Just One Year

unlock the door, and there’s the suitcase. She hasn’t come back for it, and for a moment I feel happy because it means she must still be here. Still be in Paris, looking for me.

But then I think about what the woman from Ganterie said, the one who came downstairs after my vision went all black and Toshi threatened again to call an ambulance and I begged for a taxi instead. This woman said that she saw a girl race out of the doors when she unlocked them this morning. “I called after her to come back, but she just ran away,” she told me, in French.

Lulu didn’t speak French. And she didn’t know her way around Paris. She didn’t know how to get to the train station last night. She didn’t know how to get to the club, either. She wouldn’t know where her suitcase is. She wouldn’t know where I was—even if she wanted to find me.

I take the suitcase, search for a luggage tag, and find nothing: not a name tag or an airplane baggage claim. I try to open it, but it’s locked. I pause for all of a second before yanking off the flimsy padlock. As soon as I open the bag, I’m hit with the familiar. Not the contents—clothes and souvenirs I’ve never seen before—but the smell. I pick up a neatly folded T-shirt, put it to my face, and inhale.

“What are you doing?” Celine asks, suddenly appearing in the doorway.

I slam the door shut in her face and continue going through Lulu’s things. There are souvenirs, including one of those wind-up clocks like one we looked at together at one of the stalls on the Seine, some plug adapters, chargers, toiletries, but nothing that tracks back to her. There is a sheet of paper in a plastic bag, and I pick that up, hopeful, but it only contains an inventory of sorts.

Tucked underneath a sweater is a travel journal. I finger the cover. I was on a train to Warsaw more than a year ago when my rucksack got nicked. I had my passport, money, and address book on me, so all the thieves got was a half-broken backpack with a bunch of dirty clothes, an old camera, and a diary inside of it. They had probably just thrown everything away once they’d realized there was nothing to sell. Maybe they got twenty euros for the camera, though it was worth a lot more to me. As for the diary, worthless; I prayed they tossed it. I couldn’t bear the idea of anyone reading it. It was the only time in the last two years I’d considered going home. I didn’t. But when I bought new things, I didn’t replace the diary.

I wonder what Lulu would think of me reading her journal. I try to imagine how I’d have felt had she read all my raw rantings about Bram and Yael from my stolen journal. When I do, it’s not the usual embarrassment or shame or the disgust that washes over me. Instead, it’s something quiet, familiar. Something like relief.

I open her journal, flipping through the pages, knowing I shouldn’t. But I’m looking for a way to contact to her, though maybe, I’m just looking for more of her. A different way to breathe her in.

But I find no scent of her. Not a single name or address: not hers, not anyone’s she met. There are only a few vague entries, nothing telling, nothing Lulu.

I flip to the end of the journal. The spine is stiff and cracks. Behind the back cover is a deck of postcards. I search them for addresses, but they’re blank.

I reach for a pen on one of the shelves and start writing my name, phone number, email address, and Broodje’s address for good measure, on each of the postcards. I write myself into Rome, Vienna, Prague, Edinburgh. London. All the while, I’m wondering why. Keep in touch. It’s like a mantra on the road. This act you do. But it rarely happens. You meet people, you part ways, sometimes you cross paths again. Mostly, you don’t.

The last postcard is of William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon. I’d told her to skip Hamlet and come see us instead. I’d told her the night was too nice for tragedy. I should have known better than to say a thing like that.

I flip Shakespeare over. “Please,” I begin. I’m about to write something else: Please get in touch. Please let me explain. Please tell me who you are. But my cheek is throbbing and my vision has gone all soft-focus again and I’m exhausted and weighted with regret. So I bookend the “please” with that regret. “I’m sorry,” I write.

I tuck all the postcards back in the bag and then back in the journal. I zip up the suitcase and put it back in the corner. I shut the door.

Four

The last time I was in Celine’s flat, more than a year ago, she hurled a vase of dead flowers at my head. I’d been staying with her about a month, and I told her it was time for me to move on. It had been unseasonably warm and I’d stayed unusually long. But then the weather had turned cold and I felt the claustrophobia return. Celine accused me of being a fair-weather boyfriend, and she wasn’t entirely wrong about the weather, but I’d never actually been her boyfriend, never promised to stay. There was screaming, curses, then the vase sailing through the air, missing my head but smashing into the faded blue wall. I tried to help with the mess before I left, but she refused to let me.

I don’t think either of us expected me ever to set foot in here again. I don’t think we ever thought we’d see each other again. But then I bumped into her at La Ruelle a few months later. She had recently been made booking manager, and she seemed happy enough to see me. She gave me free drinks all night and invited me down to her office to show me the roster of bands she had scheduled in the coming months. I went with her, even though I was pretty certain that the calendar was not what she wanted to show me, and sure enough, as soon as we got to the office, she locked the door, and never turned on her computer.

There was an unspoken agreement that I’d never go back to her flat. I had a place to stay, anyway, and I was leaving the next morning. After that, I saw her whenever I came through Paris. Always at the club, in the office, with the door locked.

So I think we are both surprised when I ask if I can stay at her place.

“Really? You want to?”

“If you don’t mind. You can give me the keys and meet me later. I know you have to work. I’ll leave tomorrow.”

“Stay as long as you like. Let me come with you. I can help you.”

My fingers absently touch the watch, still on my wrist. “You don’t have to. I just need to rest.”

Celine sees the watch. “Is that hers?” she asks.

I run my finger along the cracked crystal.

“Are you going to keep it?” she asks, her tone gone sour.

I nod. Celine starts to protest, but I hold up my hand to stop her. I barely have the energy to stand. But I am keeping this watch.

Celine rolls her eyes, but she also shuts down her computer and helps me up the stairs. She calls out to Modou, who is now digging around behind the bar, that she is taking me home for the night.

“What happened to your friend?” Modou asks, popping back up.

I turn back toward him. The lights are dim and Celine’s arm is around me for support. I can hardly see him. “Tell her I’m sorry. Her suitcase is in the closet. If she comes back. Tell her that.” I want to tell him to make sure she looks at the postcards, but Celine is yanking me out the door. Outside, I was expecting darkness, but, no, it’s still daytime. Days like these go on for years. It’s the ones you want to last that slip away—one, two, three—in seconds.

• • •

The watermark from where the vase smashed into the wall is still there. So are the piles of books, magazines, CDs, and precarious towers of vinyl records. The picture windows, which she never bothers to cover, even at night, are wide open, letting in the endless, endless daytime.

Celine gives me a glass of water, and at last I take the painkillers Dr. Robinet gave me before I left the hospital. He advised me to take them before the pain came on, and to keep taking them until it subsided. But I was afraid taking them earlier would dull whatever wits I had left about me.

The instructions on the bottle say one pill every six hours. I take three.

“Lift up your hands,” Celine instructs. And it’s like yesterday, when she was making me change my clothes and Lulu walked in on us, and I’d thought it cute that she tried to hide her jealousy. And then Modou had kissed her and I’d had to hide mine.