Just One Day 02: Just One Year

by Gayle Forman

  “Hungover more like. When we stop for lunch, we’ll get some tequila. Hair of the dog is what T.J. calls it.”

  I bunch my rucksack into a makeshift pillow and lean my head against the window. Broodje pulls out a copy of Voetbal International. The bus chugs off. I fall asleep, waking when we arrive at Coba. We plod off the bus, standing in a little clump as the guide tells us about the ancient Mayan ruins, a series of isolated temples and pyramids half overtaken by the trees and vines of the jungle. “It’s very unique,” she says. “This is one of the few ruins you can still climb. And you’ll also be interested in the lagoon, La Iglesia, or church, and of course, the ball courts.”

  Behind us, a girl, the only other person our age, asks, “Ball courts? What kind of ball did they play?”

  “A sort of basketball,” the guide answers.

  “Oh.” She sounds disappointed.

  “You don’t like basketball?” Broodje asks her. “I thought Americans loved basketball.”

  “She’s a soccer player,” an older woman says. “She was all-state in high school.”

  “Nana!”

  “Really? What position?” Broodje asks.

  “Striker.”

  “Midfield.” He taps his chest.

  They look at each other. “Wanna go check out the ball courts?” she asks.

  “Sure.”

  “Be back in a half hour, Candace,” the older lady says.

  “Okay.”

  Broodje looks at me to come, but I nod for him to go alone. When the rest of the tour sets off toward the lagoon, I turn straight for the Nohoch Mul pyramid, climbing the 120 near-vertical steps to the top. It’s midday and hot so there’s hardly anyone up here, just a family taking pictures. It’s still enough for the quiet to be loud: the rustle of the breeze in the trees, the squawk of tropical birds, the metallic chirp of crickets. A gust of hot wind picks up a dry leaf and carries it over the jungle canopy.

  The stillness is interrupted by a couple of kids, who have started shouting each other’s names in bird chirps. “Josh!” the girl squawks, as her brother laughs.

  “Allie!” the boy, Josh, presumably, chirps back.

  “Joshua, Allison, shh,” their mother chides, gesturing to me. “You’re not the only ones up here.”

  The kids look at me, cocking their heads, as if inviting me to call out a name, too. I hold up my hands and shrug because I don’t actually know the name I want to yell. I’m not even sure I want to yell it anymore.

  Back at the Monkey Bus, I find Broodje and Candace sharing a Coke, one bottle, two straws. When we lumber back on board, I slip into a seat next to an older man traveling solo, allowing Broodje and Candace to sit together in our row. When I hear them arguing about whether Van Persie or Messi is the best striker, I smile, and my gentleman seatmate smiles back.

  After lunch, we stop at a traditional Mayan village and are given the option of a ten-dollar spiritual cleansing by a Mayan priest. I stay off to the side as the others take turns standing under a smoking canopy. Then we’re herded back on the bus. The doors wheeze open. Broodje climbs on, Candace climbs on, my seatmate with the sandals and the socks climbs on, the guide climbs on. Everyone climbs on, except me.

  “Willy, you coming?” Broodje calls.

  He sees me hesitating by the door and comes back down the aisle to talk to me. “Willy, all is good? Are you mad that I’m sitting with Candace?”

  “Of course not. I think it’s great.”

  “Come on.”

  I do the calculations in my mind. Candace said she was in town until the eighth, longer than we are. Broodje will have company.

  “I’m getting off here.” As soon as I say it, I feel that familiar relief. When you’re on the road, there is always the promise of the next stop being better than the last.

  His face goes serious. “Are you staying away because of what I said before, about you getting all the girls? Don’t worry. I think one actually likes me.”

  “I’m sure of it. So you should make the most of it. I’ll see you back at the airport for the flight home.”

  “What? That’s in four days. And you don’t have your things.”

  “I have what I need. Just bring the rest to the airport.”

  The bus driver guns the engine. The guide taps her watch. Broodje looks panicked.

  “It’s okay,” I reassure him, tightening the straps on my rucksack.

  “You won’t get lost?” he asks.

  I paste on a reassuring smile. But of course, the truth is, that is exactly what I intend to do.

  Nineteen

  * * *

  Valladolid, Mexico

  * * *

  Two hitched truck rides later, I find myself on the outskirts of Valladolid, a small colonial town. I wander around the central square, full of low-rise, pastel colonial buildings reflecting in a large fountain. Soon I stumble upon a cheap hotel.

  It feels a world away from the Mayan Riviera here. Not just the lack of megaresorts or partying tourists, but how I got here. Not looking, just finding.

  I have no schedule. I sleep when I’m tired, eat when I’m hungry, grabbing something hot and spicy from one of the food carts. I linger late into the night. I don’t look for anyone. I don’t talk to anyone. After the last few months on Bloemstraat, the boys always around, or if not them, Ana Lucia, I’m not used to being alone.

  I sit at the edge of the fountain and watch people and, for a minute, indulge myself imagining Lulu being one of them, imagining that we really had escaped into the wilds of Mexico. Is this where we’d go? Would we sit at a café, our ankles intertwined, our heads close, like that couple over there under the umbrella? Would we walk all night, ducking into the alleyways to steal a kiss? Would we wake up the next morning, untangle our bodies, pull out a map, close our eyes and decide where to next? Or would we just never get out of bed?

  No! Stop it! This is pointless. A road nowhere. I get up, brush off my pants and return to the hotel. Lying in bed, I spin a twenty-peso coin around my knuckles and ponder what to do next. When the coin falls to the floor, I reach for it. And then I stop. Heads, I’ll stay in Valladolid another day. Tails, I’ll move on. Tails.

  It’s not pointing at the map. But it’ll do.

  • • •

  The next morning I go downstairs in search of coffee. The worn dining room is practically empty—one Spanish-speaking family at one table, and in the corner by the window, a pretty woman about my age with hair the color of rust.

  “I was wondering about you,” she calls in English. She sounds American.

  I pour some coffee from the samovar. “I often wonder about me, too,” I reply.

  “I saw you last night at the food carts. I’ve been trying to brave up to eat at them, but I wasn’t sure what they were serving or if it would kill a gringo like me.”

  “I think it was pork. I don’t ask too many questions.”

  “Well, it didn’t kill you.” She laughs. “And whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

  We stand there for a second. I gesture to join her at the same time she gestures for me to take a seat. I sit down across from her. A waiter in a tired tuxedo drops off a plate of Mexican sweet bread.

  “Careful there,” she says, flicking at her own stale bread with a turquoise-painted nail. “I almost chipped a tooth.”

  I knock at it. It sounds like a hollow log. “I’ve had worse.”

  “What are you, some kind of a professional adventure eater?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Where are you from?” She holds up a hand. “No, wait, let me guess. Say something else.”

  “Something else?”

  She taps a finger to her temple, then snaps her fingers. “You’re Dutch.”

  “Good ear.”

  “Not much of an accent, though.”
<
br />   “Very good ear. I grew up speaking English.”

  “Did you live in England?”

  “No, it was just my mother didn’t like speaking Dutch, thought it sounded too much like German. So at home, it was English.”

  She glances at the phone on the table. “Well, I suspect there is a fascinating story behind that, but I’m afraid it’ll have to remain a mystery.” She pauses. “I’m a day late already.”

  “Late for what?”

  “For Mérida. I was supposed to be there yesterday, but my car broke down, and, well, it’s been a cascading comedy of errors. What about you? Where are you headed?”

  I pause. “Mérida—if you’ll give me a ride.”

  “I wonder what would piss off David more—driving alone or giving a ride to strangers.”

  “Willem.” I hold out my hand. “Now I’m not a stranger.”

  She narrows her eyes at my outstretched hand. “You’ll need to do better than that.”

  “Sorry. I’m Willem de Ruiter.” I reach into my backpack for my stiff new passport and hand it over. “Here’s some identification.”

  She flips through it. “Nice picture, Willem. I’m Kate. Kate Roebling. And I’m not showing you my passport because the picture is very unfortunate. You’ll just have to trust me on that.”

  She smiles and slides my passport back across the table. “Okay, then, Willem de Ruiter, traveling adventure-eater. The garage just opened so I’m grabbing the car. Assuming it’s actually ready, I’ll be hitting the road in about a half hour. Does that give you time to get packed and ready to go?”

  I point to my rucksack on the floor next to me. “I’m always packed and ready to go.”

  • • •

  Kate picks me up in a sputtering Volkswagen jeep, the seats torn, the foam stuffing coming out. “This is fixed?” I ask, climbing in.

  “That’s just cosmetic. You should’ve seen it before. The muffler was falling out, literally dragging behind the car, sparking. The whole rainforest could’ve gone up in flames because of this baby. No offense. Who’s a pretty girl?” She pats the dashboard and turns to me, whispering. “You have to be nice to her. Or she won’t go.”

  I tip an imaginary hat to the car. “My apologies.”

  “This is actually a great car. Appearances can be quite deceiving, you know.” She guns the engine.

  “Yes, I’ve noticed.”

  “Thank God, or I’d be out of a job.”

  “Bank robber?”

  “Ha! I’m an actor.”

  “Really?”

  She turns to me. “Why? Are you of the tribe?”

  “Not really.”

  She raises an eyebrow. “‘Not really’? That’s like being ‘a little’ pregnant. You either are or you’re not.”

  “How about I was, not seriously, and now I’m not.”

  “Oh, did you need to get a ‘real job’?” she asks sympathetically.

  “No. I don’t have one of those, either.”

  “So you just travel and eat dangerously?”

  “More or less.”

  “Nice life.”

  “More or less.” The car hits a pothole and my stomach seems to smack against the roof and then just as abruptly, plummet back to the floor. “What kind of acting do you do?” I ask when I’ve regained my equilibrium.

  “I’m a cofounder and artistic director of a small theater company in New York called Ruckus. We do productions, but also training and teaching programs.”

  “That’s not impressive at all.”

  “I know, right? I never meant to be quite so ambitious, but when my friends and I moved to New York, we couldn’t get the kind of roles we wanted, so we started our own company. And it’s just kind of grown. We produce our own plays and we teach, and now we’ve started this overseas initiative. That’s why we’re in Mexico. We’re running a workshop on Shakespeare in Mérida in conjunction with Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán.”

  “You’re teaching Shakespeare in Spanish?”

  “Well, I’m not, because I don’t speak a lick of Spanish. I’ll work with the English speakers. David, my fiancé, he speaks Spanish. Though the funny thing is, even when we do the Shakespeare in translation, I somehow know where we are in the plays. Maybe because I know them so well. Or because Shakespeare transcends language.”

  I nod. “The first time I did Shakespeare, I did it in French.”

  She turns to me. Her eyes are green, bright as autumn apples, and there’s a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “You did Shakespeare then? And in French?”

  “Mostly in English, of course.”

  “Oh, of course.” She pauses. “That’s pretty good for a not-serious actor.”

  “I never said I was any good.”

  She laughs. “Oh, I can tell you were good.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. I have a Spidey-sense for these things.” She pulls out a package of gum, takes a stick, and offers me a piece. It tastes like talcum powder and coconuts and makes my still-churning stomach rebel a little bit more. I spit it out.

  “Vile, right? Yet strangely addictive.” She pops a second piece. “So how in the world did a Dutchman wind up doing Shakespeare in French?”

  “I was traveling. I was broke. I was in Lyon. I met this Shakespeare troupe called Guerrilla Will. They mostly performed in English but the director is a little . . . eccentric and she thought the way to one-up the other street performers was to do Shakespeare in the native language. She’d cobbled together a cast of French speakers to do Much Ado About Nothing in France, in French. But the guy who’d been playing Claudio ran off to be with some Norwegian guy he’d met; everyone was already doubling up parts so they just needed someone who could get by in French. And I could.”

  “You’d never done Shakespeare before?”

  “I’d never acted before. I’d been traveling with an acrobatic troupe. So when I tell you it was all by accident, I’m not kidding.”

  “But you did other plays?”

  “Yeah, Much Ado was a disaster but we ran it for four nights before Tor realized it. Then Guerrilla Will switched back to English and I stayed on. It was decent money.”

  “Oh, you’re one of those. Doing Shakespeare just for the money,” she jokes. “You whore.”

  I laugh.

  “So what other plays did you do?”

  “Romeo and Juliet, of course. A Midsummer’s Night Dream. All’s Well That Ends Well. Twelfth Night. All the crowd-pleasers.”

  “I love Twelfth Night; we’re talking about doing that next year when we have time. We just closed a two-year off-Broadway run of Cymbeline and we’ve been touring it. Do you know it?”

  “I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never seen it.”

  “It’s a lovely, funny, romantic play and there’s lots of music in it. At least the way we do it.”

  “Us, too. We had a drum circle in our Twelfth Night.”

  She glimpses at me sidelong as she keeps her eyes on the road. “Our Twelfth Night?”

  “Theirs. Guerrilla Will’s.”

  “Sounds like the whore fell in love with the john.”

  “No. No falling in love,” I say.

  “But you miss it?”

  I shake my head. “I’ve moved on.”

  “I see.” We’re quiet for a while. Then she says, “Do you do that a lot? Move on?”

  “Maybe. But only because I travel a lot.”

  She taps out a beat on the steering wheel, audible only to herself. “Or maybe you travel a lot because it lets you move on.”

  “Perhaps.”

  She’s quiet again. Then: “So are you moving on now? Is that what brought you to the grand metropolis of Valladolid?”

  “No. The wind just blew me there.”

  “What? Lik
e a plastic bag?”

  “I prefer to think of myself as a ship. Like a sailboat.”

  “But sailboats aren’t steered by the wind; they’re powered by it. There’s a difference.”

  I look out the window. The jungle is everywhere. I look back at her. “Can you move on from something when you’re not sure what it is you’re moving on from?”

  “You can move on from absolutely anything,” she replies. “But that does sound a little complicated.”

  “It is,” I say. “Complicated.”

  Kate doesn’t answer, and the silence stretches out, shimmery, like the road ahead of us.

  “And a long story,” I add.

  “It’s a long drive,” she replies.

  There’s something about Kate that reminds me of Lulu. Maybe it’s just that they’re both American or how we met: during journeys, talking food.

  Or maybe it’s because in a few hours, I’ll never see her again. There’s nothing to lose. So as we drive, I tell Kate the story of that day, but it’s a different version from the one I told Broodje and the boys. You play to your audience, Tor always said. Which is maybe why I can tell Kate the parts of the story that I didn’t—couldn’t—tell Broodje and the boys. “It was like she knew me,” I tell her. “Straightaway, she knew me.”

  “How?”

  I tell Kate about Lulu thinking I’d deserted her on the train when I’d spent too long in the café. Hysterically laughing, and then out of the blue—my glimmer of her strange honesty—telling me she’d thought I’d got off the train.

  “Were you going to?” Kate asks, her eyes wide.

  “No, of course not,” I answer. And I wasn’t, but the memory of it still shames me because of what I was going to do later.

  “So how did she see you, exactly?”

  “She said she couldn’t understand why I invited her without an ulterior motive.”

  Kate laughs. “I hardly think you wanting to sleep with a pretty girl qualifies as an ulterior motive.”

  I wanted to sleep with her, of course. “But that wasn’t the ulterior motive. I invited her to Paris because I didn’t want to go back to Holland that day.”