Gayle Forman - Just One Day

He’s been gone two years. Why isn’t Willem getting a hero’s welcome? Is anyone even waiting for him?

“When we were at Céline’s,” I ask him now, “did you call anyone?”

He turns to me, his dark eyes furrowed and confused. “No. Why?”

Because how does anyone know you’re delayed? Because how do they know to postpone your hero’s welcome until tomorrow?

“Isn’t anyone expecting you?” I ask.

Something happens to his face, for just the slightest of moments, a slip of his jaunty mask, which I hadn’t realized was a mask until I see how tired, how uncertain—how much like me—he looks underneath it.

“You know what I think?” Willem asks.

“What?”

“We should get lost.”

“I’ve got news for you, but I’ve been lost all day.”

“This is different. This is getting on purpose lost. It’s something I do when I first come to a new city. I’ll go into the metro or on a tramline and randomly pick a stop and go.”

I can see what he’s doing. He’s changing the scenery, changing the subject. And I get that, in some way, he needs to do this. So I let him. “Like traveler’s pin the tail on the donkey?” I ask.

Willem gives me a quizzical look. His English is so good that I forget not everything computes.

“Is this about accidents?” I ask.

He looks at me, and for half a second, the mask slips again. But then just like that, it’s back in place. It doesn’t matter. It slipped, and I saw. And I understand. Willem is alone, like I am alone. And now this ache that I can’t quite distinguish as his or mine has opened up inside of me.

“It’s always about the accidents,” he says.

I pick a doozy.

Using the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey strategy, I close my eyes and spin in front of the Metro map and land my finger on the benign-sounding Château Rouge.

When we come out of the Metro, we are in yet another Paris altogether, and there’s not a chateau, rouge or otherwise, in sight.

The streets are narrow, like in the Latin Quarter, but grittier. Tinny, drum-heavy music blares out from the shop windows, and there’s such an onslaught of smells, my nose doesn’t know what to breathe first: curry coming out of the patisseries, the ferric tang of blood from the giant animal carcasses being trundled through the street, the sweet and exotic smell of incense smoke, exhaust from the cars and motos, the ubiquitous smell of coffee—though there aren’t so many of the big cafés here, the kind that take up an entire corner, but more smaller, ad-hoc ones, bistro tables shoved onto the sidewalk. And they’re all packed with men smoking and drinking coffee. The women, some wearing full black veils with only their eyes showing through the slits, others in colorful dresses, sleeping babies tied to their backs, bustle in and out of the stores. We are the only tourists in this area, and people are looking at us, not menacingly, but just curiously, like we’re lost. Which we are. This is precisely why, on my own, I would never in a million years do this.

But Willem is loving it here. So I try to take a cue from him and relax, and just gape at this part of Paris meets Middle East meets Africa.

We go past a mosque, then a hulking church, all spires and buttresses, that seems like it landed in this neighborhood the same way we did. We twist and turn until we wind up in some sort of park: a quadrangle of grass and paths and handball courts sandwiched in between the apartment buildings. It’s packed with girls in head scarves playing some version of hopscotch and boys on the handball courts and people walking dogs and playing chess and sitting out for a smoke at the end of a summer afternoon.

“Do you have any idea where we are?” I ask Willem.

“I am as lost as you are.”

“Oh, we are so screwed.” But I laugh. It feels kind of nice to be lost, together.

We flop down under a stand of trees in a quiet corner of the park under a mural of children playing in the clouds. I slide off my sandals. I have tan lines made from dirt and sweat. “I think my feet are broken.”

Willem kicks off his flip-flops. I see the zigzag scar running up his left foot. “Mine too.”

We lie on our backs as the sun throws shadows down between the clouds that are really starting to roll in on the cooling breeze, bringing with them the electric smell of rain. Maybe Jacques was right, after all.

“What time is it?” Willem asks.

I shut my eyes and stick my arm out for him to see. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

He takes my arm, checks the time. But then he doesn’t let go. He examines my wrist, rotating it forward and back, as if it were some rare object, the first wrist he has ever seen.

“That’s a very nice watch,” he says finally.

“Thank you,” I say dutifully.

“You don’t like it?”

“No. It’s not that. I mean, it was a really generous gift from my parents, who’d already given me the tour, and it’s a very expensive watch.” I stop myself. It’s Willem, and something compels me to tell him the truth. “But, no, I don’t really like it.”

“Why not?”

“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.

“Next time I get sick, you can tell that to me. You can be my girl in the mountains.”

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll be your mountain girl and take care of you.”

He smiles, like it’s another joke, another volley in our flirtation, and I smile back, even though I’m not joking.

“And in return, I will relieve you of the burden of time.” He slips my watch onto his lanky wrist, where it doesn’t seem quite so much like a prison shackle. “For now, time doesn’t exist. It is, what did Jacques say . . . fluid?”

“Fluid,” I repeat, like an incantation. Because if time can be fluid, then maybe something that is just one day can go on indefinitely.

I fall asleep. And then I wake up, and everything feels different. The park is quiet now. The sound of laughter and echoes of handballs have disappeared into the long dusky twilight. Fat, gray rainclouds have overtaken the darkening sky.

But something else has shifted, something less quantifiable yet somehow elemental. I feel it as soon as I wake; the atoms and molecules have rearranged themselves, rendering the whole world irrevocably changed.

And that’s when I notice Willem’s hand.

Willem has also fallen asleep; his long body is curved in the space around mine like a question mark. We aren’t touching at all except for his one hand, which is tucked into the crease of my hip, casually, like a dropped scarf, like it blew there on the soft breeze of sleep. And yet now that it’s there, it feels like it belongs there. Like it’s always belonged there.