Just One Day

I hold up my hands in surrender. “You’re not. I’m done. This is a lost cause.”



Maps are taken out. Metro routes are debated. Picnic items are discussed.



“People mix up their patron saints, you know?” I look up. Wren, our pixie tagalong, who has been all but silent all day, has finally spoken.



“They do?”



She nods. “Saint Anthony is the patron saint of lost things. But Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. You have to make sure you ask the right saint for help.”



There’s a moment as everyone looks at Wren. Is she some kind of religious nut?



“Who would be in charge of a lost person?” I ask.



Wren stops to consider. “That would depend. What kind of lost?”



I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s lost at all. Maybe he’s exactly where he wants to be. Maybe I’m the lost one, chasing someone who has no desire to be found. “I’m not sure.”



Wren twirls her bracelet, fingering the charms. “Perhaps you should just pray to both.” She shows me the little charms with each patron saint. There are many more charms, one with a date, another with a clover, one with a bird.



“But I’m Jewish.”



“Oh, they don’t care.” Wren looks up at me. Her eyes don’t seem blue so much as the absence of blue. Like the sky just before dawn. “You should ask the saints for help. And you should go to that third hospital.”



Hôpital Saint-Louis turns out to be a four-hundred-year-old hospital. Wren and I make our way into the modern wing that sits adjacent. I’ve sent the others on to Luxembourg Gardens without much of an argument. Sunlight filters in through the glass atrium, throwing prisms of light onto the floor.



It’s quiet in the ER, only a few people sitting among rows of empty chairs. Wren goes right up to the two male nurses behind the desk and that weirdly mellifluous voice of hers breaks out in perfect French. I stand behind her, catching enough of what she says to get that she is telling my story, mesmerizing them with it. Even the people in the chairs are leaning in to hear her quiet voice. I have no idea how Wren even knows the story; I didn’t tell her. Maybe she picked it up at breakfast or among the others. She finishes, and there is silence. The nurses stare at her, then look down and start typing.



“How do you speak French so well?” I whisper.



“I’m from Quebec.”



“Why didn’t you translate at the other hospital?”



“Because it wasn’t the right one.”



The nurses ask me his name. I say it. I spell it. I hear the tap of the computer keys as they input it.



“Non,” one nurse says. “Pas ici.” He shakes his head.



“Attendez,” the other says. Wait.



He types some more. He says a bunch of things to Wren, and I lose track, but then one phrase floats to the top: a date. The day after the day Willem and I spent together. The day we got separated.



My breath stops. He looks up, repeats the date to me.



“Yes,” I say. That would’ve been when he was here. “Oui.”



The nurse says something and something else I don’t understand. I turn to Wren. “Can they tell us how to find him?”



Wren asks a questions, then translates back. “The records are sealed.”



“But they don’t have to give us anything written. They must have something on him.”



“They say it’s all in the billing department now. They don’t keep much here.”



“There has to be something. Now’s the time to ask Saint Jude for help.”



Wren fingers the charm on her bracelet. A pair of doctors in scrubs and lab coats come through the double doors, coffee cups in hand. Wren and I look at each other, Saint Jude apparently deciding to bestow twin inspiration.



“Can I speak to a doctor?” I ask the nurses in my horrible French. “Maybe the . . .” I turn to Wren. “How do you say ‘attending physician’ in French? Or the doctor who treated Willem?”



The nurse must understand some English because he rubs his chin and goes back to the computer. “Ahh, Dr. Robinet,” he says, and picks up a phone. A few minutes later, a pair of double doors swing open, and it’s like this time Saint Jude decided to send us a bonus, because the doctor is TV-handsome: curly salt-and-pepper hair, a face that’s both delicate and rugged. Wren starts to explain the situation, but then I realize that, lost cause or not, I have to make my own case. In the most labored French imaginable, I attempt to explain: Friend hurt. At this hospital. Lost friend. Need to find. I’m frazzled, and with my bare-basics phrases, I must sound like a cavewoman.



Dr. Robinet looks at me for a while. Then he beckons for us to follow him through the double doors into an empty examination room, where he gestures for us to sit on the table while he settles on a rolling stool.



“I understand your dilemma,” he replies in perfect British-accented English. “But we can’t just give out files about a patient.” He turns to look directly at me. His eyes are bright green, both sharp and kind. “I understand you’ve come all the way from America, but I am sorry.”



“Can you at least tell me what happened to him? Without actually looking into his chart? Would that be breaking protocol?”



Dr. Robinet smiles patiently. “I see dozens of patients a day. And this was, you say, a year ago?”



I nod. “Yes.” I bury my head in my hands. The folly of it hits me anew. One day. One year.



“Perhaps if you described him.” Dr. Robinet feeds me some rope.



I snatch it up. “He was Dutch. Very tall, six foot three—it’s one point nine in metric. Seventy-five kilos. He had very light hair, almost like straw, but very dark eyes, almost like coals. He was skinny. His fingers were long. He had a scar, like a zigzag, right on the top of his foot.” As I continue to describe him, details I thought I’d forgotten come back to me, and an image of him emerges.



But Dr. Robinet can’t see it. He looks puzzled, and I realize that from his point of view, I’ve described a tall blond guy, one person among thousands.



“Perhaps if you had a photograph?”



I feel as if the image I’ve created of Willem is alive in the room. He’d been right about not needing a camera to record the important things. He’d been there inside me all this time.



“I don’t,” I say. “Oh, but he had stitches. And a black eye.”



“That describes a majority of the people we treat,” Dr. Robinet says. “I am very sorry.” He stands up off the stool; something clinks to the ground. Wren retrieves a euro coin off the floor and starts to hand it back to him.



“Wait! He did this thing with coins,” I say. “He could balance a coin along his knuckles. Like this. May I?” I reach out for the euro and show how he flipped a coin across his knuckles.



I hand Dr. Robinet back his euro, and he holds it in his hand, examining it as if it were a rare coin. Then he flips it up in the air and catches it. “Commotion cérébrale!” he says.



“What?”



“Concussion!” Wren translates.



“Concussion?”



He holds up his index finger and turns it around slowly, like he’s spooling information from a deep well. “He had a concussion. And if I recall, a facial laceration. We wanted him to stay for observation—concussions can be serious—and we wanted to report it to the police because he’d been assaulted.”



“Assaulted? Why? By whom?”



“We don’t know. It is customary to file a police report, but he refused. He was very agitated. I remember now! He wouldn’t stay beyond a few hours. He wanted to leave straight away, but we insisted he stay for a CT scan. But as soon as we stitched him up and saw there was no cerebral bleeding, he insisted he had to go. He said it was very important. Someone he was going to lose.” He turns to me, his eyes huge now. “You?”



“You,” Wren says.



“Me,” I say. Black spots dance in my vision, and my head feels liquid.



“I think she’s going to faint,” Wren says.



“Put your head between your legs,” Dr. Robinet advises. He calls out into the hall, and a nurse brings me a glass of water. I drink it. The world stops spinning. Slowly, I sit back up. Dr. Robinet is looking at me now, and it’s like the shade of professionalism has dropped.



“But this was a year ago,” he asks in a blanket-soft voice. “You lost each other a year ago?”



I nod.



“And you’ve been looking all this time?”



I nod again. In some way, I have.



“And do you think he’s been looking for you?”



“I don’t know.” And I don’t. Just because he tried to find me a year ago doesn’t me he wants to find me now. Or wants me to find him.



“But you must know,” he replies. And for a minute I think he’s reprimanding me that I ought to know, but then he picks up the phone and makes a call. When he’s done, he turns to me. “You must know,” he repeats. “Go to window two in the billing office now. They cannot release his chart, but I have instructed them to release his address.”



“They have it? They have his address?”



“They have an address. Go collect it now. And then find him.” He looks at me again. “No matter what, you must know.”



I walk out of the hospital, past where the cancer patients are taking their chemotherapy treatments in the late afternoon sun. The printout with Willem’s address is clenched in my fist. I haven’t looked at it yet. I tell Wren that I need a moment alone and make my way toward the old hospital walls.



I sit down on a bench alongside the quadrangle of grass, between the old brick buildings. Bees dance between the flower bushes, and children play—there’s so much life in these old hospital walls. I look at the paper in my hand. It could have any address. He could be anywhere in the world. How far am I willing to take this?



I think of Willem, beaten—beaten!—and still trying to find me. I take a deep breath. The smell of fresh-cut grass mingles with pollen and the fumes from trucks idling on the street. I look at the birthmark on my wrist.



I open the paper, not sure where I’m going next, only sure that I’m going.



Thirty-four



AUGUST



Utrecht, Holland



My guidebook has all of two pages on Utrecht, so I expect it to be tiny or ugly or industrial, but it turns out to be a gorgeous, twisting medieval city full of gabled row houses and canals with houseboats, and tiny little alley streets that look like they might house humans or might house dolls. There aren’t many youth hostels, but when I turn up at the only one I can afford, I learn that before it was a hostel, it was a squat. And I get that sense, almost like a radar communicating from some secret part of the world just to me: Yes, this is where you’re meant to be.



The guys at the youth hostel are friendly and helpful and speak perfect English, just like Willem did. One of them even looks like him—that same angular face, those puffy red lips. I actually ask him if he knows Willem; he doesn’t and when I explain that he looks like someone I’m looking for, he laughs and says he and half of Holland. He gives me a map of Utrecht and shows me how to get to the address the hospital gave me, a few kilometers from here, and suggests I rent a bike.



I opt for the bus. The house is out of the center, in an area full of record stores, ethnic restaurants with meat turning on spits, and graffiti. After a couple of wrong turns, I find the street, opposite some railroad tracks, on which sits an abandoned freight car, almost completely graffitied over. Right across the street is a skinny town house, which according to my printout, is the last known address of Willem de Ruiter.



I have to push my way past six bikes locked to the front rail to get to the door, which is painted electric blue. I hesitate before pressing the doorbell, which looks like an eyeball. I feel strangely calm as I press. I hear the ring. Then the heavy clump of feet. I’ve only known Willem for a day, but I recognize that those are not his footsteps. His would be lighter, somehow. A pretty, tall girl with a long brown braid opens the door.