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I know almost nothing about Croatia, so I decide to go there. I pull out my debit card to pay for the ticket, but I notice a new email has popped up in the other window I have open. I toggle over. It’s from Wren. The subject line reads WHERE ARE YOU?
I quickly write back that I’m in Amsterdam. When I said good-bye to Wren and the Oz gang in Paris last week, she was planning on catching a train to Madrid, and Kelly and the crew were heading to Nice, and they were talking about maybe meeting up in Barcelona, so I’m a little surprised when, thirty seconds later, I get an email back from her that reads NO WAY. ME TOO!!!! The message has her cell number.
I’m grinning as I call her. “I knew you were here,” she says. “I could feel it! Where are you?”
“At an Internet café on the Warmoesstraat. Where are you? I thought you were going to Spain!”
“I changed my plans. Winston, how far is Warmoesstraat?” she calls. “Winston’s the cute guy who works here,” she whispers to me. I hear a male voice in the background. Then Wren squeals. “We’re, like, five minutes from each other. Meet me at Dam Square, in front of the white tower thing that looks like a penis.”
I close the browser window, and ten minutes later, I’m hugging Wren like she’s a long-lost relative.
“Boy, that Saint Anthony works fast,” she says.
“I’ll say!”
“So what happened?”
I give her the quick rundown about finding Ana Lucia, almost finding Willem, and deciding not to find him. “So now I’m going to Croatia.”
She looks disappointed. “You are. When?”
“I was going to fly out tomorrow morning. I was just booking my ticket when you called.”
“Oh, stay a few more days. We can explore together. We can rent bikes. Or rent one bike and have the other ride sidesaddle like the Dutch girls do.”
“I already have a bike,” I say. “It’s pink.”
“Does it have a rack on the back where I can sit?”
Her grin is too infectious to resist. “It does.”
“Oh. You have to stay. I’m at a hostel up near the Jordaan. My room is the size of a bathtub, but it’s sweet and the bed’s a double. Come share with me.”
I look up. It is threatening rain again, and it’s freezing for August, and the web said Croatia was mid-eighties and sunny. But Wren is here, and what are the chances of that? She believes in saints. I believe in accidents. I think we basically believe in the same thing.
We get my stuff out of my room at the hostel, where that one guy is now passed out, and move it to her hostel. It’s much cozier than mine, especially since tall-dark-and- grinning Winston is there checking in on us. Upstairs, her bed is covered with guidebooks, not just from Europe but from all over the world.
“What’s all this?”
“Winston loaned them to me. They’re for my bucket list.”
“Bucket list?”
“All the things I want to do before I die.”
That curious cryptic thing Wren said when we first met in Paris comes back to me: I know hospitals. I’ve only known Wren a day and a half, but that’s enough for the thought of losing her to be inconceivable. She must see something on my face, because she gently touches my arm. “Don’t worry, I plan on living a long time.”
“Why are you making a bucket list, then?”
“Because if you wait until you’re really dying, it’s too late.”
I look at her. I know hospitals. The saints. “Who?” I ask softly.
“My sister, Francesca.” She pulls out a piece of paper. It has a bunch of titles and locations, La Belle Angèle (Paris), The Music Lesson (London), The Resurrection (Madrid). It goes on like that.
“I don’t get it.” I hand back the paper.
“Francesca didn’t have much of a chance to be good at a lot of things, but she was a totally dedicated artist. She’d be in the hospital, a chemo drip in one arm, a sketchpad in the other. She made hundreds of paintings and drawings, her legacy, she liked to say, because at least when she died, they’d live on—if only in the attic.”
