The End of Getting Lost

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

Robin Kirman studied philosophy at Yale before receiving her MFA in writing from Columbia, where she also taught for several years. Her curiosity about human psychology has led her to combine work in psychoanalysis with writing fiction. Her first novel, Bradstreet Gate, was published in 2015, and her television series The Love Wave is currently in development.