Текст книги "Just One Day"

Автор книги: Gayle Forman

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Nine

Ipick 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 soscrewed.” 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.

Ten

Ifall 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.

I hold myself perfectly still, listening to the wind rustle through the trees, to the soft in-out of Willem’s rhythmic breathing. I concentrate on his hand, which feels like it’s delivering a direct line of electricity from his fingertips into some core part of me I didn’t even know existed until just now.

Willem stirs in his sleep, and I wonder if he’s feeling this too. How can he not? The electricity is so real, so palpable, that if someone waved a meter around, it would spin off the dial.

He shifts again, and his fingertips dig in right there into that tender flesh in the hollow of my hip, sending a shock and a zing so deliciously intense that I buck, kicking his leg behind me.

I swear, somehow I can feel his eyelashes flutter open, followed by the heat of his breath against the back of my neck. “Goeiemorgen,”he says, his voice still pliant with sleep.

I roll over to face him, thankful that his hand remains slung over my hip. His ruddy cheeks bear little indentations from the grass, like tribal initiation scars. I want to touch them, to feel the grooves of his otherwise smooth skin. I want to touch every part of him. It’s like his body is a giant sun, emitting its own gravitational pull.

“I think that means good morning, though technically it’s still evening.” My words come out sounding gaspy. I’ve forgotten how to talk and breathe at the same time.

“You forget, time doesn’t exist anymore. You gave it to me.”

“I gave it you,” I repeat. There’s such delicious surrender in the words, and I feel myself slipping away to him. Some small part of me warns against this. This is just one day. I am just one girl. But the part that can resist, that wouldresist, I woke up finally liberated of her.

Willem blinks at me, his eyes dark, lazy, and sexy. I can feel us kissing already. I can feel his lips all over me. I can feel the jut of his sharp hipbones against me. The park is almost deserted. There are a couple of younger girls in jeans and head scarves talking to some guys. But they are off in a corner of their own. And I don’t care about propriety.

My thoughts must be like a movie projected on a screen. He watches it all. I can tell by his knowing smile. We inch closer to each other. Beneath the chirp of cicadas, I can practically hear the energy between us humming, like the power lines that buzz overhead in the countryside.

But then I hear something else. At first, I don’t know how to place it, so discordant is it from the sounds in this bubble of electricity we are generating. But then I hear it a second time, cold and jagged and bracingly clear, and I know exactly what it is. Because fear needs no translation. A scream is the same in any language.

Willem jumps up. I jump up. “Stay here!” he commands. And before I know what has happened, he is striding away on those long legs of his, leaving me whiplashed between lust and terror.

There’s another scream. A girl’s scream. Everything seems to slow down then, like a slow-motion sequence in a movie. I see the girls, the ones with the head scarves, there are two of them, only now one isn’t wearing her scarf anymore. It is on the ground, revealing a fall of black hair that is wild and staticky, as if her hair is frightened too. She is huddled with the other girl, as if trying to disappear from the boys. Who I now see aren’t boys at all, but are men, the kind who sport shaved heads, and combat fatigues, and big black boots. The essential wrongness of thesemen with thesegirls in this now-quiet park hits me all at once. I pick up Willem’s backpack, which he’s just abandoned there, and creep closer.

I hear the soft cries of one of the girls and the men’s guttural laughter. Then they speak again. I never knew French could sound so ugly.

Just as I’m wondering where he went, Willem steps between the men and the girls and starts saying something. He’s speaking softly, but I can hear him all the way over here, which must be a kind of actor’s trick. But he’s also speaking in French, so I have no idea what he’s saying. Whatever it is, it’s gotten the skinheads’ attention. They answer him back, in loud staccato voices that echo off the empty handball courts. Willem replies in a voice as calm and quiet as a breeze, and I strain to understand just a word of it, but I can’t.

They go back and forth and as they do, the girls use the cover as it was intended and slip away. The skinheads don’t even notice. Or don’t care. It’s Willem they are interested in now. At first, I think that Willem’s powers of charm must know no bounds. That he has even made friends with skinheads. But then my ear attunes to the tone of what he is saying as opposed to the words. And I recognize the tone because it’s one I’ve been privy to all day. He’s teasing them. He is mocking them in that way that I’m not even sure they fully recognize. Because there are three of them and one of him, and if they knew what he was doing, they wouldn’t still be standing there talking.

I can smell the sickly sweet odor of booze and the acrid tang of adrenaline, and all at once, I can feelwhat they are going to do to Willem. I can feel it as if they are going to do it to me. And this should paralyze me with fear. It doesn’t. Instead it fills me with something hot and tender and vicious.

Who takes care of you?

Without even thinking about it, I’m reaching into Willem’s bag and grabbing the thickest thing I can find—the Rough Guide—and I’m striding toward them. No one sees me coming, not even Willem, so I have the element of surprise on my side. Also, apparently, some serious fight-or-flight strength. Because when I hurl that book at that guy closest to Willem, the one holding a beer bottle, it hits him with such force that he drops the bottle. And when he raises his hand to his brow, there’s a welt of blood blooming like a red flower.

I know I should be scared, but I’m not. I’m oddly calm, happy to be back in Willem’s presence after those interminable seconds apart. Willem, however, is staring at me wide-eyed and slack-jawed. The skinheads are looking right past me, surveying the park, as if they can’t quite believe that I could be the source of the attack.

It’s their moment of confusion that saves us. Because in that moment, Willem’s hand finds mine. And we run.

Out of the park, past the church, and back into that crazy mishmash neighborhood, past the tea shops and cafés and the animal carcasses. We leap over the overflowing gutters, past the congregation of motorcycles and bicycles, dodging delivery vans disgorging racks of clothing heavily bejeweled with glitter and sparkles.

The neighborhood’s residents stop to watch us, parting to let us through like we are a spectator sport, an Olympic event—the Crazy-White-People Chase.

I should be scared. I am being chased by angry skinheads; the only person who’s ever run after me before is my dad when we’ve gone out jogging. I can hear the clomp of their boots beat in time with the heartbeat in my head. But I’m not scared. I feel my legs magically lengthen, allowing me to match Willem’s long stride. I feel the ground undulating under our feet, as if it too is on our side. I feel like we are barely touching the earth, like we might just take off into the sky and run right over the Paris rooftops, where no one can ever touch us.

I hear them shouting behind us. I hear the sound of glass breaking. I hear something whizz past my ear and then something wet on my neck, as if my sweat glands have all opened up and released at once. And then I hear more laughter and the boot steps abruptly stop.

But Willem keeps going. He pulls me through the tiny jigsaw streets until they open up onto a large boulevard. We dash across as the light changes, running by a police car. It’s crowded now. I’m pretty sure we aren’t being chased. We are safe. But still, Willem carries on running, yanking me this way and that down a series of smaller, quieter streets until, like a bookcase revealing a secret door, a gap in the streetscape emerges. It’s the keypadded opening to one of those grand apartment houses. An old man with a wheeled cart leaves the inner courtyard just as Willem skids us into the entryway. Our momentum crashes from sixty to zero as we slam together against a stone wall just as the door clicks shut behind us.

We stand there, our bodies pressed together, barely an inch of space separating us. I can feel the fast, steady thud of his heart, the sharp in-out of his breath. I can see the rivulet of perspiration trickling down his neck. I feel my blood, thrumming, like a river about to spill over its banks. It’s as if my body can no longer contain me. I have become too big for it somehow.

“Willem,” I begin. There is so much I need to say to him.

He puts a finger up to my neck, and I fall silent, his touch at once calming and electrifying. But then he removes his finger and it’s red with blood. I reach up to touch my neck. My blood.

“Godverdomme!”he swears under his breath. With one hand, he reaches into his backpack for a bandanna, and with the other, he licks the blood on his finger clean.

He holds the bandanna against the side of my neck. I’m definitely bleeding, but not badly. I’m not even sure what happened.

“They threw a broken bottle at you.” Willem’s voice is pure fury.

But it doesn’t hurt. I’m not hurt. Not really. It’s just a little nick.

He’s standing so close to me now, gently pressing the bandanna against my neck. And then the cut on my neck is not the point of exit for blood, but the point of entry for this weird line of electricity that is surging between us.

I want him, all of him. I want to taste his mouth, his mouth that just tasted my blood. I lean into him.

But he pushes me away, pulls himself back. His hand drops from my neck. The bandanna, now clotted with blood, hangs there limply.

I look up then, into his eyes. All the color has drained out of them, so they just seem black. But more disconcerting is what I see in them, something instantly recognizable: fear. And more than anything, I want to do something, to take that away. Because I should be scared. But today, I’m not.

“It’s okay,” I begin. “ I’mokay.”

“What were you thinking?” he interrupts, his voice icy as a stranger’s. And maybe it’s that or maybe it’s just relief, but now I feel like I might cry.

“They were going to hurt you,” I say. My voice breaks. I look at him, to see if he understands, but his expression has only hardened, fear having been joined by its twin brother, anger. “And I promised.”

“Promised what?”

An instant replay runs through my head: No punches had been exchanged. I hadn’t even been able to understand what they’d been saying. But they weregoing to hurt him. I could feel it in my bones.

“That I’d take care of you.” My voice goes quiet as the certainty drains out of me.

“Take care of me? How does thistake care of me?” He opens his hand, which is stained with my blood.

He takes a step away from me, and with the twilight blinking between us now, it hits me how utterly wrongI have gotten this. I haven’t just skied onto the diamond run; I’ve flown off the face of the cliff. It was a joke, this request to take care of him. When have I ever taken care of anybody? And he certainly never said he needed taking care of.

We stand there, the silence curdling around us. The last of the sunlight slips away, and then, almost as if waiting for cover of darkness to sneak in, the rain starts to fall. Willem looks at the sky and then looks at his watch—my watch—still snug around his wrist.

I think of those forty pounds I have left. I imagine a quiet, clean hotel room. I think of us in it, not as I imagined it an hour before in that Paris park, but just quiet, listening to the rain. Please, I silently implore. Let’s just go somewhere and make this better.

But then Willem is reaching into his bag for the Eurostar schedule. And then he’s unclasping my watch. And then I realize, he’s giving time back to me. Which really means he’s taking it away.