“And a long story,” I add.
“It’s a long drive,” she replies.
There’s something about Kate that reminds me of Lulu. Maybe it’s just that they’re both American or how we met: during journeys, talking food.
Or maybe it’s because in a few hours, I’ll never see her again. There’s nothing to lose. So as we drive, I tell Kate the story of that day, but it’s a different version from the one I told Broodje and the boys. You play to your audience, Tor always said. Which is maybe why I can tell Kate the parts of the story that I didn’t—couldn’t—tell Broodje and the boys. “It was like she knew me,” I tell her. “Straightaway, she knew me.”
“How?”
I tell Kate about Lulu thinking I’d deserted her on the train when I’d spent too long in the café. Hysterically laughing, and then out of the blue—my glimmer of her strange honesty—telling me she’d thought I’d got off the train.
“Were you going to?” Kate asks, her eyes wide.
“No, of course not,” I answer. And I wasn’t, but the memory of it still shames me because of what I was going to do later.
“So how did she see you, exactly?”
“She said she couldn’t understand why I invited her without an ulterior motive.”
Kate laughs. “I hardly think you wanting to sleep with a pretty girl qualifies as an ulterior motive.”
I wanted to sleep with her, of course. “But that wasn’t the ulterior motive. I invited her to Paris because I didn’t want to go back to Holland that day.”
“Why not?”
My stomach lurches again. Bram, gone. Yael, all but gone. The houseboat, a signature away from gone. I force a smile. “That is a much longer story and I’m not done with this one.”
I tell Kate the double happiness story Lulu told me. About the Chinese boy traveling to take some important exam, and along the way, falling sick. About the mountain doctor taking care of him. About the doctor’s daughter telling him this strange line of verse. About the emperor who, after the boy does well on the exam, recites a mysterious line to him. About the boy immediately recognizing the line as the other half of what the girl told him, and repeating the line the girl had told him, pleasing the emperor, getting the job, going back, and marrying the girl. About double happiness.
“Green trees against the sky in the spring rain while the sky set off the spring trees in the obscuration. Red flowers dot the land in the breeze’s chase while the land colored up in red after the kiss.” That had been the couplet. As soon as Lulu told it to me, there had been something instantly familiar about it, even though I’d never heard it before, never heard the story before. Unknown and familiar. Which, by that point, was how Lulu was seeming.
I tell Kate about Lulu asking who took care of me—as if she knew the answer—and then doing it herself. Stepping between me and the skinheads. Throwing that book. Distracting them so we could get away before we got hurt. Only she got hurt. Even now, the memory of the blood on her neck from when one of the skinheads threw the bottle at her, after all these months, it makes me sick. And ashamed. I don’t tell Kate that.
“That was very brave of her,” Kate says when I tell her what Lulu did.
Saba used to say there was a difference between bravery and courage. Bravery was doing something dangerous without thinking. Courage was walking into danger, knowing full well the risks.
“No,” I tell Kate. “It was courageous.”
“You both were courageous.”
But I wasn’t. Because I tried to send Lulu back. Cowardly. And then I didn’t manage to. Cowardly. I don’t tell Kate this part either.
“So you’re here in Mexico to do what?” she asks.
I think of the boys. They think I’m here to inoculate myself. To find Lulu, sleep with her a few more times, and get on with things.
“I don’t know . . . find her. At the very least, set the record straight.”
“What record? You left a note.”
“Yes, but . . .” I almost say it. Then I stop myself.
“But what?” Kate asks.
“But . . . I didn’t come back,” I finish.
Kate looks at me for a long moment. The car starts to drift off the road before she returns her attention to driving.