Hotel Magere Brug. I know exactly where it is. I rode past it almost every day of my life. On weekends they used to serve homemade pastries in the lobby, and Broodje and I would sneak in sometimes to take some. The manager pretended not to notice.
I take her suitcase. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”
The last time I was at the boat, it was September; I got as far as the pier before I rode away. It looked so empty, so haunted, like it was mourning his loss, too, which made a certain sense because he built it. Even the clematis that Saba had planted—“because even a cloud-soaked country needs shade”—which had once run riot over the deck, had gone shriveled and brown. If Saba had been here, he would’ve cut it back. It’s what he always did when he came back in the summer and found the plants ailing in his absence.
The clematis is back now, bushy and wild, dropping purple petals all over the deck. The deck is full of other blooms, trellises, vines, arbors, pots, viny flowering things.
“This was my home,” I tell Kate. “It’s where I grew up.”
Kate was mostly quiet on the tram ride over. “It’s beautiful,” she says.
“My father built it.” I can see Bram’s winked smile, hear him announce as if to no one: I need a helper this morning. Yael would hide under the duvet. Ten minutes later, I’d have a drill in my hand. “I helped, though. I haven’t been here in a long time. Your hotel is just around the corner.”
“What a coincidence,” she says.
“Sometimes I think everything is.”
“No. Everything isn’t.” She looks at me. Then she asks, “So what’s wrong, Willem? Stage fright?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
I tell her. About getting the call this morning. About that moment in the first rehearsal, finding something new, finding something real in Orlando, and then having it all go to hell.
“Now I just want to get up there, get through it, get it over with,” I tell her. “With as few witnesses as possible.”
I expect sympathy. Or Kate’s undecipherable yet somehow resonant acting advice. Instead, I get laughter. Snorts and hiccups of it. Then she says, “You have got to be kidding me.”
I am not kidding. I don’t say anything.
She attempts to contain herself. “I’m sorry, but the opportunity of a lifetime drops into your lap—you finally get one of your glorious accidents—and you’re going to let a lousy piece of direction derail you.”
She is making it seem so slight, a bad piece of advice. But it feels like so much more. A wallop in the face, not a piece of bad direction, but a redirection. This is not the way. And just when I thought I had really found something. I try to find the words to explain this . . . this betrayal. “It’s like finding the girl of your dreams,” I begin.
“And realizing you never caught her name?” Kate finishes.
“I was going to say finding out she was actually a guy. That you had it so completely wrong.”
“That only happens in movies. Or Shakespeare. Though it’s funny you mention the girl of your dreams, because I’ve been thinking about your girl, the one you were chasing in Mexico.”
“Lulu? What does she have to do with this?”
“I was telling David about you and your story and he asked this ridiculously simple question that I’ve been obsessing about ever since.”
“Yes?”
“It’s about your backpack.”
“You’ve been obsessing about my backpack?” I make it sound like a joke, but all of a sudden, my heart has sped up. Pulled a runner. Dicked her over. I can hear Tor’s disgust, in that Yorkshire accent of hers.
“Here’s the thing: If you were just going out for coffee or croissants or to book a hotel room or whatever, why did you take your backpack, with all your things in it, with you?”
“It wasn’t a big backpack. You saw it. It was the same one I had in Mexico. I always travel light like that.” I’m talking too fast, like someone with something to hide.
“Right. Right. Traveling light. So you can move on. But you were going back to that squat, and you had to climb, if I recall, out of a second-story building. Isn’t that right?” I nod. “And you brought a backpack with you? Wouldn’t it have been easier to leave most of your things there? Easier to climb. At the very least, it would’ve been a sure sign that you intended to return.”
I was there on that ledge, one leg in, one leg out. A gust of wind, so sharp and cold after all that heat, knifed through me. Inside, I heard rustling as Lulu rolled over and wrapped herself in the tarp. I’d watched her for a moment, and as I did, this feeling had come over me stronger than ever. I’d thought, Maybe I should just wait for her to wake up. But I was already out the window and I could see a patisserie down the way.