“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.”
Twenty
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.