“Oh.”
“Victoria wouldn’t tell me. Said it was personal. You know how she gets.” He sighs. “So I just told her to send it you. I gave her the address on the boat. I didn’t know if you could get mail on the boat.”
“You could. We could. We did.”
“So you got the letter?”
“No, Skev. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Well, it must be at the boat, man.”
“But we don’t live there anymore. Haven’t done for a while.”
“Oh, shit. Forgot it was empty. Sorry about that.”
“No worries, man.”
“Break a leg with your Shakespeare and shit.”
“Yeah, you too—with your cappuccinos and all.”
He laughs. Then we say good-bye.
I go back to the rehearsal. Max is looking crazed. “I told them you had to puke. The Flunky is mad you didn’t ask first. I wonder if he calls Petra for permission before he makes love to his wife.”
It’s an image I do my best not to conjure. “I owe you. I’ll tell Linus it was a false alarm.”
“You gonna tell me what this is about?”
I think of Lulu, all the wild-goose chases this year that have led nowhere. Why would this be anything else?
“Probably just what you said: a false alarm,” I tell Max.
Except that probably becomes a pebble in my shoe, aggravating me for the rest of the day, making it hard to keep from thinking about the letter, where it is, what it says, who it’s from. By the time rehearsal ends, I feel this sort of urgency to know; so even though the rain has returned, and even though I’m bone tired, I decide to try Marjolein. She doesn’t answer her phone and I don’t want to wait until tomorrow. She lives close by, on the ground floor of a wide house in a posh neighborhood at the south end of the park. She’s always told me to drop by any time.
“Willem,” she says, opening the door. She has a glass of wine in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and she doesn’t seem so happy that I’ve dropped by. I’m dripping wet, and she doesn’t invite me in. “What brings you here?”
“Sorry to bother you but I’m trying to find a letter.”
“A letter?”
“That was sent to the boat, some time in the spring.”
“Why are you still getting mail at the boat?”
“I’m not. Someone just sent it there.”
She shakes her head. “If it went to the boat, it would’ve been forwarded to the office and then on to the address you provided us.”
“In Utrecht?”
She sighs. “Probably. Can you call me in the morning?”
“It’s important.”
She sighs. “Try Sara. She handles the mail.”
“Do you have Sara’s number?”
“I’d have thought you’d have Sara’s number,” she says.
“Not for a long time now.”
She sighs. Then reaches for her mobile. “Don’t start anything up with her.”
“I won’t,” I promise.
“Right. You’re a changed man.” I can’t quite get whether she’s being sarcastic or not.
Inside, the music changes, from mellow jazz to something wilder with screaming trumpets. Marjolein looks longingly inside. I realize that she’s not alone.
“I’ll let you go,” I say.
She leans forward to kiss good-bye. “Your mother will be pleased I saw you.”
She starts to close the door. “Can I ask you something? About Yael?”
“Sure,” she says absently, her attention already back in the warm house and on whomever’s waiting in there.
“Did she, I don’t know, do things, to help me, that I didn’t know about?”
Her face is half hidden in shadows, but her toothy smile shines in the reflected light. “What did she say?”
“She didn’t say anything.”
Marjolein shakes her head. “Then neither can I.” She starts to close the door. Then she stops. “But did you consider in all those months you were gone, why your bank account never ever went to zero?”
I hadn’t considered it, not really. I rarely used my bank card but when I did, it always worked.
“Someone was always watching,” Marjolein says. When she shuts the door, she’s still smiling.
Forty-one
Utrecht
Everything takes too long. The train is late. The bike share line is too long. So I catch a bus instead and it stops to pick up every old lady in town. I shouldn’t have left so late, but it was already late when I got hold of Sara this morning. Then it took a bit of cajoling before she finally remembered there was a letter. No, she didn’t read it. No, she didn’t remember where it came from. But she thinks she forwarded to the address on file. The one in Utrecht. Not that long ago.
By the time I get to Bloemstraat, it’s almost noon. The second tech rehearsal is at 2:00 back in Amsterdam. I have nothing but time in my life, but never enough of it when I need it.
I ring the eyeball bell. There’s no answer. I have no idea who lives here anymore. I texted Broodje on the train over but he didn’t answer. Then I remembered that he’s in the middle of the Aegean somewhere. With Candace. Whose name he knows, whose telephone number and email address he got before he left Mexico.
The front door is locked but I still have my key and it still works. The first good sign.
“Hello,” I call, my voice echoing through the empty house. It no longer looks like the place I lived in. No more lumpy sofa. No more boy smell. Even the Picasso flowers are gone.
There’s a dining room table, with the post scattered all over it. I rifle through the stacks as quickly as possible, but I see nothing, so I make myself slow down and methodically go through each piece of mail, dividing it into neat piles: for Broodje, for Henk, for W, even some for Ivo, who’s still getting letters here, for a couple of unfamiliar girls who must be living here now. There is some mail for me, mostly dead letters from the university and a travel catalog from the agency I used to book our Mexico tickets.
I look up the stairs. Perhaps the letter is up there. Or in the attic in my old room. Or in one of the cabinets. Or maybe it isn’t the one Sara forwarded. Maybe it’s still back on the Nieuwe Prinsengracht. Or somewhere in Marjolein’s office.
Or maybe there is no letter from her. Maybe it’s just another false hope I’ve conjured for myself.
I hear ticking. On the mantel, where the Picasso used to hang, there’s an old-fashioned wooden clock, like the kind Saba once had in his Jerusalem apartment. It was one of the few pieces Yael kept after he died. I wonder where it is now.
It’s half past twelve. If I want to get the train back in time for the tech rehearsal, I have to leave now. Otherwise, I’ll be late. And being late for tech? The only thing worse in Petra’s book would be not showing for a performance. I think of the original understudy, replaced because he had to miss three rehearsals. It’s too late for her to replace me, but that’s not to say she can’t fire me. I’m nothing but a shadow, anyhow.
Being fired won’t make any material difference in my life right now. Except I don’t want to be fired. And more than that, I don’t want to hand over that decision to Petra. If I’m late, that’s exactly what will happen.
The house seems huge all of a sudden, like it would take years to search all the rooms. The moment seems even bigger.
I’ve given up on Lulu before. In Utrecht. In Mexico. But that felt like surrendering. Like it was me I was really giving up on. This feels different, somehow. Like maybe Lulu brought me to this place, and for the first time in a long time, I’m on the cusp of something real. Maybe this is the point of it all. Maybe this is where the road is meant to end.
I think of the postcards I left in her suitcase. I’d written sorry on one of them. Only now do I understand what I really should’ve written was thank you.
“Thank you,” I say quietly to the empty house. I know she’ll never hear it, but somehow that seems besides the point.
Then I drop my mail in the recycling and head back to Amsterdam, closing the door behind me.
PART TWO
One Day
Forty-two
AUGUST
Amsterdam
The phone is ringing. And I’m sleeping. Two things that shouldn’t be happening at the same time. I open my eyes, fumble for the phone, but the ringing continues, crying out into the still night.
A light flicks on. Broodje, naked as a newborn, stands in front of me squinting in the yellow light of the lamp, and the lemony walls of the nursery. He holds out my phone. “It’s for you,” he mumbles, and then he flicks off the light and sleepwalks back to bed.
I put the phone to my ear and I hear the exact four words you don’t want to hear on the other end of a middle-of-the-night phone call.
“There’s been an accident.”
My stomach plummets and I hear a whistling my ears as I wait to hear who. Yael. Daniel. Fabiola. The baby. Some subtraction in my family that I can no longer bear.
But the voice continues talking and it takes me a minute to slow my breathing and hear what is being said. Bicycle and moto and ankle and fracture and performance and emergency and it’s then that I understand that it’s not that kind of accident.
“Jeroen?” I say at last, though who else can it be? I want to laugh. Not because of the irony, but because of the relief.
“Yes, Jeroen,” Linus snaps. Jeroen the invincible, felled by a drunken moto driver. Jeroen insistent he can go on anyhow, with his foot in a cast, and maybe he can, for next weekend’s performances. But this weekend’s? “We might have to cancel,” Linus says. “We need you at the theater as soon as possible. Petra wants to see what you can do.”
I rub my eyes. Light is peeking through the shades. It’s not the middle of the night after all. Linus tells me to be at the theater—the actual theater, not the stage in Vondelpark—at eight.
“It’s going to be a long day,” he warns.
Petra and Linus hardly look up when I arrive at the theater. A sloe-eyed Marina offers a tired, sympathetic look. She’s holding a roll and breaks off half and hands it to me. “Thank you,” I say. “I didn’t have time to eat.”
“I figured as much,” she says.
I sit down on the edge of the stage, alongside her. “So what happened?”
She arches her eyebrow. “Karma happened.” She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “I know it’s his joke to brag about his perfect record, and I’ve heard him do it many times before and nothing’s come of it.” She pauses to dust the crumbs off her lap. “But you don’t laugh at fate like that without fate eventually having the last laugh. The only problem is, it doesn’t just affect him. It might shut down the remaining run.”
“Shut it down? I thought it was just tonight’s.”
“Jeroen won’t be able to perform either of this weekend’s performances, and even if he can actually manage it in the boot cast he’s apparently going to have to wear for the next six weeks, they’ll have to reblock the whole thing. Plus, there are questions of insurance.” She sighs. “It might be easier to just cancel.”
My shoulders slump with the weight of that statement. So it falls to me. “I think I’m starting to believe in the Mackers curse,” I tell Marina.
She looks at me, the worry in her eyes mixed with sympathy. She seems about to say something when Petra orders me to the stage.
Linus looks miserable. But Petra, she of the thousand tantrums, is actually calm, cigarette smoke swirling around her like a statue on fire. It takes me a minute to realize she’s not calm. She’s resigned. She’s already written tonight off.
I climb onto the stage. I take a breath. “What can I do?” I ask her.