I knock at it. It sounds like a hollow log. “I’ve had worse.”
“What are you, some kind of a professional adventure eater?”
“Something like that.”
“Where are you from?” She holds up a hand. “No, wait, let me guess. Say something else.”
“Something else?”
She taps a finger to her temple, then snaps her fingers. “You’re Dutch.”
“Good ear.”
“Not much of an accent, though.”
“Very good ear. I grew up speaking English.”
“Did you live in England?”
“No, it was just my mother didn’t like speaking Dutch, thought it sounded too much like German. So at home, it was English.”
She glances at the phone on the table. “Well, I suspect there is a fascinating story behind that, but I’m afraid it’ll have to remain a mystery.” She pauses. “I’m a day late already.”
“Late for what?”
“For Mérida. I was supposed to be there yesterday, but my car broke down, and, well, it’s been a cascading comedy of errors. What about you? Where are you headed?”
I pause. “Mérida—if you’ll give me a ride.”
“I wonder what would piss off David more—driving alone or giving a ride to strangers.”
“Willem.” I hold out my hand. “Now I’m not a stranger.”
She narrows her eyes at my outstretched hand. “You’ll need to do better than that.”
“Sorry. I’m Willem de Ruiter.” I reach into my backpack for my stiff new passport and hand it over. “Here’s some identification.”
She flips through it. “Nice picture, Willem. I’m Kate. Kate Roebling. And I’m not showing you my passport because the picture is very unfortunate. You’ll just have to trust me on that.”
She smiles and slides my passport back across the table. “Okay, then, Willem de Ruiter, traveling adventure-eater. The garage just opened so I’m grabbing the car. Assuming it’s actually ready, I’ll be hitting the road in about a half hour. Does that give you time to get packed and ready to go?”
I point to my rucksack on the floor next to me. “I’m always packed and ready to go.”
Kate picks me up in a sputtering Volkswagen jeep, the seats torn, the foam stuffing coming out. “This is fixed?” I ask, climbing in.
>A kiss for you.
Moments before I’d kissed her for the first time, Lulu had said another one of her strange things: I escaped danger. She was emphatic about it, her eyes had a fire to them, just as they had when she’d come between me and the skinheads. It had seemed a peculiar thing to say. Until I’d kissed her. And then I felt it, as visceral and all-encompassing as the water around me now. Escaping danger. I’m not sure what danger she’d been referring to. All I knew was that kissing Lulu made me feel relief, like I’d landed somewhere after a long journey.
I turn onto my back, looking at the canvas of a star-spangled sky.
“Tabula rasa . . . time to hacer borrón y cuenta nueva, wipe the board clean,” the singer chants.
Wipe the board clean? I feel like my board is too clean, perpetually wiped bare. What I want is the opposite: a messy scrawl, constellations of indelible things that can’t ever be washed away.
She must be here. Maybe not at this party, or on this beach, or at the resorts I visited, but somewhere here. Swimming in this water, the same water I’m in now.
But it’s a big ocean. It’s an even bigger world. And maybe we’ve gotten as close as we’re supposed to get.