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.”
Twelve
“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.
>“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.