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I take a bite. The hagelslag crunches, then melts into the butter and still-warm bread. And what’s left over tastes just like him.
All at once, I finally understand what it means for time to be fluid. Because suddenly the entire last year flows before me, condensing and expanding, so that I’m here in Amsterdam eating hagelslag, and at the same time, I’m in Paris, his hand on my hip, and at the same time, I’m on that first train to London, watching the countryside whiz by, and at the same time, I’m in the line for Hamlet. I see Willem. At the canal basin, catching my eye. On the train, his jeans still unstained, me still unstained. On the train to Paris, his thousand shades of laughter.
The destination board shuffles, and I look up at it, and as I do, imagine a different version of time. One in which Willem quits while he’s ahead. One in which he never makes that remark about my breakfast. One in which he just says good-bye on that platform in London instead of inviting me to Paris. Or one in which he never stops to talk to me in Stratford-upon-Avon.
And that’s when I understand that I have been stained. Whether I’m still in love with him, whether he was ever in love with me, and no matter who he’s in love with now, Willem changed my life. He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.
Maybe accident isn’t the right word after all. Maybe miracle is.
Or maybe it’s not a miracle. Maybe this is just life. When you open yourself up to it. When you put yourself in the path of it. When you say yes.
How can I come this far and not tell him—he, who would understand it best—that by giving me the that flyer, by inviting me to skip Hamlet, he helped me realize that it’s not to be that matters, but how to be?
How can I come this far and not be brave?
“Excuse me,” I say to a woman in a polka-dot dress and cowboy boots. “Is there a street in Amsterdam named after a belt?”
“Ceintuurbaan,” she answers. “Tram line twenty-five. Right outside the station.”
I race out of the train station and jump onto the tram, asking the driver where to get off for Ceintuurbaan number one eighty-nine. “Near Sarphatipark,” he replies. “I’ll show you.”
Twenty minutes later, I get off at the park. Inside, there’s a small playground with a large sandpit, and I go sit down under a tree to summon my bravery. A couple of children are putting the finishing touches on an elaborate sand castle, several feet high, with towers and turrets and moats.
I stand up and make my way to the building. I don’t even know for sure that he lives here, except that the feeling of rightness, it has never been stronger. There are three bells. I ring the bottom one. An intercom squawks with a woman’s voice.
“Hello,” I call. Before I say anything else, the door clicks open.
I walk inside the dark, musty hallway. A door swings open, and my heart skips a beat, but it’s not him. It’s an older woman with a yappy dog at her heels.
“Willem?” I ask her. She points a thumb up and shuts her door.
I climb the steep stairs to the second floor. There are two other flats in the building, so this could be his, or the one upstairs. So I just stand there on the doorstep for a moment, listening for sounds inside. It is quiet, save for the faint strains of music. But my heart is beating fast and strong, like a radar pinging: Yes, yes, yes.
My hand shakes a little bit as I knock, and at first the sound is faint, as if I’m knocking on a hollowed-out log. But then I tighten my grip, and I knock again. I hear his footsteps. I remember the scar on his foot. Was it on the right foot or the left? The footsteps come closer. I feel my heart speed up, in double time to those footsteps.
And then the door swings open, and he’s there.
Willem.
His tall body casts a shadow over me, just like it did that first day, that only other day, really, when we met. His eyes, those dark, dark eyes, hiding a spectrum of hidden things, they widen, and his mouth drops. I hear his gasp of breath, the shock of it all.
He just stands there, his body taking up the doorway, looking at me like I am a ghost, which I suppose I am. But if he knows anything at all about Shakespeare, it’s that the ghosts always come haunting.
I look at him as the questions and answers collide all over his face. There is so much I want to tell him. Where do I even begin?
“Hi, Willem,” I say. “My name is Allyson.”
He says nothing in response. He just stays there for a minute, looking at me. And then he steps to the side, opens the door wider, wide enough for me to walk through.
And so I do.
>I wait for the fist of devastation, the collapse of a year’s worth of hopes, the roar of sadness. And I do feel it. The pain of losing him. Or the idea of him. But along with that pain is something else, something quiet at first, so I have to strain for it. But when I do, I hear the sound of a door quietly clicking shut. And then the most amazing thing happens: The night is calm, but I feel a rush of wind, as if a thousand other doors have just simultaneously flung open.
I give one last glance toward Willem. Then I turn to Wolfgang. “Finished,” I say.
But I suspect the opposite is true. That really, I’m just beginning.
Thirty-nine
