The Canterbury Sisters Read Online Free Page A

there’s no such thing.
    I look out the airplane window at the rain-washed tarmac, a tremor of anxiety working its way up my spine. Even the brief time I spent researching this trip on my computer taught me that walking the Canterbury Trail isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds. It’s more a matter of walking what’s left of the Canterbury Trail. The original pilgrim route followed an even more ancient Roman path, but now this old and holy road has been broken by the demands of modern life. The trail is slashed in several places by a major highway and the pieces left intact weave largely across private land, through farms and orchards and even the backyards of rural homes. Since the trail belongs to the National Trust, the owners of the land knew they must cede the route when they bought the property. Presumably they are used to Americans with backpacks and blisters and broken hearts stomping past them in the mist. But Google warns that following the path is tricky. The markers are few and subtly placed, making it nearly impossible to tell where the trail breaks off and takes up again.
    Bottom line, you need a guide.
    But it would seem I’ve already managed to lose mine. She is emailing me from a gurney in a hospital ward, where she lies awaiting an emergency appendectomy.
    “Can you believe it?” she writes.
    No, I can’t believe it. No one has an appendectomy anymore. She may as well be telling me she’s succumbed to bubonic plague. But then, in suspiciously complete and grammatical prose for a woman who is allegedly in the grip of agony, she offers me a solution. One of her fellow teachers at the university, by luck, is leading an organized tour to Canterbury that will be departing London this very afternoon. A classics professor, highly regarded in her field, quite young, almost a prodigy. And she assures me that I needn’t worry that I am crashing someone’s party. The women in the group come from all over America and have booked their trip through an outfit called Broads Abroad, which caters to the solo female traveler.
    The solo female traveler. I guess that’s what I am now.
    “It’s the perfect solution,” the professor writes, but I’m not convinced. I don’t want to talk while I walk. I don’t want to bond with other women, to tell them my troubles, which, while agonizing, are also—let’s face it—pretty clichéd. And once I’ve been forced to tell them my stories, politeness demands I must listen to theirs and I bet they all have dead mothers and bad boyfriends too. My phone has adjusted to the local time, which is not quite seven a.m. I gaze out into the ugly foreign morning and consider my options.
    Maybe I should just take the train to Canterbury. Dump Mom and get the hell back to Heathrow, and with any luck I could be on a return flight to Philly tonight. It wouldn’t be a true pilgrimage, not in the step-by-step sense, but it would fulfill my promise. And that’s what this is about, isn’t it? Putting the period at the end of a sentence. Hitting TAB and starting a new paragraph in my life. Saying goodbye. Ridding myself of ghosts. There is absolutely no reason to make things harder than they have to be.
    The plane at last begins to move toward an open gate. I look down at the message in my hand.
    The Broads Abroad. Jesus. The name doesn’t sound promising.
    BY THE time I take the Heathrow Express into the city, the rain has stopped and the morning has turned pink and gold. Oil-slick puddles shimmer like Monets on the sidewalks and the air feels fresh. I emerge from Paddington Station and head in the direction that my phone assures me is dead east, the autumn leaves crunching beneath my boots as I walk. London moves at a different pace than American cities , I think, stopping on a street corner to change hands on my suitcase. The bustle is more muted. The tempo more civilized and humane. I don’t like it.
    How long has it been since I’ve eaten? Too long to remember, which isn’t