by Gayle Forman
“Ma,” I say. “I’m not coming back to India.”
“You’re not?” There’s curiosity in her voice, and disappointment, too.
“I don’t belong there.”
“You belong where I belong.”
It’s a relief, after all this time, to hear her say so. But I don’t think it’s true. I’m grateful that she has made a new home for herself in India, but it’s not where I’m meant to be.
Go big and go home.
“I’m going to act, Ma,” I say. And I feel it. The idea, the plan, fully formed since last night, maybe since much longer. The urgency to see Kate, who never did show up at the party, courses through me. This is one chance I’m not going to let slip through my fingers. This is something I need. “I’m going to act,” I repeat. “Because I’m an actor.”
Yael laughs. “Of course you are. It’s in your blood. Just like Olga.”
The name is instantly familiar. “Olga Szabo, you mean?”
There’s a pause. I can feel her surprise crackle through the line. “Saba told you about her?”
“No. I found the pictures. In the attic. I meant to ask you about them but I didn’t, because I’ve been busy . . .” I trail off. “And because we never really talked about these things.”
“No. We never did, did we?”
“Who was she? Saba’s girlfriend?”
“She was his sister,” she replies. And I should be surprised, but I’m not. Not at all. It’s like the pieces of a puzzle slotting together.
“She would have been your great aunt,” Yael continues. “He always said she was an incredible actress. She was meant to go to Hollywood. But then the war came and she didn’t survive.”
She didn’t survive. Only Saba did.
“Was Szabo her stage name?” I ask.
“No. Szabo was Saba’s surname before he emigrated to Israel and Hebreified it. Lots of Europeans did that.”
To distance himself, I think. I understand that. Though he couldn’t really distance himself. All those silent films he took me to. The ghosts he held at bay, and held close.
Olga Szabo, my great aunt. Sister to my grandfather, Oskar Szabo, who became Oskar Shiloh, father of Yael Shiloh, wife of Bram de Ruiter, brother of Daniel de Ruiter, soon to be father of Abraão de Ruiter.
And just like that, my family grows again.
Fifty-one
* * *
When I emerge from my bedroom, Broodje and Henk are just waking up and are surveying the wreckage like army generals who have lost a major ground battle.
Broodje turns to me, his face twisted in apology. “I’m sorry. I can clean it all later. But we promised we’d meet W at ten to help him move. And we’re already late.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Henk says.
Broodje picks up a beer bottle, two-thirds full of cigarette butts. “You can be sick later,” he says. “We made a promise to W.” Broodje looks at me. “And to Willy. I’ll clean the flat later. And Henk’s vomit, which he’s going to keep corked for now.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “I’ll clean it all. I’ll fix everything!”
“You don’t have to be so cheerful about it,” Henk says, wincing and touching his temples.
I grab the keys from the counter. “Sorry,” I say, not sorry at all. I head to the door.
“Where are you going?” Broodje.
“To take the wheel!”
• • •
I’m unlocking my bike downstairs when my phone rings. It’s her. Kate.
“I’ve been calling you for the last hour,” I say. “I’m coming to your hotel.”
“My hotel, huh?” she says. I can hear the smile in her voice.
“I was worried you’d leave. And I have a proposition for you.”
“Well, propositions are best proposed in person. But sit tight because I’m actually on my way to you. That’s why I’m calling. Are you home?”
I think of the flat, Broodje and Henk in their boxers, the unbelievable mess. The sun is out, really out, for the first time in days. I suggest we meet at the Sarphatipark instead. “Across the street. Where we were yesterday,” I remind her.
“Proposition downgraded from a hotel to a park, Willem?” she teases. “I’m not sure whether to be flattered or insulted.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
I go straight to the park and wait, sitting down on one of the benches near the sandpit. A little boy and girl are discussing their plans for a fort.
“Can it have one hundred towers?” the little boy asks. The girl says, “I think twenty is better.” Then the boy asks, “Can we live there forever?” The girl considers the sky a moment and says, “Until it rains.”
By the time Kate shows up, they’ve made significant progress, digging a moat and constructing two towers.
“Sorry it took so long,” Kate says, breathless. “I got lost. This city of yours, it runs in circles.”
I start to explain about the concentric canals, the Ceintuurbaan being a belt that goes around the waist of the city. She waves me off. “Don’t bother. I’m hopeless.” She sits down next to me. “Any word from Frau Directeur?”
“Total silence.”
“That sounds ominous.”
I shrug. “Maybe. Nothing I can do. Anyway, I have a new plan.”
“Oh,” Kate says, widening her already big green eyes. “You do?”
“I do. In fact, that’s what my proposition is about.”
“The thick plottens.”
“What?”
She shakes her head. “Never mind.” She crosses her legs, leans in toward me. “I’m ready. Proposition me.”
I take her hand. “I want you.” I pause. “To be my director.”
“Isn’t that a little like shaking hands after making love?” she asks.
“What happened last night,” I begin, “it happened because of you. And I want to work with you. I want to come study with Ruckus. Be an apprentice.”
Kate’s eyes slit into smiles. “How do you know about our apprenticeships?” she drawls.
“I may have looked at your website one or a hundred times. And I know you mostly work with Americans, but I grew up speaking English, I act in English. Most of the time, I dream in English. I want to do Shakespeare. In English. I want to do it. With you.”
The grin has disappeared from Kate’s face. “It wouldn’t be like last night—Orlando on a main stage. Our apprentices do everything. They build sets. They work tech. They study. They act in the ensemble. I’m not saying you wouldn’t play principal roles one day—I would not rule that out, not after last night. But it would take a while. And, there are visa issues to consider, not to mention the union, so you couldn’t come over expecting the spotlight. And I’ve told David he needs to meet you.”
I look at Kate and am about to say that I wouldn’t expect that, that I’d be patient, that I know how to build things. But I stop myself because it occurs to me that I don’t need to convince her of anything.
“Where do you think I was last night?” she asks. “I was waiting for David to get back from his Medea, so I could tell him about you. Then I arranged for him to get his ass on a plane so he could see you tonight before that invalid comes back. He’s on his way, and in fact, I have to leave soon to go to the airport to meet him. After all this trouble, they’d better put you on again, otherwise, you’re going to have to do it solo for him.”
She laughs. “I’m kidding. But Ruckus is a small operation so we make decisions like this communally. That’s another thing you have to be prepared for, how dysfunctionally co-dependent we all are.” She throws up her arms. “But every family is like that.”
“So, wait? You were going to ask me?”
The grin is back. “Was there any doubt? But it pleases me no end, Willem, that you asked me. It
shows you’ve been paying attention, which is what a director wants in an actor.” She taps her temple. “Also, very clever of you to move to the States. Good for your career but also it’s where your Lulu is from.”
I think of Tor’s letter, only today the regret and recrimination is gone. She looked for me. I looked for her. And last night, in some strange way, we found each other.
“That’s not why I want to go,” I tell Kate.
She smiles. “I know. I’m just teasing. Though I think you’ll really take to Brooklyn. It has a lot in common with Amsterdam. The brownstones and the rowhouses, the loving tolerance of eccentricity. I think you’ll feel right at home.”
When she says that a feeling comes over me. Of pausing, of resting, of all the clocks in the world going quiet.
Home.
Fifty-two
* * *
But Daniel’s home. That is a mess.
When I get back, the boys have left, and there is crap everywhere. It looks like how Bram used to describe it in the old days, before Yael arrived and asserted her brand of order.
There are bottles and ashtrays and plates and pizza boxes and every dish seems dirty and out. The whole place smells like cigarettes. It’s certainly not a place that a baby should live. I’m momentarily paralyzed, not sure where to start.
I put on a CD of Adam Wilde, that singer-songwriter Max and I went to see a few weeks ago. And then I just go. I empty out the beer and wine bottles and put them in a box for recycling. Next, I dump the ashtrays and rinse them out. Even though there’s a dishwasher now, I fill the sink with hot, soapy water and clean all the dirty dishes, then dry them. I throw open the windows to air our the place, and sunshine and fresh air come blowing in.
By noon, I’ve collected the bottles, tossed the cigarette butts, washed and dried the dishes, dusted and vacuumed. It’s about as clean as it was on its best day with Daniel, though when he comes home with Abraão and Fabiola, I’ll have it spotless. Ready.
I make a coffee. I check my phone to see if there’s any word from Linus, but it’s sitting on my bed, dead. I plug it in to charge, setting the coffee on my shelf. The envelope is still there, with the photos of me Yael, Bram, Saba, Olga. I run my finger along the crease of the envelope, feel the weight of history inside. Wherever I’m going next, these are coming with me.
I glance at my phone. It’s still dead, but soon there will be some word from Linus and Petra. Part of me thinks that I must be fired. That has to be the price to pay for last night’s triumph, and it’s okay because it’s a price I’m willing to pay. But another part of me is losing faith that the universal law of equilibrium operates that way.
I go back into the lounge. The Adam Wilde CD has been repeating and the songs are starting to become familiar enough that I know I will be able to hear them when I’m not listening to them.
I look around the room. I fluff the cushions and lie down on the sofa. I should be in suspense, waiting for word about tonight, but I feel the opposite. It’s like that moment of pause when I step out of a train station or bus station or airport into a new city and it’s nothing but possibility.
Through the open window, the dissonant sounds of the city—of tram chimes and bicycle bells and the occasional jet roaring overhead—drift in and mingle with the music and lull me to sleep.
For the third time in one day, I’m woken up by the ringing of a phone. Like this morning when Yael called, I have that same feeling, of being somewhere else, somewhere right.
The ringing stops. But I know it must be Linus. My fate, Marina had called it. But it’s not my fate; it’s just about tonight. My fate is up to me.
I go into my room and pick up the phone. Out the window, climbing through the clouds I make out the blue-and-white underbelly of a KLM jet. I picture myself on a plane, flying out of Amsterdam, over the North Sea, over England and Ireland, past Iceland and Greenland and down Newfoundland and along the Eastern Seaboard, into New York. I feel the jerk, hear the skid of the tires touching down, the explosion of applause from the passengers. Because we are all of us, so grateful for having at last arrived.
I glance at my phone. It’s full of congratulatory texts from last night, and a voicemail from Linus. “Willem, can you please call in as soon as possible,” he says.
I take a deep breath, prepare myself for whatever he has to say. It doesn’t really matter. I went big and now I’m going home.
Just as Linus answers there’s a faint knock at the front door.
“Hello, hello . . .” Linus’s voice echoes.
There’s another knock, louder this time. Kate? Broodje?
I tell Linus I’ll call him right back. I put the phone down. I open the door. And once again, time stops.
I’m shocked. And I’m not. She is just as I remember her. And completely transformed. A stranger. And someone I know. The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin, I hear Saba say.
“Hello Willem,” she says. “My name is Allyson.”
Allyson. I say the name in my head and a year’s worth of memories and fantasies and one-sided conversations are revised and updated. Not Lulu. Allyson. A strong name. A solid name. And somehow, a familiar name. Everything about her seems familiar. I know this person. I’m known to this person. It’s then I understand what I was dreaming about this morning, who it is that’s been sitting next to me on that plane all this time.
Allyson walks in.
The door clicks shut behind her. And for a minute, they’re in the room with us too. Yael and Bram, thirty years ago. Their entire story rushes through my head, because it’s our story, too. Only now, I realize, it was an incomplete story. Because so matter how many times he told it, Bram never told me the important part. What happened during those first three hours together in the car.
Or maybe he did, only without words. With his action.
“And so I kissed her. Like I’d been expecting her all that time,” my previously melancholy father would say, always with wonder in his voice.
I’d thought the wonder was for the accidents. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the wonder was for the stain. Three hours in a car, that was all it took. And two years later, there she was.
Maybe he was overwhelmed, like I am overwhelmed, by that mysterious intersection where love meets luck, where fate meets will. Because he’d been waiting for her. And there she was.
So he’d kissed her.
I kiss Allyson.
I complete the history that came before us, and in doing so, begin one all of our own.
Double happiness: I get it now.
Acknowledgments
A novelist is a thief by necessity. I would first like to apologize to and then thank all of the people I’ve met over the years in my travels and in my life, whose bits and pieces I’ve stolen, disguised, and put in this book. There are too many of you to list, and I don’t even know if I remember everyone’s names. But I remember them just the same. People you meet for a day really can inspire you in ways you might not recognize until, decades later, a tiny piece of them gets plunked into a novel.
For all those who knowingly helped me with this great big hodgepodge of an internationally globetrotting book, a heartfelt thank you, merci, bedankt, gracias, , , , and obrigada. Specifically to: Jessie Austrian, Fabiola Bergi, Michael Bourret, Libba Bray, Sarah Burnes, Heleen Buth, Mitali Dave (and parents), Danielle Delaney, Céline Faure, Fiasco Theater Company, Greg Forman, Lee and Ruth Forman, Rebecca Gardner, Logan Garrison, Tamara Glenny, Marie-Elisa Gramain, Tori Hill, Ben Hoffman, Marjorie Ingall, Anna Jarzab, Maureen Johnson, Deborah Kaplan, Isabel Kyriacou, E. Lockhart, Elyse Marshall, Tali Meas, Stephanie Perkins, Mukesh Prasad, Will Roberts, Philippe Robinet, Leila Sales, Tamar and Robert Schamhart, William Shakespeare, Deb Shapiro, Courtney Sheinmel, Slings & Arrows, Andreas Sonju, Emke Spauwen, Margaret Stohl, Julie Strauss-Gabel, Alex Ulyett, Robin Wasserman, Cameron and Jackie Wilson, Ke
n Wright, and the whole team at Penguin Young Readers Group. It takes a village—in this case, a global one.
And finally, thank you to Nick, Willa, and Denbele: My family. My home.
