“Well it’s obviously not that important,” Bex says. “Otherwise whoever wrote it would have known where to find you.”
Bex is wrong but she’s also right. Because Lulu should’ve known where to find me. And then I stop myself. Lulu. After all this time? The letter’s more likely from a tax collector.
“What was all that about?” Max asks after Bex and Matthias have gone.
I shake my head. “I’m not sure.” I look across the square. “Do you mind? I need to duck into an Internet café for a second.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll grab a coffee.”
I log onto my old email account. There’s not much there but junk. I go back to the spring, when it got infected with that virus, and there’s a pocket of nothing. Four weeks of messages that have just vanished. I try the bulk bin. Nothing there. Out of habit before I sign off, I scroll back for the emails from Bram and Saba, relieved to find them still there. Tomorrow, I’m going to print them out and also forward them to my new account. In the meantime, I change the settings on my old account to forward all new mail to my current address.
I check my current email account, even though Tor wouldn’t have known about it because I only told a handful of people the new address. I search the inbox, the junk mail. There’s nothing.
I send Skev a quick note, asking him to ring me. Then I send a note to Tor as well, asking about the letter, what it said, where she sent it. Knowing Tor, I won’t get a response until the fall. By that point, it’ll have been more than a year since I met Lulu. Any sane person would say it’s too late. It already felt too late that first day, when I woke up in the hospital. But even so, I’ve kept looking.
I’m still looking.
Forty
The tech rehearsal is a monster. Aside from lines, plenty of which get forgotten in the new environment, everything has to be relearned and reblocked on the amphitheater stage. All day long, I stand behind Jeroen, Max behind Marina, as they fumble through their various scenes. Once again we’re like their shadows. Except none of us has a shadow because there’s no sun today, just a steady drizzle that has put everyone in a sour mood. Jeroen hasn’t even made a joke about his malady of the day.
“It makes you wonder whose brilliant idea this was,” Max says. “Outdoor bloody Shakespeare. In Holland, where English isn’t even the language and it rains all the time.”
“You forget, the Dutch are the eternal optimists,” I tell her.
“Is that true?” she asks me. “I thought they were the eternal pragmatists.”
I don’t know. Maybe I’m the optimist. I checked my email when I got back from the Paradiso last night and again before I left this morning for rehearsal. There was an email from Yael, and a forwarded joke from Henk, and a bunch of the usual junk, but nothing from Skev or Tor. What exactly did I expect?
I’m not even sure what there is to be optimistic about. If the letter is from her, what’s to say it’s not a long-distance piss off? She’d have every right.
We break for lunch and I check my phone. Broodje’s texted to say he’s heading off on some wooden sailing boat and he’ll be incommunicado for a few days, but he’ll be back in Amsterdam next week. Daniel’s also texted to let me know he’s arrived safely in Brazil, and forwarded a photo of Fabiola’s belly. Tomorrow, I vow, I’m getting a phone that accepts pictures.
Petra forbids mobile phones in rehearsal. But when she’s talking to Jeroen, I put my ringer to vibrate and slip my phone into my pocket anyway. Optimist indeed.
Around five o’clock, the drizzle lets up and Linus resumes the rehearsal. We’re having trouble with the light cues, which we can’t see. Because the show starts at dusk and goes into the night, the lights come up halfway through, so tomorrow’s rehearsal will be from two in the afternoon to midnight, so we can make sure the second half, the in-darkness part, is properly lit.
At six, my phone vibrates. I pull it out of my pocket. Max widens her eyes at me. “Cover me,” I whisper, and scuttle off to the wings.
It’s Skev.
“Hey, thanks for getting back to me,” I whisper.
“Where are you?” he asks, his voice dropped to a whisper, too.
“Amsterdam? You?”
“Back in Brighton. Why are we whispering?”
“I’m in a rehearsal.”
“For what?”
“Shakespeare.”
“In Amsterdam. Fuck, that’s cool. I gave that shit up. I’m working at a Starbucks now.”
“Oh, shit, sorry.”