Just One Year

“Also, it gives you a cover,” Broodje says. “A reason to be tracking her down other than wanting to bone her a few more times to get her out of your system. You can say you want to return the watch.”

A half hour ago the poster board was empty, but now it’s half filled, all these circles, these tenuous connections, linking me to her. W turns toward it, too.

“Principle of Connectivity,” he says.

• • •

Over the next week, one by one, the circles on W’s connectivity board become Xs, as connections that I understand never actually existed are severed. It’s a Small World is for teens and their parents, so that one’s out. Go Away doesn’t have any record of anyone with a black bob and a watch on that tour. Adventure Edge refuses to divulge information about their clients and Cool Europa appears to have gone out of business. Teen Tours! doesn’t pick up the phone, though I’ve left several messages and emails.

It’s a dispiriting process, this. And complicated, too because I have to dodge time zones and callbacks and the ever-more-suspicious Ana Lucia. She’s not pleased with my more frequent absences, which I’ve attributed to the soccer league I’ve supposedly joined.

One night the phone rings past eleven. “Your girlfriend?” Ana Lucia says, her voice flat. Girlfriend is what she calls Broodje these days, because she thinks I spend more time with him than her. It’s a joke, but it gives my stomach a guilty twist every time.

I pick up the phone and cross to the other side of her room.

“Hi. I’m looking for a Willem de Ruiter?” The voice, in English, butchers the pronunciation of my name.

“Yes, hello,” I respond, trying to stay businesslike because Ana Lucia is right there.

“Hi Willem! This is Erica from Teen Tours! I’m responding to your email about trying to return a missing watch.”

“Oh, good,” I say, keeping it breezy, though Ana Lucia is now looking at me with narrowed suspicious eyes and I realize it’s because I’m speaking in English, and though I speak English with her, on the phone, with the boys, I always speak Dutch.

“We provide loss and theft insurance for all our travelers so if she’d lost something of value, there’d be a claim.”

“Oh,” I say.

“But I’ve checked all the claims for that time period, and all I’ve found is a claim for a stolen iPad from Rome and a bracelet that was recovered. But if you have a name, I can double check.”

I look at Ana Lucia, who’s decidedly not looking at me now, so I know she’s listening. “I can’t give you that now.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, maybe you can call me back with that later?”

“I can’t really do that either.”

“Oh. You sure it was a Teen Tours! tour?”

I now see how the missing-watch story is as cracked as the watch itself. Even if this was the right tour, there’s no way the tour operators would know Lulu lost the watch because she lost it after the tour. It’s a fiction. This is all a fiction. The truth is, I’m looking for a girl whose name I don’t know, who bears a passing resemblance to Louise Brooks. None of which I can say out loud. Nor do I want to. This is absurd.

Erica goes on, “You know, one of our veterans led that tour. She’d know if anything went amiss. Do you want her number?”

I turn to the bed. Ana Lucia is up, throwing off the covers.

“Her name is Patricia Foley,” Erica continues. “Would you like her number?”

Ana Lucia walks across the room and stands in front of me, totally naked, like she knows she’s offering a choice. But it’s not really a choice, when the other option doesn’t actually exist.

“That won’t be necessary,” I say to Erika.

• • •

I wake up the next morning to knocking. I squint at the sliding glass door. There’s Broodje, holding a bag, and putting a finger to his lips.

I crack open the door. Broodje pops in his head in and hands me the bag.

From the bed, Ana Lucia rubs her eyes, looking grumpy.

“Sorry to wake you,” he calls to Ana Lucia. “I need to steal him. We have a soccer match. Lapland forfeited so now we’re playing Wiesbaden.”

Lapland and Wiesbaden? Ana Lucia is ignorant about all things soccer, but this is pushing it. But her face registers no suspicion about the pairing, only sourness about Broodje’s untimely arrival.

In the bag is someone’s old soccer kit, jersey, shorts, cleats, and a thin tracksuit to wear on top. I look at Broodje. He gives me a look. “Better go change now,” he says.

“When will you be back?” she asks me when I return. The tracksuit is several centimeters too short for me. I can’t tell if she notices.

“Late,” Broodje answers. “It’s an away game. In France.” He turns to me. “In Deauville.”

Deauville? No. The search is over. But Broodje is halfway out the door and Ana Lucia already has her hands crossed over her chest. I’m already paying the price, so I may as well do the crime.

I go to give her a kiss good-bye. “Wish me luck,” I say, forgetting for a second that there is no game, no soccer game at least, and that she’s the last person who should be wishing me luck.

Anyway, she doesn’t. “I hope you lose,” she says.

Thirteen

Deauville

It’s off season in Deauville, and the seaside resort is buttoned up tight, a cold wind whipping in off the Channel. From a distance, I can see the marina, rows of sailboats in drydock, on their stands, their masts unstepped. As we get closer, the whole marina appears shut down, hibernating for the winter. Which seems about the right idea.

On the drive down in Lien’s car, which had smelled of lavender when we left and now smells of wet, dirty laundry somehow, the boys had been ebullient. W had located a barge called Viola late last night and had then decided we should take a road trip to France. “Wouldn’t it be easier to call?” I’d asked after the plan had been explained to me. But no. They seemed to think we should just go. Of course, they were properly dressed for it, and I was in nothing but a thin tracksuit. And they had nothing to lose, except a day’s worth of studies. Me, I had even less, but it felt like more somehow.

We drive around the labyrinthine marina, finally reaching the main office only to find it closed. Of course. It’s now four o’clock on a dark November day; anyone in their right mind is holed up somewhere warm.

“Well, we’ll just have to find it ourselves,” W says.

I look around. As far as I can see in every directions are masts. “I don’t see how.”

“Are marinas organized by type of vessel?” W asks.

I sigh. “Sometimes.”

“So there might be a section for barges?” he prompts.

I sigh again. “Possibly.”

“And you said this Jacques lives on his boat year-round so it wouldn’t be drydocked?”

“Probably not.” We had to pull our houseboat out of the water every four years for service overhauls. Drydocking for a vessel that size is a massive undertaking. “Probably anchored.”

“To what?” Henk asks.

“Probably to a pier.”

“There. We walk around until we find the barges,” W says, as if it’s all that easy.

But it’s not easy at all. It’s raining hard now, wet below us and above us. And it seems deserted around