Free Artist's Daughter, The: A Memoir by Alexandra Kuykendall Page B

five-week trek.
    Paris was our first stop and one of the only places on our itinerary I hadn’t been. So Rick Steves’s books told us where to stay and what to see in the iconic city. It was August, and Paris was deserted. Shops had metal gates pulled shut for the month. The only Parisians left seemed to be those who catered to the tourists, so we walked from site to site as if it was Disneyland and we were hitting all the major rides without the lines. We shared a baguette and cheese on the banks of the Seine, and I laughed when we kissed.
    Before we took the train to see my father and his growing family, we wanted to make one small detour. To see the beaches at Normandy where Derek’s grandfather, Papa, had landed on D-Day many years earlier. A World War II battle scene would never have been on my travel schedule in the past, but this was our trip and this spot was the one thing Derek wanted to see. It was only a few hours by train off our route, so how could I disagree?

    “Here, take this with you.” Months earlier, Papa had handed Derek a patch with an Indian head inside a star. Papa sat in his recliner in the living room of the assisted living facility in rural Colorado where he lived with his wife of sixty years, Eva. A retired physician, he’d served as a medic in the war. “It was from our infantry.”
    Derek looked down at the patch and wrote down a few numbers as Papa talked. The infantry division, platoon number, regiment—it all breezed through my brain, but Derek wanted to have his homework done when we got there. Papa was in his nineties, and though usually slow getting out of his recliner, he was mentally sharp, as able to make jokes about the current president as he was to recall the details of waiting in the boat to go up the beach.
    “I was one of the oldest ones,” he told us—already married, a trained physician when he’d enlisted. “Some of those boys lied about their age so they could go fight.” His eyes watered. “We were all so seasick. We were delayed a day out there on the water because of the weather. Boys were throwing up over the sides.” As he hunched over in his chair, I saw history alive in front of me.
    A few years after that, my father-in-law would stand at the top of a ramp at Union Station in downtown Denver. He would point to it and tell me that was where he met Papa as a two-year-old boy. Where he met his daddy for the first time as he returned on the train from war. I imagined a young, handsome Papa walking up the ramp in his uniform, taking his boy in his arms. And a young Mama so relieved her doctor husband was home.

    We carried our backpacks through the cobbled streets of Normandy to the youth hostel we’d emailed weeks earlier. Flags from around the world hung from the second stories of stone buildings. Later, as we walked to the center of town to book a tour for the next day, signs greeted us in windows. In English they read, “Veterans welcome here.” Tours were based on language and country of interest. Those standing in line to purchase the German tours shifted their weight from side to side. We splurged and signed up for a small-group semiprivate tour for Americans.
    “Do any of you have a personal connection?” the Frenchwoman driving the van called over her shoulder as she turned down theroad that would take us toward the Normandy beaches. Her dark hair and obvious French accent reminded me of my father’s girlfriend.
    The three middle-aged couples who shared our van shook their heads. Based on their ages and collared dress shirts, I suspected they fit the profile of the typical tourists in this history-saturated town.
    “My grandfather was here on D-Day,” Derek spoke up. The attention in the van shifted toward us as the other couples stared at him, a little bit in awe.
    “Oh! Did he come back for the anniversary?” Our tour guide talked to her rearview mirror as she drove. “I got to host a group of veterans for the week. It was fantastíque