Just One Day - English romantic Novel

[novel]

I hold up my hands in surrender. “You’re not. I’m done. This is a lost cause.”

Maps are taken out. Metro routes are debated. Picnic items are discussed.

“People mix up their patron saints, you know?” I look up. Wren, our pixie tagalong, who has been all but silent all day, has finally spoken.

“They do?”

She nods. “Saint Anthony is the patron saint of lost things. But Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. You have to make sure you ask the right saint for help.”

There’s a moment as everyone looks at Wren. Is she some kind of religious nut?

“Who would be in charge of a lost person?” I ask.

Wren stops to consider. “That would depend. What kind of lost?”

I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s lost at all. Maybe he’s exactly where he wants to be. Maybe I’m the lost one, chasing someone who has no desire to be found. “I’m not sure.”

Wren twirls her bracelet, fingering the charms. “Perhaps you should just pray to both.” She shows me the little charms with each patron saint. There are many more charms, one with a date, another with a clover, one with a bird.

“But I’m Jewish.”

“Oh, they don’t care.” Wren looks up at me. Her eyes don’t seem blue so much as the absence of blue. Like the sky just before dawn. “You should ask the saints for help. And you should go to that third hospital.”

Hôpital Saint-Louis turns out to be a four-hundred-year-old hospital. Wren and I make our way into the modern wing that sits adjacent. I’ve sent the others on to Luxembourg Gardens without much of an argument. Sunlight filters in through the glass atrium, throwing prisms of light onto the floor.

It’s quiet in the ER, only a few people sitting among rows of empty chairs. Wren goes right up to the two male nurses behind the desk and that weirdly mellifluous voice of hers breaks out in perfect French. I stand behind her, catching enough of what she says to get that she is telling my story, mesmerizing them with it. Even the people in the chairs are leaning in to hear her quiet voice. I have no idea how Wren even knows the story; I didn’t tell her. Maybe she picked it up at breakfast or among the others. She finishes, and there is silence. The nurses stare at her, then look down and start typing.

“How do you speak French so well?” I whisper.

“I’m from Quebec.”

“Why didn’t you translate at the other hospital?”

“Because it wasn’t the right one.”

The nurses ask me his name. I say it. I spell it. I hear the tap of the computer keys as they input it.

“Non,” one nurse says. “Pas ici.” He shakes his head.

“Attendez,” the other says. Wait.

He types some more. He says a bunch of things to Wren, and I lose track, but then one phrase floats to the top: a date. The day after the day Willem and I spent together. The day we got separated.

My breath stops. He looks up, repeats the date to me.

“Yes,” I say. That would’ve been when he was here. “Oui.”

The nurse says something and something else I don’t understand. I turn to Wren. “Can they tell us how to find him?”

Wren asks a questions, then translates back. “The records are sealed.”

“But they don’t have to give us anything written. They must have something on him.”

“They say it’s all in the billing department now. They don’t keep much here.”

“There has to be something. Now’s the time to ask Saint Jude for help.”

Wren fingers the charm on her bracelet. A pair of doctors in scrubs and lab coats come through the double doors, coffee cups in hand. Wren and I look at each other, Saint Jude apparently deciding to bestow twin inspiration.

“Can I speak to a doctor?” I ask the nurses in my horrible French. “Maybe the . . .” I turn to Wren. “How do you say ‘attending physician’ in French? Or the doctor who treated Willem?”

The nurse must understand some English because he rubs his chin and goes back to the computer. “Ahh, Dr. Robinet,” he says, and picks up a phone. A few minutes later, a pair of double doors swing open, and it’s like this time Saint Jude decided to send us a bonus, because the doctor is TV-handsome: curly salt-and-pepper hair, a face that’s both delicate and rugged. Wren starts to explain the situation, but then I realize that, lost cause or not, I have to make my own case. In the most labored French imaginable, I attempt to explain: Friend hurt. At this hospital. Lost friend. Need to find. I’m frazzled, and with my bare-basics phrases, I must sound like a cavewoman.

Dr. Robinet looks at me for a while. Then he beckons for us to follow him through the double doors into an empty examination room, where he gestures for us to sit on the table while he settles on a rolling stool.

“I understand your dilemma,” he replies in perfect British-accented English. “But we can’t just give out files about a patient.” He turns to look directly at me. His eyes are bright green, both sharp and kind. “I understand you’ve come all the way from America, but I am sorry.”

“Can you at least tell me what happened to him? Without actually looking into his chart? Would that be breaking protocol?”

Dr. Robinet smiles patiently. “I see dozens of patients a day. And this was, you say, a year ago?”

I nod. “Yes.” I bury my head in my hands. The folly of it hits me anew. One day. One year.

“Perhaps if you described him.” Dr. Robinet feeds me some rope.

I snatch it up. “He was Dutch. Very tall, six foot three—it’s one point nine in metric. Seventy-five kilos. He had very light hair, almost like straw, but very dark eyes, almost like coals. He was skinny. His fingers were long. He had a scar, like a zigzag, right on the top of his foot.” As I continue to describe him, details I thought I’d forgotten come back to me, and an image of him emerges.

But Dr. Robinet can’t see it. He looks puzzled, and I realize that from his point of view, I’ve described a tall blond guy, one person among thousands.

“Perhaps if you had a photograph?”

I feel as if the image I’ve created of Willem is alive in the room. He’d been right about not needing a camera to record the important things. He’d been there inside me all this time.

“I don’t,” I say. “Oh, but he had stitches. And a black eye.”

“That describes a majority of the people we treat,” Dr. Robinet says. “I am very sorry.” He stands up off the stool; something clinks to the ground. Wren retrieves a euro coin off the floor and starts to hand it back to him.

“Wait! He did this thing with coins,” I say. “He could balance a coin along his knuckles. Like this. May I?” I reach out for the euro and show how he flipped a coin across his knuckles.

I hand Dr. Robinet back his euro, and he holds it in his hand, examining it as if it were a rare coin. Then he flips it up in the air and catches it. “Commotion cérébrale!” he says.

“What?”

“Concussion!” Wren translates.

“Concussion?”

He holds up his index finger and turns it around slowly, like he’s spooling information from a deep well. “He had a concussion. And if I recall, a facial laceration. We wanted him to stay for observation—concussions can be serious—and we wanted to report it to the police because he’d been assaulted.”

“Assaulted? Why? By whom?”

“We don’t know. It is customary to file a police report, but he refused. He was very agitated. I remember now! He wouldn’t stay beyond a few hours. He wanted to leave straight away, but we insisted he stay for a CT scan. But as soon as we stitched him up and saw there was no cerebral bleeding, he insisted he had to go. He said it was very important. Someone he was going to lose.” He turns to me, his eyes huge now. “You?”

“You,” Wren says.

“Me,” I say. Black spots dance in my vision, and my head feels liquid.

“I think she’s going to faint,” Wren says.

“Put your head between your legs,” Dr. Robinet advises. He calls out into the hall, and a nurse brings me a glass of water. I drink it. The world stops spinning. Slowly, I sit back up. Dr. Robinet is looking at me now, and it’s like the shade of professionalism has dropped.

“But this was a year ago,” he asks in a blanket-soft voice. “You lost each other a year ago?”

I nod.

“And you’ve been looking all this time?”

I nod again. In some way, I have.

“And do you think he’s been looking for you?”

“I don’t know.” And I don’t. Just because he tried to find me a year ago doesn’t me he wants to find me now. Or wants me to find him.

“But you must know,” he replies. And for a minute I think he’s reprimanding me that I ought to know, but then he picks up the phone and makes a call. When he’s done, he turns to me. “You must know,” he repeats. “Go to window two in the billing office now. They cannot release his chart, but I have instructed them to release his address.”

“They have it? They have his address?”

“They have an address. Go collect it now. And then find him.” He looks at me again. “No matter what, you must know.”

I walk out of the hospital, past where the cancer patients are taking their chemotherapy treatments in the late afternoon sun. The printout with Willem’s address is clenched in my fist. I haven’t looked at it yet. I tell Wren that I need a moment alone and make my way toward the old hospital walls.

I sit down on a bench alongside the quadrangle of grass, between the old brick buildings. Bees dance between the flower bushes, and children play—there’s so much life in these old hospital walls. I look at the paper in my hand. It could have any address. He could be anywhere in the world. How far am I willing to take this?

I think of Willem, beaten—beaten!—and still trying to find me. I take a deep breath. The smell of fresh-cut grass mingles with pollen and the fumes from trucks idling on the street. I look at the birthmark on my wrist.

I open the paper, not sure where I’m going next, only sure that I’m going.

Thirty-four

AUGUST

Utrecht, Holland

My guidebook has all of two pages on Utrecht, so I expect it to be tiny or ugly or industrial, but it turns out to be a gorgeous, twisting medieval city full of gabled row houses and canals with houseboats, and tiny little alley streets that look like they might house humans or might house dolls. There aren’t many youth hostels, but when I turn up at the only one I can afford, I learn that before it was a hostel, it was a squat. And I get that sense, almost like a radar communicating from some secret part of the world just to me: Yes, this is where you’re meant to be.

The guys at the youth hostel are friendly and helpful and speak perfect English, just like Willem did. One of them even looks like him—that same angular face, those puffy red lips. I actually ask him if he knows Willem; he doesn’t and when I explain that he looks like someone I’m looking for, he laughs and says he and half of Holland. He gives me a map of Utrecht and shows me how to get to the address the hospital gave me, a few kilometers from here, and suggests I rent a bike.

I opt for the bus. The house is out of the center, in an area full of record stores, ethnic restaurants with meat turning on spits, and graffiti. After a couple of wrong turns, I find the street, opposite some railroad tracks, on which sits an abandoned freight car, almost completely graffitied over. Right across the street is a skinny town house, which according to my printout, is the last known address of Willem de Ruiter.

I have to push my way past six bikes locked to the front rail to get to the door, which is painted electric blue. I hesitate before pressing the doorbell, which looks like an eyeball. I feel strangely calm as I press. I hear the ring. Then the heavy clump of feet. I’ve only known Willem for a day, but I recognize that those are not his footsteps. His would be lighter, somehow. A pretty, tall girl with a long brown braid opens the door.

[romantic_story]

“Hi. Do you speak English?” I ask.

“Yes, of course,” she answers.

“I’m looking for Willem de Ruiter. I’m told he lives here.” I hold up the piece of paper as if in proof.

Somehow I knew he wasn’t here. Maybe because I wasn’t nervous enough. So when her expression doesn’t register, I’m not all that surprised. “I don’t know him. I’m just renting here for the summer,” she says. “I’m sorry.” She starts to close the door.

By now, I’ve learned no or sorry or I can’t help you—these are opening offers. “Is there someone else here who might know him?”

“Saskia,” she calls. From the top of a stairway so narrow it looks like a ladder, a girl appears. She climbs down. She has blond hair and rosy cheeks and blue eyes, and there’s something vaguely farm-fresh about her, as though she just this minute finished riding a horse or plowing a field, even though her hair is cut in spikes and she’s dressed in a woven black sweater that is anything but traditional.

Once again I explain that I’m looking for Willem de Ruiter. Then, even though she doesn’t know me, Saskia invites me in and offers me a cup of coffee or tea.

The three of us sit down at a messy wooden table, piled high with stacks of magazines and envelopes. There are clothes strewn everywhere. It’s clear a lot of people live here. But apparently not Willem.

“He never really lived here,” Saskia explains after she serves me tea and chocolates.

“But you know him?” I ask.

“I’ve met him a few times. I was friends with Lien, who was the girlfriend of one of Robert-Jan’s friends. But I don’t really know Willem. Like Anamiek, I just moved in over the summer.”

“Do you know why he would use this as his address?”

“Probably because of Robert-Jan,” Saskia says.

“Who’s Robert-Jan?”

“He goes to the University of Utrecht, same as me. He used to live here,” Saskia explains. “But he moved out. I took over his room.”

“Of course you did,” I mutter to myself.

“In student houses, people come and go. But Robert-Jan will be back to Utrecht. Not here but to a new flat. Unfortunately, I don’t know where that will be. I just took over his room.” She shrugs as if to say, that’s all.

I drum my fingers on the old wooden table. I look at the pile of mail. “Do you think maybe I could look through the mail? See if there’s anything with a clue?”

“Go ahead,” Saskia says.

I go through the piles. They are mostly bills and magazines and catalogs, addressed to various people who live or have lived at this address. I count at least a half dozen names, including Robert-Jan. But Willem doesn’t have a single piece of mail.

“Did Willem ever get mail here?”

“There used to be some,” Saskia replies. “But someone organized the mail a few days ago, so maybe they threw his away. Like I said, he hasn’t been around in months.”

“Wait,” Anamiek says. “I think I saw some new mail with his name on it. It’s still in the box by the door.”

She returns with an envelope. This one isn’t junk mail. It’s a letter, with the address handwritten. The stamps are Dutch. I want to find him, but not enough to open his personal correspondence. I put the envelope down on the piles, but then I double-take. Because the return address in the upper left-hand corner, written in a swirling unfamiliar script, is mine.

I take the envelope and hold it up to the lamp. There’s another envelope inside. I open the outer envelope and out of that spills my letter, the one I sent to Guerrilla Will in En-gland, looking for Willem. From the looks of the stamps and crossed-out addresses and tape on the envelope, it’s been forwarded a few times. I open up the original letter to see if anyone has added anything to it, but they haven’t. It’s just been read and passed on.

Still, I feel overjoyed somehow. All this time, my scrappy little letter has been trying to find him too. I want to kiss it for its tenacity.

I show the letter to Saskia and Anamiek. They read it and look at me confused. “I wrote this letter,” I say. “Five months ago. When I first tried to find him. I sent it to an address in England, and somehow it found its way here. Same as me.” As I say it, I get that sense again. I’m on the right path. My letter and I landed in the same place, even if it’s the wrong place.

Saskia and Anamiek look at each other.

“We will make some calls,” Saskia says. “We can certainly help you find Robert-Jan.”

The girls disappear up the stairs. I hear a computer chime on. I hear the sounds of one-sided conversations, Saskia on the phone. About twenty minutes later, they come back down. “It’s August, so almost everyone is away, but I am sure I can get you contact information for Robert-Jan in a day or two.”

“Thank you,” I say.

Her eyes flicker up. I don’t like the way they look at me. “Though I might have found a faster way to find Willem.”

“Really? What?”

She hesitates. “His girlfriend.”

Thirty-five

Ana Lucia Aureliano. That’s her name. Willem’s girlfriend. She goes to some honors college connected to the University of Utrecht.

In all the time I’ve been looking, I never dreamed of getting this far. So I didn’t let myself imagine actually finding him. And while I have imagined him having lots of girls, I hadn’t thought of him having just one. Which, in retrospect, seems awfully stupid.

It’s not like I’m here to get back together. It’s not like there’s a together to get back to. But if I came this close, only to leave, I think I’d regret it for the rest of my life.

Ironically, it’s Céline’s words that finally convince me to go find the girlfriend: You will need to be brave.

University College’s campus is small and self-contained, unlike the University of Utrecht, which sprawls through the city center, Saskia explained. It’s on the outskirts of town, and as I ride out there on a pink bike that Saskia insisted I borrow, I practice what I’m going to say if I find her. Or find him.

The school has very few students, and they all live on campus, and it’s also an international school, drawing students from all over the world, with all the classes taught in English. Which means it only takes asking two people about Ana Lucia before I’m given directions to her dorm.

A dorm that seems less like a college residence than an IKEA showroom. I peer inside the sliding-glass door; it’s all sleek wood and modern furniture, a million miles away from the industrial blah of the room I shared with Kali. The lights are out, and when I knock, no one answers. There’s a little cement landing outside the door that has some embroidered cushions, so I sit down and wait.

I must have dozed off because I wake up falling backward. Someone has opened the door behind me. I look up. The girl—Ana Lucia, I assume—is beautiful, with long wavy brown hair and rosebud lips, accentuated with red lipstick. Between her and Céline, I should feel flattered to be in such company, but that’s not what I’m feeling at the moment.

“Can I help you?” she asks, hovering over me, eyeing me as you might eye a vagrant you caught sleeping on your stoop.

The sun has come out from behind the clouds and it reflects off the glass window, creating a glare. I shield my eyes with my hands and heave myself up. “I’m sorry. I must’ve fallen asleep. I’m looking for Ana Lucia Aureliano.”

“I’m Ana Lucia,” she says, emphasizing the correct pronunciation with the strength of her Spanish lisp: Ana Lu-thee-uh. She squints her eyes, studying me. “Have we met before?”

“Oh, no. I’m Allyson Healey. I’m . . . I’m sorry. This is weird. I’m from America, and I’m trying to find someone.”

“Is this your first term here? There is an online student directory.”

“What? Oh, no. I don’t go here. I go to school in Boston.”

“Who do you search for?”

I almost don’t want to say his name. I could make up a name and then she’d be none the wiser. I wouldn’t have to hear her ask in that adorable accent of hers why I want to know where her boyfriend is. But then I would go home, and I’d have come this far and would never know. So I say it.

“Willem de Ruiter.”

She looks at me for a long moment and then her pretty face puckers, her cosmetic-ad lips part. And then out of those perfect lips comes a spew of what I assume is invective. I can’t be sure. It’s in Spanish. But she’s waving her arms and talking a mile a minute, and her face has gone red. Vate! Déjame, puta! And then she picks me up by my shoulders and throws me off the stoop, like a bouncer ejecting a drunk. She throws my backpack after me, so that everything spills out. Then she slams the door shut, as much as you can slam a sliding-glass door. Locks it. And draws the shades.

I sit there agape for a moment. Then, in a daze, I start putting my things back in my bag. I examine my elbow, which has a scrape from where I landed, and my arm, which bears the half-moons of her nail marks.

“Are you okay?” I look up and see a pretty girl with dreadlocks who has bent down beside me and is handing me my sunglasses.

I nod.

“You don’t need ice or anything? I have some in my room.” She starts to walk back to her stoop.

I touch my head. There’s a bump there too, but nothing serious. “I think I’m okay. Thanks.”

She looks at me and shakes her head. “You were not, by any chance, asking about Willem?”

“You know him?” I ask. “You know Willem?” I come over to her stoop. There’s a laptop and a textbook sitting there. It’s a physics book. She has it open to the section on quantum entanglement.

“I’ve seen him around. This is only my second year, so I didn’t know him when he went here. But only one person makes Ana Lucia crazy like that.”

“Wait. Here? He went to college? Here?” I try to reconcile the Willem I met, the itinerant traveling actor, with an honors college student, and it hits me again how little I know this person.

“For one year. Before I got here. He studied economics, I think.”

“So what happened?” I meant with the college, but she starts telling me about Ana Lucia. About how she and Willem got back together last year but then how she found out that he’d been cheating on her with some French girl the whole time. She’s very casual about it, like none of it is all that surprising.

But my head is reeling. Willem went here. He studied economics. So it takes a minute to finally digest the last part. The cheating-on-Ana-Lucia-with-a-French-girl part.

“A French girl?” I repeat.

“Yes. Apparently, Willem was going to meet her for some secret tryst, in Spain, I think. Ana Lucia saw him shopping for flights on her computer, and thought he was planning to take her as a surprise because she has relatives there. So she canceled her vacation to Switzerland, and then told her family all about it, and they planned a big party, only to discover that the tickets were never for her. They were for the French girl. She freaked out, confronted him right in the middle of the campus—it was quite a scene. He hasn’t been around since, obviously. Are you sure you don’t need some ice for your head?”

I sink onto the stoop next to her. Céline? But she claimed she hadn’t seen him since last year. But then she’d said a lot of things. Including that we were both just ports that Willem visited. Maybe there were a bunch of us out there. A French girl. Or two or three. A Spaniard. An American. A whole United Nations of girls waving from their ports. I think of Céline’s parting words to me, and now they seem ominous.

I always knew that Willem was a player and that I was one of many. But now I also know that he didn’t ditch me that day. He wrote me a note. He tried, however halfheartedly, to find me.

[romantic_story]

I think of what my mom said. About being grateful for what you have instead of yearning for what you think you want. Standing here, on the campus where he once walked, I think I finally get what she was talking about. I think I finally understand what it truly means to quit while you’re ahead.

Thirty-six

Amsterdam

Forward momentum. That’s my new motto. No regrets. And no going back.

I cancel the Paris-London portion of my flight home so I can fly home straight from London. I don’t want to go back to Paris. I want to go somewhere else. I have five more days in Europe, and there are all these low-cost airlines. I could go to Ireland. Or Romania. I could take a train to Nice and hook up with the Oz crew. I could go anywhere.

But to get to any of those places, I have to go to Amsterdam. So that’s where I’m going first. On the pink bike.

When I went to deliver the bike to Saskia, along with a box of chocolates to say thank you, I told her that I didn’t need her to find me Robert-Jan’s contact information.

“You found what you needed?” she asked.

“Yes and no.”

She seemed to understand. She took the chocolates but told me to keep the bike. It didn’t belong to anyone, and I’d need it in Amsterdam, and I could take it with me on the train or pass it along to someone else.

“The pink White Bicycle,” I said.

She smiled. “You know about the White Bicycle?”

I nodded.

“I wish it still existed.”

I thought about my travels, about all the things that people had passed on to me: friendship, help, ideas, encouragement, macarons. “I think it still does,” I told her.

Anamiek has written me instructions on biking from Utrecht to Amsterdam. It’s only twenty-five miles, and there are bike paths the whole, flat way. Once I get to the eastern end of the city, I’ll hook up with the tram line nine, and I can just follow that all the way to Centraal Station, which is where most of the budget youth hostels are.

Once out of Utrecht, the landscape turns industrial and then to farms. Cows lolling in green fields, big stone windmills—I even catch a farmer in clogs. But it doesn’t take long for the bucolic to meld with office parks and then I’m on the outskirts of Amsterdam, going past a huge stadium that says Ajax and then the bike path dumps me onto the street and things get a little confusing. I hear the bring-bring of a tram, and it’s the number nine, just as Anamiek promised. I follow it up the long stretches past the Oosterpark and what I assume is the zoo—a flock of pink flamingos in the middle of the city—but then things get a little confusing at an intersection by a big flea market and I lose the tram. Behind me, motos are beeping, and the traffic of bicycles seems twice that of cars, and I keep trying to find the tram, but the canals all seem to go in circles, each one looking like the last, with tall stone banks and every kind of boat—from houseboat to rowboat to glass-domed tour boat—on its brackish waters. I pass by improbably skinny gabled row houses and cozy little cafés, doors flung open to reveal walls a hundred years’ worth of brown. I turn right and wind up at a flower market, the colorful blooms popping in the gray morning.

I pull out my map and turn it around. This whole city seems to turn in circles, and the names of the streets read like all the letters in the alphabet got into a car accident: Oudezijds Voorburgwal. Nieuwebrugsteeg. Completely lost, I pedal up next to a tall guy in a leather jacket who’s strapping a blond toddler into a bike seat. When I see his face, I do another double take because he’s another, albeit older, Willem clone.

I ask him for directions, and he has me follow him to Dam Square and from there points me around the dizzying traffic circle to the Warmoesstraat. I pedal up a street full of sex shops, brazen with their lurid window displays. At the end of the block is one of the city’s cheaper youth hostels.

The lobby is boisterous with activity: people are playing pool and Ping-Pong, and there’s a card game going, and everyone seems to have a beer in hand, even though it’s barely lunchtime. I ask for a dormitory room, and wordlessly, the dark-eyed girl at the desk takes my passport info and money. Upstairs in my room, in spite of the NO DRUG USE IN THE DORMS sign, the air is thick with hash smoke, and a bleary-eyed guy is smoking something through a tube on a piece of tinfoil, which I’m pretty sure is neither hash nor legal. I lock my backpack in the locker and head back downstairs and out onto the street to a crowded Internet café.

I pay for a half hour and check out the budget airline sites. It’s Thursday now. I fly home out of London on Monday. There’s a flight to Lisbon for forty-six euros. One to Milan, and one to somewhere in Croatia! I Google Croatia and look at pictures of rocky beaches and old lighthouses. There are even cheap hotels in the lighthouses. I could stay in a lighthouse. I could do anything!

I know almost nothing about Croatia, so I decide to go there. I pull out my debit card to pay for the ticket, but I notice a new email has popped up in the other window I have open. I toggle over. It’s from Wren. The subject line reads WHERE ARE YOU?

I quickly write back that I’m in Amsterdam. When I said good-bye to Wren and the Oz gang in Paris last week, she was planning on catching a train to Madrid, and Kelly and the crew were heading to Nice, and they were talking about maybe meeting up in Barcelona, so I’m a little surprised when, thirty seconds later, I get an email back from her that reads NO WAY. ME TOO!!!! The message has her cell number.

I’m grinning as I call her. “I knew you were here,” she says. “I could feel it! Where are you?”

“At an Internet café on the Warmoesstraat. Where are you? I thought you were going to Spain!”

“I changed my plans. Winston, how far is Warmoesstraat?” she calls. “Winston’s the cute guy who works here,” she whispers to me. I hear a male voice in the background. Then Wren squeals. “We’re, like, five minutes from each other. Meet me at Dam Square, in front of the white tower thing that looks like a penis.”

I close the browser window, and ten minutes later, I’m hugging Wren like she’s a long-lost relative.

“Boy, that Saint Anthony works fast,” she says.

“I’ll say!”

“So what happened?”

I give her the quick rundown about finding Ana Lucia, almost finding Willem, and deciding not to find him. “So now I’m going to Croatia.”

She looks disappointed. “You are. When?”

“I was going to fly out tomorrow morning. I was just booking my ticket when you called.”

“Oh, stay a few more days. We can explore together. We can rent bikes. Or rent one bike and have the other ride sidesaddle like the Dutch girls do.”

“I already have a bike,” I say. “It’s pink.”

“Does it have a rack on the back where I can sit?”

Her grin is too infectious to resist. “It does.”

“Oh. You have to stay. I’m at a hostel up near the Jordaan. My room is the size of a bathtub, but it’s sweet and the bed’s a double. Come share with me.”

I look up. It is threatening rain again, and it’s freezing for August, and the web said Croatia was mid-eighties and sunny. But Wren is here, and what are the chances of that? She believes in saints. I believe in accidents. I think we basically believe in the same thing.

We get my stuff out of my room at the hostel, where that one guy is now passed out, and move it to her hostel. It’s much cozier than mine, especially since tall-dark-and- grinning Winston is there checking in on us. Upstairs, her bed is covered with guidebooks, not just from Europe but from all over the world.

“What’s all this?”

“Winston loaned them to me. They’re for my bucket list.”

“Bucket list?”

“All the things I want to do before I die.”

That curious cryptic thing Wren said when we first met in Paris comes back to me: I know hospitals. I’ve only known Wren a day and a half, but that’s enough for the thought of losing her to be inconceivable. She must see something on my face, because she gently touches my arm. “Don’t worry, I plan on living a long time.”

“Why are you making a bucket list, then?”

“Because if you wait until you’re really dying, it’s too late.”

I look at her. I know hospitals. The saints. “Who?” I ask softly.

“My sister, Francesca.” She pulls out a piece of paper. It has a bunch of titles and locations, La Belle Angèle (Paris), The Music Lesson (London), The Resurrection (Madrid). It goes on like that.

“I don’t get it.” I hand back the paper.

“Francesca didn’t have much of a chance to be good at a lot of things, but she was a totally dedicated artist. She’d be in the hospital, a chemo drip in one arm, a sketchpad in the other. She made hundreds of paintings and drawings, her legacy, she liked to say, because at least when she died, they’d live on—if only in the attic.”

“You never know,” I say, thinking of those paintings and sculptures in the art squat that might one day be in the Louvre.

“Well, that’s exactly it. She found a lot of comfort in the fact that artists like Van Gogh and Vermeer were obscure in life but famous in death. And she wanted to see their paintings in person, so the last time she was in remission, we made a pilgrimage to Toronto and New York to see a bunch of them. After that, she made a bigger list.”

I glance at the list again. “So which painting is here? A Van Gogh?”

“There was a Van Gogh on her list. The Starry Night, which we saw together in New York, and she has some Vermeers on here, though the one she loved best is in London. But that’s her list, which has been back-burnered since Paris.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I love Francesca, and I will see those paintings for her, one day. But I’ve spent a lot of my life in her shadow. It had to be that way. But now she’s gone—and it’s like I’m still in her shadow, you know?”

Strangely, I sort of do. I nod.

“There was something about seeing you in Paris. You’re just this normal girl who’s doing something kind of crazy. It inspired me. I changed my plans. And now I’ve started to wonder if meeting you isn’t the whole reason I’m on this trip. That maybe Francesca, the saints, they wanted us to meet.”

I get a chill from that. “You really think so?”

“I think I do. Don’t worry, I won’t tell my parents you’re the reason I’m coming home a month later. They’re a tad upset.”

I laugh. I understand that too. “So what’s on your list?”

“It’s far less noble than Francesca’s.” She reaches into her travel journal and pulls out a creased piece of paper. Kiss a boy on top of the Eiffel Tower. Roll in a field of tulips. Swim with dolphins. See the northern lights. Climb a volcano. Sing in a rock band. Cobble my own boots. Cook a feast for 25 friends. Make 25 friends. “It’s a work in progress. I keep adding to it, and already I’ve had some hiccups. I came here for tulip fields, but they only bloom in the springtime. So now I’ll have to figure something else out. Oh, well. I think I can catch the northern lights in this place called Bodø in Norway.”

“Did you manage to kiss a boy on top of the Eiffel Tower?”

Her lips prick up into a slightly wicked pixie elf grin. “I did. I went up the morning you left. There was a group of Italians. They can be very obliging, those Italians.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “I didn’t even get a name.”

I whisper back, “Sometimes you don’t need to.”

Thirty-seven

We go to a late lunch at an Indonesian restaurant that serves one of those massive rijsttafel meals, and we stuff ourselves silly, and as we’re wobbling along on the bike, I get an idea. It’s not quite the flower fields at Keukenhof, but maybe it’ll do. I get us lost for about twenty minutes until I find the flower market I passed this morning. The vendors are closing up their stalls and leaving behind a good number of throwaways. Wren and I steal a bunch of them and lay them out on the crooked sidewalk above the canal bank. She rolls around in them, happy as can be. I laugh as I snap some pictures with her camera and with my phone and text them to my mom.