“What is it?”
“Can I ask you to do something?” I’ve asked Kate so much already. But having her there? Broodje and the boys, they may not know any better. But Kate will. She can see through all the bullshit.
“Of course.”
“Will you not go tonight?”
She laughs. As if this is a joke. And then she realizes it’s not a joke “Oh,” she says, turning serious. “Are they not putting you on? Did the other Orlando’s ankle mysteriously heal?”
I shake my head. I look down and see that Kate is holding her suitcase. She literally did come straight from the airport. To see me.
“Where are you staying?” I ask Kate.
“The only place I could find at the last minute.” She pulls out a slip of paper from her bag. “Major Rug Hotel?” she says. “I have no idea how to pronounce it, let alone where it is.” She hands me the paper. “Do you know it?
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?”