Just One Day 02: Just One Year (6 page)

NOVEMBER

Utrecht

A
na Lucia’s dorm is like a cocoon, thick feather quilts, radiators hissing full blast, endless cups of custard-like hot chocolate. For the first few days, I am content just to be here, with her.

“Did you ever think we’d get back together?” she coos, snuggling up to me like a warm little kitten.

“Hmm,” I say, because there’s no right way to answer that. I never thought we’d get back together because I never considered us together in the first place. Ana Lucia and I had a three, maybe four-week fling in that hazy spring after Bram died, when I was spectacularly floundering in school but also spectacularly succeeding with women. Though succeeding isn’t the right word, exactly. It implies a kind of effort, when really, it was the one thing in my life that was effortless.

“
I
did,” she says, nibbling my ear. “I thought about you so much these past few years. And then we bumped into each other in Paris, and it felt like it meant something, like fate.”

“Hmmm,” I repeat. I remember bumping into her in Paris and also feeling like it meant something, but not fate. More like the encroachment, a day too soon, of a world I’d left behind.

“But then you didn’t call me,” she says.

“Oh, you know. Something came up.”

“I’m sure
something
did.” Her hand drifts between my legs. “I saw you with that girl. In Paris. She was pretty.”

She says it offhandedly, dismissively even, but something skitters to life in my gut. A kind of warning. Ana Lucia’s hand is still between my legs and it’s having the intended effect, but now Lulu’s somewhere in the room, too. Just like that day in Paris, when I ran into Ana Lucia and her cousins while I was in the Latin Quarter with Lulu, I want nothing but distance between these two girls.

“She was pretty, but
you’re
beautiful.” I say it, trying to steer the conversation away. My words are true, but meaningless. Though Ana Lucia is probably technically prettier than Lulu, such contests are rarely won on technicalities.

Her grip tightens. “What was her name?” she asks.

I don’t want to say her name. But Ana Lucia has me firmly in hand and if I don’t say it, I’ll arouse suspicion. “Lulu,” I say into the pillow. It’s not even her real name, but it feels like a betrayal.

“Lulu,” Ana Lucia says. She lets go of me and sits up in the bed. “A French girl. Was she your girlfriend?”

Morning light is filtering through the window, pale and gray and tinting everything in here slightly greenish. Somehow, the gray dawn light had made Lulu glow in that white room.

“Of course not.”

“Just another one of your flings then?” Ana Lucia’s laughter answers her own question; the knowingness irks me.

That night in the art squat, after everything, Lulu had smudged her finger against her wrist, and I’d done the same. A kind of code for
stain
, for something that lasts, even if you might not want it to. It had meant something, in that moment at least. “You know me,” I say lightly.

Ana Lucia laughs again, the sound of it throaty and full, rich and indulgent. She climbs on top of me, straddling my hips. “I
do
know you,” she says, her eyes flashing. She runs a finger down my center line. “I know what you’ve been through now. I didn’t understand before. But I’ve grown up. You’ve grown up. I think we’re both different people, with different needs.”

“My needs haven’t changed,” I tell her. “They’re the same as they ever were. Very basic.” I yank her toward me. I’m still angry at her, but her invoking of Lulu’s name has riled me up. I finger the lace along the trim of her camisole. I dip a finger under the straps.

Her eyes flutter closed for a minute and I close mine, too. I feel the give of the bed and the trail of her waxy kisses on my neck. “
Dime que me quieres
,” she whispers.
“Dime que me necesitas
.”
Tell me you want me. Tell me you need me
.

I don’t tell her because she’s speaking Spanish, which she doesn’t realize I now understand. I keep my eyes closed, but even in darkness I hear a voice telling me she’ll be my mountain girl.

“I’ll take care of you,” Ana Lucia says, and I jump in the bed at hearing Lulu’s words come out of Ana Lucia’s mouth.

But as Ana Lucia’s head dips under the covers, I realize it’s a different kind of taking care she’s talking about. It’s not the kind I really need. But I don’t refuse it.

A
fter two weeks ensconced in Ana Lucia’s dorm, I make my way back to Bloemstraat. It’s quiet, a welcome change from the constant hubbub in and around the University College campus, everyone in everyone’s business.

In the kitchen, I open the cupboards. Ana Lucia has been bringing me back cafeteria food or ordering takeout, charging it away on her father’s credit cards. I crave something real.

There’s not much here, a couple of bags of pasta and some onions and garlic. There’s a can of tomatoes in the pantry. Enough for a sauce. I start to chop the onions and my eyes immediately tear. They always do this. Yael’s too. She never cooked much, but occasionally she’d get homesick for Israel, and she’d play bad Hebrew pop music and make
shakshouka.
I might be all the way upstairs in my room and I’d feel the burn. I’d gravitate down to the kitchen. Bram would find us sometimes, together and red-eyed, and he’d laugh and ruffle my hair and kiss Yael and joke that chopping onions was the only time you’d ever catch Yael Shiloh crying.

Around four, I hear the key click in the lock. I call out a hello.

“Willy, you’re back. And you’re cook—” Broodje says as he turns the corner into the kitchen. Then he stops midsentence. “What’s wrong?”

“Huh?” And then I realize he means my tears. “Just the onions,” I explain.

“Oh,” Broodje says. “Onions.” He picks up the wooden spoon and swirls it in the sauce, blows, then tastes. Then he reaches into the pantry for several dried herbs and rubs them between his fingers before sprinkling them in. He gives a few shakes of salt and several turns of the pepper mill. Then he turns the flame down low and puts on the lid. “Because if it’s not the onions . . .” he says.

“What else would it be?”

He shuffles his foot against the floor. “I’ve been worried about you since that night,” he says. “What happened after the movie.”

“What about it?” I say.

He starts to say something. Then stops. “Nothing,” he says. “So, Ana Lucia? Again.”

“Yeah. Ana Lucia. Again.” I can think of nothing else to add so I revert to small talk. “She sends her greetings.”

“I’m sure she does,” Broodje says, not buying it for a minute.

“You want to eat?”

“I do,” he says. “But the sauce isn’t ready.”

Broodje goes up to his room. I’m perplexed. It’s unlike him to turn down food, no matter how cooked it is. I’ve seen him eat raw hamburger meat. I let the sauce simmer. The aroma fills up the house and he still doesn’t come down. So I go up and tap on his door. “Hungry yet?” I ask.

“I’m always hungry.”

“Do you want to come down? I can make some pasta.”

He shakes his head.

“Are you on a hunger strike?” I joke. “Like Sarsak.”

He shrugs. “Maybe I will go on a hunger strike.”

“What will you strike for?” I ask. “It would have to be very important for you to go without food.”

“
You
are very important.”

“
Me
?”

Broodje swivels in his desk chair. “Didn’t we used to tell each other things, Willy?”

“Of course.”

“Haven’t we always been good friends? Even when I moved away we stayed close. Even when you were gone and you didn’t ever contact me, I thought we were good friends, and now you’re back, what if we’re not really friends at all?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Where have you been, Willy?”

“Where have I been? With Ana Lucia. Jesus, you were the one who said I needed to get laid to get over it.”

His eyes flash. “Get over
what
, Willy?”

I sit down on the bed. Get over what? That’s the question, right there.

“Is it your pa?” Broodje asks. “It’s okay if it still is. It’s only been three years. It took me that long to get over Varken, and he was a dog.”

Bram’s death gutted me. It did. But that was then and I’ve been okay so I’m not sure why it feels so raw again
now
. Maybe because I’m back in Holland. Maybe it was a mistake to stay.

“I don’t know what it is,” I tell Broodje. It’s a relief to admit this much.

“But it is
something
,” he says.

I can’t really explain it, because it makes no sense. One girl. One day.

“It is something,” I tell Broodje.

He doesn’t say anything, but the silence is like an invitation, and I’m not sure why I’m keeping this a secret. So I tell him: About meeting Lulu in Stratford-upon-Avon. About seeing her again on the train. About our flirtation on the train about
hagelslag
of all things. About calling her Lulu, a name that seemed to fit her so well that I forgot she wasn’t actually called that.

I tell him some of the highlights of a day that seems so perfect in retrospect, I sometimes think I invented it: Lulu marching up and down the Bassin de la Villette with a hundred-dollar bill, bribing Jacques to take us down the canal. The two of us almost getting arrested by that gendarme for illegally riding two people on a single Vélib’ bike, but then when the gendarme asked me why I’d done something so stupid, I’d quoted that Shakespeare line about beauty being a witch, and he recognized it, and let us off with a warning. Lulu blindly picking a Métro stop to go to and us winding up in Barbès Rochechouart, and Lulu, who claimed to be uncomfortable with traveling, seeming to love the randomness of it all. I tell him about the skinheads, too. About how I didn’t really think about it when I intervened and tried to stop them from hassling those two Arab girls about their headscarves. I didn’t really think about what they might do to
me
, and just as it was starting to dawn on me that I might have really screwed myself, there was Lulu, hurling a book at one of them.

Even as I explain it, I realize I’m not doing it justice. Not the day. Not Lulu. I’m not telling the whole story, either, because there are things I just don’t know how to explain. Like how when Lulu bribed Jacques to give us that ride on the canal, it wasn’t her generosity that got to me. I never told her I’d grown up on a boat, or that I was one day away from signing it all away. But she seemed to know. How did she know? How do I explain that?

When I’m done with my story, I’m unsure if I’ve made any sense. But I feel better somehow. “So,” I say to Broodje. “Now what?”

Broodje sniffs the air. The smell of the sauce has infiltrated the entire house. “Sauce is ready. Now we eat.”

“I
’ve been thinking,” Ana Lucia says. It’s sleeting outside but it’s toasty in her dorm, with our little feast of Thai food on her bed.

“Always dangerous words,” I joke.

She throws a sachet of duck sauce at me. “I’ve been thinking about Christmas. I know you don’t really celebrate it, but maybe you should come with me to Switzerland next month. So you’re among family.”

“I didn’t realize I had relatives in Switzerland,” I tease, popping a spring roll in my mouth.

“I meant my family.” She looks at me, her eyes uncomfortably intense. “They want to meet you.”

Ana Lucia belongs to a sprawling Spanish clan, the heirs to a shipping company that was sold to the Chinese before the recession crippled their economy. She has endless relatives, siblings and cousins, living all over Europe and the U.S., Mexico, and Argentina, and she speaks to them in a kind of round-robin on the phone each night. “You never know what might happen. One day, you might think of them as your family, too.”

I want to say I already have a family, but it hardly seems true anymore. Who’s left? Yael and me. And Uncle Daniel, but he barely counted in the first place. The roll sticks in my throat. I wash it down with a gulp of beer.

“It’s beautiful there,” she adds.

Bram took Yael and me skiing once in Italy. We both stayed huddled in the lodge, freezing. He learned his lesson. The next year we went to Tenerife. “Switzerland’s too cold,” I say.

“And it’s so nice here?” she asks.

Ana Lucia and I have been together for three weeks. Christmas is in six weeks. You don’t need to be W to figure out the math on that one.

When I don’t answer, Ana Lucia says, “Or maybe you want me to go, so you can have someone else keep you warm?” Just like that, her tone changes, and the suspicion that I now realize has been lurking outside all along comes rushing in.

• • •

The next afternoon, when I head back to Bloemstraat, I find the boys at the table, papers sprawled out all over the place. Broodje looks up wearing the expression of a guilty dog who stole the dinner.

“I’m sorry,” he says straightaway.

“About what?” I ask.

“I may have told them a little bit about our conversation,” he stammers. “About what you said.”

“It wasn’t much of a surprise,” W says. “It was obvious
something
has been wrong since you came back. And I
knew
that scar wasn’t from a bicycle accident. It doesn’t look like something you’d get from a fall.”

“My story was I got hit by a tree branch.”

“But you got beaten up by skinheads,” Henk tells me. “The same ones the girl threw the book at the day before.”

“I think he knows what happened to him,” Broodje says.

“Crazy that you saw the same guys,” Henk says.

“More like bad luck,” Broodje says.

I don’t say anything

“We think you have that post-traumatic thing,” Henk says. “That’s why you’ve been so depressed.”

“So you’ve scrapped the celibacy theory?”

“Well, yeah,” Henk says. “Because you’re getting laid now and you’re still depressed.”

“You think it’s because of this,” I say, tapping the scar. “Not because of the girl?” I look at W. “You don’t think maybe Lien was right?”

The three of them try not to laugh. “What’s so funny?” I ask, feeling irritated and defensive all of a sudden.

“This girl didn’t break your heart,” W says. “She just broke your streak.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

“Willy, come on,” Broodje says, waving his arms to calm us all down. “I know you. I know how you are with girls. You fall in love and then it disappears like snow in the sun. If you’d had another few weeks with this girl you’d get tired of her, just like you do all the others. But you didn’t. It was almost like she dumped you. So you’re pining.”

You’re comparing love to a stain?
Lulu had asked. She’d been skeptical at first.

Something that never comes off, no matter how much you might want it to
. Yes, stain had seemed about right.

“Okay,” W says, clicking his pen. “Let’s start at the beginning, with as much detail as you can muster.”

“The beginning of what?”

“Your story.”

“Why?”

W starts explain about the Principle of Connectivity and how police use that to track down criminals, via who they associate with. He is always talking about theories like this. He believes that all of life boils down to mathematics, that there’s a numeric principal or algorithm to describe every event, even the random ones (chaos theory!). It takes me a while to understand that he means to use the Principle of Connectivity to solve the mystery of Lulu.

“Again, why? The mystery’s solved,” I snap. “I’m pining over the girl who got away, because she got away.” I’m not sure if I’m irritated because I think this is true or because I think it’s not.

W rolls his eyes, as if this is beside the point. “But you want to find her, don’t you?”

• • •

By that night, W has spreadsheets and graphs and on the mantel, below the fading Picasso poster, an empty poster board. “Principle of Connectivity. Basically, we track down the people we can find and see what connections they have back to your mystery girl,” W says. “Our best bet is to start with Céline. Lulu may have gone back for the suitcase.” He writes Céline’s name and draws a circle around it.

The thought has crossed my mind a number of times, and each time, I’ve been tempted to contact Céline. But then I think back to that night, the raw, wounded look on her face. In any case, it doesn’t matter. Either the suitcase is at the club, and Lulu hasn’t gone back for it, or it’s not there and she did somehow retrieve it and she found my notes inside and chose not to respond. Knowing does nothing to change the situation.

“Céline is off the table,” I say.

“But she’s the strongest connection,” W protests.

I don’t tell them about Céline and what happened at her flat that night, or what I promised her. “She’s out.”

W makes a rather dramatic X through Céline’s name. Then he draws a circle. Inside he writes, “barge.”

“What about it?” I ask.

“Did she fill out any paperwork?” W says. “Pay with a card?”

I shake my head. “She paid with a hundred dollar bill. She basically bribed Jacques.”

He writes “Jacques.” Circles it.

I shake my head again. “I spent more time with him than she did.”

“What do you know about him?”

“He’s a typical sailor. Lives on the water all year round. Sails in warm weather, kept the barge anchored in a marina, in Deauville he said, I think.”

W writes “Deauville” and puts a circle around it. “What about other passengers?”

“They were older. Danish. One married couple, one divorced couple that seemed married. They were all drunk off their heads.”

W writes “Drunk Danes” in a circle way off on the side of the poster board.

“We’ll consider them last resorts,” W says, moving to the next line. “I think the strongest lead is probably the most time-consuming.” Small grin there. Then on the bottom of the poster he writes “TOUR COMPANY” in large block letters.

“Only problem is I don’t know which one it was.”

“Odds are, it’s one of these seven,” W says, reaching for a computer printout.

“You found the tour company? Why didn’t you say so to begin with?”

“I didn’t find it. But I did narrow down the seven companies that do tours for American students that had a tour operating in Stratford-upon-Avon on the nights in question.”

“Nights in question,” Henk jokes. “This is starting to sound like a detective program.”

I stare at the printout. “How did you do that? In one night?”

I expect some complicated mathematical theorem, but he just shrugs and says: “The Internet.” He pauses. “There may be more than seven tours, but these are seven that I’ve confirmed as possibilities.”

“More?” Broodje says. “Seven already seems like lot.”

“There was a music festival that week,” I explain. It was why Guerrilla Will had gone to Stratford-upon-Avon in the first place. Tor generally avoided it; she had a poisonous grudge against the Royal Shakespeare Company, related to her even more toxic grudge against the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which had denied her admission twice. It was after that that she’d gone all anarchist and started Guerrilla Will.

W writes and circles the names of the tours on the poster: “Wide Horizons,” “Europe Unlimited,” “It’s a Small World,” “Adventure Edge,” “Go Away,” “Teen Tours!” and “Cool Europa.” “My guess is that your mystery girl was on one of these.”

“Okay, but there’s seven tours,” Henk says. “Now what?”

“I call them?” I guess.

“Exactly,” W says.

“Looking for . . . damn.” Once again, it comes back to me: I don’t even know her name.

“What identifying details
do
you know?” W asks.

I know the timbre of her laugh. I know the heat of her breath. I know the cast of moonlight against her skin.

“She was traveling with her friend,” I say, “who was blonde, and Lulu had black hair, cut short, in a bob, like Louise Brooks.” The boys all exchange a look. “She had a birthmark right here.” I touch my wrist. Since she first showed it to me on the train, I’d wondered what it would taste like. “She mostly kept it covered with a watch. Oh, right, she had an expensive gold watch. Or did have. I have it now.”

“That’s hers?” Broodje asks.

I nod.

W scribbles this down. “This is good,” W says. “The watch, especially. It identifies her.”

“Also, it gives you a cover,” Broodje says. “A reason to be tracking her down other than wanting to bone her a few more times to get her out of your system. You can say you want to return the watch.”

A half hour ago the poster board was empty, but now it’s half filled, all these circles, these tenuous connections, linking me to her. W turns toward it, too.

“Principle of Connectivity,” he says.

• • •

Over the next week, one by one, the circles on W’s connectivity board become Xs, as connections that I understand never actually existed are severed. It’s a Small World is for teens and their parents, so that one’s out. Go Away doesn’t have any record of anyone with a black bob and a watch on that tour. Adventure Edge refuses to divulge information about their clients and Cool Europa appears to have gone out of business. Teen Tours! doesn’t pick up the phone, though I’ve left several messages and emails.

It’s a dispiriting process, this. And complicated, too because I have to dodge time zones and callbacks and the ever-more-suspicious Ana Lucia. She’s not pleased with my more frequent absences, which I’ve attributed to the soccer league I’ve supposedly joined.

One night the phone rings past eleven. “Your girlfriend?” Ana Lucia says, her voice flat.
Girlfriend
is what she calls Broodje these days, because she thinks I spend more time with him than her. It’s a joke, but it gives my stomach a guilty twist every time.

I pick up the phone and cross to the other side of her room.

“Hi. I’m looking for a Willem de Ruiter?” The voice, in English, butchers the pronunciation of my name.

“Yes, hello,” I respond, trying to stay businesslike because Ana Lucia is right there.

“Hi Willem! This is Erica from Teen Tours! I’m responding to your email about trying to return a missing watch.”

“Oh, good,” I say, keeping it breezy, though Ana Lucia is now looking at me with narrowed suspicious eyes and I realize it’s because I’m speaking in English, and though I speak English with her, on the phone, with the boys, I always speak Dutch.

“We provide loss and theft insurance for all our travelers so if she’d lost something of value, there’d be a claim.”

“Oh,” I say.

“But I’ve checked all the claims for that time period, and all I’ve found is a claim for a stolen iPad from Rome and a bracelet that was recovered. But if you have a name, I can double check.”

I look at Ana Lucia, who’s decidedly not looking at me now, so I know she’s listening. “I can’t give you that now.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, maybe you can call me back with that later?”

“I can’t really do that either.”

“Oh. You sure it was a Teen Tours! tour?”

I now see how the missing-watch story is as cracked as the watch itself. Even if this was the right tour, there’s no way the tour operators would know Lulu lost the watch because she lost it after the tour. It’s a fiction. This is
all
a fiction. The truth is, I’m looking for a girl whose name I don’t know, who bears a passing resemblance to Louise Brooks. None of which I can say out loud. Nor do I want to. This is absurd.

Erica goes on, “You know, one of our veterans led that tour. She’d know if anything went amiss. Do you want her number?”

I turn to the bed. Ana Lucia is up, throwing off the covers.

“Her name is Patricia Foley,” Erica continues. “Would you like her number?”

Ana Lucia walks across the room and stands in front of me, totally naked, like she knows she’s offering a choice. But it’s not really a choice, when the other option doesn’t actually exist.

“That won’t be necessary,” I say to Erika.

• • •

I wake up the next morning to knocking. I squint at the sliding glass door. There’s Broodje, holding a bag, and putting a finger to his lips.

I crack open the door. Broodje pops in his head in and hands me the bag.

From the bed, Ana Lucia rubs her eyes, looking grumpy.

“Sorry to wake you,” he calls to Ana Lucia. “I need to steal him. We have a soccer match. Lapland forfeited so now we’re playing Wiesbaden.”

Lapland and Wiesbaden?
Ana Lucia is ignorant about all things soccer, but this is pushing it. But her face registers no suspicion about the pairing, only sourness about Broodje’s untimely arrival.

In the bag is someone’s old soccer kit, jersey, shorts, cleats, and a thin tracksuit to wear on top. I look at Broodje. He gives me a look. “Better go change now,” he says.

“When will you be back?” she asks me when I return. The tracksuit is several centimeters too short for me. I can’t tell if she notices.