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“Was it part of the show?”
He cocks his head.
“I mean, do you throw a coin to a girl at every performance, or was I special?”
Last night after I got back to the hotel, I spent a long time examining the coin he’d tossed me. It was a Czech koruna, worth about a nickel. But still, I’d put it in a separate corner of my wallet, away from all the other foreign coins. I pull it out now. It glints in the bright afternoon sun.
Willem looks at it too. I’m not sure if his answer is true or just maddeningly ambiguous, or maybe both. Because that’s exactly what he says: “Maybe both.”
Seven
When we leave the restaurant, Willem asks me the time. I twist the watch around my wrist. It feels heavier than ever, the skin underneath itchy and pale from being stuck under the piece of chunky metal for the past three weeks. I haven’t taken it off once.
It was a present, from my parents, though it was Mom who’d given it to me on graduation night, after the party at the Italian restaurant with Melanie’s family, where they told us about the tour.
“What’s this?” I’d asked. We were sitting at the kitchen table, decompressing from the day. “You already gave me a graduation present.”
She’d smiled. “I got you another.”
I’d opened the box, seen the watch, fingered the heavy gold links. Read the engraving.
“It’s too much.” And it was. In every way.
“Time stops for no one,” Mom had said, smiling a little sadly. “You deserve a good watch to keep up.” Then she’d snapped the watch on my wrist, shown me how she had an extra safety clasp installed, pointed out that it was waterproof too. “It’ll never fall off. So you can take it to Europe with you.”
“Oh, no. It’s way too valuable.”
“It’s fine. It’s insured. Besides, I threw away your Swatch.”
“You did?” I’d worn my zebra-striped Swatch all through high school.
“You’re a grown-up now. You need a grown-up watch.”
I look at my watch now. It’s almost four. Back on the tour, I’d be breathing a sigh of relief, because the busy part of the day would be winding down. Usually we had a rest around five, and most nights, by eight o’clock, I could be back in my hotel room watching some movie.
“We should probably start seeing some of the sights,” Willem says. “Do you know what you want to do?”
I shrug. “We could start with the Seine. Isn’t that it?” I point to a concrete embankment, underneath which is a river of sorts.
Willem laughs. “No, that’s a canal.”
We walk down the cobblestoned pathway, and Willem pulls out a thick Rough Guide to Europe. He opens to a small map of Paris, points out, more or less, where we are, an area called Villette.
“The Seine is here,” he says, tracing a line down the map.
“Oh.” I look out at the boat, which is stuck now between two big metal gates; the area is filling up with water. Willem explains that this is a lock, basically an elevator that lifts and drops the boats down differing depths of the canals.
“How do you know so much about everything?”
He laughs. “I’m Dutch.”
“So that means you’re a genius?”
“Only about canals. They say ‘God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland.’” And then he goes on to tell me about how so much of the country was reclaimed from the sea, about riding your bike along the low embankments that keep the water out of Holland. How it’s an act of faith to ride your bike around, with the dikes above you, knowing somehow, even though you’re below sea level, you’re not under water. When he talks about it, he seems so young that I can almost see him as a towheaded little kid, eyes wide, staring out at the endless waterways and wondering where they all led to.
“Maybe we can go on one of those boats?” I ask, pointing to the barge we just watched go through the lock.
Willem’s eyes light up, and for a second, I see that boy again. “I don’t know.” He looks inside the guidebook. “It doesn’t really cover this neighborhood.”
