She runs a finger along the top of the rim. “I have a feeling I’m long past making my first mistake.” She takes a gulp of her drink. “Aren’t you drinking?”
“I already feel drunk.”
“Here. Catch up with yourself.”
She hands me her glass and I take a sip. I taste the sour tequila that Broodje now favors, mixed with some other orange-flavored booze. “Yeah. No hangover from this. Definitely not.”
She laughs, touches my arm. “I’m not going to tell you how fantastic you were tonight. You’re probably sick of hearing it.”
“Do you ever get sick of hearing it?”
She grins. “No.” She looks away. “I know what I said earlier today, about after the show, but all the rules seem to be getting broken today. . . .” She trails off. “So really, can three weeks make much of a difference?”
Marina is sexy and gorgeous and smart. And she’s also wrong. Three weeks can make all the difference. I know that because one day can make all the difference.
“Yes,” I tell Marina. “They can.”
“Oh,” she says, sounding surprised, a little hurt. Then: “Are you with someone else?”
Tonight on that stage, it felt like I was. But that was a ghost. Shakespeare’s full of them. “No,” I tell her.
“Oh, I just saw you, with that woman. After the show. I wasn’t sure.”
Kate. The need to see her feels urgent. Because what I want is so clear to me now.
I excuse myself from Marina and poke through the flat, but there’s no sign of Kate. I go downstairs to see if the door is still propped open. It is. I bump into Mrs. Van der Meer again, out walking her dog. “Sorry about all the noise,” I tell her.
“It’s okay,” she says. She looks upstairs. “We used to have some wild parties here.”
“You lived here back when it was a squat?” I ask, trying to reconcile the middle-aged vrouw with the young anarchists I’ve seen in pictures.
“Oh, yes. I knew your father.”
“What was he like then?” I don’t know why I’m asking that. Bram was never the hard one to crack.
But Mrs. Van der Meer’s answer surprises me. “He was a bit of a melancholy young man,” she says. And then her eyes flicker up to the flat, like she’s seeing him there. “Until that mother of yours showed up.”
Her dog yanks on the leash and she sets off, leaving me to ponder how much I know, and don’t know, about my parents.
Fifty
The phone is ringing. And I’m sleeping.
I fumble for it. It’s next to my pillow.
“Hello,” I mumble.
“Willem!” Yael says in a breathless gulp. “Did I wake you?”
“Ma?” I ask. I wait to feel the usual panic but none comes. Instead, there’s something else, a residue of something good. I rub my eyes and it’s still there, floating like a mist: a dream I was having.
“I talked to Mukesh. And he worked his magic. He can get you out Monday but we have to book now. We’ll do an open-ended ticket this time. Come for a year. Then decide what to do.”
My head is hazy with lack of sleep. The party went until four. I fell asleep around five. The sun was already up. Slowly, yesterday’s conversation with my mother comes back to me. The offer she made. How much I wanted it. Or thought I did. Some things you don’t know you want until they’re gone. Other things you think want, but don’t understand you already have them.
“Ma,” I say. “I’m not coming back to India.”