I wait for the fist of devastation, the collapse of a year’s worth of hopes, the roar of sadness. And I do feel it. The pain of losing him. Or the idea of him. But along with that pain is something else, something quiet at first, so I have to strain for it. But when I do, I hear the sound of a door quietly clicking shut. And then the most amazing thing happens: The night is calm, but I feel a rush of wind, as if a thousand other doors have just simultaneously flung open.
I give one last glance toward Willem. Then I turn to Wolfgang. “Finished,” I say.
But I suspect the opposite is true. That really, I’m just beginning.
Thirty-nine
I wake up to bright blinking sunlight. I squint at the travel alarm. It’s almost noon. In four hours, I’m leaving. Wren has decided to stay on a few more days. There’s a bunch of weird museums she just found out about that she wants to see, one devoted to medieval torture, another to handbags, and Winston has told her that he knows someone who can teach her how to cobble shoes, which might keep her here another week. But I have three days left, and I’ve decided to go to Croatia.
I won’t get there till tonight, and I’ll have to leave first thing Monday morning to make my flight back home. So I’ll have just one full day there. But I now know what can happen it just one day. Absolutely anything.
Wren thinks I’m making a mistake. She didn’t see Willem with the redhead, and she keeps arguing that she could be anyone—his sister, for instance. I don’t tell her that Willem, like me, like Wren herself now, is an only child. All last night, she begged me to go to the party, to see how it played out. “I know where it is. Robert-Jan told me. It’s on, oh, I can’t remember the street name, but he said it means ‘belt’ in Dutch. Number one eighty-nine.”
I’d held up my hand. “Stop! I don’t want to go.”
“But just imagine,” she’d said. “What if you’d never met Willem before, and Broodje invited us to the party, and we went, and you two met there for the first time and fell in love? Maybe that’s what happens.”
It’s a nice theory. And I can’t help but wonder if that would’ve happened. Would we fall in love if we met today? Had I really fallen in love with him in the first place? Or was it just infatuation fueled by mystery?
But I’m also starting to wonder something else. If maybe the point of this crazy quest I’m on wasn’t to help me find Willem. Maybe it was to help me find someone else entirely.
I’m getting dressed when Wren opens the door, clutching a paper bag. “Hi, sleepyhead. I made you some breakfast. Or rather Winston did. He said it’s very Dutch.”
I take the bag. “Thanks.” I look Wren, who’s grinning like crazy. “Winston, huh?”
Now she’s blushing. “He just got off work and he’s going to take me for a bike ride and introduce me to his cobbler friend as soon as you leave,” she says, her grin now threatening to split her face. “And tomorrow he says I have to go to an Ajax football game with him.” She pauses to consider. “It wasn’t on my list, but you never know.”
“No, you don’t. Well, I should go soon. Let you get to your, um, cobbling.”
“But your flight’s not for ages yet.”
“That’s okay. I want to leave enough time, and I hear the airport is amazing.”
I pack up the rest of my things and go downstairs with Wren. Winston points me toward the train station.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you to the station or the airport?” Wren asks.
I shake my head. I want to see Wren ride away on the pink bike as if I’ll see her again tomorrow. She hugs me tight and then kisses me three times like the Dutch do. “Tot ziens,” she calls. “It means ‘see you later’ in Dutch, because we aren’t saying good-bye.” I swallow the lump in my throat. And then Winston gets on his big black bike and Wren gets on the little pink bike, and they pedal away.
I hoist my backpack up and make the short walk to the train station. There are trains every fifteen minutes or so to Schiphol, and I buy a ticket and a cup of tea and go sit under the clattering destination board to eat my breakfast. When I see what’s inside, I have to laugh. Because Winston has made me a hagelslag sandwich. For all our talk, I never did get to try this particular delicacy.
I take a bite. The hagelslag crunches, then melts into the butter and still-warm bread. And what’s left over tastes just like him.
All at once, I finally understand what it means for time to be fluid. Because suddenly the entire last year flows before me, condensing and expanding, so that I’m here in Amsterdam eating hagelslag, and at the same time, I’m in Paris, his hand on my hip, and at the same time, I’m on that first train to London, watching the countryside whiz by, and at the same time, I’m in the line for Hamlet. I see Willem. At the canal basin, catching my eye. On the train, his jeans still unstained, me still unstained. On the train to Paris, his thousand shades of laughter.
The destination board shuffles, and I look up at it, and as I do, imagine a different version of time. One in which Willem quits while he’s ahead. One in which he never makes that remark about my breakfast. One in which he just says good-bye on that platform in London instead of inviting me to Paris. Or one in which he never stops to talk to me in Stratford-upon-Avon.
And that’s when I understand that I have been stained. Whether I’m still in love with him, whether he was ever in love with me, and no matter who he’s in love with now, Willem changed my life. He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.
Maybe accident isn’t the right word after all. Maybe miracle is.
Or maybe it’s not a miracle. Maybe this is just life. When you open yourself up to it. When you put yourself in the path of it. When you say yes.
How can I come this far and not tell him—he, who would understand it best—that by giving me the that flyer, by inviting me to skip Hamlet, he helped me realize that it’s not to be that matters, but how to be?
How can I come this far and not be brave?
“Excuse me,” I say to a woman in a polka-dot dress and cowboy boots. “Is there a street in Amsterdam named after a belt?”
“Ceintuurbaan,” she answers. “Tram line twenty-five. Right outside the station.”
I race out of the train station and jump onto the tram, asking the driver where to get off for Ceintuurbaan number one eighty-nine. “Near Sarphatipark,” he replies. “I’ll show you.”
Twenty minutes later, I get off at the park. Inside, there’s a small playground with a large sandpit, and I go sit down under a tree to summon my bravery. A couple of children are putting the finishing touches on an elaborate sand castle, several feet high, with towers and turrets and moats.
I stand up and make my way to the building. I don’t even know for sure that he lives here, except that the feeling of rightness, it has never been stronger. There are three bells. I ring the bottom one. An intercom squawks with a woman’s voice.
“Hello,” I call. Before I say anything else, the door clicks open.
I walk inside the dark, musty hallway. A door swings open, and my heart skips a beat, but it’s not him. It’s an older woman with a yappy dog at her heels.
“Willem?” I ask her. She points a thumb up and shuts her door.
I climb the steep stairs to the second floor. There are two other flats in the building, so this could be his, or the one upstairs. So I just stand there on the doorstep for a moment, listening for sounds inside. It is quiet, save for the faint strains of music. But my heart is beating fast and strong, like a radar pinging: Yes, yes, yes.
My hand shakes a little bit as I knock, and at first the sound is faint, as if I’m knocking on a hollowed-out log. But then I tighten my grip, and I knock again. I hear his footsteps. I remember the scar on his foot. Was it on the right foot or the left? The footsteps come closer. I feel my heart speed up, in double time to those footsteps.
And then the door swings open, and he’s there.
Willem.
His tall body casts a shadow over me, just like it did that first day, that only other day, really, when we met. His eyes, those dark, dark eyes, hiding a spectrum of hidden things, they widen, and his mouth drops. I hear his gasp of breath, the shock of it all.
He just stands there, his body taking up the doorway, looking at me like I am a ghost, which I suppose I am. But if he knows anything at all about Shakespeare, it’s that the ghosts always come haunting.
I look at him as the questions and answers collide all over his face. There is so much I want to tell him. Where do I even begin?
“Hi, Willem,” I say. “My name is Allyson.”
He says nothing in response. He just stays there for a minute, looking at me. And then he steps to the side, opens the door wider, wide enough for me to walk through.
And so I do.
