Coming Home

The last day of the internship falls on a Friday in late June, which means New York is already in the full grip of summer — the kind of heat that rises from the pavement in visible waves and makes the subway platform feel like a punishment you signed up for voluntarily.

Patricia hands her a letter of recommendation in a sealed envelope at four-thirty in the afternoon and says, without preamble: "You should come back. Not as an intern."

Valentina holds the envelope. "I have a final year."

"I know. I'm telling you what comes after." Patricia looks at her with the directness she applies to everything. "We don't say this to many people. I'm saying it to you."

"I understand," Valentina says. And then, because Patricia has earned the truth: "I'm not sure New York is where I'm going. But I'm sure this is the kind of work I want to do."

Patricia nods once — the nod of a woman who has heard enough equivocal answers to recognize a clear one. "Then make sure whoever gets you knows what they're getting."

Valentina shakes her hand. The grip is firm on both sides.

Sofía throws a small goodbye dinner in the apartment the night before — herself, Valentina, the German intern named Klaus who has barely spoken for five months but turns out, over three glasses of wine and the last of the good olive oil (aceite de oliva — the kind they'd pooled their money to buy from a specialty shop on 9th Avenue because neither of them could bear the supermarket version), to have strong opinions about jazz and Argentine cinema and the architecture of public transit systems.

"You should come to Buenos Aires," Sofía tells Valentina. "You would like it. It's a city that feels like it's always about to do something."

"Like New York," Valentina says.

"No." Sofía considers this seriously, which is the only way she considers anything. "New York is always doing something. Buenos Aires is always about to. It's a different energy. More — suspended. Expectant."

Klaus nods like this is the most accurate thing anyone has said all evening, which, coming from Klaus means a great deal.

Valentina thinks about Barcelona — about the particular quality of a city that is perpetually in the middle of something, never quite starting and never quite finishing, always warm, always loud at odd hours, always itself regardless of who is passing through. She has been away from it for five months and she misses it the way you miss a person, not a place.

"I'll come to Buenos Aires," she tells Sofía. "After I figure out the next part."

"What is the next part?"

Valentina refills her glass. "Still working on the details."

This is true. The broad architecture is clear — finish the degree, complete the ROTC service commitment, and find a position in hospitality marketing that she builds on her own terms rather than someone else's referral. But the details have texture she is still mapping: where exactly, at what level, with whom.

With whom is a question that has a card in her inside jacket pocket and a September arrival date in Barcelona, and a compatible frequency she has been thinking about, carefully, in the spaces between everything else, for four months.

She does not say any of this to Sofía, who nevertheless looks at her with the expression of someone who has a fairly good guess.

"Text me when you land," Sofía says.

"I will."

They hug at the door of the apartment at midnight. Klaus shakes Valentina's hand, which, given that Klaus is the equivalent of a long embrace.

The flight back to Barcelona departs at seven a.m. and lands at eight in the evening local time, (hora local — the arrival time adjusted to Spain's time zone, six hours ahead of New York), which means she clears customs in the long summer dusk and steps outside into air that smells of exhaust and dry heat and jasmine from somewhere she can't see, which is the smell of the city telling her she's back.

Her mother is not at the airport. Valentina told her not to come — the traffic from Sant Andreu to El Prat (El Prat de Llobregat — the area where Barcelona's international airport is located) on a Friday evening is forty-five minutes each way on a good day, and Rosa works Saturdays. She takes the Aerobus (the direct shuttle from the airport to the city center) to Plaça Catalunya (the central square of Barcelona, where the upper and lower parts of the city meet) and then the metro to Gràcia and walks the last eight minutes with her suitcase wheels loud on the stone sidewalk.

Her apartment is exactly as she left it. Smaller than she remembered — five months in a New York apartment will recalibrate your sense of space in either direction, and apparently hers went the wrong way — but hers, familiar in the particular way of spaces that have absorbed your habits.

She opens the window. The sounds of the neighborhood come in: someone's television, a scooter, two people having the tail end of an argument in the street, a dog with something to say about all of it.

Barcelona.

She sits on the edge of her bed and does nothing for three full minutes, which is harder than it sounds after five months of constant forward motion. Then she takes out her phone and sends three texts: one to her mother (Ja soc a casa — I'm home), one to Sofía (Landed. The jasmine here is better than New York. Come visit.), and one to Clàudia, who has been texting intermittently all semester with updates about campus life that Valentina has found unexpectedly grounding.

She does not text Ethan Cole. She has not texted Ethan Cole in four months, since they exchanged a brief, professional follow-up about the Algarve brief ten days after the conference — a conversation that was entirely about work and also entirely not, the way some conversations are both things simultaneously.

He is coming to Barcelona in September.

It is July.

She has two months and a final year of university, a ROTC summer exercise in August, and a version of herself she is still in the process of completing.

Rosa comes on Sunday with food — a container of escudella (a traditional Catalan stew, thick with vegetables and meat, the kind that takes most of a Saturday to make properly) and a smaller container of crema catalana (the Catalan version of crème brûlée, with a caramelized sugar crust and a custard infused with lemon zest and cinnamon) because Rosa Serra has always expressed care in the form of things that keep you fed.

She sits at Valentina's kitchen table and watches her daughter eat with the quiet attention of a woman taking inventory.

"You look different," Rosa says.

"I've been told that before."

"Not the same, different." Rosa wraps her hands around her coffee cup. "Before, you looked like someone who had decided something. Now you look like someone who has already started."

Valentina sets down her spoon. Outside the window, Sunday in Gràcia is doing what Sunday in Gràcia always does — slow, warm, the neighborhood unwinding at its own pace, the sound of a market somewhere nearby, someone playing guitar badly and cheerfully on a balcony three buildings over.

Guitar. Badly and cheerfully. Like her father, Rosa said once, in Begur, in March, on a terrace above the sea.

"I have," Valentina says. "Started."

Rosa nods, as if this confirms something she already knew. She reaches across the table and covers Valentina's hand with hers — a gesture so rare from Rosa that Valentina goes very still, the way you go still when something precious is happening and you don't want to disrupt it.

"Good," her mother says. Just that. The full weight of it in one syllable.

They finish the escudella. They watch a film Rosa has been meaning to see, something French with subtitles, on Valentina's laptop with the sound low because the upstairs neighbor keeps early hours. They do not talk about the future or the career or September or anyone named Ethan Cole.

They just sit together in the apartment in Gràcia, mother and daughter, in the long summer evening, with the window open and the city outside doing what it has always done.

It is, Valentina thinks, the best Sunday she can remember.

In either life.