Just One Year

She sighs. Then reaches for her mobile. “Don’t start anything up with her.”

“I won’t,” I promise.

“Right. You’re a changed man.” I can’t quite get whether she’s being sarcastic or not.

Inside, the music changes, from mellow jazz to something wilder with screaming trumpets. Marjolein looks longingly inside. I realize that she’s not alone.

“I’ll let you go,” I say.

She leans forward to kiss good-bye. “Your mother will be pleased I saw you.”

She starts to close the door. “Can I ask you something? About Yael?”

“Sure,” she says absently, her attention already back in the warm house and on whomever’s waiting in there.

“Did she, I don’t know, do things, to help me, that I didn’t know about?”

Her face is half hidden in shadows, but her toothy smile shines in the reflected light. “What did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything.”

Marjolein shakes her head. “Then neither can I.” She starts to close the door. Then she stops. “But did you consider in all those months you were gone, why your bank account never ever went to zero?”

I hadn’t considered it, not really. I rarely used my bank card but when I did, it always worked.

“Someone was always watching,” Marjolein says. When she shuts the door, she’s still smiling.

Forty-one

Utrecht

Everything takes too long. The train is late. The bike share line is too long. So I catch a bus instead and it stops to pick up every old lady in town. I shouldn’t have left so late, but it was already late when I got hold of Sara this morning. Then it took a bit of cajoling before she finally remembered there was a letter. No, she didn’t read it. No, she didn’t remember where it came from. But she thinks she forwarded to the address on file. The one in Utrecht. Not that long ago.

By the time I get to Bloemstraat, it’s almost noon. The second tech rehearsal is at 2:00 back in Amsterdam. I have nothing but time in my life, but never enough of it when I need it.

I ring the eyeball bell. There’s no answer. I have no idea who lives here anymore. I texted Broodje on the train over but he didn’t answer. Then I remembered that he’s in the middle of the Aegean somewhere. With Candace. Whose name he knows, whose telephone number and email address he got before he left Mexico.

The front door is locked but I still have my key and it still works. The first good sign.

“Hello,” I call, my voice echoing through the empty house. It no longer looks like the place I lived in. No more lumpy sofa. No more boy smell. Even the Picasso flowers are gone.

There’s a dining room table, with the post scattered all over it. I rifle through the stacks as quickly as possible, but I see nothing, so I make myself slow down and methodically go through each piece of mail, dividing it into neat piles: for Broodje, for Henk, for W, even some for Ivo, who’s still getting letters here, for a couple of unfamiliar girls who must be living here now. There is some mail for me, mostly dead letters from the university and a travel catalog from the agency I used to book our Mexico tickets.

I look up the stairs. Perhaps the letter is up there. Or in the attic in my old room. Or in one of the cabinets. Or maybe it isn’t the one Sara forwarded. Maybe it’s still back on the Nieuwe Prinsengracht. Or somewhere in Marjolein’s office.

Or maybe there is no letter from her. Maybe it’s just another false hope I’ve conjured for myself.

I hear ticking. On the mantel, where the Picasso used to hang, there’s an old-fashioned wooden clock, like the kind Saba once had in his Jerusalem apartment. It was one of the few pieces Yael kept after he died. I wonder where it is now.

It’s half past twelve. If I want to get the train back in time for the tech rehearsal, I have to leave now. Otherwise, I’ll be late. And being late for tech? The only thing worse in Petra’s book would be not showing for a performance. I think of the original understudy, replaced because he had to miss three rehearsals. It’s too late for her to replace me, but that’s not to say she can’t fire me. I’m nothing but a shadow, anyhow.

Being fired won’t make any material difference in my life right now. Except I don’t want to be fired. And more than that, I don’t want to hand over that decision to Petra. If I’m late, that’s exactly what will happen.

The house seems huge all of a sudden, like it would take years to search all the rooms. The moment seems even bigger.

I’ve given up on Lulu before. In Utrecht. In Mexico. But that felt like surrendering. Like it was me I was really giving up on. This feels different, somehow. Like maybe Lulu brought me to this place, and for the first time in a long time, I’m on the cusp of something real. Maybe this is the point of it all. Maybe this is where the road is meant to end.

I think of the postcards I left in her suitcase. I’d written sorry on one of them. Only now do I understand what I really should’ve written was thank you.

“Thank you,” I say quietly to the empty house. I know she’ll never hear it, but somehow that seems besides the point.

Then I drop my mail in the recycling and head back to Amsterdam, closing the door behind me.

PART TWO One Day

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.