Gayle Forman - Just One Year

Inside, the music changes, from mellow jazz to something wilder with screaming trumpets. Marjolein looks longingly inside. I realize that she’s not alone.

“I’ll let you go,” I say.

She leans forward to kiss good-bye. “Your mother will be pleased I saw you.”

She starts to close the door. “Can I ask you something? About Yael?”

“Sure,” she says absently, her attention already back in the warm house and on whomever’s waiting in there.

“Did she, I don’t know, do things, to help me, that I didn’t know about?”

Her face is half hidden in shadows, but her toothy smile shines in the reflected light. “What did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything.”

Marjolein shakes her head. “Then neither can I.” She starts to close the door. Then she stops. “But did you consider in all those months you were gone, why your bank account never ever went to zero?”

I hadn’t considered it, not really. I rarely used my bank card but when I did, it always worked.

“Someone was always watching,” Marjolein says. When she shuts the door, she’s still smiling.

Utrecht

Everything takes too long. The train is late. The bike share line is too long. So I catch a bus instead and it stops to pick up every old lady in town. I shouldn’t have left so late, but it was already late when I got hold of Sara this morning. Then it took a bit of cajoling before she finally remembered there was a letter. No, she didn’t read it. No, she didn’t remember where it came from. But she thinks she forwarded to the address on file. The one in Utrecht. Not that long ago.

By the time I get to Bloemstraat, it’s almost noon. The second tech rehearsal is at 2:00 back in Amsterdam. I have nothing but time in my life, but never enough of it when I need it.

I ring the eyeball bell. There’s no answer. I have no idea who lives here anymore. I texted Broodje on the train over but he didn’t answer. Then I remembered that he’s in the middle of the Aegean somewhere. With Candace. Whose name he knows, whose telephone number and email address he got before he left Mexico.

The front door is locked but I still have my key and it still works. The first good sign.

“Hello,” I call, my voice echoing through the empty house. It no longer looks like the place I lived in. No more lumpy sofa. No more boy smell. Even the Picasso flowers are gone.

There’s a dining room table, with the post scattered all over it. I rifle through the stacks as quickly as possible, but I see nothing, so I make myself slow down and methodically go through each piece of mail, dividing it into neat piles: for Broodje, for Henk, for W, even some for Ivo, who’s still getting letters here, for a couple of unfamiliar girls who must be living here now. There is some mail for me, mostly dead letters from the university and a travel catalog from the agency I used to book our Mexico tickets.

I look up the stairs. Perhaps the letter is up there. Or in the attic in my old room. Or in one of the cabinets. Or maybe it isn’t the one Sara forwarded. Maybe it’s still back on the Nieuwe Prinsengracht. Or somewhere in Marjolein’s office.

Or maybe there is no letter from her. Maybe it’s just another false hope I’ve conjured for myself.

I hear ticking. On the mantel, where the Picasso used to hang, there’s an old-fashioned wooden clock, like the kind Saba once had in his Jerusalem apartment. It was one of the few pieces Yael kept after he died. I wonder where it is now.

It’s half past twelve. If I want to get the train back in time for the tech rehearsal, I have to leave now. Otherwise, I’ll be late. And being late for tech? The only thing worse in Petra’s book would be not showing for a performance. I think of the original understudy, replaced because he had to miss three rehearsals. It’s too late for her to replace me, but that’s not to say she can’t fire me. I’m nothing but a shadow, anyhow.

Being fired won’t make any material difference in my life right now. Except I don’t want to be fired. And more than that, I don’t want to hand over that decision to Petra. If I’m late, that’s exactly what will happen.

The house seems huge all of a sudden, like it would take years to search all the rooms. The moment seems even bigger.

I’ve given up on Lulu before. In Utrecht. In Mexico. But that felt like surrendering. Like it was me I was really giving up on. This feels different, somehow. Like maybe Lulu brought me to this place, and for the first time in a long time, I’m on the cusp of something real. Maybe this is the point of it all. Maybe this is where the road is meant to end.

I think of the postcards I left in her suitcase. I’d written sorry on one of them. Only now do I understand what I really should’ve written was thank you.

“Thank you,” I say quietly to the empty house. I know she’ll never hear it, but somehow that seems besides the point.

Then I drop my mail in the recycling and head back to Amsterdam, closing the door behind me.

AUGUST

Amsterdam

The phone is ringing. And I’m sleeping. Two things that shouldn’t be happening at the same time. I open my eyes, fumble for the phone, but the ringing continues, crying out into the still night.

A light flicks on. Broodje, naked as a newborn, stands in front of me squinting in the yellow light of the lamp, and the lemony walls of the nursery. He holds out my phone. “It’s for you,” he mumbles, and then he flicks off the light and sleepwalks back to bed.

I put the phone to my ear and I hear the exact four words you don’t want to hear on the other end of a middle-of-the-night phone call.

“There’s been an accident.”

My stomach plummets and I hear a whistling my ears as I wait to hear who. Yael. Daniel. Fabiola. The baby. Some subtraction in my family that I can no longer bear.

But the voice continues talking and it takes me a minute to slow my breathing and hear what is being said. Bicycle and moto and ankle and fracture and performance and emergency and it’s then that I understand that it’s not that kind of accident.

“Jeroen?” I say at last, though who else can it be? I want to laugh. Not because of the irony, but because of the relief.

“Yes, Jeroen,” Linus snaps. Jeroen the invincible, felled by a drunken moto driver. Jeroen insistent he can go on anyhow, with his foot in a cast, and maybe he can, for next weekend’s performances. But this weekend’s? “We might have to cancel,” Linus says. “We need you at the theater as soon as possible. Petra wants to see what you can do.”

I rub my eyes. Light is peeking through the shades. It’s not the middle of the night after all. Linus tells me to be at the theater—the actual theater, not the stage in Vondelpark—at eight.

“It’s going to be a long day,” he warns.

• • •

Petra and Linus hardly look up when I arrive at the theater. A sloe-eyed Marina offers a tired, sympathetic look. She’s holding a roll and breaks off half and hands it to me. “Thank you,” I say. “I didn’t have time to eat.”

“I figured as much,” she says.

I sit down on the edge of the stage, alongside her. “So what happened?”

She arches her eyebrow. “Karma happened.” She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “I know it’s his joke to brag about his perfect record, and I’ve heard him do it many times before and nothing’s come of it.” She pauses to dust the crumbs off her lap. “But you don’t laugh at fate like that without fate eventually having the last laugh. The only problem is, it doesn’t just affect him. It might shut down the remaining run.”

“Shut it down? I thought it was just tonight’s.”

“Jeroen won’t be able to perform either of this weekend’s performances, and even if he can actually manage it in the boot cast he’s apparently going to have to wear for the next six weeks, they’ll have to reblock the whole thing. Plus, there are questions of insurance.” She sighs. “It might be easier to just cancel.”

My shoulders slump with the weight of that statement. So it falls to me. “I think I’m starting to believe in the Mackers curse,” I tell Marina.

She looks at me, the worry in her eyes mixed with sympathy. She seems about to say something when Petra orders me to the stage.

Linus looks miserable. But Petra, she of the thousand tantrums, is actually calm, cigarette smoke swirling around her like a statue on fire. It takes me a minute to realize she’s not calm. She’s resigned. She’s already written tonight off.

I climb onto the stage. I take a breath. “What can I do?” I ask her.

“We have the cast on standby for a full run-through later,” Linus answers. “Right now, we’d like to run your scenes with Marina. See how those go.”

Petra stubs out her cigarette. “We’ll skip ahead to Act One, Scene Two with Rosalind. I will read Celia. Linus will read Le Beau and the Duke. Let’s start just before the fight with Le Beau’s line.”

“‘Monsieur the challenger, the princesses call for you?’” Linus asks. Petra nods.

“I attend them with all respect and duty,” I say, jumping right in with Orlando’s next line.

There’s a moment of surprise as they all look at me

“Young man, have you challenged Charles the wrestler?” Marina asks as Rosalind.

“No, fair princess; he is the general challenger: I come but in, as others do, to try with him the strength of my youth,” I reply, not boastfully, as Jeroen does, but tempering the bravado with a little uncertainty, which I somehow now know is what Orlando must feel.

I’ve said these words hundreds of times in readings with Max, but they were just lines in a script, and I never stopped to figure out what it all meant because I never really had to. But just as Sebastian’s monologue came alive during my audition months ago, the words seem charged with meaning all of a sudden. They become a language I know.

We go back and forth and then I get to Orlando’s line: “I shall do my friends no wrong, for I have none to lament me, the world no injury, for in it I have nothing. ” As I say the words, I feel a tiny catch of emotion in the back of my throat. Because I know what he means. For a minute, I think to swallow the emotion down, but I don’t. I breathe into it, letting it carry me through the scene.

I’m feeling loose and good as we move onto the fight scene, in which I pantomime fighting an invisible opponent. I know this part well. Orlando wins the fight, but he loses anyway. He is cast out of the duke’s kingdom and warned that his brother wants to kill him.

We reach the end of the scene. Petra, Linus, even Marina, they all stare at me, not saying a thing.

“Shall we continue?” I ask. “On to Act Two?” They nod. I run that scene with Linus reading the part of Adam, and when I finish that, Petra clears her throat and asks me to take it from the beginning, Orlando’s opening monologue, the one I flubbed so badly during my callback.

I don’t flub it this time. When I finish, there is more silence. “So you’re off book, that is clear,” Linus says finally. “And the blocking?”

“Yes, that too,” I say.

They look so incredulous. What do they think I’ve been doing all this time?

Warming a seat, comes my own answer. And maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised by their surprise. Because isn’t that exactly what I’d thought I’d been doing, too?