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“I don’t know. It’s heavy. It makes my wrist sweaty. And it ticks loudly, like it’s always trying to remind me that time is passing. Like I can’t ever forget about time.”
“So why do you wear it?”
It’s such a simple question. Why do I wear a watch that I hate? Even here, thousands of miles from home, with no one to see me wearing it, why do I still wear it? Because my parents bought it for me with the best of intentions. Because I can’t let them down.
I feel the gentle pressure of Willem’s fingers on my wrist again. The clasp opens, and the watch falls away, leaving a white ghost imprint. I can feel the refreshing breeze tickle against my birthmark.
Willem examines the watch, the Going Places engraving. “Where are you going, exactly?”
“Oh, you know. To Europe. To college. To medical school.”
“Medical school?” There’s surprise in his voice.
I nod. That’s been the plan ever since eighth grade, when I gave the Heimlich maneuver to some guy who was choking on his lamb shank at the next table. Dad had been out front, answering a call from the service when I’d seen the guy next to us go purple. So I just got up and calmly put my arms around the guy’s diaphragm and pushed until a piece of meat arced out. Mom was beyond impressed. She’d started talking about my becoming a doctor like Dad. After a while, I started talking about it too.
“So you’ll take care of me?”
His voice has the usual teasing tone, so I get that he’s joking, but this wave comes over me. Because who takes care of him now? I look at him, and he makes everything seem effortless, but I remember that feeling before—a certainty—that he is alone.
“Who takes care of you now?”
At first I’m not sure I said it aloud and, if I did, that he heard me, because he doesn’t answer for a long time. But then finally, he says, “I take care of me.”
“But what about when you can’t? When you get sick?”
“I don’t get sick.”
“Everybody gets sick. What happens when you’re on the road and you get the flu or something?”
“I get sick. I get better,” he replies, waving the question away.
I prop myself up on my elbow. This weird chasm of feeling has opened in my chest, making my breath come shallow and my words dance like scattered leaves. “I keep thinking about the double happiness story. That boy was traveling alone and got sick, but someone took care of him. Is that what happens to you when you get sick? Or are you alone in some gross hotel room?” I try to picture Willem in a mountain village, but all I get is an image of him in a dingy room. I think of how I get when I’m sick, that deep sadness, that aloneness that strikes—and I have Mom to take care of me. What about him? Does anyone bring him soup? Does anyone tell him about the green trees against the sky in the spring rain?
Willem doesn’t answer. In the distance, I can hear the pop of the handball slamming against the wall, the coquettish sound of women’s laughter. I think of Céline. The girls on the train. The models at the café. The slip of paper in his pocket. There’s probably no shortage of girls wanting to play nurse with him. I get a weird feeling in my stomach. I’ve made a wrong turn, like when I am skiing and I accidentally swerve onto a black-diamond run full of moguls.
“Sorry,” I say. “It’s probably just the doctor in me coming out. Or the Jewish mother.”
Willem gives me a peculiar look. Another wrong turn. I keep forgetting that in Europe, there are hardly any Jewish people, so jokes like that don’t make sense.
“I’m Jewish, and apparently that means when I get older, I’m doomed to fuss about everyone’s health,” I hastily explain. “That’s what ‘Jewish mother’ means.”
Willem lies on his back and holds my watch up to his face. “It’s strange you mention the double happiness story. Sometimes I do get sick and wind up puking into squat toilets, and it’s not so nice.”
I wince at the thought of it.
“But there was this one time, I was traveling from Morocco to Algeria by bus, and I got dysentery, a pretty bad case. So bad I had no choice but to get off the bus in the middle of nowhere. It was some town at the edge of the Sahara, not even mentioned in any book. I was dehydrated, hallucinating, I think, stumbling around for a place to stay when I saw a hotel and restaurant called Saba. Saba was what I used to call my grandfather. It seemed like a sign, like he was saying ‘go here.’ The restaurant was empty. I went straight to the toilets to throw up again. When I came out, there was a man with a short gray beard wearing a long djellaba. I asked for some tea and ginger, which is what my mother always uses for upset stomachs. He shook his head and told me I was in the desert now and had to use desert remedies. He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a grilled lemon, cut in half. He sprinkled it with salt and told me to squeeze the juice into my mouth. I thought I would lose it again, but in twenty minutes, my stomach was okay. He gave me some terrible tea that tasted like tree bark and sent me upstairs, where I slept maybe eighteen hours. Every day, I came downstairs, and he would ask how I was feeling and then prepare me a meal specifically based on my symptoms. After that we would talk, just as I had done with Saba as a child. I stayed there for a week, in this town on the edge of the map that I am not even sure exists. So it is a lot like your story from before.”
“Except he didn’t have a daughter,” I say. “Or you’d be married by now.”
We are on our sides, facing each other, so close I can feel the warmth radiating off him, so close it’s like we are breathing the same air.
“You be the daughter. Tell me that couplet again,” he says.
“Green trees against the sky in the spring rain while the sky set off the spring trees in the obscuration. Red flowers dot the land in the breeze’s chase while the land colored up in red after the kiss.”
The last word, kiss, hangs in the air.
