Just One Night (3 page)

“Are we clear?” Petra asks after she has smoked her way through two cigarettes worth of criticisms. “You will do as your director tells you.”

He
would
do as his director told him, but Kate was his director now. “I will perform the role as I did last night,” he tells Petra.

Petra’s face goes purple. It doesn’t bother Willem one bit. What can she do? Fire him?

She stomps her feet. She seems like a little girl denied her dessert. He tries to keep a straight face, tries not to laugh, tries not to notice that Linus appears to be holding in a chuckle of his own.

Dee is laughing, too.

At the story his girl has just finished telling him. It’s almost too crazy to believe, which is how you know it’s true.

“Too bad Shakespeare’s dead,” Dee tells Allyson. “Because that’s a story he’d wanna steal.”

“I know, right?” Allyson says.

Dee’s mama drops a cup of coffee onto the desk. He can smell bacon frying in the kitchen. “That our girl?” she asks.

Dee isn’t sure when Allyson went from being his girl to
their
girl, but he opens the screen so his mama can say hello, too.

“Hey, baby,” she says. “How you doin’? “Want some waffles?”

“Hi, Mrs. D—”

Dee’s warning face travels four thousand miles in a split second.

“I mean, Sandra,” Allyson corrects. “I’d love some. Not sure you can Skype food.”

“Some day, I wouldn’t put it past them,” she says.

Dee angles the computer away. “Mama, I haven’t talked to my girl in a week. You can have her when she comes home.” Dee turns back to the screen. “Am I still picking you up at the airport?”

“You can. I think my mom was going to drive down, too. She said you could come back with us.”

“When’s this party starting,?” Dee asks.

“I’m meant to be flying home tomorrow afternoon. I’m actually meant to be in Croatia right now.”

“You got a lotta ‘meant to’ going on,” he says.

“I know.” Allyson laughs. “Truth is I don’t have a clue what I’m doing.”

She might not have a clue but Dee knows the signs and symptoms of a girl in love. She’s practically glowing, and without the benefit of the cucumber-and-yogurt facial he has planned as part of his welcome-home pampering spa day. He’s got a whole list of activities, but mostly he just wants to sit in the same room and talk. He misses her. Dee didn’t know you could miss a friend as much as he’s missed Allyson this summer, but then again, he’s never had a friend like her.

“You never did have a clue. At least now you’re owning your ignorance,” Dee teases.

“You know me so well!” Allyson jokes, but she touches her hand to the camera so it appears on the screen and Dee knows she’s not joking, not really. He reciprocates by putting his hand on her screen. They let the gesture say the unspoken things: Thank you for getting me here. Thank you for understanding me.

“I miss you,” Allyson says.

It’s just what Dee needs to hear. “I miss you, too, baby.”

Mama swoops back behind him, forcing herself back into the screen. She blows Allyson kisses. “He does. My boy is pining.”

“I miss him, too.”

Sandra sticks her head right in front of the camera. “How’s that map working out?”

She had bought Allyson a laminated map of Paris as a bon voyage present. The gesture had embarrassed Dee at first, along with the bon voyage party his mama had insisted on throwing for Allyson, even though she’d never met her. “Feels more like what you’re really doin’ is throwing me a hooray-you-finally-done-made-a-friend party,” Dee had said. His mama had raised one formidable eyebrow and retorted, “And why can’t I do both?” (Dee lost the argument. The party had been delightful.)

“Mama, she ain’t in Paris anymore. She’s in Amster—” Dee starts to say.

But Allyson cuts him off. “The map was perfect,” she says. She explains how the map had given her the idea to check the Paris hospitals, which had led her to Wren and to Dr. Robinet and to the house on Bloemstraat and now here. “So you see, I wouldn’t have found my way here without it.”

Broodje is shattered. He was up most of the night drinking, celebrating Willem’s debut as Orlando. He woke up after three hours of sleep with a Queen’s-Day-level hangover, only to remember he and Henk had promised W they’d help him move.

They’d spent the day lugging boxes up four flights of steep stairs. (W would have to be moving into the top-floor flat. Broodje had remarked that if they weren’t hungover, the flat would’ve been garden level. W spent fifteen long minutes poking holes in the logic of such a statement.)

Now Broodje is back at his flat. Not his, exactly. His for the next two weeks until he moves back to Utrecht with Henk. He doesn’t really want to go to Willy’s show again tonight, but he will because it’s Willy. At least he has a few hours free to rest. All he wants to do is take off his dusty, sweaty clothes and climb into bed.

He is already pulling off his shirt when he walks in the door.

And then he screams.

“Oh, shit, sorry,” he says, putting the shirt back on. “I didn’t know Willy had company.”

It’s a bit of a déjà vu this, walking in on one of Willy’s girls. It used to be like this all the time. But not for a while. Not for a really long while.

“Sorry,” the girl says. “I didn’t know anyone was coming.”

Then Broodje looks at the girl for a longer moment. “Wait, I know you. You were at the play last night. In the park.” He’d invited her and her friend to come to the party. He’d talked more to the friend, who was very cute, though he still missed Candace, his sort-of girlfriend, but she lived in America so they were trying to figure things out. When did Willy hook up with the friend?

“You’re Broodje,” the girl says.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Broodje says. He is tired and hungover and his muscles ache and he doesn’t want to entertain one of Willy’s girls. “Who are you?”

“I’m Allyson,” she says. Then she seems to reconsider. “But you might know me as Lulu.”

Broodje looks at her for a minute. And then he tackles her in a hug.

When Willem comes home, he finds his best friend and the girl his best friend tried to help him track down sitting together, eating. Broodje has emptied the kitchen, it seems: cheese, crackers, sausage, herring, beer. He is feeding Allyson, which is what Broodje does with people he loves. Willem sees Allyson has received a fast pass to his best friend’s heart.

“Willy!” Broodje calls. “We were just talking about you.”

“You were?” Willem says. He steps forward and his instinct is to kiss Allyson. He does not want to enter or leave a room without kissing her. This, too, is something new. But he doesn’t because this is all so new, even though the way Broodje and Allyson are sitting there, smearing cheese on crackers, it seems like they’ve been doing this for decades.

“I was telling Lulu, sorry, Allyson, what a sad sack you’ve been all year.”

“Not
all
year,” Willem says. (Though, really, it was almost all year.)

“Okay. Maybe not in India. I wasn’t with you in India. He went to India for three months to see his ma,” Broodje explains to Allyson. “He was in a movie over there.”

“Are you famous in India?” Allyson asks.

“I am Brad Pitt in India,” Willem says.

“And maybe not since he came back. But shit, after he got back from Paris, he was a mess. And in Mexico, when he couldn’t find you—”

“Okay, Broodje,” Willem says. “No need to give away all the family secrets.”

Broodje rolls his eyes. “Far as I’m concerned, she’s family now.”

Speaking of family, Allyson loves watching Willem with Broodje. Not that she needs reassuring exactly, but seeing him with Broodje is reassuring.

“I was going to take you out to eat,” Willem says to her. “But Broodje beat me to it.”

“We can still go if you want,” Allyson says.

“I have to be at the theater in less than an hour,” Willem says. “We can go out after? Just us.”

“Not just you,” Broodje says. “W, Henk, Lien, they’re all coming. And they will all want to meet her.” He nods to Allyson. “You are like the business we all invested in and now you’re paying off so . . . you can be alone later.”

“Wren called, too. The friend I was in Amsterdam with” Allyson says. “She wants to meet up.”

And, Willem thinks, there would also be Kate and her fiancé.

Allyson and Willem look at each other, the invisible chain connecting them pulling hard. Why hadn’t they taken more advantage of those quiet hours this afternoon? Why had they just sat there, her feet in his lap, when there was a perfectly good empty apartment here?

Except Allyson wouldn’t have exchanged those hours with Willem for anything in the world.

And neither would Willem.

All too quickly, they part again. Willem will go ahead to his call at the theater. Wren is meeting Allyson and Broodje at the flat. Everyone will meet at the park, and after the play, they will all celebrate.

Saying good-bye is less fraught this time. They have done it now once, like normal people: leave, come back. It builds confidence.

This time Willem kisses her good-bye. It is quick, a peck on the lips. It is not nearly enough. He wants all of her. From her lips to her feet.

“I’ll see you after the play,” Allyson says.

“Yes,” Willem says.

But they both know they will see each other sooner than that. That they will find each other
during
the play, once more, in the words of Shakespeare.

Wren arrives not long after Willem has left. She squeals and hugs Allyson, squeals and hugs Broodje. She kisses the saints on her bracelet. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Anthony, patron saint of lost things. She kisses all the saints. They all came through.

“I knew it,” Wren says in that fluty voice of hers. “But I thought you were going to find him on the train, like you did the last time.”

“I sort of found him at the train station,” Allyson says. And then she explains how she’d been about to catch the train to the airport when she’d opened the packed breakfast Winston, the guy from their hotel, had made for her. And it was the
hagelslag
that did it. The bread with chocolate sprinkles, the very first thing she and Willem had talked about. It had been the sign, the accident, the nudge to go to Willem.

“How did you know where to find him?” Wren asks

“Because you told me the address, and that the name of the street was a belt.”

Wren turns to Broodje. “
You
told me that.”

“Foreigners can never remember Ceintuurbaan otherwise,” he says.

“As opposed to the many other pronounceable street names here?” Allyson asks.

They all laugh.

They clean up the mess from the snacks and prepare to make their way to Vondelpark. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Allyson knows she has a flight home out of London tomorrow, at 4:00. She will have to figure out how to get there. She has a few hundred dollars left. If she has to blow it on the fast Eurostar train, so be it. It was a last-minute impromptu decision to go to Paris from London that had gotten this entire ball rolling. It took two hours to get from one world to another. She is fairly confident she’ll be able to get back in time.

When Broodje goes to have a quick shower, Wren pats the sofa next to her. “Did you find out who the woman was, the one with the flowers from last night?” she asks.

Allyson hasn’t. Last night, seeing Willem with the woman had been a deal breaker. It had seemed to confirm everything she suspected about him, the way that Ana Lucia’s fury had. But now Allyson doesn’t really care who that woman is. She has seen Willem. She has spent an afternoon with him. She knows that what happened to her last year, in a way, has happened to him.

“I didn’t,” she tells Wren.

“You could ask Broodje.”

She could, but she doesn’t want to. It no longer matters.

She can almost hear Melanie’s scoff from across the Atlantic. Melanie had been with Allyson last summer when she’d met Willem, had been suspicious of him from the start, had not been able to understand why Allyson wouldn’t let go of that one guy, that one day.

Whatever. She isn’t listening to Melanie. Or her mom. Or Dee. Or Céline. Or Ana Lucia. She is listening to herself. And she knows that everything is okay.

“You know what we should do?” Wren says, that manic mischievous smile of hers spreading across her face. “We should get him flowers.”

For a second Allyson thinks this is some sort of duel, to win against the red-haired woman from last night. But then she understands what Wren means. They should get him flowers. At the flower market. Where Wolfgang works.

They ride on Wren’s bicycle, Allyson sidesaddle on the rack behind. (She thinks this might be her favorite thing about Amsterdam. She wants to import the tandem sidesaddle riding back home.) It is early evening when they arrive at the flower market, but a Saturday night, and bustling. Wolfgang is there, wrapping up a big bouquet of lilies.

When he looks up and sees them, he doesn’t seem the slightest bit surprised, even though Allyson is supposed to be in Croatia. He just winks. Allyson waits for the crowd to disperse and when there’s a break, she hugs him. The smell of him, tobacco and flowers, feels so good and familiar that it doesn’t make sense that she only met Wolfgang three days ago (except that it does).

“She found him!” Wren announces. “She found her Orlando.”

“I was under the impression she found what she was looking for already last night,” he says in that rumbly heavily accented voice.

Wolfgang looks at Allyson, a silent understanding passing between them. He is right. Last night, even when she’d thought Willem was a ghost she’d been chasing, she still felt like she’d found what she’d been looking for. Something harder to lose. Because it was connected to her. Because it
was
her.

“It turns out, I found us both,” Allyson tells Wolfgang.

“Double good news then,” he says.

“Double happiness,” Allyson says.

“That too,” Wolfgang says.

“We are going to see him perform Orlando again. Can you come?” Wren asks.

Wolfgang says that one night of Shakespeare is enough for him. And he has to shut down the stall tonight. But he’ll be free after ten.