat, I handed Lyndie two Nyquil tablets. We drove to a motel near the airport, I helped her check into her room, and she slept soundly until morning.
Lyndie seemed more like herself yesterday. We didn’t talk much during the long drive back to her home, and when she did speak she was as lively as usual. We listened to classical music. She only coughed twice.
“What I would like now is a full week of enforced silence,” she said as we neared her home. “There has been so much bustle. I wonder how much they charge by night to stay at that Benedictine convent up on the mountain.”
The journal she kept throughout the cruise was in her suitcase. She wouldn’t give it to me because she wanted to add a few things.
What you have read is what she wrote.