by Gayle Forman
When he finally kisses my mouth, everything goes oddly quiet, like the moment of silence between lightning and thunder. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four Mississippi. Five Mississippi.
Bang.
We kiss again. This next kiss is the kind that breaks open the sky. It steals my breath and gives it back. It shows me that every other kiss I’ve had in my life has been wrong.
I tangle my hands into that hair of his and pull him toward me. Willem cups the back of my neck, runs his fingers along the little outcroppings of my vertebrae. Ping. Ping. Ping, go the electric shocks.
His hands encircle my waist as he boosts me onto the table, so we are face-to-face, kissing hard now. My cardigan comes off. Then my T-shirt. Then his. His chest is smooth and cut, and I bury my head in it, kissing down the indentation at his centerline. I’m unbuckling his belt, tugging down his jeans with hunger I don’t recognize.
My legs loop around his waist. His hands are all over me, migrating down to the crease of my hip where they’d rested during our nap. I make a sound that doesn’t seem like it could come from me.
A condom materializes. My underwear is shimmied down over my sandaled feet and my skirt is bunched into a petticoat around my waist. Willem’s boxers fall away. Then he lifts me off the table. And then I realize that I was wrong before. Only now is my surrender complete.
After, we fall to the floor, Willem on his back, me resting next to him. His fingers graze my birthmark, which feels like it is flashing heat, and mine tickle his wrist, the hairs so soft against the heavy links of my watch.
“So this is how you’d take care of me?” he jokes, pointing to a red mark on his neck where I think I bit him.
Like with everything, he’s turned my promise into something funny, something to tease me with. But I don’t feel like laughing, not now, not about this, not after that.
“No,” I say. “That’s not how.” Part of me wants to disavow the whole thing. But I won’t. Because he asked me if I’d take care of him, and even if it was a joke, I made a promise that I would, and that wasn’t a joke. When I said I’d be his mountain girl, I knew I wasn’t going to see him again. That wasn’t the point. I wanted him to know that when felt alone out there in the world . . . I was there too.
But that was yesterday. With a clench of my chest that makes me truly understand why it’s called heartbreak, I wonder if it’s not him being alone that I’m worried about.
Willem fingers the fine film of white clay dust that covers my body. “You’re like a ghost,” he says. “Soon you disappear.” His voice is light, but when I try to catch his eye, he won’t meet my gaze.
“I know.” There’s a lump in my throat. If we keep talking about this, it’ll become a sob.
Willem wipes off a bit of the dust and my darker, tour-tanned skin reemerges. But other things, I now realize, won’t come off so readily. I take Willem’s chin in my hands and turn him to face me. In the wispy glow of the streetlamp, his planes and angles are both shadowed and illuminated. And then he looks at me, really looks at me, and the expression on his face is sad and wistful and tender and yearning, and it tells me everything I need to know.
My hand shakes as I raise it to my mouth. I lick my thumb and rub it against my wrist, against my birthmark. Then I rub again. I look up, look him right in his eyes, which are as dark as this night I don’t want to end.
Willem’s face falters for a moment, then he grows solemn, the way he did after we were chased. Then he reaches over and rubs my birthmark. It’s not coming off, is what he is telling me.
“But you leave tomorrow,” he says.
I can hear the drumbeat of my heart echo in my temples. “I don’t have to.”
For a second, he looks confused.
“I can stay for another day,” I explain.
Another day. That’s all I’m asking. Just one more day. I can’t think beyond that. Beyond that things get complicated. Flights get delayed. Parents go ballistic. But one more day. One more day I can swing with minimal hassle, without upsetting anyone but Melanie. Who will understand. Eventually.
Part of me knows one more day won’t do anything except postpone the heartbreak. But another part of me believes differently. We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.
“What do you think?” I ask Willem. “One more day?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he flips me under him. I sink into the cement floor, submitting to the weight of him. Until something sharp jabs into my rib cage.
“Ow!”
Willem reaches under me and pulls out a small metal chisel.
“We should find somewhere else to stay,” I say. “Not with Céline.”
“Shh.” Willem quiets me with his lips.
Later, after we have taken our time, exploring every hidden crease of each other’s bodies, after we have kissed and licked and whispered and laughed until our limbs are heavy and the sky outside has started to purple with predawn light, Willem pulls a tarp over us.
“Goeienacht, Lulu,” he says, his eyes fluttering with exhaustion.
I trace the creases of his face with my fingers. “Goeienacht, Willem,” I reply. I lean into his ear, push the messy bramble of his hair aside and whisper, “Allyson. My name is Allyson.” But by then, he is already asleep. I rest my head in the crook between his arm and shoulder, tracing the letters of my true name onto his forearm, where I imagine their outlines will remain until morning.
Thirteen
After a ten-day heat wave, I’m used to waking up sweaty, but I wake up to a cool breeze gusting through an open window. I reach for a blanket, but instead of getting something warm and feathery, I get something hard and crinkly. A tarp. And in that hazy space between wake and sleep, it all comes back to me. Where I am. Who I’m with. The happiness warms me from the inside.
I reach for Willem, but he’s not there. I open my eyes, squinting against the gray light, bouncing off the bright white of the studio walls.
Instinctively, I check my watch, but my wrist is bare. I pad over to the window, pulling my skirt around my naked chest. The streets are still quiet, the stores and cafés still shut. It’s still early.
I want to call to him, but there’s a church-like hush, and to disrupt it feels wrong. He must be downstairs, maybe in the bathroom. I could sort of use it myself. I pull on my clothes and tiptoe down the stairs. But Willem isn’t in the bathroom, either. I quickly pee and throw water on my face and try to drink away the beginnings of my hangover.
He must be exploring the studios by daylight. Or maybe he went back up the staircase. Calm down, I tell myself. He’s probably back upstairs right now.
“Willem?” I call.
There’s no answer.
I run back upstairs to the studio we slept in. It’s messy. On the floor is my bag, its contents spilling out. But his bag, his stuff, is all gone.
My hearts starts to pound. I run over to my bag and open it up, checking for my wallet and passport, my minimal cash. Immediately I feel stupid. He paid for me to come over here. He isn’t going to rip me off. I remind myself of the tizzy I got myself into yesterday on the train.
I run up and down the stairs, calling his name now. But it just echoes back to me—Willem, Willem!—like the walls are laughing at me.
Panic is coming. I try to push it away with logic. He went out to get us something to eat. To find us somewhere to sleep.
I go stand next to the window and wait.
Paris begins to wake. Store grates go up, sidewalks are swept. Car horns start honking, bicycles chime, the sound of footfalls on the rainy pavement multiply.
If stores are open, it must be nine o’clock? Ten? Soon the artists will arrive, and what will they do when they find me squatting in their squat like Goldilocks?
I decide to wait outside. I put on my shoes and sling my bag over my shoulder and head to the open window. But in the cold light of day,
without wine emboldening me or Willem helping me, the distance between the second floor and the ground seems like an awfully long way to fall.
You got up, you can get back down, I chastise myself. But when I hoist myself onto the ledge and reach for the scaffolding, my hand slips and I feel dizzy. I imagine my parents getting the news of me falling to my death from a Paris building. I collapse back into the studio, hyperventilating into the cave of my hands.
Where is he? Where the hell is he? My mind pinballs through rationales for his delay. He went to get more money. He went to fetch my suitcase. What if he fell going out the window? I jump up, full of twisted optimism that I will find him sprawled underneath the drain pipe, hurt but okay, and then I can make good on my promise to take care of him. But there’s nothing under the window except a puddle of dirty water.
I sink back down onto the studio floor, breathless with fear, which is now on an entirely different Richter scale than my little scare on the train.
More time goes by. I hug my knees, shivering in the damp morning. I creep downstairs. I try the front door, but it’s locked, from the outside. I have the sense that I’m going to be trapped here forever, that I’ll grow old and wither and die locked in this squat.
How late can artists sleep? What time is it? But I don’t need a clock to tell me Willem has been gone too long. With each passing minute, the explanations I keep concocting ring increasingly hollow.
Finally, I hear the clank of the chain and keys jangle in the locks, but when the door swings open, it’s a woman with two long braids carrying a bunch of rolled up canvases. She looks at me and starts talking to me in French, but I just spring past her.
Out on the street, I look around for Willem, but he’s not here. It seems like he would never be here, on this ugly stretch of cheap Chinese restaurants and auto garages and apartment blocks, all gray in the gray rain. Why did I ever think this place was beautiful?
I run into the street. The cars honk at me, their horns strange and foreign sounding, as if even they speak another language. I spin around, having absolutely no idea where I am, no idea where to go, but desperately wanting to be home. Home in my bed. Safe.
The tears make it hard to see, but somehow I stumble across the street, down the sidewalk, ricocheting from block to block. This time no one is chasing me. But this time I am scared.
I run for several blocks, up a bunch of stairs and onto a square of sorts, with a rack of those gray-white bicycles, a real estate agency, a pharmacy, and a café, in front of which is a phone booth. Melanie! I can call Melanie. I take some deep breaths, swallow my sobs, and follow the instructions to get the international operator. But the call goes straight to voice mail. Of course it does. She left the phone off to avoid calls from my mother.
An operator comes on the line to tell me I can’t leave a message because the call is collect. I start to cry. The operator asks me if she should call the police for me. I hiccup out a no, and she asks if perhaps there is someone else I might call. And that’s when I remember Ms. Foley’s business card.
She picks up with a brisk “Pat Foley.” The operator has to ask her if she’ll accept the collect call three times because I start crying harder the minute she answers, so she can’t hear the request.
“Allyson. Allyson. What’s the matter? Are you hurt?” she asks over the line.
I’m too scared, too numb to be hurt. That will come later.
“No,” I say in the tiniest of voices. “I need help.”
Ms. Foley manages to pull the basics out of me. That I went to Paris with a boy I met on the train. That I’m stuck here, lost, with no money, no clue where I am.
“Please,” I beg her. “I just want to go home.”
“Let’s work on getting you back to England, shall we?” she says calmly. “Do you have a ticket?”
Willem bought me a round trip, I think. I rifle through my bag and pull out my passport. The ticket is still folded neatly inside. “I think so,” I tell Ms. Foley in a quivery voice.
“When is the return booked for?”
I look at it. The numbers and dates all swim together. “I can’t tell.”
“Top left corner. It’ll be in military time. The twenty-four-hour clock.”
And there I see it. “Thirteen-thirty.”
“Thirteen-thirty,” Ms. Foley says in that comfortingly efficient voice of hers. “Excellent. That’s one-thirty. It’s just past noon now in Paris, so you have time to catch that train. Can you get yourself to the train station? Or to a Metro?”
I have no idea how. And no money. “No.”
“How about a taxi? Take a taxi to the Gare du Nord?”
I shake my head. I don’t have any euros to pay for a taxi. I tell Ms. Foley that. I can hear the disapproval in her silence. As if nothing I’ve told her before has lowered me in her esteem, but coming to Paris without sufficient funds? She sighs. “I can order you a taxi from here and have it prepaid to bring you to the train station.”
“You can do that?”
“Just tell me where you are.”
“I don’t know where I am,” I bellow. I paid absolutely no attention to where Willem took me yesterday. I surrendered.
“Allyson!” Her voice is a slap across the face, and it has just the intended effect. It stops my caterwauling. “Calm down. Now put the phone down for a moment and go write down the nearest intersection.”
I reach into my bag for my pen, but it’s not there. I put the phone down and memorize the street names. “I’m at Avenue Simon Bolivar and Rue de l’Equerre.” I’m butchering the pronunciation. “In front of a pharmacy.”
Ms. Foley repeats back the information, then tells me not to move, that a car will be there within a half hour and that I’m to call her back if one doesn’t arrive. That if she doesn’t hear from me, she will assume that I will be on the one-thirty train to St. Pancras, and she will meet me in London right at edge of the platform at two forty-five. I’m not to leave the train station without her.
Fifteen minutes later, a black Mercedes cruises up to the corner. The driver holds a sign, and when I see my name—Allyson Healey—I feel both relieved and bereft. Lulu, wherever she came from, is truly gone now.
I slide into the backseat, and we take off for what turns out to be all of a ten-minute drive to the train station. Ms. Foley has arranged for the driver to take me inside, to show me right where to board. I’m in a daze as we make our way through the station, and it’s only when I am slumped into my seat and I see people wheeling bags through the aisles that I realize that I’ve left my suitcase at the club. All my clothes and all the souvenirs from the trip are in there. And I don’t even care. I have lost something far more valuable in Paris.
I keep it together until the train goes into the Tunnel. And then maybe it’s the safety of the darkness or the memory of yesterday’s underwater journey that sets everything loose, but once we leave Calais and the windows darken, I again start to quietly sob, my tears salty and endless as the sea I’m traveling through.
At St. Pancras, Ms. Foley escorts me to a café, stations me at a corner table, and buys me tea that grows cold in its cup. I tell her everything now: The underground Shakespeare play in Stratford-upon-Avon. Meeting Willem on the train. The trip to Paris. The perfect day. His mysterious disappearance this morning that I still do not understand. My panicked flight.
I expect her to be stern—disapproving, for deceiving her, for being such a not-good girl—but instead she is sympathetic.
“Oh, Allyson,” she says.
“I just don’t know what could’ve happened to him. I waited and waited for a few hours at least, and I got so scared. I panicked. I don’t know, maybe I should’ve waited longer.”
“You could’ve waited until next Christmas, and I scarcely imagine it would have done a spot of good,” Ms. Foley says.
I look at her. I can feel my eyes beseeching.
“He was an actor, Allyson. An actor. They are the worst of the lot.”
�
��You think the whole thing was an act? Was fake?” I shake my head. “Yesterday wasn’t fake.” My voice is emphatic, though I’m no longer sure who I’m trying to convince.
“I daresay it was real in the moment,” she says, measuring her words. “But men are different from women. Their emotions are capricious. And actors turn it on and turn it right back off.”
“It wasn’t an act,” I repeat, but my argument is losing steam.
“Did you sleep with him?”
For a second, I can still feel him on me. I push the thought away, look at Ms. Foley, nod.
“Then he got what he came for.” Her words are matter-of-fact, but not unkind. “I imagine he never planned on it being more than a one-day fling. That was exactly what he proposed, after all.”
It was. Until it wasn’t. Last night, we declared our feelings for each other. I am about to tell Ms. Foley this. But then I stop cold: Did we declare anything? Or did I just lick some spit on myself?
I think about Willem. Really think about him. What do I actually know about him? Only a handful of facts—how old he is, how tall he is, what he weighs, his nationality, except I don’t even know that because he said his mother wasn’t Dutch. He’s a traveler. A drifter, really. Accidents are the defining force in his life.
I don’t know his birthday. Or his favorite color, or favorite book, or favorite type of music. Or if he had a pet growing up. I don’t know if he ever broke a bone. Or how he got the scar on his foot or why he hasn’t been home in so long. I don’t even know his last name! And that’s still more than he has on me. He doesn’t even know my first name!
In this ugly little café, without the romantic gleam of Paris turning everything rose-colored pretty, I begin to see things as they truly are: Willem invited me to Paris for one day. He never promised me anything more. Last night, he’d even tried to send me home. He knew Lulu wasn’t my real name, and he made absolutely no attempt to ever find out who I really was. When I’d mentioned texting or emailing him the picture of the two of us, he’d cleverly refused to give out his contact details.
