Just One Night

There is so much to say. It is like shoving all the sand of the world into an hourglass. Or trying to get it out.

But Willem’s phone keeps ringing. He keeps ignoring it, until he remembers he promised he’d call Linus back right before he opened the door to her.

“Oh, shit. Linus.” He goes to fetch his mobile. Five missed calls.

Allyson looks curious. He tells her, “I have to make a call.”

She thinks he will go into the other room to do it, but he doesn’t. He sits down next to her.

The conversation is in Dutch so Allyson doesn’t understand what he’s saying, anyway. She can’t really make much out from the look on his face, either: a half smile. A shoulder shrug. She’s not sure if the news is good or bad.

Willem hangs up the phone. “I’m the understudy for Orlando in a play. Shakespeare again. As You Like It,” he begins.

“Understudy?” Allyson asks. “I thought you were Orlando.”

Only for last night’s performance. And tonight’s. That’s what Petra had decreed, Linus has just told him. Next week Jeroen, the actor Willem replaced, will come back, ankle cast and all, for a final weekend of performances. After this evening, Willem’s services will no longer be needed, as actor or understudy. But he’s on for tonight. In fact, they need him to come listen to notes before the 7:00 call. He is about to explain this all to Allyson, but then he stops himself.

“You knew?” he asks.

And then she says, “I was there.”

He shouldn’t be surprised. Hadn’t he felt her there? Hadn’t he spoken his lines to her? But after all the false hopes of the last year, and after that letter Tor had told him about, he’d thought he had conjured her. Maybe he had. Maybe he had done such a fine job of it, he’d conjured her right into existence, into his uncle’s flat, where she is now sitting, with her feet resting in his lap.

How did that happen? He vaguely remembers grabbing her ankles and laying her feet across his legs, casually, as if they were a blanket, but he can’t be sure. It all feels like a dream and yet as natural as breathing. This is what you do. Put Allyson’s feet into your lap.

“You were fantastic,” Allyson tells him. “Magnetic. It was like you were Orlando.”

Willem had felt a kinship with Orlando, a bereaved young man inexplicably fallen in love with a girl who came and disappeared like a wisp of smoke. But the girl came back. (The girl came back.)

“I always thought you were good,” she continues. “Even when I saw you perform last year, the night we met, but it was nothing like last night.”

The night they met. He’d been doing Twelfth Night with Guerrilla Will, playing Sebastian. They hadn’t spoken, but he’d tossed her a coin at the end of the play. It was a flirtation, an invitation. God, he’d had no idea then.

“A lot has happened this year,” Willem tells her.

When Allyson smiles, Willem is reminded of a sunrise. A bit of light, then more of it, then a burst of brightness. A sunrise is something you can see all the time and still marvel at. Maybe that is why her smile feels so familiar. He has seen many sunrises.

No, that is not why it feels familiar.

Allyson meanwhile is remembering. Why this person? All the things she has told herself, or other people have told her—infatuation or Paris or good acting or lust—no longer hold water, because she remembers so viscerally and feels it anew. It’s not any of that. It’s not even him. Or all him. It’s her. The way she can be with him.

It was so new that day: the liberation of being honest, of being brave, maybe a little stupid. She’s had a bit more practice at it now, the past few weeks alone in Europe, a lot of practice. She knows this girl pretty well now.

“A lot has happened to me too,” she tells Willem.

• • •

They tell the story in bits, in tandem. The parts already known: Willem being concussed. The parts guessed: Willem being beaten by the skinheads; Allyson fleeing back to London in misery. They share the frustration of never finding out each other’s true names, their whole names, email addresses. They remedy that. (Willem Shiloh De Ruiter. Allyson Leigh Healey, etc. etc.) Allyson tells Willem about the letter she wrote him last March, when she finally allowed herself to wonder if maybe the worst hadn’t happened, if maybe Willem hadn’t abandoned her.

Willem tells Allyson about only just finding out about the letter’s existence last month, trying to track it down, and only yesterday finding out what it said.

“How is that possible?” Allyson asks. “I got the letter back four days ago.”

“You got it back?” Willem asks. “How?”

“When I went to your house. Your old house, in Utrecht.”

Broodje’s place, on Bloemstraat, where he’d spent the dark days following his return from Paris, healing from the beating, from everything, really.

“How did you know to go there?” he asks. “To Bloemstraat.” He hadn’t lived there when they’d met, and he hadn’t given her any contact information. This was something he had regretted.

Allyson is embarrassed now, at the lengths she went through to find him. She doesn’t regret going through them, but she understands how overzealous it might look. In her discomfort, she starts to pull her feet away. But Willem won’t let her. He holds them fast. And this small gesture gives her the courage to tell him. About venturing to Paris. About tracking down Céline. About going to the Hôpital Saint-Louis. About Dr. Robinet and his kindness. The address, which led her back to the house in Utrecht. And to the letter.

“I kept the letter. I actually have it in my backpack.”

She leans over and pulls out a creased envelope. She hands it to Willem. There are generations of addresses here. Tor’s house in Leeds, the original Guerilla Will headquarters (how had she found that?), forwarded to Willem’s former houseboat in Amsterdam, since sold, and forwarded on to Bloemstraat.

“You can read it if you want,” Allyson offers.

“Seems beyond the point,” Willem says. Though that isn’t why he doesn’t want to read it. Tor had instructed someone to email him and tell him what the letter said. He doesn’t have the stomach to read the whole letter in front of Allyson.

But Allyson takes the envelope back, unfolds the letter inside of it, and hands it to him.

Dear Willem:

I’ve been trying to forget about you and our day in Paris for nine months now, but as you can see, it’s not going all that well. I guess more than anything, I want to know, did you just leave? If you did, it’s okay. I mean it’s not, but if I can know the truth, I can get over it. And if you didn’t leave, I don’t know what to say. Except I’m sorry that I did.

I don’t know what your response will be at getting this letter, like a ghost from your past. But no matter what happened, I hope you’re okay.

The letter is not what he thought it would be. Not what Tor suggested it was. It takes Willem a moment to find his voice again, and when he does, he speaks to the Allyson who wrote the letter as much as to the girl sitting here. “I didn’t just leave,” he says. “I’m glad you didn’t forget. And I wasn’t okay.”

“I know that now,” she says. “I think part of me knew it then, too but I wasn’t brave enough to believe it. I was okay that day but I wasn’t okay generally. I am now.”