Just One Day 02: Just One Year

by Gayle Forman

  I set off for the patisserie not quite knowing what to do, not quite knowing if I should go back, stay another day, but knowing if I did, it would break all this wide open. I bought the croissants, still not knowing what to do. And then I turned a corner and there were the skinheads. And in a twisted way, I was relieved: They would make the decision for me.

  Except as soon as I woke up in that hospital, unable to remember Lulu, or her name, or where she was, but desperate to find her, I understood that it was the wrong decision.

  “I was coming back,” I tell Kate. But there’s a razor of uncertainty in my voice, and it cuts my deception wide open.

  “You know what I think, Willem?” Kate says, her voice gentle. “I think acting, that girl, it’s the same thing. You get close to something and you get spooked, so you find a way to distance yourself.”

  In Paris, the moment when Lulu had made me feel the safest, when she had stood between me and the skinheads, when she had taken care of me, when she became my mountain girl, I’d almost sent her away. That moment, when we’d found safety, I’d looked at her, the determination burning in her eyes, the love already there, improbably after just one day. And I felt it all—the wanting and the needing—but also the fear because I’d seen what losing this kind of thing could do. I wanted to be protected by her love, and to be protected from it.

  I didn’t understand then. Love is not something you protect. It’s something you risk.

  “You know the irony about acting?” Kate muses. “We wear a thousand masks, are experts at concealment, but the one place it’s impossible to hide is on stage. So no wonder you’re freaked out. And Orlando, well now!”

  She’s right, again. I know she is. Petra didn’t do anything today except give me an excuse to pull another runner. But the truth of it is I didn’t really want to pull a runner that day with Lulu. And I don’t want to pull one now, either.

  “What’s the worst that happens if you do it your way tonight?” Kate asks.

  “She fires me.” But if she does, it’ll be my action that decides it. Not my inaction. I start to smile. It’s tentative, but it’s real.

  Kate matches mine with a big American version. “You know what I say: Go big or go home.”

  I look at the boat; it’s quiet, but the garden is so lush and well-tended in a way that it never was with us. It is a home, not mine, but someone else’s now.

  Go big or go home. I heard Kate say that before and didn’t quite get it. But I understand it now, though I think on this one, Kate has it wrong. Because for me, it’s not go big or go home. It’s go big and go home.

  I need to do one to do the other.

  Forty-eight

  * * *

  Backstage. It’s the usual craziness, only I feel strangely calm. Linus hustles me to the makeshift dressing room where I change out of my street clothes into Orlando’s clothes, hastily altered to fit me. I put on my makeup. I fold my clothes into the lockers behind the stage. My jeans, my shirt, Lulu’s watch. I hold it in my hand one second longer, feel the ticking vibrate against my palm, and then I put it in the locker.

  Linus gathers us into a circle. There are vocal exercises. The musicians tune their guitars. Petra barks last-minute direction, about finding my light and keeping the focus and the other actors supporting me, and just doing my best. She is giving me a piercing, worried look.

  Linus calls five minutes and puts on his headset, and Petra walks away. Max has come backstage for tonight’s performance and is sitting on a three-legged stool in the wings. She doesn’t say anything, but just looks at me and kisses two fingers and holds them up in the air. I kiss the same two on my hand and hold them up to her.

  “Break a leg,” someone whispers in my ear. It’s Marina, come up behind me. Her arms quickly encircle me from behind as she kisses me somewhere between my ear and my neck. Max catches this and smirks.

  “Places!” Linus calls. Petra is nowhere to be seen. She disappears before curtain and won’t reappear until the show is over. Vincent says she goes somewhere to pace, or smoke, or disembowel kittens.

  Linus grabs my wrist. “Willem,” he says. I spin to look at him. He gives a small squeeze and nods. I nod back. “Musicians, go!” Linus commands into his headset.

  The musicians start to play. I take my place at the side of stage.

  “Light cue one, go,” Linus says.

  The lights go up. The audience hushes.

  Linus: “Orlando, go!”

  I hesitate a moment. Breathe, I hear Kate say. I take a breath.

  My heart hammers in my head. Thud, thud, thud. I close my eyes and can hear the ticking of Lulu’s watch; it’s as if I’m still wearing it. I stop and listen to them both before I walk onto the stage.

  And then time just stops. It is a year and a day. One hour and twenty-four. It is time, happening, all at once.

  The last three years solidify into this one moment, into me, into Orlando. This bereft young man, missing a father, without a family, without a home. This Orlando, who happens upon this Rosalind. And even though these two have known each other only moments, they recognize something in each other.

  “The little strength that I have, I would it were with you,” Rosalind says, cracking it all wide open.

  Who takes care of you? Lulu asked, cracking me wide open.

  “Wear this for me,” Marina says as Rosalind, handing me the prop chain from around her neck.

  I’ll be your mountain girl and take care of you, Lulu said, moments before I took the watch from her wrist.

  Time is passing. I know it must be. I enter the stage, I exit the stage. I make my cues, hit my marks. The sun dips across the sky and then dances toward the horizon and the stars come out, the floodlights go on, the crickets sing. I sense it happening as I drift above it somehow. I am only here, now. This moment. On this stage. I am Orlando, giving myself to Rosalind. And I am Willem, too, giving myself to Lulu, in a way that I should’ve done a year ago, but couldn’t.

  “You should ask me what time o’ day: there’s no clock in the forest,” I say to my Rosalind.

  You forget, time doesn’t exist anymore. You gave it to me, I said to my Lulu.

  I feel the watch on my wrist that day in Paris; I hear it ticking in my head now. I can’t tell them apart, last year, this year. They are one and the same. Then is now. Now is then.

  “I would not be cured, youth,” my Orlando tells Marina’s Rosalind.

  “I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind,” Marina replies.

  I’ll take care of you, Lulu promised.

  “By my troth, and in good earnest, and so God mend me, and by all pretty oaths that are not dangerous,” Marina’s Rosalind says.

  I escaped danger, Lulu said.

  We both did. Something happened that day. It’s still happening. It’s happening up here on this stage. It was just one day and it’s been just one year. But maybe one day is enough. Maybe one hour is enough. Maybe time has nothing at all to do with it.

  “Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love,” my Orlando tells Rosalind.

  Define love, Lulu had demanded. What would “being stained” look like?

  Like this, Lulu.

  It would look like this.

  • • •

  And then it’s over. Like a great wave crashing onto a shore, the applause erupts and I’m here, on this stage, surrounded by the shocked and delighted smiles of my castmates. We are grasping hands and bowing and Marina is pulling me out front for our curtain call and then stepping to the side and gesturing for me to walk ahead and I do and the applause grows even louder.

  Backstage, it is madness. Max is screaming. And Marina is crying and Linus is smiling, although his eyes keep darting to the side entrance that Petra left from hours ago. People are surrounding me, patting me on the back, offering congratulations and kisses and I’m h
ere but I’m not—I’m still in some strange limbo where the boundaries of time and place and person don’t exist where I can be here and in Paris, where it can be now and then, where I’m me and also Orlando.

  I try to stay in this place as I change out of my clothes, scrub the makeup off my face. I look at myself in the mirror and try to digest what I just did. It feels completely unreal, and like the truest thing I have ever done. The truth and its opposite. Up on stage, playing a role, revealing myself.

  People gather round me. There is talk, of parties, celebration, a cast party tonight, even though the show doesn’t wrap for two more weeks and to celebrate now is technically bad luck. But it seems like everyone has given up on luck tonight. We make our own.

  Petra comes backstage, stone-faced and not saying a word. She walks right past me. Goes straight to Linus.

  I leave the backstage and go out the gate that serves as a stage door. Max is at my side, jumping up and down like an exuberant puppy. “So was Marina a decent kisser?” she asks me.

  “I’m sure she was glad not to be kissing Jeroen,” Vincent says, and I laugh.

  Outside, I scan the area for my friends. I’m not quite sure who will be here. And then I hear her call my name.

  “Willem!” she says again.

  It’s Kate, charging toward me, a blur of gold and red. My heart seems to expand as she leaps into my arms and we spin around.

  “You did it. You did it. You did it!” she murmurs in my ear.

  “I did it. I did it. I did it.” I repeat, laughing with joy and relief and awe at the direction this day has taken.

  Someone taps me on the shoulder. “You dropped something.”

  “Oh, right. Your flowers,” Kate says, leaning over to pick up a bouquet of sunflowers. “For your stunning debut.”

  I take the flowers.

  “How do you feel?” she asks.

  I have no answer, no words. I just feel full. I try to explain it but then Kate interrupts: “Like you just had the best sex in the world?” And I laugh. Yeah, something like that. I take her hand and kiss it. She twines an arm around my waist.

  “Ready to meet your adoring public?” she asks.

  I’m not. Right now, I just want to savor this. With the person who helped make it happen. Leading her by the hand, I take us over to a quiet bench under a nearby gazebo and attempt in some way to articulate what just happened.

  “How did that happen?” is all I can think to ask.

  She holds my hands in hers. “Do you really need to ask that?”

  “I think I do. It felt like something otherworldly.”

  “Oh, no,” she says, laughing. “I believe in the muse and all, but don’t go attributing that performance to one of your accidents. It was all you up there.”

  It was. And it wasn’t. Because I wasn’t alone up there.

  We sit there for a little while longer. I feel my whole body buzzing, humming. This night is perfect.

  “I think your groupies are waiting,” Kate says after a while, gesturing behind me. I turn around and there are Broodje, Henk, W, Lien, and a few other people, watching us curiously. I take Kate by the hand and introduce them to the boys.

  “You’re coming to our party, aren’t you?” Broodje asks.

  “Our party?” I ask.

  Broodje manages to look a tiny bit sheepish. “It’s hard to un-throw a party at short notice.”

  “Especially since he has now invited the cast, and about half the audience,” Henk says.

  “That’s not true!” Broodje says. “Not half. Just a couple of Canadians.”

  I roll my eyes and laugh. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  Lien laughs and takes my hand. “I’m going to say goodnight. One of us should be coherent tomorrow. It’s moving day.” She kisses W. Then me. “Well done, Willem.”

  “I’m going to follow her out of the park,” Kate says. “This city confounds me.”

  “You’re not coming?” I ask.

  “I have some things I need to do first. I’ll come later. Prop the door open for me.”

  “Always,” I say. I go to kiss her on the cheek and she whispers into my ear, “I knew you could do it.”

  “Not without you,” I say.

  “Don’t be silly. You just needed a pep talk.”

  But I don’t mean the pep talk. I know Kate believes that I have to commit, to not rely on the accidents, to take the wheel. But had we not met in Mexico, would I be here now? Was it accidents? Or will?

  For the hundredth time tonight, I’m back with Lulu, on Jacques’s barge, the improbably named Viola. She’d just told me the story of double happiness and we were arguing over the meaning. She’d thought it meant the luck of the boy getting the job and the girl. But I’d disagreed. It was the couplet fitting together, the two halves finding each other. It was love.

  But maybe we were both wrong, and both right. It’s not either or, not luck or love. Not fate or will.

  Maybe for double happiness, you need both.

  Forty-nine

  * * *

  Inside the flat, it is complete mayhem. More than fifty people, from the cast, from Utrecht, even old school friends from my Amsterdam days. I have no idea how Broodje dug everyone up so fast.

  Max pounces on me as soon as she comes in the door, followed by Vincent. “Holy. Shit,” Max says.

  “You might’ve mentioned you could act!” Vincent adds.

  I smile. “I like to preserve a bit of mystery.”

  “Yeah, well, everyone in the cast is bloody delighted,” says Max. “Except Petra. She’s pissy as ever.”

  “Only because her understudy just completely cockblocked her star. And now she has to decide whether to put up a lame, and I mean that both literally and figuratively, star, or let you carry us home,” Vincent says.

  “Decisions, decisions,” Max adds. “Don’t look now but Marina is giving you the fuck-me eyes again.”

  We all look. Marina is staring right at me and smiling.

  “And don’t even deny it, unless it’s me she wants to shag,” Max says.

  “I’ll be right back,” I tell Max. I go over to her to where Marina’s standing by the table Broodje has turned into the bar. She has a jug of something in her hand. “What do you have there?” I ask.

  “Not entirely sure. One of your mates gave it to me, promised me no hangover. I’m taking him at his word.”

  “That’s your first mistake right there.”

  She runs a finger along the top of the rim. “I have a feeling I’m long past making my first mistake.” She takes a gulp of her drink. “Aren’t you drinking?”

  “I already feel drunk.”

  “Here. Catch up with yourself.”

  She hands me her glass and I take a sip. I taste the sour tequila that Broodje now favors, mixed with some other orange-flavored booze. “Yeah. No hangover from this. Definitely not.”

  She laughs, touches my arm. “I’m not going to tell you how fantastic you were tonight. You’re probably sick of hearing it.”

  “Do you ever get sick of hearing it?”

  She grins. “No.” She looks away. “I know what I said earlier today, about after the show, but all the rules seem to be getting broken today. . . .” She trails off. “So really, can three weeks make much of a difference?”

  Marina is sexy and gorgeous and smart. And she’s also wrong. Three weeks can make all the difference. I know that because one day can make all the difference.

  “Yes,” I tell Marina. “They can.”

  “Oh,” she says, sounding surprised, a little hurt. Then: “Are you with someone else?”

  Tonight on that stage, it felt like I was. But that was a ghost. Shakespeare’s full of them. “No,” I tell her.

  “Oh, I just saw you, with that woman. After the show. I wasn’t sure.”


  Kate. The need to see her feels urgent. Because what I want is so clear to me now.

  I excuse myself from Marina and poke through the flat, but there’s no sign of Kate. I go downstairs to see if the door is still propped open. It is. I bump into Mrs. Van der Meer again, out walking her dog. “Sorry about all the noise,” I tell her.

  “It’s okay,” she says. She looks upstairs. “We used to have some wild parties here.”

  “You lived here back when it was a squat?” I ask, trying to reconcile the middle-aged vrouw with the young anarchists I’ve seen in pictures.

  “Oh, yes. I knew your father.”

  “What was he like then?” I don’t know why I’m asking that. Bram was never the hard one to crack.

  But Mrs. Van der Meer’s answer surprises me. “He was a bit of a melancholy young man,” she says. And then her eyes flicker up to the flat, like she’s seeing him there. “Until that mother of yours showed up.”

  Her dog yanks on the leash and she sets off, leaving me to ponder how much I know, and don’t know, about my parents.

  Fifty

  * * *

  The phone is ringing. And I’m sleeping.

  I fumble for it. It’s next to my pillow.

  “Hello,” I mumble.

  “Willem!” Yael says in a breathless gulp. “Did I wake you?”

  “Ma?” I ask. I wait to feel the usual panic but none comes. Instead, there’s something else, a residue of something good. I rub my eyes and it’s still there, floating like a mist: a dream I was having.

  “I talked to Mukesh. And he worked his magic. He can get you out Monday but we have to book now. We’ll do an open-ended ticket this time. Come for a year. Then decide what to do.”

  My head is hazy with lack of sleep. The party went until four. I fell asleep around five. The sun was already up. Slowly, yesterday’s conversation with my mother comes back to me. The offer she made. How much I wanted it. Or thought I did. Some things you don’t know you want until they’re gone. Other things you think want, but don’t understand you already have them.