AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Willem laughs again. The sound is clear and strong as a bell, and it fills me with joy, and it’s like, for the first time in my life, I understand that this is the point of laughter, to spread happiness.
“Sometimes you can’t know until you know,” he says.
“That’s very helpful.”
He laughs and looks at me for a long moment. “You know, I think you might be good at traveling after all.”
“Seriously? I’m not. Today is a total anomaly. I was miserable on the tour. Trust me, I didn’t flag down a single boat. Not even a taxi. Not even a bicycle.”
“What about before the tour?”
“I haven’t traveled much, and the kind I’ve done . . . not a lot of room for accidents.”
Willem raises a questioning eyebrow.
“I’ve been places. Florida. Skiing. And to Mexico, but even that sounds more exotic than it is. Every year, we go to this time-share resort south of Cancún. It’s meant to look like a giant Mayan temple, but I swear the only clue that you’re not in America is the piped-in mariachi Christmas carols along the fake river waterslide thing. We stay in the same unit. We go to the same beach. We eat at the same restaurants. We barely even leave the gates, and when we do, it’s to visit the ruins, but we go to the same ones every single year. It’s like the calendar flips but nothing else changes.”
>I slip away to the bow of the boat and watch the scenery slip by. It’s cooler down here in the canals, under the narrow arched footbridges. And it smells different too. Older, mustier, like generations of history are stored in the wet walls. If these walls could talk, I wonder what secrets they’d tell.
When we get to the first lock, Willem clambers to the side of the barge to show me how the mechanism works. The ancient-looking metal gates, rusted the same brackish color as the water, close behind us, the water drains out from beneath us, the gates reopen to a lower section.
This part of the canal is so narrow that the barge takes up almost the entire width. Steep embankments lead up to the streets, and above those, poplar and elm trees (per Captain Jack) form an arbor, a gentle respite from the hot afternoon sun.
A gust of wind shakes the trees, sending a scrim of leaves shimmying onto the deck. “Rain is coming,” Captain Jack says, sniffing the air like a rabbit. I look up and then over at Willem and roll my eyes. The sky is cloudless, and there hasn’t been rain in this part of Europe for ten days.
Up above, Paris carries on, doing her thing. Mothers sip coffee, keeping eyes on their kids as they scooter along the sidewalks. Vendors at outdoor stalls hawk fruits and vegetables. Lovers wrap their arms around each other, never mind the heat. A clarinet player stands atop the bridge, serenading it all.
I’ve hardly taken any pictures on this trip. Melanie teased me about it, to which I always said I preferred to experience something rather than obsessively record it. Though, really, the truth of it was, unlike Melanie (who wanted to remember the shoe salesman and the mime and the cute waiter and all the other people on the tour), none of that really mattered to me. At the start of the trip, I took shots of the sights. The Colosseum. Belvedere Palace. Mozart Square. But I stopped. They never came out very well, and you could get postcards of these things.
But there are no postcards of this. Of life.
I snap a picture of a bald man walking four bushy-haired dogs. Of a little girl in the most absurdly frilly skirt, plucking petals off a flower. Of a couple, unabashedly making out on the fake beach along the waterside. Of the Danes, ignoring all of this, but having the time of their lives playing cards.
“Oh, let me take one of the two of you,” Agnethe says, rising, a little wobbly, from the game. “Aren’t you golden?” She turns to the table. “Bert, was I ever that golden?”
“You still are, my love.”
“How long have you been married?” I ask.
“Thirteen years,” she says, and I’m wondering if they’re stained, but then she adds, “Of course, we’ve been divorced for ten.”
She sees the look of confusion on my face. “Our divorce is more successful than most marriages.”
I turn to Willem. “What kind of stain is that?” I whisper, and he laughs just as Agnethe takes the picture.
A church bell rings in the distance. Agnethe hands back the phone, and I take a picture of her and Bert. “You will send me that one? All of the ones?”
“Of course. As soon as I have reception.” I turn to Willem. “I’ll text them to you too, if you give me your number.”
“My phone is so old, it doesn’t work with pictures.”
“When I get home, then, I’ll put the pictures on my computer and email them to you,” I say, though I’ll have to figure out a place to hide the pictures from Mom; it wouldn’t be beyond her to look through my phone—or computer. Though, I realize now, only for another month. And then I’ll be free. Just like today I’m free.
He looks at one of the pictures for a long time. Then he looks at me. “I’ll keep you up here.” He taps his temple. “Where you can’t get lost.”
I bite my lip to hide my smile and pretend to put the phone away, but when Captain Jack calls to Willem to take the wheel while he visits the head, I pull it back out and scroll through the photos, stopping at the one of the two of us that Agnethe took. I’m in profile, my mouth open. He’s laughing. Always laughing. I run my thumb over his face, halfway expecting it to emanate some sort of heat.
I put the phone away and watch Paris drift by, feeling relaxed, almost drunk with a sleepy joy. After a while, Willem returns to me. We sit quietly, listening to the lapping of the water, the babble of the Danes. Willem pulls a coin out and does that thing, flipping it from knuckle to knuckle. I watch, hypnotized by his hand, by the gentle rocking of the water. It’s peaceful until the Danes start bickering, loudly. Willem translates: Apparently they’re hotly debating whether some famous French actress has ever made a p**n ographic film.
