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They slot together like puzzle pieces. As Allyson and Willem kiss for the first time in a year, both are thinking the same thing: This feels new.
She’d spent a year looking for him, looking for the girl she was with him.
This girl he has not seen in a year, this girl he’s thought about, dreamed about, looked for, for a year, this girl he just kissed (he’s still a bit dazed from that kiss)
Tea. One day. A year ago. He remembered.
And immediately she knows, maybe she knew then, that there is no more Bram. Which isn’t to say there is no more stain.
When Allyson smiles, Willem is reminded of a sunrise. A bit of light, then more of it, then a burst of brightness. A sunrise is something you can see all the time and still marvel at. Maybe that is why her smile feels so familiar. He has seen many sunrises.
It’s not any of that. It’s not even him. Or all him. It’s her. The way she can be with him.
Allyson is embarrassed now, at the lengths she went through to find him.
I’ve been trying to forget about you and our day in Paris for nine months now, but as you can see, it’s not going all that well.
And if you didn’t leave, I don’t know what to say. Except I’m sorry that I did.
But no matter what happened, I hope you’re okay.
“I didn’t just leave,” he says. “I’m glad you didn’t forget. And I wasn’t okay.”
“But why would she hate me?” Allyson asks, remembering her own jealousy at any girl Willem seemed vaguely interested in.
“Because she caught me buying the airplane tickets to find you.”
Airplane tickets? Find me where? Allyson mind scrambles to incorporate this new information. It still doesn’t make sense. Willem had gone to Spain to meet the French girl he’d been cheating on Ana Lucia with.
And just like that, Allyson understands it. How jealousy contorts things. She thinks of Céline, how jealous she had been of her, and how wrong about her. She was Ana Lucia’s Céline. There was no French girl. There was an American girl he met in France. “So you didn’t go to Spain?” Allyson asks. “Spain?” Willem says. “No. I went to Mexico.”
There is something then that hangs between them. Meeting later is what got them into this predicament in the first place. Willem stepping out for a bit. Accidents happening. And a year before they found each other again.
“Here is my cellphone number,” he tells her. He writes it on a pad. He resists the urge to write it on her arm, to tattoo it there.
He starts to close the door behind him. Then opens it again. “You’ll be here?” He is nervous now about leaving. He can’t help it. The mirror images. The Universal Law of Equilibrium. Last year, he vanished. This year, it could be her. Except he thinks he has stopped believing in this universal register of deposits and debits, of good things coming at a cost. And when Allyson closes the door, promising that she will be there, he allows himself to believe it.
I found her. He stops. Maybe it is more accurate to say she found him. But that is not what he is feeling. He is feeling that he found her.
He steps forward and his instinct is to kiss Allyson. He does not want to enter or leave a room without kissing her. This, too, is something new.
She kisses the saints on her bracelet.
Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Anthony, patron saint of lost things.
No one had believed her when she’d said he had fallen in love. They believe her now.
“That boy is hopelessly in love with some American girl he found and lost in Paris. As for me, I’m hopelessly in love with some stranger I met five years ago.”
Allyson could live in that kiss. Except she hears laughter behind them. And a voice, an unfamiliar one, though Allyson knows at once that it belongs to the redhead. “I take it you found her then,” the voice says.
Something about the night feels magical, as if a bit of Shakespeare’s fairy dust has settled over them.
It’s noisy in the bar but it goes quiet for a second as Allyson and Willem look at each other and once again understand something that they somehow, somewhere already knew. “You were there,” she says. “You were there,” he says. “You were both at the same party,” W says. He shakes his head. “I cannot even begin to calculate those odds.” She’d been thinking of him. But it had felt like ridiculous wishful thinking. Delusional wishful thinking. He’d been thinking of her, too. In the water, he knew she was close, but not that close.
“I cannot believe you went all the way there and you didn’t find each other.”
“Maybe they weren’t ready to find each other,” Wolfgang begins. “And so they didn’t,” Kate finishes. “That makes no sense whatsoever,” W says. Except that even W—mathematical, logical, analytical W—somewhere understands that it does.
“I have a sense I will see you again.” “Me, too.” Allyson has a feeling she’s coming back to Amsterdam. She’ll have to get
The table is so quiet. The restaurant is quiet. It seems like all of Amsterdam is holding its breath for them.
(It doesn’t matter; good-byes with these two aren’t to be trusted anyhow)
It is a devouring, consuming
kiss. The kind of kiss that never comes off.
A year is a long time to wait. And Allyson and Willem, they feel like they’ve been waiting a lot longer.
Last year in Paris, she asked him to stay on with her, for just one day. He had wanted to, but he’d been ambivalent,
Maybe last year wasn’t their time. But now is. He knows it.
“Can’t you stay,” Willem begins. “For just one—?” Allyson doesn’t wait for him to finish the question—hour, day, week—because her answer is the same. “Yes.”
