Just One Night (2 page)

Broodje’s place, on Bloemstraat, where he’d spent the dark days following his return from Paris, healing from the beating, from everything, really.

“How did you know to go there?” he asks. “To Bloemstraat.” He hadn’t lived there when they’d met, and he hadn’t given her any contact information. This was something he had regretted.

Allyson is embarrassed now, at the lengths she went through to find him. She doesn’t regret going through them, but she understands how overzealous it might look. In her discomfort, she starts to pull her feet away. But Willem won’t let her. He holds them fast. And this small gesture gives her the courage to tell him. About venturing to Paris. About tracking down Céline. About going to the Hôpital Saint-Louis. About Dr. Robinet and his kindness. The address, which led her back to the house in Utrecht. And to the letter.

“I kept the letter. I actually have it in my backpack.”

She leans over and pulls out a creased envelope. She hands it to Willem. There are generations of addresses here. Tor’s house in Leeds, the original Guerilla Will headquarters (how had she found that?), forwarded to Willem’s former houseboat in Amsterdam, since sold, and forwarded on to Bloemstraat.

“You can read it if you want,” Allyson offers.

“Seems beyond the point,” Willem says. Though that isn’t why he doesn’t want to read it. Tor had instructed someone to email him and tell him what the letter said. He doesn’t have the stomach to read the whole letter in front of Allyson.

But Allyson takes the envelope back, unfolds the letter inside of it, and hands it to him.

Dear Willem
:

I’ve been trying to forget about you and our day in Paris for nine months now, but as you can see, it’s not going all that well. I guess more than anything, I want to know, did you just leave? If you did, it’s okay. I mean it’s not, but if I can know the truth, I can get over it. And if you didn’t leave, I don’t know what to say. Except I’m sorry that I did.

I don’t know what your response will be at getting this letter, like a ghost from your past. But no matter what happened, I hope you’re okay.

The letter is not what he thought it would be. Not what Tor suggested it was. It takes Willem a moment to find his voice again, and when he does, he speaks to the Allyson who wrote the letter as much as to the girl sitting here. “I didn’t just leave,” he says. “I’m glad you didn’t forget. And I wasn’t okay.”

“I know that now,” she says. “I think part of me knew it then, too but I wasn’t brave enough to believe it. I was okay that day but I wasn’t okay generally. I am now.”

Willem folds the letter, carefully, like it is sacred text. “I am, too.”

He hands the letter back to Allyson. She shakes her head. “I wrote it to you.”

He knows exactly where he will keep it. With the photo of him and Yael and Bram from his eighteenth birthday. With the photo of Saba and Saba’s sister, Willem’s great aunt Olga, who, like this letter, he only recently discovered had existed. This letter from Allyson will join the important things, thought lost, now found.

“I still don’t understand,” Willem says. “I went to the house on Bloemstraat last month and the letter wasn’t there.”

“That’s weird,” Allyson says. “Saskia and Anamiek never mentioned seeing you.”

“Who are they?” Willem asks.

“They live there.”

“Ahh. Well, I didn’t meet them. I let myself in with my key.”

Allyson laughs. “That explains it. They didn’t know you, either, though they knew of you. And also . . .” She pauses and then forces herself to finish. “Ana Lucia.”

“Ana Lucia?” Willem asks. He has not thought much about her since their spectacular blowout before Christmas last year. “What about Ana Lucia?”

“I met her.”

“
You met Ana Lucia
?”

Allyson remembers the girl’s fury. Another student at Ana Lucia’s college had told Allyson that Willem had been cheating on Ana Lucia with a French girl all along. When she’d heard that, it had seemed to confirm everything bad Allyson suspected about him.

“How did
that
go? Willem asks.

“Well, she didn’t punch me.”

Willem winces. “She wasn’t so happy to see you,” he says.

“I didn’t get it. I’d never even met her before.”

“You have. A bit.”

Allyson shakes her head. “No. I think I’d remember.”

“In Paris. In the Latin Quarter.”

Allyson’s mind spins and lands on the carousel of postcards that she had pretended to look at while Willem chatted with some girls he’d known from home. Ana Lucia was one of them?

“But why would she hate me?” Allyson asks, remembering her own jealousy at any girl Willem seemed vaguely interested in. But jealousy was one thing. Ana Lucia had literally thrown Allyson out of her dorm room.

“Because she caught me buying the airplane tickets to find you.”

Airplane tickets? Find me where?
Allyson mind scrambles to incorporate this new information. It still doesn’t make sense. Willem had gone to Spain to meet the French girl he’d been cheating on Ana Lucia with. Allyson had suspected it was Céline, even though Céline had told Allyson she had not seen Willem since the day he was with Allyson in Paris. At the time, Allyson had believed her.

And just like that, Allyson understands it. How jealousy contorts things. She thinks of Céline, how jealous she had been of her, and how wrong about her.
She
was Ana Lucia’s Céline.

There was no
French
girl. There was an American girl he met in
France
.

“So you didn’t go to Spain?” Allyson asks.

“Spain?” Willem says. “No. I went to Mexico.”

The more questions are answered, the more are asked. But now Willem has to leave to meet Petra and Linus. Neither Allyson nor Willem wants to part. For now, they wish they could both stay like this, talking.

He would like to bring her with him now, to put her in his pocket. Except he must face Petra, his cantankerous director, who he knows is furious with him about last night’s performance. He ignored her direction to play the part safe, to play it as Jeroen had played it. Instead, he had done what his friend Kate had suggested. He’d done it his way, found his own Orlando and in doing so, opened up a vein of himself on that stage. It had been the most exhilarating experience of his life. Well, until the knock at the door today.

Much as he would like to keep Allyson close by, he knows it is unwise to parade her in front of Petra. Though he cannot wait to introduce her to Kate. He will introduce her to Kate tonight. And Broodje. And W and Henk and Max. All the people who led him back to her.

“I am in trouble with the director,” Willem explains. “Maybe it’s better if we meet later.”

There is something then that hangs between them. Meeting later is what got them into this predicament in the first place. Willem stepping out for a bit. Accidents happening. And a year before they found each other again.

They both seem to recognize the moment. But they also know now is not then. And as if to prove it, Willem slides a key off a ring and gives it to Allyson. She stares at it in her palm. So does he.

A year ago I had a backpack, and now I have a key
, he thinks.

A year ago we didn’t give each other our names, and now he gave me a key
, she thinks.

(Also, Willem has just glanced at the birthmark on Allyson’s wrist, giving himself an urgent desire to taste it again. Between her feet and her wrist, he is having a hard time getting out the door.)

(Speaking of feet, Allyson is looking at the zigzag scar on Willem’s foot—left foot—and remembering she wanted to find out how he got it. Along with his birthday and his favorite ice cream flavor and ten thousand other things there don’t seem to be enough time for.)

So for now Willem tells her to make herself at home. Eat what is in the kitchen. Use the computer. There is WiFi. Skype. Have a rest. His bedroom is the yellow one. He likes to picture her in his flat.

“Here is my cellphone number,” he tells her. He writes it on a pad. He resists the urge to write it on her arm, to tattoo it there.

He is about to leave, but stops in the doorway. They are now mirror images of how they were a few hours ago, Willem in the flat, Allyson in the hall. Neither is sure what this means.

What they are sure is that they want to kiss. Both of them do. There is a pull, it feels almost like a chain, linking them.

“I’ll be back here at six,” Willem promises.

“Six,” she repeats. It’s after four now. She has officially missed her flight to Croatia.

He starts to close the door behind him. Then opens it again. “You’ll be here?” He is nervous now about leaving. He can’t help it. The mirror images. The Universal Law of Equilibrium. Last year, he vanished. This year, it could be her.

Except he thinks he has stopped believing in this universal register of deposits and debits, of good things coming at a cost. And when Allyson closes the door, promising that she will be there, he allows himself to believe it.

There is news to share. They each share it.

Willem, in a rush, texts Kate, whom he just saw a few hours ago when she was on her way to meet her fiancé at the airport. She was bringing him to meet Willem so Willem could get his seal of approval to join their theater group.

I have big news
, he writes.
I’m Orlando tonight
.

He writes a version of the same to Broodje, who, along with Henk is helping W move into a new flat with his girlfriend, Lien. He knows all of them will get the message and all of them will come, even though they all came last night, because that is how his friends are.

He is riding his bike to the theater when he realizes that they will all think the big news is that he was given one more chance to do Orlando. Though in reality, he was fired. He is going on tonight out of necessity. He can almost taste Petra’s disgust at having to put him back on the stage.

That isn’t the news. The news is Lulu, of course. Allyson. But tonight, they will all come. And they will find out.

Then he thinks of Yael. His mother, so far away from him these past few years, until that day in Paris last year that set everything in motion. It’s the middle of the night in Mumbai, so Willem texts her.

I found her
. He stops. Maybe it is more accurate to say she found him. But that is not what he is feeling. He is feeling that he found her. So that is what he writes.

He doesn’t elaborate. He knows his mother will understand.

Back in Willem’s flat, Allyson has texted Wren.
CALL ME ASAP!!!
And then she decides to be nosy. Not to snoop exactly, but to look around.

The living room does not offer clues. Even had Allyson not been told this apartment belonged to Willem’s uncle, she would’ve been able to tell it was not Willem’s. She goes into the bedroom in the back. The yellow one. The bed is unmade, and it smells of Willem. Somehow she knows this.

She feels shy, tentative, as if she is invading. But she remembers Willem telling her, exhorting her, as much as someone as Willem exhorts, to make herself at home. The key to the flat is still in her pocket.

She sits down on the bed. It’s low to the ground, the view looking up out the window. There’s a small bookshelf. She smiles when she sees a copy of
Twelfth Night
there. She leafs through it, remembering how she avoided reading it in her Shakespeare Out Loud class. She thinks of Dee. She hasn’t talked with him since Paris. She calculates the time difference. It’s a little past 8:00 a.m. in New York. Maybe she can Skype him.

The laptop is on the bookshelf. When she takes it, she accidentally knocks over a large envelope. Out spill several photographs, newspaper clippings, some of them very old. There’s also a picture of Willem, a younger Willem, his face slightly less chiseled, but still Willem. He is flanked by a man and a woman. The woman is small, dark, intense, and the man is her opposite, all tall golden smiles. These must be Yael and Bram.

She feels a little as if she knows them. And sorry she never did.

She carefully puts the photographs back in the envelope and puts the envelope in a safe corner of the bookshelf. That is when she hears the sound, instantly familiar. It takes her a moment to locate it, inside the pocket of the jacket she saw Willem wearing after the play last night.

She pulls it out. Her old gold watch, last year’s high-school graduation gift. She’d hated it, so heavy and perfect, but it’s kind of endearing now, all scuffed up, the face of it cracked. She turns it over. The GOING PLACES engraving had seemed so burdensome when her mother had given it to her, but now it seems kind of prophetic, like the most perfect thing to have wished for her. She wants to tell her mother about this revelation and stops for a moment to savor that, wanting to tell her mother something.

That said, she doesn’t want the watch back.

In that Paris park, she’d given it to Willem, given time to him, and in exchange she became the girl in the Double Happiness story. His mountain girl, he’d called her.

She’d known he kept the watch. Céline had told her as much when she’d confronted her in Paris last week. But she’d made it sound as though Willem had kept it to pawn it. But he’d kept it to keep. To keep her.

Allyson holds the watch in her hand. She feels the vibration of its ticking and is full in a way she can’t really explain.

Willem is trying hard not to laugh.

Petra is berating him, telling him he made a mockery of the company last night. This might be true, but Willem also knows the performance was a triumph. Which is perhaps the real mockery. But he lets Petra give him all her notes. Tell him all the beats he got wrong, how he mangled the language, how he confused the audience.

“Tonight you will play the part as Jeroen plays it, as an understudy must play it,” she commands. It is the same direction she’d given him yesterday, when he was called up to step in for Jeroen after the lead actor broke his ankle. It was the direction that had almost derailed him, until Kate had persuaded him to take the risk. “Go big or go home” was how Kate put it. But Willem had come to understand it as “Go big
and
go home.” That’s how it had felt. Last night he had thought the going home was to acting, to a new home in New York City, to an apprenticeship with Ruckus Theater Company, which Kate runs with her fiancé. But today it feels as though home has come to him.