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 cafe.
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 cafe 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
“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:
“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.
“My sister, Francesca.” She pulls out a piece of paper. It has a bunch of titles and locations,
“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.
“I don’t understand.”
“I love Francesca, and I
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.