The devastation caught me off guard. There’s a difference between losing something you knew you had and losing something you discovered you had. One is a disappointment. The other is truly a loss.
I didn’t realize that before. I realize it now.
Fourteen
Utrecht
On the ride back to Utrecht, I call Agnethe the Dane to see if Lulu sent her any photographs, if there had been any correspondence. But she hardly remembers who I am. It’s depressing. This day, so seared in my memory, is just another day to everyone else. And in any case, it was just one day, and it’s over now.
It’s over now with Ana Lucia, too. I can feel it, even if she can’t. When I come back, defeated, telling her soccer season is over, she is sympathetic, or maybe victorious. She’s full of kisses and cariños.
I accept them. But I know now it’s just a matter of time. In three weeks, she leaves for Switzerland. By the time she gets back, four weeks later, I will be gone. I make a mental note to get on that passport renewal.
It’s as if Ana Lucia senses all this. Because she starts pushing harder for me to join her in Switzerland. Every day, a new appeal. “Look how nice the weather is,” she says one morning as she gets ready for class. She opens her computer and reads me the weather report from Gstaad. “Sunny skies every day. Not even so cold.”
I don’t answer. Just force a smile.
“And here,” she says, clicking over to a travel site she likes and tilting the laptop toward me to show me pictures of snowy alps and painted nutcrackers. “Here it shows you all the things you can do besides skiing. You don’t have to sit at the lodge. We’re close to Lausanne or Bern. Geneva’s not even so far. We can go shopping there. It’s famous for watches. I know! I’ll buy you a watch.”
My whole body stiffens. “I already have a watch.”
“You do? I never see you wear it.”
It’s back at Bloemstraat, in my rucksack. Still ticking. I can almost hear it from here. And suddenly, three weeks feels too long.
“We should talk.” The words trip out before I know what to follow them with. Breaking up is not something I’ve done in a while. So much easier to kiss good-bye and catch a train.
“Not now,” she says, rising to apply lipstick in the mirror. “I’m already late.”
Okay. Not now. Later. Good. It will give me time to find the right words. There are always right words.
After she leaves, I get dressed, make a coffee, and sit down at her computer to check my email before I leave. The travel page she was on is still open, and I’m about to close the window when I see one of the banner ads. MEXICO!!! it screams. Outside, it’s cold and gray, but the pictures promise only warmth and sunshine.
I click on the link, and it takes me to a page listing several package holiday specials, not the kind of thing I’d ever do, but I feel warmer just looking at the beaches. And then I see some ads for trips to Cancún.
Cancún.
Where Lulu goes every year.
Where she has gone with her family to the same place every year. Her mother’s predictability, so exasperating to her, is now my best hope.
I pull up the details. Like everything from that day, they’re as fresh as wet paint. A resort fashioned like a Mayan temple. Like America behind walls with Christmas carols mariachi- style. Christmas. They went for the holidays. Christmas. Or was it New Year’s? I can just go for both!
Channeling W, I start searching for resorts in Cancún. One crystalline-water beach after the other flashes across the screen. There is no end to them, these megaresorts like Mayan fortresses and temples. She said it had some kind of river. I’d remembered wondering about that, a resort with a river. There aren’t any natural rivers running through Cancún. There are golf courses and swimming pools and diving cliffs, and waterslides. But rivers? I’m looking at the listing for Palacio Maya when I stumble across it. A lazy river, a kind of fake stream you ride on in an inflatable tube.
I narrow my search. There don’t seem to be that many resorts that look like Mayan temples and have lazy rivers. Four, that I can see. Four that Lulu might be staying at some time between Christmas and New Year’s.
Outside it’s pouring, but the sites brag that the weather in Mexico is hot, endless blue skies and sunshine. All this time, I’ve been stuck, trying to figure out where to go next. Why not here? To find her? I click over to an airline consolidator and look up the prices for two tickets to Cancún. Expensive, but then again, I can afford it.
I snap the computer shut, a list forming in my head. It seems so simple.
Get my passport.
Invite Broodje.
Buy the tickets.