Gayle Forman - Just One Year

“Maybe. But only because I travel a lot.”

She taps out a beat on the steering wheel, audible only to herself. “Or maybe you travel a lot because it lets you move on.”

“Perhaps.”

She’s quiet again. Then: “So are you moving on now? Is that what brought you to the grand metropolis of Valladolid?”

“No. The wind just blew me there.”

“What? Like a plastic bag?”

“I prefer to think of myself as a ship. Like a sailboat.”

“But sailboats aren’t steered by the wind; they’re powered by it. There’s a difference.”

I look out the window. The jungle is everywhere. I look back at her. “Can you move on from something when you’re not sure what it is you’re moving on from?”

“You can move on from absolutely anything,” she replies. “But that does sound a little complicated.”

“It is,” I say. “Complicated.”

Kate doesn’t answer, and the silence stretches out, shimmery, like the road ahead of us.

“And a long story,” I add.

“It’s a long drive,” she replies.

There’s something about Kate that reminds me of Lulu. Maybe it’s just that they’re both American or how we met: during journeys, talking food.

Or maybe it’s because in a few hours, I’ll never see her again. There’s nothing to lose. So as we drive, I tell Kate the story of that day, but it’s a different version from the one I told Broodje and the boys. You play to your audience, Tor always said. Which is maybe why I can tell Kate the parts of the story that I didn’t—couldn’t—tell Broodje and the boys. “It was like she knew me,” I tell her. “Straightaway, she knew me.”

“How?”

I tell Kate about Lulu thinking I’d deserted her on the train when I’d spent too long in the café. Hysterically laughing, and then out of the blue—my glimmer of her strange honesty—telling me she’d thought I’d got off the train.

“Were you going to?” Kate asks, her eyes wide.

“No, of course not,” I answer. And I wasn’t, but the memory of it still shames me because of what I was going to do later.

“So how did she see you, exactly?”

“She said she couldn’t understand why I invited her without an ulterior motive.”

Kate laughs. “I hardly think you wanting to sleep with a pretty girl qualifies as an ulterior motive.”

I wanted to sleep with her, of course. “But that wasn’t the ulterior motive. I invited her to Paris because I didn’t want to go back to Holland that day.”

“Why not?”

My stomach lurches again. Bram, gone. Yael, all but gone. The houseboat, a signature away from gone. I force a smile. “That is a much longer story and I’m not done with this one.”

I tell Kate the double happiness story Lulu told me. About the Chinese boy traveling to take some important exam, and along the way, falling sick. About the mountain doctor taking care of him. About the doctor’s daughter telling him this strange line of verse. About the emperor who, after the boy does well on the exam, recites a mysterious line to him. About the boy immediately recognizing the line as the other half of what the girl told him, and repeating the line the girl had told him, pleasing the emperor, getting the job, going back, and marrying the girl. About double happiness.

“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.” That had been the couplet. As soon as Lulu told it to me, there had been something instantly familiar about it, even though I’d never heard it before, never heard the story before. Unknown and familiar. Which, by that point, was how Lulu was seeming.

I tell Kate about Lulu asking who took care of me—as if she knew the answer—and then doing it herself. Stepping between me and the skinheads. Throwing that book. Distracting them so we could get away before we got hurt. Only she got hurt. Even now, the memory of the blood on her neck from when one of the skinheads threw the bottle at her, after all these months, it makes me sick. And ashamed. I don’t tell Kate that.

“That was very brave of her,” Kate says when I tell her what Lulu did.

Saba used to say there was a difference between bravery and courage. Bravery was doing something dangerous without thinking. Courage was walking into danger, knowing full well the risks.

“No,” I tell Kate. “It was courageous.”

“You both were courageous.”

But I wasn’t. Because I tried to send Lulu back. Cowardly. And then I didn’t manage to. Cowardly. I don’t tell Kate this part either.

“So you’re here in Mexico to do what?” she asks.

I think of the boys. They think I’m here to inoculate myself. To find Lulu, sleep with her a few more times, and get on with things.

“I don’t know . . . find her. At the very least, set the record straight.”

“What record? You left a note.”

“Yes, but . . .” I almost say it. Then I stop myself.

“But what?” Kate asks.

“But . . . I didn’t come back,” I finish.

Kate looks at me for a long moment. The car starts to drift off the road before she returns her attention to driving.

“Willem, in case you haven’t noticed, Cancún is back that way?” She points in the reverse direction. I nod. “The chances of you finding this girl seem unfavorable enough without you going to an entirely different city.”

“It wasn’t going to happen. I could tell.”

“How could you tell?”

“Because you don’t ever find things when you’re looking for them. You find them when you’re not.”

“If that were true, nobody would ever find their keys.”

“Not keys. The bigger things.”

She sighs. “I don’t get it. On one hand, you put all this faith into these accidents of yours, and on the other hand, you write off the chance of one even happening.”

“I didn’t write it off. I came all the way to Cancún.”

“And promptly went to Mérida.”

“I wasn’t going to find her. By looking.” I shake my head. It’s hard to explain this part. “It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Meant to be,” Kate scoffs. “Excuse me but I’m having a hard time buying all this woo-woo stuff.” She waves her arms in the air and I have to reach out for the steering wheel until she takes it again. “Nothing happens without intention, Willem. Nothing. This theory of yours—life is ruled by accidents—isn’t that just one huge excuse for passivity?”

I start to disagree, but then the image of Ana Lucia flits through my head. Right place at the right time. It had seemed like a fortuitous accident back then. Now, it feels more like surrender.

“How do you explain us?” I point back and forth to me and her. “Right now, right here, having this conversation, if not for accidents? If not because your car muffler broke and put you in Valladolid, where I wasn’t even meant to be?” I don’t mention the flipped coin being a deciding factor, even though it would seem to support my case.

“Oh, no, don’t go falling in love with me.” She laughs and taps the ring on her finger. “Look, I don’t discount a magical hand of fate. I am an actor, after all, and a Shakespearian, no less. But it can’t be the ruling force of your life. You have to be the driver. And by the way, yes, we are having this conversation because my car—lovely, sweet car that you are,” she baby talks, stroking the dashboard, “had some mechanical issues. But you were the one who asked me for a ride, persuaded me to give you a ride, so you discredit your own theory right there. That was pure will, Willem. Sometimes fate or life or whatever you want to call it, leaves a door a little open and you walk through it. But sometimes it locks the door and you have to find the key, or pick the lock, or knock the damn thing down. And sometimes, it doesn’t even show you the door, and you have to build it yourself. But if you keep waiting for the doors to be opened for you. . . .” she trails off.

“What?”

“I think you’ll have a hard time finding single happiness, let alone that double portion.”

“I’m beginning to doubt that double happiness even exists,” I say, thinking of my parents.

“That’s because you’re looking for it. Doubt is part of searching. Same as faith.”

“Aren’t those opposites?”

“Maybe they’re just two parts of the couplet.”

It reminds me of something Saba used to say: A truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin. It never quite made sense to me before.

“Willem, I suspect deep down you know exactly why you’re here, exactly what you want, but you’re unwilling to commit to it, unwilling to commit to the wanting, let alone the having. Because both of those propositions are terrifying.”

She turns to me and gives me a long, searing look. It goes on a while, and the car starts to drift. Again, I take the wheel to right us. She lets go of the wheel entirely and I grasp it with both hands.

“Look there, Willem. You grabbed the wheel.”

“Only to keep us from crashing.”

“Or, you might say, to keep us from having an accident.”

Mérida, Mexico

Mérida is a bigger version of Valladolid, a colonial pastel-painted city. Kate drops me off in front of a historic peach-colored building that she has heard is a decent hostel. I book myself a room with a balcony overlooking the square and I sit out and watch people taking shelter from the afternoon sun. Shops are closing up for siesta and though I’d planned to scout out the area and find some lunch, I’m not actually hungry. I’m a little wrung out from the morning’s drive and my stomach still feels as if it’s on the bumpy highway. I decide to take a siesta, too.

• • •

I wake up covered in sweat. It’s dark outside, the air in my room still and stale. I sit up to open my window or the balcony door, but when I do, my stomach heaves. I flop back down on the bed and close my eyes, willing myself back to sleep. Sometimes I can trick my body into righting itself before it realizes something’s wrong. Sometimes that works.

But not tonight. I think of the pork in the brown sauce I ate for dinner last night and the memory of it makes my stomach wave and flutter, like there’s a small feral animal trapped inside.

Food poisoning. It must be. I sigh. Okay. A few hours discomfort, and then sleep. Then it will be over. It’s all about getting to the sleep.

I’m not sure of the time so I don’t know how long it takes for the sun to come up, but when it does, I haven’t even touched sleep. I’ve puked so many times the plastic wastebin is almost full. I tried, a few times, to crawl to the shared bathroom down the hall, but I couldn’t make it past my door. Now that the sun is up, the room is heating up. I can almost see the toxic fumes from the wastebin spreading out, poisoning me all over again.

I keep throwing up. There’s no respite or relief in between bouts. I puke until there’s nothing left: no food, no bile, none of me left, it seems.

That’s when the thirst hits. I’ve long since drunk the rest of the water in my bottle, and thrown that up too. I start to fantasize about mountain streams, waterfalls, rain showers, even the Dutch canal; I’d drink from those if I could. They sell bottled water downstairs. And there’s a tap in the bathroom. But I can’t sit up, let alone stand up, let alone make it to water.

Is anyone there? I call. In Dutch. In English. I try to remember the Spanish but the words get jumbled. I think I’m talking but I can’t tell and it’s noisy in the square and my weak voice stands no chance.

I listen for a knock at the door, praying for an offering of water, clean sheets, a cool compress, a soft hand on my forehead. But none comes. This is a hostel, bare bones, no housekeeping, and I prepaid two nights.

I retch again. Nothing comes out except my tears. I am twenty-one years old and I still cry when I puke.

Finally, sleep comes to rescue me. And then I wake up, and I see her, so close. And all I can think is: It was worth it if it brought you.

Who takes care of you now? she whispers. Her breath feels like a cooling breeze.

You, I whisper back. You take care of me.

I’ll be your mountain girl.

I try to reach for her, but now she’s gone and the room is full of the others: Céline and Ana Lucia and Kayla and Sara and the girl with the worm, and there’s more yet—a Franke in Riga, a Gianna in Prague, a Jossra in Tunis. They all start talking at me.