Chapter Ten
Ten
“So things with Wouter have… escalated,” I tell my sister a few mornings later.
Phoebe’s half laugh manages to communicate both concern and intrigue. “Elaborate.”
With the phone pressed to my ear, I rummage through a drawer for a pair of sweatpants. Fortunately, my sister’s a night owl; these early conversations are becoming as much a part of my routine as hearing the front door open and shut every day at precisely seven thirty, with Wouter’s whispered braaf, braaf — good boy —to George as they trot outside for a walk. I’m always hovering on that dreamlike edge before they come back inside, listening for the sound of him pouring food into a bowl. The jingle of George’s collar, a mug of tea being placed on the counter. A few more hushed words in Dutch to his dog before Wouter leaves for work. All of it so quiet, and even so, he messaged me the first morning: I hope we didn’t wake you up.
What I wanted to say: that it’s the best way I’ve woken up in years.
“You cannot tell a soul,” I say to Phoebe. “Other than Maya, because I assume you tell her everything anyway.”
“Correct. Proceed.”
Once I tell her, my Amsterdam life will collide with my American one, which feels, if mildly terrifying, like the necessary next step. I trust her implicitly; I know she won’t tell our parents. And I can’t fathom sharing this with anyone else—certainly not with the friends who’ve barely checked in since I left.
I’ve never been able to keep secrets from Phoebe for very long. She knew about my crush on Wouter even before I admitted it to myself, and I texted her about our first kiss minutes after I left his room. Right before I was hospitalized, those blurry few weeks in my mid-twenties I try not to think about, she was the first to gently suggest that I talk to someone.
No matter what I’m going through, she’s endlessly supportive, with an underlying sense of sisterly worry.
“You know that startup sponsored my work visa, and I can’t be here longer than ninety days without it.” Somewhere in the low eighties now. “But there’s actually an easy solution, and it’s that I’m—well, we—Wouter and I—we’re going to get married.” My mouth trips over the words. I take a steadying breath, bracing myself for her reaction. “So I can stay in the country, and so he can inherit the building his family owns. We’re obviously not in a relationship or anything—it’s just for the visa. And by the time we get divorced, I’ll be much more settled and we can both just…move on with our lives.”
Those words, get divorced —I’m not sure anyone’s ever said them as casually as I just did.
The other end of the phone goes silent. I pull on the sweats and sit down on the bed, wondering if the connection dropped.
“Phee? Hello?”
“I’m here, I’m here. I think I fainted.”
“I know it’s ridiculous,” I say, aware of my quickening heart rate. I’ve never been so desperate for her approval. Her understanding. “But if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. It’ll give me more time to find a job without the stress of potential deportation hanging over me, and—”
“Oh, I’m thinking about it. And it might be the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard.” Even though I can’t see her, I can picture her: she told me when she answered the phone that she was wrapped in a blanket on the couch while Maya was asleep upstairs, and I hear what sounds like the blanket being pushed to the floor, Phoebe getting to her feet to pace. When she speaks again, it’s more frantic. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you could get into? Like, internationally?”
“We’re not going to. We have history.” Without meaning to, I’ve echoed exactly what Wouter said to me. “We can pretend we’re in love the same way we pretended we weren’t back when he was living with us.”
“Well, good. Sounds like you’ve really thought about it. Weighed all the pros and cons,” she says. “And your plan is just that Mom and Dad won’t find out? Because you know they’d absolutely lose it if they did, right?”
“They’re on the other side of the world.” I bite down on the inside of my cheek a little too hard. We’ve never fought about anything serious, only childish arguments that led to one of us slamming a door, only for our parents to find us an hour later singing along to vintage Britney Spears and painting our nails together. The hard edge in my voice is almost unrecognizable. “Phoebe. I’m doing this. I wasn’t calling to ask for permission or for a voice of reason. I just wanted you to know.”
There’s another long stretch of quiet. “Okay,” she finally says after blowing out a long breath. Her couch creaks as she sits back down. “I get it. You’re an adult. If you’re sure about this, if this is what you really want to do…then I’m not going to stand in your way.”
“Thank you.”
“And you’re still living downstairs?”
The truth hovers right there on the tip of my tongue—but I swallow it back. “Right.”
“Good. Probably smart to have that extra space.”
With everything I’m telling her, I’m not sure why I lie about this. Maybe because the marriage is easier to grasp: we’re connected only on paper, except in front of his family. Living together, the reality of navigating these tight spaces and darkened corners…I’m not sure I could describe it to her in a way that doesn’t make it sound more intimate than it actually is.
Because it isn’t. It’s just practical.
Even when Phoebe tells me she and Maya want to visit before the baby is born and I say I can’t wait, it dawns on me that I haven’t yet planned the opposite: visiting California. It didn’t cross my mind when I was packing up my life, and while I miss her and Maya and my parents, flights are expensive, and leaving and returning to this country might draw more questions at passport control than I’m prepared to answer. Another quandary for the expat crisis center of my brain.
After we hang up, I head across the hall to shower. We were talking for a while; Wouter must have left for work over an hour ago. I reach for the doorknob, push it open, and—
“Oh—”
“Sorry—”
“—shit—no— I’m sorry!”
Wouter’s standing there shirtless, a towel wrapped around his hips, mouth open in horror. A razor dangles from one hand.
Fuck fuck fuck. I haven’t even been here a week, and already I’ve fallen into my worst nightmare.
The scene registers in breathless snapshots: wet hair and a fogged-up mirror. The tang of shaving cream in the air. His chest, still glistening from the shower, and a flash of ink on his left shoulder I can’t make out. That trail of hair I spied when he was working on the sink, dusted along his abdomen and disappearing somewhere beneath the towel.
Maybe most dangerous of all is the cherry-red shyness splashed across his face, like I’ve caught him doing something far less innocent than shaving. Our eyes lock for an instant longer than they should, our bodies frozen, neither of us lunging for the door.
He hitches the towel higher, tighter—but not before I get a glimpse of that suggestive V-line between his hips.
Finally, I snap back to my senses and shut the door, my heart still in my throat. It was only open for a few seconds, which was somehow enough time for me to map every detail of his half-naked body. Never let it be said that I’m not efficient.
Even though I can’t see him anymore, I cover my face on instinct. Give my forehead a few light bangs against the wood. “I thought you left for work,” I manage. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have just barged in.”
I can still smell his shaving cream. His peppermint shampoo. Because we shower in the same place, I know exactly what’s in his soap, an off-white bottle with a French name. Notes of green tea, citrus, sage.
“I had a patient cancel this morning. Should have locked the door.” A cough. “Do you mind if—I didn’t bring a change of clothes into the bathroom with me.”
“Oh! Yeah. Of course. You’re safe!” I call out once I’m in the doorway to my room. George is sitting there on the floor, wagging his tail at me, so I toss him the pair of my socks he’s already almost chewed his way through. I have a feeling animals know exactly what ridiculous antics their humans are up to, and they are definitely always judging us. Lovingly.
Years ago, Wouter and I had an awkward bathroom interaction in my house, though both of us were fully clothed. And now I’m wondering if he’s remembering it, too: me at the sink in pajama shorts and a Speak Now World Tour T-shirt, the door opening because I hadn’t locked it.
“Oh—sorry,” Wouter said, backing up.
“I’m just brushing my teeth.” I held up my toothbrush. “You can stay if you want.”
I was rarely so brazen with my flirting—was it flirting, telling him we could share the bathroom? There was a moment of hesitation, as if he didn’t know whether he was allowed to say yes. Then he stepped inside, keeping the door wide open.
We’d seen each other in pajamas before, but something about standing next to him at the double sinks like that felt unbearably intimate. We brushed our teeth together, eyes catching in the mirror, and in all my teenage misguidance of how a girl should act around guys, I tried to make my spitting as dainty as possible.
Until my chest grew so tight I couldn’t breathe, and I dropped my toothbrush into the sink.
He was quick with my inhaler, which was just in the medicine cabinet, helped me sit down on the toilet seat as I held it to my mouth. I’d felt the early stages of an asthma attack most of that day but chalked it up to wildfire smoke.
“You’re going to be okay,” he kept saying, but I could see the concern in his eyes that he was trying so hard to fight against. “You’re doing great. Slow breaths, just like that.”
It was impossible not to fall for him after the way he talked me through it.
Thirty-year-old Wouter reemerges from his bedroom a few minutes later in jeans and a collared shirt. “Guess we should always lock doors from now on,” he says, but there’s a flash of amusement on his face. His hair is still damp, the scent of his aftershave clinging to my nostrils.
My face flames. “Great idea. Knocking, too—house rules one and two.”
In the kitchen, he takes a kettle off the shelf and lifts his eyebrows at me. I give him a nod and he grabs two mugs.
For the most part, this is what living together has been like, a choreographed politeness not too dissimilar from when he lived with my family. I take George for walks during the day, and then I open my laptop and browse job listings until my eyes burn. I cooked dinner for us last night, an Albert Heijn meal kit with Dutch instructions I translated with my phone, figuring it was the literal least I could do with how much he’s given me, and the night before he had a work dinner with some colleagues. He’s already rented out the ground-floor unit to a friendly Serbian couple—which makes our cohabitation feel even more final.
When we were teenagers, we dreamed of something like this: no parents, complete independence. The ability to come and go whenever we wanted. A shared bed, which of course isn’t applicable here. The reality of living together is much more tentative, neither of us wanting to encroach on the other’s space, trading apologies when we pass each other in the narrow hall. He even made room for me in the bathroom cabinet, but a general fear of overstepping has me keeping most of my products on my desk, my antidepressants safely inside a drawer.
“What are you up to today?” he asks after I finish showering, joining him in the kitchen where the tea is steeping. When he reaches for the kettle, I try not to picture the way the muscles in his arm flexed when he held the razor, because that only leads to picturing his bare chest. And his shoulders. And the way water dripped from his hair to the hollow of his throat.
“My first Dutch class!” I say with genuine enthusiasm, in part to mask the fact that what I’m really up to is pushing all those images far, far from my mind. For some reason, this makes him laugh. “What? Should I be more morose about it?”
“That’s the most excited anyone’s ever been about learning Dutch.” He passes me a mug of Earl Grey with its relaxing hint of lemon. “Amsterdam can be kind of a transient place. A lot of people stay here for only a short time before they move on, back to their home country or somewhere else. So plenty of internationals never learn the language, which I can understand. You’ve been here only a couple months, and you already want to make the effort…” A shake of his head. “I guess I’m touched? On behalf of my entire country?”
Now it’s my turn to laugh as I reach for the bowl of brown sugar cubes, although the sound is quite in opposition to what’s happening in my heart. “I was also wondering if maybe I could visit you at work?” When he gives me a perplexed look, I add, “Is it so weird that I want to see what you do before we’re—married?” Even after a few days of this, I still trip over the word.
“It’s just an office,” he says, but tells me to come by after his last patient.
George trots into the living room with my socks in his mouth, determinedly not letting go even when Wouter bends to scratch him behind the ears. Then with a wave and a final sip of his tea, my almost-husband is out the door.
—
Now that I’m technically unemployed, I’m not used to the freedom. I’ve only experienced this twice in my life: The first was in between my freshman and sophomore years of college, when I didn’t apply for an internship because Phoebe wanted to drive Route 66 together. The second was when I was hospitalized, though I didn’t exactly feel very independent back then.
Every time I have a moment to contemplate my future, the same refrain plays in my mind: I should be doing something meaningful. Something that shows I’m taking full advantage of the life I wasn’t supposed to have.
It wasn’t just the fact that I was a micro-preemie, that strange term that’s always brought to mind a delicate glass figurine instead of an actual human. Every few years when they had nothing else to report, some local newspaper or TV station would want to do an update on me. One of those feel-good stories about the insurmountable odds I surmounted and how I was doing now.
The last time this happened was part of a bigger story tied to the opening of a new NICU at the hospital where I was born. I was one of a handful of “miracle babies” they interviewed, twenty-six and working at a tech company that didn’t have the best reputation. The other people they profiled had gone on to become a social worker, a civil engineer, a neonatal nurse. One was even a violinist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. And there I was in my tiny studio apartment microwaving instant ramen, my latest casual relationship having just fizzled out, working on designing a drop-down menu for a corporation most people hated.
The night the story aired on TV, I crawled into bed and started shaking. Gasping for air. My lungs felt fragile, but my inhaler barely helped. Though everything in my body hurt, somehow I was certain what was wrong with me wasn’t physical. It had been building for months, but I’d dismissed it as flu season or not getting enough sleep. I was just a little off , I always told myself, but how many people could say they felt truly on all the time, or even most of it?
Days later, when I’d still barely moved, so dehydrated it hurt to swallow, I called my sister and, when she showed up, asked her to take me to the nearest hospital. I wound up getting a referral to a mental health facility, where I voluntarily checked myself in, hugged Phoebe goodbye, and told her not to worry.
There I learned that I’d been hiding my symptoms for years. High-functioning depression and anxiety. I’d ignored so many signs—the endless fatigue, body aches I couldn’t explain, an inability to focus. There were therapists and groups and medication until we found the right one and, finally, the ability to breathe again. When I was there, I didn’t have to worry about work or meals or other people. My only responsibility was getting healthy.
I still can’t believe I let myself get to that point, that I was so out of tune with my body and mind that I didn’t realize I was on the verge of collapse until it had already happened.
Slowly, I got better. Not 100 percent, but the fog lifted, and I got stable enough to consider myself content on most days, though I still had some gray moments. I used all my vacation time and even some unpaid leave to figure it out, and when I got back to work, I lied and told anyone who asked that it had been surgery.
After I lost my job, even after the breakup with Jace, I was so terrified of another breakdown that I did everything I could to distract myself. There was the haircut, attempts at self-care disguised as expensive beauty products, spending as much time with my family as I could before I left. And then, of course, the international move. The great escape. If I could just run fast enough, then maybe the darkness in my brain wouldn’t be able to catch up with me.
I’m aware that plenty of people no longer work in the fields they majored in. I just don’t know what else I’m qualified for or what might make me happy, which makes me feel a bit like I’m having a quarter-life crisis.
A single dinner isn’t enough to repay Wouter for this gift of time to figure myself out—it’s a tremendous privilege, I realize that. But for now, all I need to figure out is how to pronounce the eu sound in Dutch.
I’ve always liked languages; I took three years of French in high school and had a brief Italian phase in college, because I had a brief everything phase. One semester and an application to a study abroad program in Florence, which my parents didn’t think was a good idea. “It’s just so far away,” they said, and so I didn’t go.
Here’s my chance to start fresh with a new vocabulary.
Before class, the room is filled with chatter in a half dozen different languages, only some of which I recognize, and I trade smiles with my new classmates as I sit down and take out my textbook. Despite feeling very out of practice when it comes to school, I’m relaxed for the first time all day. We’re all here because we want to be, because we’re trying to soak up every bit of our new lives.
“Welkom in de Nederlandse les,” says the teacher, a friendly middle-aged Dutch woman named Femke. “Laten we beginnen. Let’s begin.”