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.
Eleven
After 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.”