“Yes,” I say.
“Me too.”
“Our parents quit while they were ahead,” I say, repeating the line Mom and Dad always use when people ask if I’m an only child. We quit while we were ahead.
“I never understand some English sayings,” Willem replies. “If you’re ahead, why would you quit?”
“I think it’s a gambling term.”
But Willem is shaking his head. “I think it’s human nature to keep going when you’re ahead, no matter what. You quit while you’re behind.” Then he looks at me again, and as if realizing that he has maybe insulted me, he hastily adds, “I’m sure with you it was different.”
When I was little, my parents had tried to have more children. First they went the natural route, then they went the fertility route, Mom going through a bunch of horrible procedures that never worked. Then they looked into adoption and were in the process of filling out all the paperwork when Mom got pregnant. She was so happy. I was in first grade at the time, and she’d worked since I was a baby, but when the baby came, she was going to go on an extended leave from her job at a pharmaceutical company, then maybe only go back half time. But then in her fifth month, she lost the baby. That’s when she and Dad decided to quit while they were ahead. That’s what they told me. Except even back then, I think I’d recognized it as a lie. They’d wanted more, but they’d had to settle with just me, and I had to be good enough so that we could all pretend that we weren’t actually settling.
“Maybe you’re right,” I tell Willem now. “Maybe nobody quits while they’re really ahead. My parents always say that, but the truth is, they only stopped with me because they couldn’t have any more. Not because I was enough.”
“I’m sure you were enough.”
“Were you?” I ask.
“Maybe more than enough,” he says cryptically. It almost sounds like he’s bragging, except it doesn’t look like he’s bragging.
He starts doing the thing with the coin again. As we sit silently, I watch the coin, feeling something like suspense build in my stomach, wondering if he’ll let it fall. But he doesn’t. He just keeps spinning it. When he finishes, he flips it in the air and tosses it to me, just like he did last night.
“Can I ask you something?” I say after a minute.
“Yes.”
“Was it part of the show?”
He cocks his head.
“I mean, do you throw a coin to a girl at every performance, or was I special?”
Last night after I got back to the hotel, I spent a long time examining the coin he’d tossed me. It was a Czech koruna, worth about a nickel. But still, I’d put it in a separate corner of my wallet, away from all the other foreign coins. I pull it out now. It glints in the bright afternoon sun.
Willem looks at it too. I’m not sure if his answer is true or just maddeningly ambiguous, or maybe both. Because that’s exactly what he says: “Maybe both.”
Seven
When we leave the restaurant, Willem asks me the time. I twist the watch around my wrist. It feels heavier than ever, the skin underneath itchy and pale from being stuck under the piece of chunky metal for the past three weeks. I haven’t taken it off once.
It was a present, from my parents, though it was Mom who’d given it to me on graduation night, after the party at the Italian restaurant with Melanie’s family, where they told us about the tour.
“What’s this?” I’d asked. We were sitting at the kitchen table, decompressing from the day. “You already gave me a graduation present.”
She’d smiled. “I got you another.”
I’d opened the box, seen the watch, fingered the heavy gold links. Read the engraving.
“It’s too much.” And it was. In every way.
“Time stops for no one,” Mom had said, smiling a little sadly. “You deserve a good watch to keep up.” Then she’d snapped the watch on my wrist, shown me how she had an extra safety clasp installed, pointed out that it was waterproof too. “It’ll never fall off. So you can take it to Europe with you.”
“Oh, no. It’s way too valuable.”
“It’s fine. It’s insured. Besides, I threw away your Swatch.”
“You did?” I’d worn my zebra-striped Swatch all through high school.
“You’re a grown-up now. You need a grown-up watch.”
I look at my watch now. It’s almost four. Back on the tour, I’d be breathing a sigh of relief, because the busy part of the day would be winding down. Usually we had a rest around five, and most nights, by eight o’clock, I could be back in my hotel room watching some movie.
“We should probably start seeing some of the sights,” Willem says. “Do you know what you want to do?”
I shrug. “We could start with the Seine. Isn’t that it?” I point to a concrete embankment, underneath which is a river of sorts.
Willem laughs. “No, that’s a canal.”
We walk down the cobblestoned pathway, and Willem pulls out a thick Rough Guide to Europe. He opens to a small map of Paris, points out, more or less, where we are, an area called Villette.
“The Seine is here,” he says, tracing a line down the map.
“Oh.” I look out at the boat, which is stuck now between two big metal gates; the area is filling up with water. Willem explains that this is a lock, basically an elevator that lifts and drops the boats down differing depths of the canals.
“How do you know so much about everything?”
He laughs. “I’m Dutch.”
“So that means you’re a genius?”
“Only about canals. They say ‘God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland.’” And then he goes on to tell me about how so much of the country was reclaimed from the sea, about riding your bike along the low embankments that keep the water out of Holland. How it’s an act of faith to ride your bike around, with the dikes above you, knowing somehow, even though you’re below sea level, you’re not under water. When he talks about it, he seems so young that I can almost see him as a towheaded little kid, eyes wide, staring out at the endless waterways and wondering where they all led to.
“Maybe we can go on one of those boats?” I ask, pointing to the barge we just watched go through the lock.
Willem’s eyes light up, and for a second, I see that boy again. “I don’t know.” He looks inside the guidebook. “It doesn’t really cover this neighborhood.”
“Can we ask?”
Willem asks someone in French and is given a very complicated answer full of hand gestures. He turns to me, clearly excited. “You’re right. He says that they have boat rides leaving from the basin.”
We go along the cobblestoned walkway until it lets out in a large lake, where people are paddling in canoes. Off to one side, next to a cement pier, a couple of boats are moored. But when we get over there, we find out that they’re private boats. The tourist boats have left for the day.
“We can take a boat along the Seine,” Willem says. “It’s much more popular, and the boats run all day.” His eyes are downcast. I can see he’s disappointed, as if he let me down.
“Oh, no big deal. I don’t care.”
But he’s staring wistfully out at the water, and I see that he cares. And I know I don’t know him, but I swear the boy is homesick. For boats and canals and watery things. And for a second, I think of what it must be like—away from home for two years, and here he postponed his return for another day. He did that. For me.
There’s a row of boats and barges tied up, bobbing in the breeze that’s kicked up. I look at Willem; a melancholy expression is deepening the lines on his face. I look back at the boats.
“Actually, I do care,” I say. I reach into my bag for my wallet, for the hundred-dollar bill folded inside. I hold it up in the air and call out, “I’m looking for a ride down the canals. And I can pay.”
Willem’s head jerks toward me. “Lulu, what are you doing?”
But I’m walking away from him. “Anyone willing to give us a lift down the canals?” I call. “I got good old-fashioned American greenbacks.”
A pock-faced guy with sharp features and a scrubby goatee pops onto the side of a blue-canopied barge. “How many greenbacks?” he asks in a very thick French accent.
“All of them!”
He takes the C-note and stares at it up close. Then he smells it.
It must smell legit, because he says, “If my passengers agree, I will take you down the canal to Arsenal, close to Bastille. It is where we dock for the night.” He gestures to the back of the boat where a quartet of gray-haired people are sitting around a small table, playing bridge or something. He calls out to one of them.
“Aye, Captain Jack,” the man answers. He must be sixty. His hair is white, and his face is burnished red from the sun.
“We have some hitchhikers who want to come aboard with us.”
“Can they play poker?” one of the women asks.
I used to play seven-card stud for nickels with my grandfather before he died. He said I was an excellent bluffer.
“Do not bother. She gave all her money to me,” Captain Jack says.
“How much is he charging you?” one of the men asks.
“I offered him a hundred dollars,” I say.
“To go where?”
“Down the canals.”
“This is why we call him Captain Jack,” one of the men says. “Because he’s a pirate.”
“No. It is because my name is Jacques, and I am your captain.”
“A hundred dollars, Jacques?” a woman with a long gray braid and startlingly blue eyes asks. “That seems a little much, even for you.”
“She offered this much.” Jacques shrugs. “Also, now I will have more money to lose to you in poker.”
“Ahh, good point,” she says.
“Are you leaving now?” I ask.
“Soon.”
“When is soon?” It’s after four. The day is speeding by.
“You cannot rush these things.” He flicks his hand in the air. “Time is like the water. Fluid.”
Time doesn’t seem fluid to me. It seems real and animate and hard as a rock.
“What he means,” says the guy with the ponytail, “is that the trip to Arsenal takes a while and we were just about to open a bottle of claret. Come on, Captain Jack, let’s shove off. For a hundred bucks, you can have your wine later.”
“We’ll continue with this fine French gin,” the braided lady says.
He shrugs and then pockets my bill. I turn to Willem and grin. Then I nod at Captain Jack. He reaches out for my hand to escort me onboard.
The four passengers introduce themselves. They are Danish, retirees, and every year, they tell us, they rent a barge and cruise a European country for four weeks. Agnethe has the braid and Karin has short spiked hair. Bert has a shock of white hair and Gustav has the bald spot and the rat’s tail of a ponytail and is sporting the ever-stylish socks-with-sandals look. Willem introduces himself, and almost automatically, I introduce myself as Lulu. It’s almost as if I’ve become her. Maybe I have. Never in a million years would Allyson have done what I just did.
Captain Jack and Willem untie the line, and I’m about to say that maybe I should get some of my money back if Willem is going to play first mate but then I see that Willem is bounding about, having a blast. He clearly knows his way around a boat.
The barge chugs out of the broad basin, giving a wide view of a white-columned old building and a silver-domed modern-looking one. The Danes return to their poker game.
“Don’t lose all your money,” Captain Jack calls to them. “Or you won’t have any left to lose to me.”