The End of Getting Lost: A Novel

by Robin Kirman, Michael David Axtell

Genres: General Fiction; Thrillers; Family Life; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Margaret Qualley and Paul Mescal!

A young woman and her husband travel around Europe to celebrate their first year of marriage—a year that the woman has no memory of—in this “wildly beautiful and darkly sinister” (Rosamund Lupton, New York Times bestselling author of Sister) novel of intimacy and deceit.

The year is 1996—a time before cell phones, status updates, and location tags—when you could still travel to a remote corner of the world and disappear. This is where we meet Gina and Duncan, a young couple madly in love, traveling around Europe on a romantic adventure. It’s a time both thrilling and dizzying for Gina, whose memories are hazy following a head injury—and the growing sense that the man at her side is keeping secrets from her. 

Just what is Duncan hiding and how far will he go to keep their pasts at bay? As the pair hop borders across Europe, their former lives threatening to catch up with them while the truth grows more elusive, we witness how love can lead us astray, and what it means to lose oneself in love.

The End of Getting Lost is a tightrope act of deception and an elegant exploration of love and marriage—as well as our cherished illisions of both. With notes of Patricia Highsmith, Caroline Kepnes, and Lauren Groff, Robin Kirman has spun an “atmospheric, lyrical” (Susie Yang, New York Times bestselling author of White Ivy) tale of deceit, redemption, and the fight to keep love alive—no matter the costs.

 

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Release date: February 7, 2023

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 288

Sample

Chapter One: Gina // Lake Walen

One Gina // Lake Walen
June 1996

It was the end of getting lost—a moment when travel could still feel like taking leave of the familiar, before there were ten different means for a person to be reached in almost any corner of the world in which she might be standing, when letters and postcards would still follow slowly on the heels of a young couple moving across Europe, and two people in love could escape their old reality a little, experiencing the world before them like a shared dream.

The year was 1996, the month June, when Gina and Duncan arrived at the Walensee, a lake less than an hour’s drive from the clinic near Zurich where she had spent the past two weeks. She’d come there to recuperate from a head injury she’d suffered from a bad fall in Berlin. The injury hadn’t been a small one, rehabilitation was required, but now that Gina was well enough to do without doctors and nurses, she and Duncan had escaped to the Swiss countryside. The scenery around Lake Walen was possibly the loveliest and most peaceful that she had ever seen: small villages of white, red-roofed houses, lush fields of wildflowers and, across the still, blue water, green mountains topped with milky clouds. They’d spent three days there in a small guesthouse, hiking and biking among the villages, or boating on the lake. Duncan didn’t usually swim, and the lake water was cold, but Gina liked to jump in anyway in the hours when the sun was strongest. After she’d tired herself with laps, and as the light began to weaken, she’d leave the water to go inside and dress, and then they’d bring their chairs down to the grassy banks to take in the sky and lake, lit pink and gold by the setting sun.

During this quiet hour, Duncan, who was a classical composer, listened to music with headphones on his Discman, and, beside him, Gina read—Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, which Duncan had bought her that week as a gift. He’d been aware a Zurich clinic featured in the story, otherwise under the impression that it was a romance about a glamorous American couple traveling in Europe. The day after Duncan gave Gina the book, her doctor at the clinic had remarked on the Swiss sanatorium, and Gina had been forced to tell Duncan that it wasn’t a happy story, that the wife in the novel was mentally ill.

“Oh God, forget it, then,” Duncan had pleaded, but she’d made clear that reading it didn’t upset her. On the contrary, it soothed her to return to a novel that she’d read before and remembered—in better detail than she possessed regarding her own recent life.

In the last weeks, Gina had often felt like she was crazy—though the doctors in the hospital in West Berlin and at the Zurich clinic had made clear that what she’d experienced was entirely a physical trauma. She’d suffered a concussion and intracranial swelling, and no one could predict what sort of recovery she’d make. The consensus by the end was that she’d been lucky. Her sight and hearing were normal and she had no speech difficulties, no aphasia. Her mind was sharp, her reasoning was good, and her moods were stable. Her dizzy spells were now gone, her balance and motor coordination perfectly restored. In fact, only two weeks after her injury, she was taking runs through the Swiss woods.

The only significant loss in functioning involved her memory. She couldn’t recall anything of the accident or of the months leading up to her trip. Beyond that, there were stretches of experience that remained missing, which she didn’t know she missed—her dance performances that year, the departure from New York of their two close friends—until Duncan would refer to these and nothing would come to mind.

At the same time, there were also many things that she did remember that before she’d forgotten. It was as if her mind had been shaken during the impact, and material that had been buried cast up to the top again. Scenes from her childhood, for instance, a trip she’d taken with her parents to Italy when her mother was still healthy. Gina could see her mother quite clearly, as she’d looked on that visit—in a white dress walking barefoot on the beach, her dark curls to her shoulders, her smile wide and bright as the pale sand—looking, Gina realized with a pang, very much the way she herself looked now.

Her recent brush with death had brought her closer to her late mother, and closer too to Duncan, who had hardly left her side since the accident, except to see that she received the best possible care. Unimpressed with the medical standard in Berlin, where she’d been hospitalized first, he’d proposed moving her to the clinic just outside of Zurich, where the techniques for physical rehabilitation were more advanced. Gina was a dancer, he let the doctor know, and therefore required special treatment.

The Swiss clinic had been state of the art, and during her stay there, Gina often wondered how all this would be paid for. She had a hefty inheritance from her mother, but Duncan had always refused to touch it and insisted she keep it in an account separate from him. He preferred to live frugally from what they earned, though in this case he insisted on sparing no expense.

“I’d pay any amount to have you back as you were again.”

She’d grasped then how much the prospect of losing her had undone him. In some ways, her accident had been even more frightening for Duncan, as the only one who could recall it.

She’d asked him, once, to describe that day for her: They’d been in Berlin almost a week when Gina set off for a morning walk around the city. Duncan would have joined her, but that morning he’d been struck with musical inspiration he wanted to get down onto paper. As Duncan worked, morning turned to afternoon, and Gina still hadn’t returned. He was beginning to grow nervous when the phone rang in his room. A hotel receptionist was calling to relay a message from a local hospital. Gina had suffered an accident.

Duncan had rushed over to the address that he’d been given: the Charité Hospital on Luisenstrasse. There, the doctor presiding over Gina’s case told him what had happened, that Gina had been found at a construction site at Potsdamer Platz. It seemed she’d gone poking around one of the sections that was off-limits and that she’d slipped along the way and hit her head on a piece of exposed pipe. Tourists had discovered her, unconscious, and called an ambulance. Inside her pocket was a hotel key with her room number, and this was how she’d been identified and Duncan had been reached. Her prognosis was still uncertain then; the doctors didn’t know what state she’d be in when she awoke.

“I thought I’d lost you,” Duncan told her. “I lived it in that hospital that night, life without you. You were gone.”

In moments when she caught him looking at her, she could see that this was true—he seemed not to trust that she was real, as though at any instant she might disappear.

“Still here,” she’d tease him, smiling reassuringly, but hiding her private thoughts—she was mostly there, sure, but what parts of her were lost?

She’d asked Duncan to fill in any large events of the last year. He insisted her life had gone on much as before. She’d continued dancing with the same experimental company, and Duncan continued to play piano there to accompany rehearsals. They collaborated on their own work: Duncan composed music and she choreographed dances to go with it. The biggest change was that Duncan had landed his first significant commission, which enabled them to afford this trip, their belated honeymoon. She and Duncan had been married for over a year; they were the only couple that had married among their young friends. But since then, they hadn’t been able to find the time or funds for such a frivolous excursion. And now, here they were.

Their travels, Duncan told her, were to last the whole summer, starting in Berlin and moving west. They’d planned on heading to either Munich or Vienna, but they’d changed their minds on the day that Gina was released from the clinic in Zurich, after they’d sat down in a café and she’d noticed a discarded International Herald Tribune left behind on a chair. America was gearing up for an election in the fall: Clinton against Dole. In Russia, the first presidential election was also underway, with Boris Yeltsin struggling to maintain power. Also that spring, Bosnian war criminals were ordered by the UN to stand trial; a bombing by the IRA in Manchester had injured two hundred people, and, back in America, a man named Ted Kaczynski had been identified as the Unabomber and indicted. As Gina read, her heart started to thud—the sheer breadth of what she’d missed, the many events unfolding that she knew nothing about. After that, they’d agreed on stopping at Lake Walen: a place with no one around to prompt her thoughts besides a landlady who came to drop fresh daffodils inside their room, a place where it was easy to forget the larger world, and so forget what she’d forgotten.

Now, on their fourth and last day here, she and Duncan planned on renting the landlady’s car to visit the Churfirsten mountains, where they would hike to the Paxmal, the famous monument to peace.

They left after breakfast and drove out to the bottom of the mountain to begin the long, steep hike. The way up was difficult, and Gina found herself thinking of the man who’d made this trek on his own hundreds of times in order to construct the monument: a rectangular stone building with thick columns, a reflecting pool in front, and, along each side of the pool, stone walls decorated with mosaics. According to the guidebook, all this work had been accomplished by a single artist, and had taken him twenty-five years of grueling effort. The story moved Gina—the solitude in which this man maintained his vision. She wrapped her arms around Duncan and leaned into him, holding him tight. She’d always longed for an artistic life, but feared its loneliness. What a gift to have Duncan, her husband and a composer, a man she could both love and create with, sharing in beauty together.

The hike down the mountain was quicker, but still, by the time she and Duncan returned to the guesthouse for lunch, it was quarter past two. The cook was upset over having to put out food so late, since lunch service, she reminded them, was officially meant to end at two.

“I guess it’s not just a cliché,” Duncan muttered under his breath, “the Swiss and time.”

As a punishment, the cook brought out the same food she’d served for lunch the day before: reheated salmon and potatoes.

As Gina picked at a spongy bit of potato, Duncan pushed his plate away. “Forget this, we’ve got the car all night. Let’s drive somewhere and get a real meal.”

After the lunch, which the cook frowned to see they hadn’t eaten, they stopped at the reception desk so that Duncan could tell the owner of the guesthouse, Ms. Arner, that they wouldn’t be around for dinner.

“I think my wife and I could use a night out.”

My wife. The description sounded alien to Gina; wife and husband were terms they’d used only in private, when they didn’t need to hide how much those archaic, yet still fresh, titles thrilled them.

They returned to their room, where Gina pointed out that there was enough sun left for a swim. At the lake, Duncan splashed around up to his waist, while Gina jumped in with a shout and swam laps in the cold water for as long as she could stand it.

When she emerged, shivering in the last rays of sun, Duncan was waiting for her with a towel. He wrapped himself around her, containing the warmth between them. When he spoke, chest pressed to her bare back, his words seemed to vibrate within her. “This might be the happiest that I’ve ever been.”

Around six they started getting ready. Duncan whistled as he dressed in a yellow linen suit that he’d gotten before they left Zurich. He hadn’t brought many clothes with him on the trip, preferring to travel light, picking up what he needed as they went. Gina put on a blue dress, then searched for the silk satchel that contained her jewelry.

Inside, there wasn’t much: a pair of diamond earrings that she’d received from her grandparents at her high school graduation, an anklet she’d bought in college, on a trip into the city with her best friend, Violet. Her most cherished piece was a ring she’d been given by her mother, a yellow stone, not precious, but exotic: it had functioned as an engagement ring until Duncan could afford a proper one—what little money they had they’d spent on simple bands. Hers hung a little loosely on her finger, she’d noticed; apparently she’d lost some weight from the stress her injury had caused her.

Feeling around in the satchel for her mother’s ring, she found a chain caught among some threads at the bottom. She pulled it out: a silver bracelet with a turquoise stone at the center. It must be from her father or other family in Santa Fe, she thought, but when she turned the piece over, she noticed an inscription on the back: For My Love.

“Did you give this to me?” she asked Duncan, thinking that he knew her taste too well to choose a piece that was so bland.

He laid the bracelet in his palm and took note of the inscription. “It’s from an aunt of yours. Some sort of family heirloom.”

Could she have forgotten such a thing? She felt a moment of unease at her failure to recall, but told herself not to dwell on such details. Did she really need to know the story behind every small object in her possession—the countless bits of information that we all carry with us and let shape, in some cluttered and arbitrary way, our sense of who we are? There was something freeing in forgetting, she’d discovered, as if all these tiny accretions were like layers of clothing that kept you from feeling the air, the night, the life that was cloaked around you.

She looked over at Duncan, seeing him almost freshly then, with the years together stripped away, revealing the qualities she loved in him: his gentleness, his intelligence, his delicate dark features and the green eyes that always had a slightly distracted look about them, like he was listening to some inner song only he could hear.

He turned to take her arm then, and she stepped out into the cool Swiss evening, with the sounds of crickets and lapping water and a man beside her with a mild voice and smiling face who’d stood by her and loved her since she was nineteen.

The drive to the restaurant wasn’t an easy one. The roads were dark and curving, the signs difficult to spot. She and Duncan had to pull over twice to consult a map before locating the simple stone building with a restaurant in the back. The room was rustic but elegant, with exposed wooden beams, red tablecloths, and candles.

Duncan pulled out Gina’s seat for her and, as she thanked him, she almost called him by the wrong name. “Graham—” she began, and stopped herself, puzzling.

Before she could remark on it, Duncan rushed to speak. “Supposed to be classic Swiss cooking, this place.”

“I don’t think I know what that is.”

“Well, the guidebook says we need to get the cholera.”

“Like the disease?”

“Exactly.” He described for her what he’d read: “During the epidemic, since people were afraid to leave their homes, they’d throw everything into a pie.”

“Desperation casserole.” She laughed, and she could see how much it pleased him, since the accident, to see her having fun.

They turned to study the menu and Gina noted the prices. “Duncan, it’s too expensive.”

“Oh, it’s fine. One plate of cholera won’t kill us.”

“I’m serious. The way we’ve been spending, and we’ve still got months ahead—”

“We’re fine,” he insisted, and reached across for her hand, just as the waiter stepped up to pour their water and describe the evening’s specials. Gina tried to listen, to let her concerns go, though she couldn’t quite believe that Duncan, who’d worked sometimes for free as a composer, had suddenly been paid enough to afford all this. As she wondered, she became aware of another distraction: a man was watching her from across the room. She looked away, concentrating on her order, but when the waiter left, the man was still staring. He was heavyset, with receding white hair and a pink face.

Meanwhile, Duncan had begun to speak about their itinerary. “Plus, later in the summer it will be packed, which is another reason to start there.”

“What’s that?”

“The South of France.”

“Sorry, I wasn’t listening,” she admitted, and, leaning forward, added more softly, “There’s a man over there who keeps looking at me. Do we know him? In the corner, with the white hair.”

Duncan turned in his chair to check, and Gina saw the man lower his eyes.

“Never seen him. But he looks pretty harmless to me.”

After a moment, the man went back to staring, and Gina began to fidget in her seat. She’d been out in public so little since her accident, and some of the effects of her injury had made her self-conscious. She felt a sudden urge to study herself in a mirror, so she stood and told Duncan she was heading to the bathroom.

In the mirror above the sink, she confronted a woman of twenty-five, her curly auburn hair cut shorter than she recalled wearing it, which made her look younger than she was. Nothing showed of her injury but the remnants of a scrape across one cheekbone. She smiled, just to make sure her smile was even, as it had not been in the first days at the hospital. This small change, temporary as it proved to be, had terrified her. She’d found herself thinking of her mother—after her stroke, her smile had never been the one in the pictures from before.

When Gina stepped out into the dining room again, Duncan wasn’t at their table. She spotted him in the corner, speaking with the man who’d been staring at her. Catching her eye, Duncan abruptly excused himself to meet her back at their table, settling into his seat just as she settled into hers.

“Did you find out who he is?” she asked him.

“A German tourist. He said he’d seen you performing in Vienna.”

“Really?” She supposed it was possible: she had spent two summers in Vienna, dancing for an international festival, though her parts hadn’t been large ones. “I’m surprised anyone would notice a single dancer in a group.”

“I’d have noticed you,” said Duncan, smiling.

The food arrived. Gina had ordered the pastetli, a meat pie, which she no longer felt like eating. She was agitated, suddenly, restless in her chair. Her first Vienna tour, as magical as it had been, had also directly preceded her mother’s death. She’d had the call from her father about her mother’s final, fatal stroke a week before she was due to return home.

She felt a sudden pang—homesickness, she thought. Now and then she’d had the impulse to call her father, though Duncan had reminded her of the risks involved in that. Her father was bound to panic at the news of the accident. After his wife’s stroke, Mr. Reinhold never remarried. Gina became his everything. It would terrify him to learn his only child, so far from home, had suffered a brain injury of all things, and, even if her not calling might cause him worry too, nothing could be worse than his reliving some version of her mother’s decline, noting minor gaps in Gina’s awareness, or some way in which she might fail to be the person that she’d been before.

“Are you all right?” Duncan asked, peering up from his plate.

“I’m fine.” She saw no point in spoiling things with her grim thoughts. “Go on with what you were saying.”

“Our itinerary.” Duncan hesitated but, after a short pause, went on. “I’d been thinking France, I guess, along the Riviera. There are some quieter spots, and better to visit now than in July or August, when the whole region is packed. Plus I speak French, so we can navigate more easily. What do you think?”

She hadn’t given much thought to their travels, though now that Vienna had been mentioned, she felt she’d like to go there again. And she’d intended to drop in too on her friend Violet, in Prague.

“If we’re heading west, doesn’t it make sense to visit Vienna and Prague first? I’d like to visit Violet for a day or two at least.”

Duncan raised his glass quickly, and wine spilled onto his upper lip. “You don’t remember what happened with you two? That argument you had?”

No, she didn’t have the slightest recollection of any fight with her best friend, though it wasn’t inconceivable that it could happen. She and Violet both had strong opinions, about their work and about Duncan—whom Violet had never liked—and it was a function of their loyalty to one another that they hadn’t butted heads more often. “When did we fight?”

“It was after she’d moved to Prague. Over the phone. I guess she’d been dismissive about a piece I’d written. Nothing new, but this time she’d gone too far and you were really shouting, said you’d had it, you were done with her.”

Violet putting down Duncan was plausible enough, though Gina didn’t see much point in staying angry when she’d forgotten why she was.

“In that case, I think I should definitely call her. Take the chance to repair things while I’m here.”

Duncan took a bite of his casserole and chewed it before responding. “Right, sure you should. Though I don’t see any reason to put yourself under pressure right away. Plus, Prague isn’t a simple place to get around, so maybe better to start with Vienna?”

She pictured Vienna then, recalled the nights she’d spent there on her first visit. She and her fellow dancers had performed at the Volkstheater, a grand building on the corner of Arthur-Schnitzler-Platz, stretching out backward, like a crouching animal. There were two tiers of columns at the entrance, but the relative modesty of the exterior gave little hint of what lay inside: red velvet seats and curtains, crystal chandeliers, a fresco on the ceiling. Perhaps it was the sheer beauty of the place that caused her to put more into her dancing in Vienna than she ever had before. Her limbs felt more powerful, her instincts freer. She’d had the thought that this was her apotheosis, the moment when her talent as a dancer reached its peak, and she would look back on those nights, years later, and recall that fleeting bliss.

“Yes, right. I think Vienna would do me good.”

“Great, then we’re decided.”

Duncan clinked his glass against hers and Gina took a sip of wine. Soon she began to relax, to enjoy the food, the cozy room—until the man who’d been staring at her before rose from his table. She watched him lay his napkin down, squeeze by another diner, and make his way toward her. For a moment, she thought the stranger might say something, but when she looked up he turned away, disappearing out the door into the darkness.

The next morning, a vision struck Gina as she woke from sleep. She was in a gallery, in a white and airy space, with paintings on the walls. She crossed the room and came to stand in front of a portrait of Duncan and herself. This was a painting her father had done of them for their wedding. She stood there, facing the portrait, in an atmosphere of sadness, and then a tall, sandy-haired man stepped up alongside her. He leaned over and whispered something in her ear that made her start.

She sat up sharply, there in the bed she shared with Duncan. He was awake, looking at her.

“A bad dream?” he asked her, rubbing her back.

“No, just a thought… nothing.” She lay back down beside him and felt his hand stroke her thigh under the sheet.

He’d been especially hungry for sex since the accident, and she’d been too, maybe for the connection it gave her to him, or the grounding in her own body. She was young and healthy, alive, his touch reminded her, and she curled under him as he began to kiss her, her cheeks, her neck, lifting up her top to bare her stomach.

She looked down at him, at his smooth shoulders, that transfixed expression he always wore when he was aroused, moving in a daze but deliberately, a mood of sex he’d absorbed from her, years ago, but which had since become a state evolved together—their style of movement, their patient tangles. Arching up over her, he reached for the nightstand drawer. She drew him back to her.

He hesitated, about to say something, until she reached for him by the hips and drew him inside her. She looked him in the eyes so he could read her desire, then pulled him closer so that his face was at her ear and she could hear the sounds he made, deep and adult one moment and in the next just like the eager boy who’d been almost a virgin when she first led him to her bed.

“I love you,” he told her after, dropping behind her and pressing her up against him so she could feel his heart going fast.

“I love you too.”

They lay there like that, in the quiet morning light, until Duncan finally stood and announced he’d take a shower.

“Want to join me?”

She did, really; he looked sweetly boyish standing there, with his face flushed, naked before her. But then she recalled her vision that morning and felt an urge to write it down. Had it been a dream? Or a flash of memory, like she sometimes had now? She wanted to collect these impressions that came to her, usually when she wasn’t hoping to have them, when she wasn’t trying to remember anything at all.

“You go ahead. I’ll have a last dip in the lake before we go.”

He nodded, disappointed, but she rose and kissed him again before he turned toward the bathroom and she moved to the desk. As the shower ran, she jotted down what parts of the image she could recall—large gallery, Dad’s show—Santa Fe? Stranger with blond hair. She supposed she might ask her father to tell her if such a show had taken place, but these were just the sorts of questions that would make him worry. How frustrating it was not to be able to simply pick up the phone and have some answers.

Their room seemed smaller and more confining now. Crossing to the suitcase, she rummaged for her swimsuit. As she did, she came across the pad of stationery she’d brought with her, along with matching envelopes.

If she couldn’t call her father, why not at least write him a letter? In a letter she could craft precisely what she wished to say. Crossing back to the desk and pulling out a fresh page, she began:

Dear Dad,

I’m writing to you from the countryside not too far from Zurich where Duncan and I have been resting up after Berlin. Berlin was thrilling and exhausting. I’m sure you’d be inspired by it. Everywhere the past is being smashed and rebuilt. Imagine a whole city intent on erasing history, reinventing itself according to new possibilities. It’s like an art studio twenty miles wide.

She thought of other details she might invent—going to one of the nightclubs that had sprung up in old industrial sites, drinking with East Berliners and hearing their stories of childhoods filled with longings, disloyalties, and daily duplicities. Instead she caught herself, feeling guilty for enjoying the fiction a bit too much. Staying on course, she considered what else she should say. She ought to tell her father how to reach her, but the letter would take up to two weeks to arrive in Santa Fe, and then his reply would take as long to cross the ocean again. By that time she had no idea where she and Duncan might be.

Vienna will be next—Duncan and I leave today—