Just One Night
Page 6

• • •
When Willem comes home, he finds his best friend and the girl his best friend tried to help him track down sitting together, eating. Broodje has emptied the kitchen, it seems: cheese, crackers, sausage, herring, beer. He is feeding Allyson, which is what Broodje does with people he loves. Willem sees Allyson has received a fast pass to his best friend’s heart.
“Willy!” Broodje calls. “We were just talking about you.”
“You were?” Willem says. 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. But he doesn’t because this is all so new, even though the way Broodje and Allyson are sitting there, smearing cheese on crackers, it seems like they’ve been doing this for decades.
“I was telling Lulu, sorry, Allyson, what a sad sack you’ve been all year.”
“Not all year,” Willem says. (Though, really, it was almost all year.)
“Okay. Maybe not in India. I wasn’t with you in India. He went to India for three months to see his ma,” Broodje explains to Allyson. “He was in a movie over there.”
“Are you famous in India?” Allyson asks.
“I am Brad Pitt in India,” Willem says.
“And maybe not since he came back. But shit, after he got back from Paris, he was a mess. And in Mexico, when he couldn’t find you—”
“Okay, Broodje,” Willem says. “No need to give away all the family secrets.”
Broodje rolls his eyes. “Far as I’m concerned, she’s family now.”
• • •
Speaking of family, Allyson loves watching Willem with Broodje. Not that she needs reassuring exactly, but seeing him with Broodje is reassuring.
“I was going to take you out to eat,” Willem says to her. “But Broodje beat me to it.”
“We can still go if you want,” Allyson says.
“I have to be at the theater in less than an hour,” Willem says. “We can go out after? Just us.”
“Not just you,” Broodje says. “W, Henk, Lien, they’re all coming. And they will all want to meet her.” He nods to Allyson. “You are like the business we all invested in and now you’re paying off so . . . you can be alone later.”
“Wren called, too. The friend I was in Amsterdam with” Allyson says. “She wants to meet up.”
And, Willem thinks, there would also be Kate and her fiancé.
Allyson and Willem look at each other, the invisible chain connecting them pulling hard. Why hadn’t they taken more advantage of those quiet hours this afternoon? Why had they just sat there, her feet in his lap, when there was a perfectly good empty apartment here?
Except Allyson wouldn’t have exchanged those hours with Willem for anything in the world.
And neither would Willem.
• • •
All too quickly, they part again. Willem will go ahead to his call at the theater. Wren is meeting Allyson and Broodje at the flat. Everyone will meet at the park, and after the play, they will all celebrate.
Saying good-bye is less fraught this time. They have done it now once, like normal people: leave, come back. It builds confidence.
This time Willem kisses her good-bye. It is quick, a peck on the lips. It is not nearly enough. He wants all of her. From her lips to her feet.
“I’ll see you after the play,” Allyson says.
“Yes,” Willem says.
But they both know they will see each other sooner than that. That they will find each other during the play, once more, in the words of Shakespeare.
• • •
Wren arrives not long after Willem has left. She squeals and hugs Allyson, squeals and hugs Broodje. She kisses the saints on her bracelet. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Anthony, patron saint of lost things. She kisses all the saints. They all came through.
“I knew it,” Wren says in that fluty voice of hers. “But I thought you were going to find him on the train, like you did the last time.”
“I sort of found him at the train station,” Allyson says. And then she explains how she’d been about to catch the train to the airport when she’d opened the packed breakfast Winston, the guy from their hotel, had made for her. And it was the hagelslag that did it. The bread with chocolate sprinkles, the very first thing she and Willem had talked about. It had been the sign, the accident, the nudge to go to Willem.
“How did you know where to find him?” Wren asks
“Because you told me the address, and that the name of the street was a belt.”
Wren turns to Broodje. “You told me that.”
“Foreigners can never remember Ceintuurbaan otherwise,” he says.
“As opposed to the many other pronounceable street names here?” Allyson asks.
They all laugh.
They clean up the mess from the snacks and prepare to make their way to Vondelpark. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Allyson knows she has a flight home out of London tomorrow, at 4:00. She will have to figure out how to get there. She has a few hundred dollars left. If she has to blow it on the fast Eurostar train, so be it. It was a last-minute impromptu decision to go to Paris from London that had gotten this entire ball rolling. It took two hours to get from one world to another. She is fairly confident she’ll be able to get back in time.
When Broodje goes to have a quick shower, Wren pats the sofa next to her. “Did you find out who the woman was, the one with the flowers from last night?” she asks.
Allyson hasn’t. Last night, seeing Willem with the woman had been a deal breaker. It had seemed to confirm everything she suspected about him, the way that Ana Lucia’s fury had. But now Allyson doesn’t really care who that woman is. She has seen Willem. She has spent an afternoon with him. She knows that what happened to her last year, in a way, has happened to him.
“I didn’t,” she tells Wren.
“You could ask Broodje.”
She could, but she doesn’t want to. It no longer matters.
She can almost hear Melanie’s scoff from across the Atlantic. Melanie had been with Allyson last summer when she’d met Willem, had been suspicious of him from the start, had not been able to understand why Allyson wouldn’t let go of that one guy, that one day.
Whatever. She isn’t listening to Melanie. Or her mom. Or Dee. Or Céline. Or Ana Lucia. She is listening to herself. And she knows that everything is okay.
“You know what we should do?” Wren says, that manic mischievous smile of hers spreading across her face. “We should get him flowers.”