Just One Day (26 page)

Thirty-five

A
na 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.

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

F
orward 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.”