Dee looks at me as if the answer is obvious. “You look.”
Twenty-three
NAME: Willem
NATIONALITY: Dutch
AGE: 20 as of last August
GREW UP IN AMSTERDAM.
PARENTS: Yael and Bram. Mom isn’t Dutch Mom is a naturopathic doctor
1.9 meters, which is about 6’3”; 75 kilos, which is about 165 pounds.
Acted with the theater troupe Guerrilla Will last summer
This is the complete list of hard biographical facts that I have on Willem. It takes up barely a third of a page in one of my abandoned lab notebooks. When I finish, the list is like a taunt, reality’s bitchslap. You think you fell in love with someone, and this is what you know about him? Eight things? And how would I find him with these eight things? Forget looking for a needle in a haystack. That’s easy. At least it would stand out. I’m looking for one specific needle in a needle factory.
Eight things. It’s humiliating. I stare at the page and am about to tear it out and crumple it up.
But instead, I turn the page and start writing a different list. Random things. Like the amused look on his face when I admitted I’d thought he was a kidnapper. And the way he looked at the café when he found out I was an only child and asked if I was alone. The goofy happiness as he bounded around the barge with Captain Jack. How good it felt to know that I was responsible for him looking that way. The way Paris sounded under the canal. The way it looked from the back of the bike. The way his hand felt in the crook of my hip. The fierceness in his eyes when he jumped up to help those girls in the park. The reassurance of his hand, grasping mine as we ran through the streets of Paris. The raw expression on his face at the dinner table when I’d asked him why he’d brought me there. And later, at the squat, how he looked at me and I felt so big and strong and capable and brave.
I let the memories flood me as I fill one page. Then another. And then I’m not even writing about him anymore. I’m writing about me. About all the things I felt that day, including panic and jealousy, but more about feeling like the world was full of nothing but possibility.
I fill three pages. None of what I’m writing will help me find him. But in writing, I feel good—no, not just good, but full. Right, somehow. It’s a feeling I haven’t experienced in a long, long time, and it’s this more than anything that convinces me to look for him.
The most concrete thing on the list is Guerrilla Will, so I start there. They have a bare-basics website, which gets me pretty excited—until I see how out of date it is. It’s advertising plays from two summers ago. But still, there’s a contact tab with an email address. I spend hours composing ten different emails and then finally just delete them in favor of a simple one:
Hello:
I am trying to find a Dutch guy named Willem, age 20, who performed in last summer’s run of Twelfth Night. I saw it and met him, in Stratford-upon-Avon, and went to Paris with him last August. If anyone knows where he is, please tell him that Lulu, also known as Allyson Healey, would like him to get in touch with her. This is very important.
I list all my contact info and then I pause there for a moment, imagining the ones and zeros or whatever it is that emails are made of, traveling across oceans and mountains, landing somewhere in someone’s inbox. Who knows? Maybe even his.
And then I press Send.
Thirty seconds later, my inbox chimes. Could it be? Could it be that fast? That easy? Someone knows where he is. Or maybe he’s been looking for me all this time.
My hand shakes as I go to my inbox. Only all that’s there is the message I just sent, bounced. I check the address. I send it again. It bounces again.
“Strike one,” I tell Dee before class the next day. I explain about the bounced email.
“I don’t do sports metaphors, but I’m pretty sure baseball games are generally nine innings.”
“Meaning?”
“Dig in for the long haul.”
Professor Glenny sweeps in and starts talking about Cymbeline, the play we’re about to start, and announcing last call for tickets for As You Like It before giving a brief warning to start thinking about oral presentations at the end of the year. “You can either work alone or with your partners, do a regular presentation or something more theatrical.”
“We’ll do theatrical,” Dee whispers.
“It’s the Glenny way.”
And then we look at each other as if both getting the same idea. After class, we go up to the lectern where the usual coterie of groupies are simpering.
“Well, Rosalind, here to buy your As You Like It tickets?”
I blush. “I already bought mine. I’m actually trying to get ahold of someone I lost touch with, and I don’t have very many leads, but the one I do have is through this Shakespeare troupe that I saw in Stratford-upon-Avon last year, and they have a website, but the email bounced, but I saw them do a play less than a year ago . . . ”
“In Stratford-upon-Avon?”
“Yeah. But not at a theater. It was sort of an underground thing. It was called Guerrilla Will. They performed at the canal basin. They were really good. I actually ditched the RSC’s Hamlet to watch them do Twelfth Night.”
Professor Glenny likes this. “I see. And you’ve lost a Sebastian, have you?” I gasp and I blush but then I realize he’s just referring to the play. “I have an old mate in the tourist bureau there. Guerrilla Will, you say?”
I nod.
“I’ll see what I can dig up.”
The following week, right before spring break, Professor Glenny hands me an address. “This is what my friend found. It’s from police records. Apparently your Guerrilla Will friends have a habit of performing without permits, and this is from an old arrest. Not sure how current it is.” I look at the address. It’s for a city in England called Leeds.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’re welcome. Let me know how it ends.”
That night, I print out the copy of the email I sent to Guerrilla Will but then I change my mind and write a handwritten letter to Willem.
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.
I sign Lulu and Allyson and leave all my various contact details. I put it inside an envelope and write Forward to Willem, in care of Guerrilla Will. The night before I leave for spring break, I mail it.
I spend a boring break at home. Melanie’s vacation doesn’t coincide with mine, and I both miss her and feel relieved not to have to see her. I hole up in my room and prop my old science books all around me and spend the time doing Facebook searches and Twitter searches and every imaginable social networking search, but it turns out, only having a first name is kind of a problem. Especially because Willem is a pretty common Dutch name. Still, I go through hundreds of pages, staring at pictures of all different Willems, but none of them are him.
I post a Facebook page as Lulu with pictures of Louise Brooks and of me. I change the status every day, to something only he’d understand. Do you believe in accidents of the universe? Is Nutella chocolate? Is falling in love the same as being in love? I get friend requests from New Age freaks. I get requests from perverts. I get requests from a Nutella fan club in Minnesota (who knew?). But nothing from him.
I try searching for his parents. I do combination searches: Willem, Bram, Yael and then just Bram, Yael. But without a last name, I get nothing. I search every Dutch naturopathic site I can find for a Yael but come up with nothing. I Google the name Yael, and it’s a Hebrew name. Is his Mom Jewish? Israeli? Why didn’t I think to ask him any of these questions when I had the chance? But I know why. Because when I was with him, I felt like I already knew him.
Twenty-four
Spring break ends, and in Shakespeare class we start reading Cymbeline. Dee and I are halfway through, at the really juicy part where Posthumus, Imogen’s husband, sees Iachimo with the secret bracelet that he gave Imogen and decides this is proof that she cheated on him, though of course, the bracelet was stolen by Iachimo, precisely so he could win his bet with Posthumus that he could get Imogen to cheat.
“Another jumped conclusion,” Dee says, looking at me pointedly.
“Well, he did have good reason to suspect,” I say. “Iachimo totally knew things about her, what her bedroom looked like, that she had a mole on her boob.”
“Because he spied on her when she was sleeping,” Dee says. “There was an explanation.”
“I know. I know. Just like you say there might be a good explanation for Willem disappearing. But you know, sometimes you do have accept the evidence at face value. In one day, I saw Willem flirt with, get undressed by, and get a telephone number from a minimum of three girls, not counting me. That says ‘player’ to me. And I got played.”
“For a player, boy talked a lot about falling in love.”
“Falling in love, not being in love,” I say. “And with Céline.” Though when he spoke of his parents, of being stained, I recall the look on his face, one of unmasked yearning. And then I feel the heat on my wrist, as if his saliva were still wet there.
“Céline,” Dee says, snapping his fingers. “The hottie French girl.”
“She wasn’t that hot.”
Dee rolls his eyes. “Why didn’t we think of this? What’s the name of the club she worked at? Where you left your bag?”
“I have no idea.”
“Okay. Where was it?”
“Near the train station.”
“Which train station?”
I shrug. I’ve sort of blocked it all out.
Dee grabs my laptop. “Now you’re just being ornery.” He taps away. “If you came from London, you arrived at Gare du Nord.” He pronounces it Gary du Nord.
“Aren’t you clever?”
He pulls up Google Maps and then types something in. A cluster of red flags appear. “There.”
“What?”
“Those are the nightclubs near Gare du Nord. You call them. Presumably Céline works in one of them. Find her, find him.”
“Yeah, maybe in the same bed.”
“Allyson, you just said you had to have your eyes wide open.”
“I do. I just don’t ever want to see Céline again.”
“How bad do you want to find him?” Dee asks.
“I don’t know. I guess, more than anything, I want to find out what happened.”
“All the more reason to call this Céline person.”
“So I’m supposed to call all these clubs and ask for her? You forget, I don’t speak French.”
“How hard can it be?” He stops and arranges his face into a puckered expression. “Bon lacroix monsoir oui, tres, chic chic croissant French Ho-bag.” He smirks. “See? Easy peasy lemon squeezy.”
“Is that French too?”
“No, that’s Latin. And you can ask for the other guy too, the African.”
The Giant. Him I wouldn’t mind talking to, but of course, I don’t even know his name.
“You do it. You’re better at all that than me.”
“What you on about? I studied Spanish.”
“I just mean you’re better at voices, pretending.”
“I’ve seen you do Rosalind. And you spent a day playing Lulu, and you’re currently masquerading as a pre-med student to your parents.”
I look down, pick at my nail. “That just makes me a liar.”
