Just One Year

Forty-two

AUGUST

Amsterdam

The phone is ringing. And I’m sleeping. Two things that shouldn’t be happening at the same time. I open my eyes, fumble for the phone, but the ringing continues, crying out into the still night.

A light flicks on. Broodje, naked as a newborn, stands in front of me squinting in the yellow light of the lamp, and the lemony walls of the nursery. He holds out my phone. “It’s for you,” he mumbles, and then he flicks off the light and sleepwalks back to bed.

I put the phone to my ear and I hear the exact four words you don’t want to hear on the other end of a middle-of-the-night phone call.

“There’s been an accident.”

My stomach plummets and I hear a whistling my ears as I wait to hear who. Yael. Daniel. Fabiola. The baby. Some subtraction in my family that I can no longer bear.

But the voice continues talking and it takes me a minute to slow my breathing and hear what is being said. Bicycle and moto and ankle and fracture and performance and emergency and it’s then that I understand that it’s not that kind of accident.

“Jeroen?” I say at last, though who else can it be? I want to laugh. Not because of the irony, but because of the relief.

“Yes, Jeroen,” Linus snaps. Jeroen the invincible, felled by a drunken moto driver. Jeroen insistent he can go on anyhow, with his foot in a cast, and maybe he can, for next weekend’s performances. But this weekend’s? “We might have to cancel,” Linus says. “We need you at the theater as soon as possible. Petra wants to see what you can do.”

I rub my eyes. Light is peeking through the shades. It’s not the middle of the night after all. Linus tells me to be at the theater—the actual theater, not the stage in Vondelpark—at eight.

“It’s going to be a long day,” he warns.

• • •

Petra and Linus hardly look up when I arrive at the theater. A sloe-eyed Marina offers a tired, sympathetic look. She’s holding a roll and breaks off half and hands it to me. “Thank you,” I say. “I didn’t have time to eat.”

“I figured as much,” she says.

I sit down on the edge of the stage, alongside her. “So what happened?”

She arches her eyebrow. “Karma happened.” She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “I know it’s his joke to brag about his perfect record, and I’ve heard him do it many times before and nothing’s come of it.” She pauses to dust the crumbs off her lap. “But you don’t laugh at fate like that without fate eventually having the last laugh. The only problem is, it doesn’t just affect him. It might shut down the remaining run.”

“Shut it down? I thought it was just tonight’s.”

“Jeroen won’t be able to perform either of this weekend’s performances, and even if he can actually manage it in the boot cast he’s apparently going to have to wear for the next six weeks, they’ll have to reblock the whole thing. Plus, there are questions of insurance.” She sighs. “It might be easier to just cancel.”

My shoulders slump with the weight of that statement. So it falls to me. “I think I’m starting to believe in the Mackers curse,” I tell Marina.

She looks at me, the worry in her eyes mixed with sympathy. She seems about to say something when Petra orders me to the stage.

Linus looks miserable. But Petra, she of the thousand tantrums, is actually calm, cigarette smoke swirling around her like a statue on fire. It takes me a minute to realize she’s not calm. She’s resigned. She’s already written tonight off.

I climb onto the stage. I take a breath. “What can I do?” I ask her.

“We have the cast on standby for a full run-through later,” Linus answers. “Right now, we’d like to run your scenes with Marina. See how those go.”

Petra stubs out her cigarette. “We’ll skip ahead to Act One, Scene Two with Rosalind. I will read Celia. Linus will read Le Beau and the Duke. Let’s start just before the fight with Le Beau’s line.”

“‘Monsieur the challenger, the princesses call for you?’” Linus asks. Petra nods.

“I attend them with all respect and duty,” I say, jumping right in with Orlando’s next line.

There’s a moment of surprise as they all look at me

“Young man, have you challenged Charles the wrestler?” Marina asks as Rosalind.

“No, fair princess; he is the general challenger: I come but in, as others do, to try with him the strength of my youth,” I reply, not boastfully, as Jeroen does, but tempering the bravado with a little uncertainty, which I somehow now know is what Orlando must feel.

I’ve said these words hundreds of times in readings with Max, but they were just lines in a script, and I never stopped to figure out what it all meant because I never really had to. But just as Sebastian’s monologue came alive during my audition months ago, the words seem charged with meaning all of a sudden. They become a language I know.

We go back and forth and then I get to Orlando’s line: “I shall do my friends no wrong, for I have none to lament me, the world no injury, for in it I have nothing. ” As I say the words, I feel a tiny catch of emotion in the back of my throat. Because I know what he means. For a minute, I think to swallow the emotion down, but I don’t. I breathe into it, letting it carry me through the scene.

I’m feeling loose and good as we move onto the fight scene, in which I pantomime fighting an invisible opponent. I know this part well. Orlando wins the fight, but he loses anyway. He is cast out of the duke’s kingdom and warned that his brother wants to kill him.

We reach the end of the scene. Petra, Linus, even Marina, they all stare at me, not saying a thing.

“Shall we continue?” I ask. “On to Act Two?” They nod. I run that scene with Linus reading the part of Adam, and when I finish that, Petra clears her throat and asks me to take it from the beginning, Orlando’s opening monologue, the one I flubbed so badly during my callback.

I don’t flub it this time. When I finish, there is more silence. “So you’re off book, that is clear,” Linus says finally. “And the blocking?”

“Yes, that too,” I say.

They look so incredulous. What do they think I’ve been doing all this time?

Warming a seat, comes my own answer. And maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised by their surprise. Because isn’t that exactly what I’d thought I’d been doing, too?

• • •

Petra and Linus excuse Marina and me. They have some things to discuss. If they decide to proceed with tonight’s performance, there will be an all-cast rehearsal at the theater at noon, and I’ll have to do an additional tech run-through at the amphitheater later in the day with just Linus.

“Sit tight. Keep your phone on,” Linus says and he pats my back and gives me a look that’s almost fatherly. “We’ll speak soon.”

Marina and I head to a nearby café for coffee. It’s raining, and inside the windows are fogged up. We sit down at a table. I rub a circle of condensation off the window. Across the canal is the bookstore where I first found the copy of Twelfth Night. It’s just opening up for the day. I tell Marina about the flat tire and stopping at the shop, the strange chain of events that led to me being Jeroen’s understudy, and now possibly, playing Orlando.

“None of that has anything to do with that performance you just gave.” She shakes her head and smiles, a private smile, and it’s this, more than anything else, that makes me stop feeling like a member of the shadow cast. “You were holding out on us.”

I don’t know how to answer. Maybe I’ve been holding out on myself, too.

“You should tell him,” she says, gesturing to the bookstore. “The guy who sold you the book and told you about the play. If you go on, you should tell him it’s partly because of him.”

If I go on, there are lots of people I’ll have to tell.

“Wouldn’t you want to know?” Marina continues. “That in some little way, something random you did had such an impact on someone’s life? What do they call that? The Butterfly Effect?”

I watch the man open the bookstore. I should tell him. Though the person I really want to tell, the person who is somehow intricately tied up in all this, who has really led me to this, I can’t tell.

“While we’re confessing,” Marina says, “I should tell you that I’ve been a little intrigued by you from the start, this mysterious actor who keeps to himself, whom no one has ever heard of, but who is good enough to get cast as the understudy.”

Good enough? That surprises me. I’d thought it was the opposite.

“I have a strict policy of no showmances,” she continues. “Nikki keeps saying you can be an exception because you’re an understudy and not in the show, but now that you maybe are I’m even more intrigued.” She gives me that private smile again. “Either we close tonight or we close in three weeks, but either way, after it’s over maybe we can spend some time together?”

That surge of longing for Lulu is still in my bloodstream, like a drug wearing out its half life. Marina is not Lulu. But Lulu is not even Lulu. And Marina is amazing. Who knows what might happen?

I’m about to tell her yes, after we close, I’d like that, but I’m interrupted by the ringing of my phone. She glances at the number and smiles at me. “That’s your fate calling.”

Forty-three

So much to do. There’s an all-cast rehearsal at noon. Then a tech run-through. I need to run back to the flat, grab some things, tell the boys. And Daniel. Yael.

Broodje is only waking up. Breathlessly, I tell him the news. By the time I’ve finished, he’s already on his phone, calling the boys.

“Did you tell your ma?” he asks when he hangs up.

“I’m calling her now.”

I calculate the time difference. It’s not quite five o’clock in Mumbai, so Yael will still be working. I send her an email instead. While I’m at it, I send one to Daniel. At the last minute, I send one to Kate, telling her about Jeroen’s accident, inviting her to tonight’s show if she’s at all in the area. I even invite her to stay with me and give her the address of the flat.

I’m about to log off when I do a quick scan of my inbox. There’s a new message from an unfamiliar address and I think it’s junk. Until I see the subject line: Letter.

My hand’s shaking a bit as I click on the message. It’s from Tor. Or relayed from Tor via some Guerrilla Will player who doesn’t abide by the email ban as she does.

Hi Willem:

Tor asked me to email you to say that she ran into Bex last week and Bex told her that you hadn’t gotten that letter. Tor was pretty upset because the letter was important and she’d gone to a lot of trouble to try to get it to you. She wanted you to know it was from a girl you’d met in Paris who was looking for you because you’d dicked her over and pulled a runner. (Tor’s words, not mine.) She said that you ought to know that actions have consequences. Again, Tor’s words. Don’t shoot the messenger. You know how she is.

Cheers! Josie

I sink down onto my bed as very different emotions battle it out. Dicked her over, pulled a runner. I feel Tor’s anger. And Lulu’s too. Shame and regret well up but then just stop there, held at bay by some invisible force. Because she’s looking for me. Lulu is looking for me, too. Or she was. Maybe just to tell me to piss off. But she was looking for me like I was looking for her.

I don’t know what to feel as I wander into the kitchen. It’s all just too much for one day.

I find Broodje cracking eggs into a frying pan. “Want an uitsmijter?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“You should eat something. Keep your strength up.”

“I have to go.”

“Now? Henk and W are on their way over. They want to see you. Will you be around at all before your big debut?”

The rehearsal starts at noon and will take at least three hours, and then Linus said I’d have a break before I go for a run-through at the amphitheater at six. “I can probably get back here around four or five?”

“Great. We should have the party plans well under way by then.”

“Party plans?”

“Willy, this is big.” He pauses to look at me. “After the year you’ve had—the years you’ve had—we should celebrate this.”

“Okay, fine,” I say, still half dazed.

I go back into my room to pack up a change of clothes for under the costume, shoes to wear. I’m about to leave when I see Lulu’s watch sitting on my shelf. I hold it in my hand. After all this time, it’s still ticking. I hold it in my hand a moment longer. Then I slip it into my pocket.

Forty-four

At the theater, the rest of the cast has assembled. Max comes up behind me. “I’ve got your back,” she whispers.

I’m about to ask her what she means, and then I see what she means. For the better part of three months, I have been mostly invisible to many of these people, a shadow-cast member. And now, the spotlight is glaring and there’s no safety in the shadows anymore. People are looking at me with a particular mix of suspicion and condescension, a familiar feeling from when I was traveling and walked through certain neighborhoods where my kind didn’t tend to wander. As I did when I was traveling, I just act like I don’t notice and carry on. Soon enough Petra is clapping her hands, gathering us together.

“We have no time to lose,” Linus says. “We will do a modified run-through, skipping over scenes that Orlando is not in.”

“So why did you call all of us in?” mutters Geert, who plays the swing roles of one of Frederick’s men and Silvius; he has almost no scenes with Orlando.

“I know. Sitting around watching other people act is such a bloody waste of time,” Max says, her voice so sincere that it takes Geert a few seconds to have the good sense to look chastened.

Max gives me a crooked smile. I’m glad she’s here.

“I called everyone in,” Petra says, with an exaggerated patience that lets you know she’s reaching the end of her supply, “so you could all accustom yourself to the different rhythms of a new actor, and so we could all of us help Willem ensure that the transition between him and Jeroen is as seamless as possible. Ideally, you won’t even be able to tell the difference.”

Max rolls her eyes at this and once again I’m glad she’s here.

“Now from the top, please,” Linus says, tapping his clipboard. “There’s no set and no marks so just do your best.”

As soon as I step onto the stage, I feel relieved. This is where I’m meant to be. In Orlando’s head. As we move through the play, I discover more things about Orlando. I discover how key that first scene when he and Rosalind meet is. It’s just for a few moments, but they see something in each other, recognize something. And that the spark sustains the passion, for both of them, for the rest of the play. They don’t see each other—knowingly see each other—again until the very end.

Such a dance that Shakespeare wrote into a handful of pages of text. Orlando’s about to fight a man far stronger than he is, but he peacocks in front of Rosalind and Celia to impress them. He’s scared, he must be, but instead of showing it, he bluffs. He flirts. “Let your fair eyes and gentle wishes go with me to my trial,” he says.

The world pivots on moments. And in this play, it’s the moment when Rosalind says, “The little strength that I have, I would it were with you.”

That one line. It cracks open his facade. It reveals what’s underneath. Rosalind sees Orlando. He sees her. That’s the whole play, right there.

I feel the lines like I haven’t before, like I’m truly understanding Shakespeare’s intentions. I feel as if there really was a Rosalind and an Orlando and I’m here to represent them. It isn’t acting in a play. It goes back further than that. It’s much bigger than me.

“Ten-minute break,” Linus calls at the end of Act One. Everyone heads out for a smoke or a coffee. But I am reluctant to leave the stage.

“Willem,” Petra calls to me. “A word.”

She’s smiling, which she rarely does, and at first I read it for pleasure, because isn’t that what a smile communicates?

The theater empties out. It’s just the two of us now. Not even Linus. “I want to tell you how impressed I am,” she begins.

Inside I’m a little boy grinning on a birthday morning, about to get the presents. But I try to keep my face professional.

“With so little experience, to know the language so well. We were taken with your ease with the language at your audition, but this . . .” She smiles again, only now I notice that it looks a bit like a dog baring its fangs. “And the blocking, you have it cold. Linus tells me that you even learned some of the fight choreography.”

“I observed,” I tell her. “I paid attention.”

“Excellent. That’s just what you needed to do.” And there’s that smile again. Only now do I begin to doubt it reflects any pleasure. “I spoke to Jeroen today,” she continues.

I don’t say anything but my gut twists. All this, and now Jeroen is going to lumber back with his cast.

“He’s terribly embarrassed by what happened, but most of all he’s disappointed to have let down his company.”

“There’s no one to blame. He was in an accident,” I say.

“Yes. Of course. An accident. And he very much wants to be back for the last two weeks of the season and we will do our best to adapt to meet his needs, because that is what you do when you are part of a cast. Do you understand?”

I nod, even though I don’t really understand what she’s on about.

“I understand what you were trying to do up there with your Orlando.”

Your Orlando. Something about the way she says that makes me feel like it won’t be mine for much longer.

“But the role of the understudy is not to bring his own interpretation to the part,” she continues. “It is to play the part as the actor you’re replacing played it. So in effect, you aren’t playing Orlando. You are playing Jeroen Gosslers playing Orlando.”

But Jeroen’s Orlando is all wrong, I want to say. It’s all machismo and prancing and no revealing; and without vulnerability, Rosalind wouldn’t love him, and if Rosalind doesn’t love him, why should the audience care? I want to say: Let me do this. Let me do it right this time.

But I don’t say any of that. And Petra just stares at me. Then, finally she asks: “Do you think you can manage that?”

Petra smiles again. How foolish of me—of all people—not to recognize her smile for what it was. “We can still cancel for this weekend,” she says, her voice soft, the threat clear. “Our star has had an accident. No one would fault us.”

Something given, something taken away. Does it always have to work like that?

The cast starts to drift back into the theater, the ten-minute break over, ready to get back to work, to make this happen. When they see me and Petra talking, they go quiet.

“Are we understood?” she asks, her voice so friendly it’s almost singsong.

I look at the cast again. I look at Petra. I nod. We’re understood.

Forty-five

When Linus releases us for the afternoon, I bolt for the door. “Willem,” Max calls.

“Willem,” Marina calls behind her.

I wave them off. I have to be fitted for my costume and then I have only a couple hours until Linus will meet me to go through my marks on the amphitheater stage. As for what Marina and Max have to say: if it’s compliments of my performance, so Jeroen-like even Petra was impressed, I don’t want to hear it. If it’s questions about why I’m playing it like this, when I played it so differently before, then I really don’t want to hear it.

“I have to go,” I tell them. “I’ll see you tonight.”

They look wounded, each in their own way. But I just walk away from them.

Back at the flat, I find W, Henk, and Broodje busy at work, pages of yellow pad on the coffee table. “That’s Femke in,” Broodje is saying. “Hey, it’s the star.”

Henk and W start to congratulate me. I just shake my head. “What’s all this?” I gesture to the project on the table.

“Your party,” W says.

“My party?”

“The one we’re throwing tonight,” Broodje says.

I sigh. I forgot all about that. “I don’t want a party.”

“What do you mean you don’t want a party?” Broodje asks. “You said it was okay.”

“Now it’s not. Cancel it.”

“Why? Aren’t you going on?”

“I’m going on.” I go into my room. “No party,” I call.

“Willy,” Broodje yells after me.

I slam the door, lie down on the bed. I close my eyes and try to sleep, but that’s not happening. I sit up and flip through one of Broodje’s copies of Voetbal International but that’s not happening either. I toss it back on my bookshelf. It lands next to a large manila envelope. The package of photos I unearthed from the attic last month.

I open the envelope, thumb through the pictures. I linger on the one of me and Yael and Bram from my eighteenth birthday. It’s like an ache, how much I miss them. How much I miss her. I’m so tired of missing things I don’t have.

I pick up the phone, not even calculating the time difference.

She answers straight away. And just like that time before, I’m at a loss for words. But not Yael. Not this time.

“What’s wrong? Tell me.”

“Did you get my email?”

“I haven’t checked it. Is something wrong?”

She sounds panicked. I should know better. Out-of-the-blue phone calls. They require reassurance. “It’s nothing like that.”

“Nothing like what?”

“Like before. I mean, nobody is sick, though someone did break an ankle.” I tell her about Jeroen, about my taking on his part.

“But shouldn’t this make you happy?” she asks.

I thought it would make me happy. It did make me so happy this morning. Hearing about Lulu’s letter made me happy this morning. But now that’s worn off and all I feel is her recrimination. How far the pendulum can swing in one day. You’d think I’d know that by now. “It appears not.”

She sighs. “But Daniel said you seemed so energized.”

“You spoke to Daniel? About me?”

“Several times. I asked his advice.”

“You asked Daniel for advice?” Somehow this is even more shocking than her asking him about me.

“I wondered if he thought I should ask you to come back here.” She pauses. “To live with me.”

“You want me to come back to India?”

“If you want to. You might act here. It seemed to go well for you. And we could find a bigger flat. Something big enough for both of us. But Daniel thought I should hold off. He thought you seemed to have found something.”

“I haven’t found anything. And you might’ve asked me.” It comes out so bitter.

She must hear it, too. But her voice stays soft. “I am asking you, Willem.”

And I realize she is. After all this time. Tears well up in my eyes. I’m grateful, in that small moment, for the thousands of kilometers that separate us.

“How soon could I come?” I ask.

There’s a pause. Then she gives the answer I need: “As soon as you want.”

The play. I’ll have to do it this weekend, and then Jeroen will come back or I can quit. “Monday?”

“Monday?” She sounds only a little bit surprised. “I’ll have to ask Mukesh what he can do.”

Monday. It’s in three days. But what is there to stay for? The flat is finished. Soon enough Daniel and Fabiola will be back with the baby, and there won’t be room for me.

“It’s not too soon?” I ask.

“It’s not too soon,” she says. “I’m just grateful it’s not too late.”

There’s a hitch in my throat and I can’t speak. But I don’t need to. Because Yael starts speaking. In torrents, apologizing for keeping me at arm’s length, telling me what Bram always said, that it wasn’t me, it was her, Saba, her childhood. All the things I already knew but just didn’t really understand until now.

“Ma, it’s okay.” I stop her.

“It’s not, though,” she says.

But it is. Because I understand all the ways of trying to escape, how sometimes you escape one prison only to find you’ve built yourself a different one.

It’s a funny thing, because I think that my mother and I may finally be speaking the same language. But somehow, now words don’t seem as necessary.

Forty-six

I hang up the phone with Yael, feeling as though someone has opened a window and let the air in. This is how it is with traveling. One day, it all seems hopeless, lost. And then you take a train or get a phone call, and there’s a whole new map of options opening up. Petra, the play, it had seemed like something, but maybe it was just the latest place the wind blew me. And now it’s blowing back to India. Back to my mother. Where I belong.

I’m still holding the envelope of photos. Once again, I forgot to ask Yael about them. I look at the one of Saba and mystery girl and realize now why she looked familiar to me the first time I saw her. With her dark hair and playful smile and bobbed hair, she looks quite a bit like Louise Brooks, this . . . I grab the newspaper clipping . . . this Olga Szabo. Who was she? Saba’s girlfriend? Was she Saba’s one that got away?

I’m not quite sure what to do with them now. The safest thing would be to put them back in the attic, but that feels a little like imprisoning them. I could make copies of them and take the originals with me, but they still might get lost.

I stare at the picture of Saba. I flip to one of Yael. I think of the impossible life those two had together because Saba loved her so much and tried so hard to keep her safe. I’m not sure it’s possible to simultaneously love something and keep it safe. Loving someone is such an inherently dangerous act. And yet, love, that’s where safety lives.

I wonder if Saba understood this. After all, he’s the one who always said: The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.

Forty-seven

It’s half past four. I’m not due to meet Linus until six for a quick tech run through before the curtain. Out in the lounge, I hear Broodje and the boys. I don’t want to face them. I can’t imagine telling them I’m going back to India in three days.

I leave my phone on the bed and slip out the door, saying good-bye to the boys. Broodje gives me such a mournful look. “Do you even want us to go tonight?” he asks.

I don’t. Not really. But I can’t be that cruel. Not to him. “Sure,” I lie.

Downstairs, I bump into my neighbor Mrs. Van Der Meer, who’s on her way out to walk her dog. “Looks like we’re getting some sun finally,” she tells me.

“Great,” I say, though this is one time I’d prefer rain. People will stay away in the rain.

But, sure enough, the sun is fighting its way through the stubborn cloud cover. I make my way over to the little park across the street. I’m almost through the gates when I hear someone calling my name. I keep going. There are a thousand Willems. But the name gets louder. And then it yells in English. “Willem, is that you?”

I stop. I turn around. It can’t be.

But it is. Kate.

“Jesus Christ, thank God!” she says, running up to me. “I’ve been calling you and there’s no answer and then I came over but your stupid bell doesn’t work. Why didn’t you pick up?”

It feels like I sent her that email a year ago. From a different world. I’m embarrassed by it now, to have asked her to come all this way. “I left it in the flat.”

“Good thing I saw your dog-walking neighbor and she said she thought you went this way. It’s like one of your little accidents.” She laughs. “It’s a day of them. Because your email came at the most serendipitous moment. David was intent on dragging me to the most hideous sounding avant-garde Medea in Berlin tonight and I was desperately trying to find an excuse not to go, and then this morning I got your email so I came here instead. And I was on the plane when I realized I had no idea where you were performing. And you didn’t answer your phone and I got a little panicky, so I thought I’d track you down. But now here we are and everything’s good.” She exaggeratedly wipes a hand across her brow. “Phew!”

“Phew,” I say weakly.

Kate’s radar goes up. “Or maybe not phew.”

“Perhaps not.”

“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?”

“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.

I’d landed heavily, in a puddle, rainwater sloshing around my feet. When I’d looked back up at the window, the white curtain flapping in the gusty breeze, I’d felt both sadness and relief, the oppositional tug of heaviness and lightness, one lifting me up, one pushing me down. I understood then, Lulu and I had started something, something I’d always wanted, but also something I was scared of getting. Something I wanted more of. And, also, something I wanted to get away from. The truth and its opposite.

I set off for the patisserie not quite knowing what to do, not quite knowing if I should go back, stay another day, but knowing if I did, it would break all this wide open. I bought the croissants, still not knowing what to do. And then I turned a corner and there were the skinheads. And in a twisted way, I was relieved: They would make the decision for me.

Except as soon as I woke up in that hospital, unable to remember Lulu, or her name, or where she was, but desperate to find her, I understood that it was the wrong decision.

“I was coming back,” I tell Kate. But there’s a razor of uncertainty in my voice, and it cuts my deception wide open.

“You know what I think, Willem?” Kate says, her voice gentle. “I think acting, that girl, it’s the same thing. You get close to something and you get spooked, so you find a way to distance yourself.”

In Paris, the moment when Lulu had made me feel the safest, when she had stood between me and the skinheads, when she had taken care of me, when she became my mountain girl, I’d almost sent her away. That moment, when we’d found safety, I’d looked at her, the determination burning in her eyes, the love already there, improbably after just one day. And I felt it all—the wanting and the needing—but also the fear because I’d seen what losing this kind of thing could do. I wanted to be protected by her love, and to be protected from it.

I didn’t understand then. Love is not something you protect. It’s something you risk.

“You know the irony about acting?” Kate muses. “We wear a thousand masks, are experts at concealment, but the one place it’s impossible to hide is on stage. So no wonder you’re freaked out. And Orlando, well now!”

She’s right, again. I know she is. Petra didn’t do anything today except give me an excuse to pull another runner. But the truth of it is I didn’t really want to pull a runner that day with Lulu. And I don’t want to pull one now, either.

“What’s the worst that happens if you do it your way tonight?” Kate asks.

“She fires me.” But if she does, it’ll be my action that decides it. Not my inaction. I start to smile. It’s tentative, but it’s real.

Kate matches mine with a big American version. “You know what I say: Go big or go home.”

I look at the boat; it’s quiet, but the garden is so lush and well-tended in a way that it never was with us. It is a home, not mine, but someone else’s now.

Go big or go home. I heard Kate say that before and didn’t quite get it. But I understand it now, though I think on this one, Kate has it wrong. Because for me, it’s not go big or go home. It’s go big and go home.

I need to do one to do the other.

Forty-eight

Backstage. It’s the usual craziness, only I feel strangely calm. Linus hustles me to the makeshift dressing room where I change out of my street clothes into Orlando’s clothes, hastily altered to fit me. I put on my makeup. I fold my clothes into the lockers behind the stage. My jeans, my shirt, Lulu’s watch. I hold it in my hand one second longer, feel the ticking vibrate against my palm, and then I put it in the locker.

Linus gathers us into a circle. There are vocal exercises. The musicians tune their guitars. Petra barks last-minute direction, about finding my light and keeping the focus and the other actors supporting me, and just doing my best. She is giving me a piercing, worried look.

Linus calls five minutes and puts on his headset, and Petra walks away. Max has come backstage for tonight’s performance and is sitting on a three-legged stool in the wings. She doesn’t say anything, but just looks at me and kisses two fingers and holds them up in the air. I kiss the same two on my hand and hold them up to her.

“Break a leg,” someone whispers in my ear. It’s Marina, come up behind me. Her arms quickly encircle me from behind as she kisses me somewhere between my ear and my neck. Max catches this and smirks.

“Places!” Linus calls. Petra is nowhere to be seen. She disappears before curtain and won’t reappear until the show is over. Vincent says she goes somewhere to pace, or smoke, or disembowel kittens.

Linus grabs my wrist. “Willem,” he says. I spin to look at him. He gives a small squeeze and nods. I nod back. “Musicians, go!” Linus commands into his headset.

The musicians start to play. I take my place at the side of stage.

“Light cue one, go,” Linus says.

The lights go up. The audience hushes.

Linus: “Orlando, go!”

I hesitate a moment. Breathe, I hear Kate say. I take a breath.

My heart hammers in my head. Thud, thud, thud. I close my eyes and can hear the ticking of Lulu’s watch; it’s as if I’m still wearing it. I stop and listen to them both before I walk onto the stage.

And then time just stops. It is a year and a day. One hour and twenty-four. It is time, happening, all at once.

The last three years solidify into this one moment, into me, into Orlando. This bereft young man, missing a father, without a family, without a home. This Orlando, who happens upon this Rosalind. And even though these two have known each other only moments, they recognize something in each other.

“The little strength that I have, I would it were with you,” Rosalind says, cracking it all wide open.

Who takes care of you? Lulu asked, cracking me wide open.

“Wear this for me,” Marina says as Rosalind, handing me the prop chain from around her neck.

I’ll be your mountain girl and take care of you, Lulu said, moments before I took the watch from her wrist.

Time is passing. I know it must be. I enter the stage, I exit the stage. I make my cues, hit my marks. The sun dips across the sky and then dances toward the horizon and the stars come out, the floodlights go on, the crickets sing. I sense it happening as I drift above it somehow. I am only here, now. This moment. On this stage. I am Orlando, giving myself to Rosalind. And I am Willem, too, giving myself to Lulu, in a way that I should’ve done a year ago, but couldn’t.

“You should ask me what time o’ day: there’s no clock in the forest,” I say to my Rosalind.

You forget, time doesn’t exist anymore. You gave it to me, I said to my Lulu.

I feel the watch on my wrist that day in Paris; I hear it ticking in my head now. I can’t tell them apart, last year, this year. They are one and the same. Then is now. Now is then.

“I would not be cured, youth,” my Orlando tells Marina’s Rosalind.

“I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind,” Marina replies.

I’ll take care of you, Lulu promised.

“By my troth, and in good earnest, and so God mend me, and by all pretty oaths that are not dangerous,” Marina’s Rosalind says.

I escaped danger, Lulu said.

We both did. Something happened that day. It’s still happening. It’s happening up here on this stage. It was just one day and it’s been just one year. But maybe one day is enough. Maybe one hour is enough. Maybe time has nothing at all to do with it.

“Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love,” my Orlando tells Rosalind.

Define love, Lulu had demanded. What would “being stained” look like?

Like this, Lulu.

It would look like this.

• • •

And then it’s over. Like a great wave crashing onto a shore, the applause erupts and I’m here, on this stage, surrounded by the shocked and delighted smiles of my castmates. We are grasping hands and bowing and Marina is pulling me out front for our curtain call and then stepping to the side and gesturing for me to walk ahead and I do and the applause grows even louder.

Backstage, it is madness. Max is screaming. And Marina is crying and Linus is smiling, although his eyes keep darting to the side entrance that Petra left from hours ago. People are surrounding me, patting me on the back, offering congratulations and kisses and I’m here but I’m not—I’m still in some strange limbo where the boundaries of time and place and person don’t exist where I can be here and in Paris, where it can be now and then, where I’m me and also Orlando.

I try to stay in this place as I change out of my clothes, scrub the makeup off my face. I look at myself in the mirror and try to digest what I just did. It feels completely unreal, and like the truest thing I have ever done. The truth and its opposite. Up on stage, playing a role, revealing myself.

People gather round me. There is talk, of parties, celebration, a cast party tonight, even though the show doesn’t wrap for two more weeks and to celebrate now is technically bad luck. But it seems like everyone has given up on luck tonight. We make our own.

Petra comes backstage, stone-faced and not saying a word. She walks right past me. Goes straight to Linus.

I leave the backstage and go out the gate that serves as a stage door. Max is at my side, jumping up and down like an exuberant puppy. “So was Marina a decent kisser?” she asks me.

“I’m sure she was glad not to be kissing Jeroen,” Vincent says, and I laugh.

Outside, I scan the area for my friends. I’m not quite sure who will be here. And then I hear her call my name.

“Willem!” she says again.

It’s Kate, charging toward me, a blur of gold and red. My heart seems to expand as she leaps into my arms and we spin around.

“You did it. You did it. You did it!” she murmurs in my ear.

“I did it. I did it. I did it.” I repeat, laughing with joy and relief and awe at the direction this day has taken.

Someone taps me on the shoulder. “You dropped something.”

“Oh, right. Your flowers,” Kate says, leaning over to pick up a bouquet of sunflowers. “For your stunning debut.”

I take the flowers.

“How do you feel?” she asks.

I have no answer, no words. I just feel full. I try to explain it but then Kate interrupts: “Like you just had the best sex in the world?” And I laugh. Yeah, something like that. I take her hand and kiss it. She twines an arm around my waist.

“Ready to meet your adoring public?” she asks.

I’m not. Right now, I just want to savor this. With the person who helped make it happen. Leading her by the hand, I take us over to a quiet bench under a nearby gazebo and attempt in some way to articulate what just happened.

“How did that happen?” is all I can think to ask.

She holds my hands in hers. “Do you really need to ask that?”

“I think I do. It felt like something otherworldly.”

“Oh, no,” she says, laughing. “I believe in the muse and all, but don’t go attributing that performance to one of your accidents. It was all you up there.”

It was. And it wasn’t. Because I wasn’t alone up there.

We sit there for a little while longer. I feel my whole body buzzing, humming. This night is perfect.

“I think your groupies are waiting,” Kate says after a while, gesturing behind me. I turn around and there are Broodje, Henk, W, Lien, and a few other people, watching us curiously. I take Kate by the hand and introduce them to the boys.

“You’re coming to our party, aren’t you?” Broodje asks.

“Our party?” I ask.

Broodje manages to look a tiny bit sheepish. “It’s hard to un-throw a party at short notice.”

“Especially since he has now invited the cast, and about half the audience,” Henk says.

“That’s not true!” Broodje says. “Not half. Just a couple of Canadians.”

I roll my eyes and laugh. “Fine. Let’s go.”

Lien laughs and takes my hand. “I’m going to say goodnight. One of us should be coherent tomorrow. It’s moving day.” She kisses W. Then me. “Well done, Willem.”

“I’m going to follow her out of the park,” Kate says. “This city confounds me.”

“You’re not coming?” I ask.

“I have some things I need to do first. I’ll come later. Prop the door open for me.”

“Always,” I say. I go to kiss her on the cheek and she whispers into my ear, “I knew you could do it.”

“Not without you,” I say.

“Don’t be silly. You just needed a pep talk.”

But I don’t mean the pep talk. I know Kate believes that I have to commit, to not rely on the accidents, to take the wheel. But had we not met in Mexico, would I be here now? Was it accidents? Or will?

For the hundredth time tonight, I’m back with Lulu, on Jacques’s barge, the improbably named Viola. She’d just told me the story of double happiness and we were arguing over the meaning. She’d thought it meant the luck of the boy getting the job and the girl. But I’d disagreed. It was the couplet fitting together, the two halves finding each other. It was love.

But maybe we were both wrong, and both right. It’s not either or, not luck or love. Not fate or will.

Maybe for double happiness, you need both.

Forty-nine

Inside the flat, it is complete mayhem. More than fifty people, from the cast, from Utrecht, even old school friends from my Amsterdam days. I have no idea how Broodje dug everyone up so fast.

Max pounces on me as soon as she comes in the door, followed by Vincent. “Holy. Shit,” Max says.

“You might’ve mentioned you could act!” Vincent adds.

I smile. “I like to preserve a bit of mystery.”

“Yeah, well, everyone in the cast is bloody delighted,” says Max. “Except Petra. She’s pissy as ever.”

“Only because her understudy just completely cockblocked her star. And now she has to decide whether to put up a lame, and I mean that both literally and figuratively, star, or let you carry us home,” Vincent says.

“Decisions, decisions,” Max adds. “Don’t look now but Marina is giving you the fuck-me eyes again.”

We all look. Marina is staring right at me and smiling.

“And don’t even deny it, unless it’s me she wants to shag,” Max says.

“I’ll be right back,” I tell Max. I go over to her to where Marina’s standing by the table Broodje has turned into the bar. She has a jug of something in her hand. “What do you have there?” I ask.

“Not entirely sure. One of your mates gave it to me, promised me no hangover. I’m taking him at his word.”

“That’s your first mistake right there.”

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.”

“You’re not?” There’s curiosity in her voice, and disappointment, too.

“I don’t belong there.”

“You belong where I belong.”

It’s a relief, after all this time, to hear her say so. But I don’t think it’s true. I’m grateful that she has made a new home for herself in India, but it’s not where I’m meant to be.

Go big and go home.

“I’m going to act, Ma,” I say. And I feel it. The idea, the plan, fully formed since last night, maybe since much longer. The urgency to see Kate, who never did show up at the party, courses through me. This is one chance I’m not going to let slip through my fingers. This is something I need. “I’m going to act,” I repeat. “Because I’m an actor.”

Yael laughs. “Of course you are. It’s in your blood. Just like Olga.”

The name is instantly familiar. “Olga Szabo, you mean?”

There’s a pause. I can feel her surprise crackle through the line. “Saba told you about her?”

“No. I found the pictures. In the attic. I meant to ask you about them but I didn’t, because I’ve been busy . . .” I trail off. “And because we never really talked about these things.”

“No. We never did, did we?”

“Who was she? Saba’s girlfriend?”

“She was his sister,” she replies. And I should be surprised, but I’m not. Not at all. It’s like the pieces of a puzzle slotting together.

“She would have been your great aunt,” Yael continues. “He always said she was an incredible actress. She was meant to go to Hollywood. But then the war came and she didn’t survive.”

She didn’t survive. Only Saba did.

“Was Szabo her stage name?” I ask.

“No. Szabo was Saba’s surname before he emigrated to Israel and Hebreified it. Lots of Europeans did that.”

To distance himself, I think. I understand that. Though he couldn’t really distance himself. All those silent films he took me to. The ghosts he held at bay, and held close.

Olga Szabo, my great aunt. Sister to my grandfather, Oskar Szabo, who became Oskar Shiloh, father of Yael Shiloh, wife of Bram de Ruiter, brother of Daniel de Ruiter, soon to be father of Abraão de Ruiter.

And just like that, my family grows again.

Fifty-one

When I emerge from my bedroom, Broodje and Henk are just waking up and are surveying the wreckage like army generals who have lost a major ground battle.

Broodje turns to me, his face twisted in apology. “I’m sorry. I can clean it all later. But we promised we’d meet W at ten to help him move. And we’re already late.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Henk says.

Broodje picks up a beer bottle, two-thirds full of cigarette butts. “You can be sick later,” he says. “We made a promise to W.” Broodje looks at me. “And to Willy. I’ll clean the flat later. And Henk’s vomit, which he’s going to keep corked for now.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “I’ll clean it all. I’ll fix everything!”

“You don’t have to be so cheerful about it,” Henk says, wincing and touching his temples.

I grab the keys from the counter. “Sorry,” I say, not sorry at all. I head to the door.

“Where are you going?” Broodje.

“To take the wheel!”

• • •

I’m unlocking my bike downstairs when my phone rings. It’s her. Kate.

“I’ve been calling you for the last hour,” I say. “I’m coming to your hotel.”

“My hotel, huh?” she says. I can hear the smile in her voice.

“I was worried you’d leave. And I have a proposition for you.”

“Well, propositions are best proposed in person. But sit tight because I’m actually on my way to you. That’s why I’m calling. Are you home?”

I think of the flat, Broodje and Henk in their boxers, the unbelievable mess. The sun is out, really out, for the first time in days. I suggest we meet at the Sarphatipark instead. “Across the street. Where we were yesterday,” I remind her.

“Proposition downgraded from a hotel to a park, Willem?” she teases. “I’m not sure whether to be flattered or insulted.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

I go straight to the park and wait, sitting down on one of the benches near the sandpit. A little boy and girl are discussing their plans for a fort.

“Can it have one hundred towers?” the little boy asks. The girl says, “I think twenty is better.” Then the boy asks, “Can we live there forever?” The girl considers the sky a moment and says, “Until it rains.”

By the time Kate shows up, they’ve made significant progress, digging a moat and constructing two towers.

“Sorry it took so long,” Kate says, breathless. “I got lost. This city of yours, it runs in circles.”

I start to explain about the concentric canals, the Ceintuurbaan being a belt that goes around the waist of the city. She waves me off. “Don’t bother. I’m hopeless.” She sits down next to me. “Any word from Frau Directeur?”

“Total silence.”

“That sounds ominous.”

I shrug. “Maybe. Nothing I can do. Anyway, I have a new plan.”

“Oh,” Kate says, widening her already big green eyes. “You do?”

“I do. In fact, that’s what my proposition is about.”

“The thick plottens.”

“What?”

She shakes her head. “Never mind.” She crosses her legs, leans in toward me. “I’m ready. Proposition me.”

I take her hand. “I want you.” I pause. “To be my director.”

“Isn’t that a little like shaking hands after making love?” she asks.

“What happened last night,” I begin, “it happened because of you. And I want to work with you. I want to come study with Ruckus. Be an apprentice.”

Kate’s eyes slit into smiles. “How do you know about our apprenticeships?” she drawls.

“I may have looked at your website one or a hundred times. And I know you mostly work with Americans, but I grew up speaking English, I act in English. Most of the time, I dream in English. I want to do Shakespeare. In English. I want to do it. With you.”

The grin has disappeared from Kate’s face. “It wouldn’t be like last night—Orlando on a main stage. Our apprentices do everything. They build sets. They work tech. They study. They act in the ensemble. I’m not saying you wouldn’t play principal roles one day—I would not rule that out, not after last night. But it would take a while. And, there are visa issues to consider, not to mention the union, so you couldn’t come over expecting the spotlight. And I’ve told David he needs to meet you.”

I look at Kate and am about to say that I wouldn’t expect that, that I’d be patient, that I know how to build things. But I stop myself because it occurs to me that I don’t need to convince her of anything.

“Where do you think I was last night?” she asks. “I was waiting for David to get back from his Medea, so I could tell him about you. Then I arranged for him to get his ass on a plane so he could see you tonight before that invalid comes back. He’s on his way, and in fact, I have to leave soon to go to the airport to meet him. After all this trouble, they’d better put you on again, otherwise, you’re going to have to do it solo for him.”

She laughs. “I’m kidding. But Ruckus is a small operation so we make decisions like this communally. That’s another thing you have to be prepared for, how dysfunctionally co-dependent we all are.” She throws up her arms. “But every family is like that.”

“So, wait? You were going to ask me?”

The grin is back. “Was there any doubt? But it pleases me no end, Willem, that you asked me. It shows you’ve been paying attention, which is what a director wants in an actor.” She taps her temple. “Also, very clever of you to move to the States. Good for your career but also it’s where your Lulu is from.”

I think of Tor’s letter, only today the regret and recrimination is gone. She looked for me. I looked for her. And last night, in some strange way, we found each other.

“That’s not why I want to go,” I tell Kate.

She smiles. “I know. I’m just teasing. Though I think you’ll really take to Brooklyn. It has a lot in common with Amsterdam. The brownstones and the rowhouses, the loving tolerance of eccentricity. I think you’ll feel right at home.”

When she says that a feeling comes over me. Of pausing, of resting, of all the clocks in the world going quiet.

Home.

Fifty-two

But Daniel’s home. That is a mess.

When I get back, the boys have left, and there is crap everywhere. It looks like how Bram used to describe it in the old days, before Yael arrived and asserted her brand of order.

There are bottles and ashtrays and plates and pizza boxes and every dish seems dirty and out. The whole place smells like cigarettes. It’s certainly not a place that a baby should live. I’m momentarily paralyzed, not sure where to start.

I put on a CD of Adam Wilde, that singer-songwriter Max and I went to see a few weeks ago. And then I just go. I empty out the beer and wine bottles and put them in a box for recycling. Next, I dump the ashtrays and rinse them out. Even though there’s a dishwasher now, I fill the sink with hot, soapy water and clean all the dirty dishes, then dry them. I throw open the windows to air our the place, and sunshine and fresh air come blowing in.

By noon, I’ve collected the bottles, tossed the cigarette butts, washed and dried the dishes, dusted and vacuumed. It’s about as clean as it was on its best day with Daniel, though when he comes home with Abraão and Fabiola, I’ll have it spotless. Ready.

I make a coffee. I check my phone to see if there’s any word from Linus, but it’s sitting on my bed, dead. I plug it in to charge, setting the coffee on my shelf. The envelope is still there, with the photos of me Yael, Bram, Saba, Olga. I run my finger along the crease of the envelope, feel the weight of history inside. Wherever I’m going next, these are coming with me.

I glance at my phone. It’s still dead, but soon there will be some word from Linus and Petra. Part of me thinks that I must be fired. That has to be the price to pay for last night’s triumph, and it’s okay because it’s a price I’m willing to pay. But another part of me is losing faith that the universal law of equilibrium operates that way.

I go back into the lounge. The Adam Wilde CD has been repeating and the songs are starting to become familiar enough that I know I will be able to hear them when I’m not listening to them.

I look around the room. I fluff the cushions and lie down on the sofa. I should be in suspense, waiting for word about tonight, but I feel the opposite. It’s like that moment of pause when I step out of a train station or bus station or airport into a new city and it’s nothing but possibility.

Through the open window, the dissonant sounds of the city—of tram chimes and bicycle bells and the occasional jet roaring overhead—drift in and mingle with the music and lull me to sleep.

For the third time in one day, I’m woken up by the ringing of a phone. Like this morning when Yael called, I have that same feeling, of being somewhere else, somewhere right.

The ringing stops. But I know it must be Linus. My fate, Marina had called it. But it’s not my fate; it’s just about tonight. My fate is up to me.

I go into my room and pick up the phone. Out the window, climbing through the clouds I make out the blue-and-white underbelly of a KLM jet. I picture myself on a plane, flying out of Amsterdam, over the North Sea, over England and Ireland, past Iceland and Greenland and down Newfoundland and along the Eastern Seaboard, into New York. I feel the jerk, hear the skid of the tires touching down, the explosion of applause from the passengers. Because we are all of us, so grateful for having at last arrived.

I glance at my phone. It’s full of congratulatory texts from last night, and a voicemail from Linus. “Willem, can you please call in as soon as possible,” he says.

I take a deep breath, prepare myself for whatever he has to say. It doesn’t really matter. I went big and now I’m going home.

Just as Linus answers there’s a faint knock at the front door.

“Hello, hello . . .” Linus’s voice echoes.

There’s another knock, louder this time. Kate? Broodje?

I tell Linus I’ll call him right back. I put the phone down. I open the door. And once again, time stops.

I’m shocked. And I’m not. She is just as I remember her. And completely transformed. A stranger. And someone I know. The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin, I hear Saba say.

“Hello Willem,” she says. “My name is Allyson.”

Allyson. I say the name in my head and a year’s worth of memories and fantasies and one-sided conversations are revised and updated. Not Lulu. Allyson. A strong name. A solid name. And somehow, a familiar name. Everything about her seems familiar. I know this person. I’m known to this person. It’s then I understand what I was dreaming about this morning, who it is that’s been sitting next to me on that plane all this time.

Allyson walks in.

The door clicks shut behind her. And for a minute, they’re in the room with us too. Yael and Bram, thirty years ago. Their entire story rushes through my head, because it’s our story, too. Only now, I realize, it was an incomplete story. Because so matter how many times he told it, Bram never told me the important part. What happened during those first three hours together in the car.

Or maybe he did, only without words. With his action.

“And so I kissed her. Like I’d been expecting her all that time,” my previously melancholy father would say, always with wonder in his voice.

I’d thought the wonder was for the accidents. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the wonder was for the stain. Three hours in a car, that was all it took. And two years later, there she was.

Maybe he was overwhelmed, like I am overwhelmed, by that mysterious intersection where love meets luck, where fate meets will. Because he’d been waiting for her. And there she was.

So he’d kissed her.

I kiss Allyson.

I complete the history that came before us, and in doing so, begin one all of our own.

Double happiness: I get it now.