Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
Roos van Leeuwen is waiting for me at a café—still not a coffeeshop—on a narrow street tucked behind a kitschy tulip museum in the Jordaan, Amsterdam’s most picturesque neighborhood, where every canal looks plucked from a dream.
“I’m so glad you could do this,” she says after we order. She’s adorable in a blue plaid overcoat and short gray boots, a hip bag casually slung across her chest. “Your job was fine with you taking the afternoon off?”
I’m still wearing a turtleneck under my wool jacket in March, and I’m not even mad about it. Cold-weather clothing is simply superior. “It’s a startup, you know. Weird hours sometimes.” Then I force a smile, trying my best to brush it off. “I’m happy to be a tourist. As long as I don’t have to get a T-shirt with, like, an anthropomorphic penis holding a joint on it.” Unfortunately, this is something I’ve seen at numerous souvenir shops.
Roos feigns offense at this. “But that’s our national uniform.”
We exchanged numbers in Culemborg, but I hadn’t expected her to reach out so soon. She was working on a list of Amsterdam’s numerous canal cruise options, she said, and wanted to know if I’d like to try one out with her. I leapt at the chance to get out of the apartment, away from the monotony of job hunting.
Away from Wouter.
After that night of bad decisions, I woke up with a throbbing headache. On the counter was a spread of remedies for a hangover, or kater , according to a new Post-it note. A bottle of aspirin, a loaf of bread, a whole ginger root he’d peeled and chopped for me.
And then what I could only assume wasn’t for the hangover but to combat the homesickness I mentioned at the museum: inside a bag from an American expat shop, a box of frosted cherry Pop-Tarts.
It was unfair that he could make me soft for him even when I felt this complicated.
That was only three days ago. Barely half a week since we kissed, since he tucked me in, since we did… god , I don’t even know what to call it. And that’s part of the problem. I have no idea where he’s at with it or if he wants to forget it ever happened. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know where I’m at with it, either—only that I don’t regret it.
How could I, when it was one of the most intimate, freeing moments of my life?
So I’ve been avoiding him, taking my laptop to the library in the afternoon, “missing” dinner and texting him that I’m studying for class. Based on his early mornings and late evenings at work, he’s been doing the same.
I just wish I couldn’t hear him growl my name whenever I close my eyes.
Roos and I pick up our coffees and venture back outside. It isn’t lost on me, the strangeness of getting space from Wouter by spending time with his sister. The area is mobbed with tourists, some of them dawdling in the streets, people with giant backpacks forcing the cyclists to dodge them. I envy their confidence—I’ve been too nervous to get back on a bike.
“None of this ever gets old?” I ask as we pass a tour group, a dozen white-haired people following a guide speaking in rapid Spanish. “The tourists, the bachelor parties, how busy it always is?”
“Never.” Roos takes a sip of coffee. “Some Amsterdammers hate it, but I’m addicted to the energy. I don’t know if I ever appreciated it until my twenties, though. I used to complain about the tourists as much as everyone else, but once I started traveling on my own, I realized—I was that tourist who gets in the way sometimes, too. I was the person wanting to get the perfect picture. Now every time I see a girl taking a photo of her friend in front of a canal, I can’t help smiling. Even if it’s the same shot as everyone else here on vacation.” With a knowing look, she nods toward a couple doing this exact thing on the opposite side of the canal. “I’m like, ‘Yes, you go for it, and do you want me to take one for you?’ Because this city is beautiful, and I don’t want to miss a moment of it.”
I’ve never met someone like this, someone seemingly without a shred of cynicism. “You and Wouter have that in common. That deep love for the city.”
“It’s only the best place in the world,” she says. “Plenty of people who grow up here never leave. They have Amsterdam in their veins.”
I always liked LA well enough, considered myself a true Angeleno in the sense that I’d slept through a few earthquakes and always noticed when a movie was shot in LA but was supposed to be some other major city. But in my veins? I don’t know if I ever had that kind of connection to it.
“This is going to sound strange,” I say, “and don’t take it the wrong way, but…you’re being really nice to me.” Given all those false friendships I left back in California, it feels like a gift, being let into the Van Leeuwens’ world like this.
Roos almost chokes on her latte. “Are you not used to that?”
“Well—it depends.” I try to backpedal, since I don’t want to verge on giving the truth away. “I guess I thought you’d be more skeptical?”
“What can I say, I’m a little sappy. I know it was more than ten years ago that you two met, but I always wondered if anyone could ever be as special to him as you were. Even though I hadn’t met you—I could just tell. And then fate brought you together again, and, well…” She punctuates this with a little shrug, gesturing to my ring. “It’s kind of magical.”
She doesn’t ask me to defend it. She doesn’t press me for details. It’s not naivete—I can tell, and Roos isn’t an idiot. She saw, once, how much he loved me, and she believes it’s still there.
“And you love my brother,” she says.
I swallow hard, the lie settling uncomfortably in my stomach. Wouter must be selling this harder than I’ve given him credit for, and I should be doing the same. Even if what happened in our rooms obliterated my capability for rational thought.
“I do,” I manage, the words tasting far less acidic than I thought they might.
“Then that’s all I need to know.” She tosses her empty cup into a nearby trash can and steers us toward the dock. “He’s just…he’s been a little closed off, ever since our dad passed away. So focused on work, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but…”
“I’ve noticed that.” He admitted the same—and that he wants to change.
“Getting George was a huge deal. That gave him more of a reason to get outside, to go to the park. And he obviously has his friends, but I don’t know how much joy he has in his life on a regular basis, you know? When I saw you together, I could tell right away—I hadn’t seen him that relaxed in a while.” She clutches my arm as we approach the dock, and I wonder if physical touch is a love language that runs in their family. “I’m just really glad he has you.”
—
DAM FINE BOAT TOURS is emblazoned on the side of a little blue boat on the Keizersgracht. A perfect bit of kismet that Roos’s assignment brought us to Iulia’s company.
While we wait, Roos asks what kind of dress I might want for the wedding celebration, which the Van Leeuwens have planned for early May. It’s only another performance, and yet when I imagine Wouter’s broad shoulders in a suit jacket, a tie around his neck…I feel a little unsteady on my feet.
“I’m not sure,” I tell Roos truthfully. The best summary of my current emotions.
“Don’t worry, we’ll find something. If you want to go less conventional, maybe a lavender or powder blue would look good with your complexion? Or even something darker, like a navy or forest gr—”
“Welcome, welcome,” a familiar voice interrupts us, thankfully. “It looks like there was going to be a family of six with us, but they called to say they have food poisoning, so I guess it’s just us three!” Iulia beams at us, looking casual in jeans and a utility jacket, hair in its usual ponytail.
After I introduce the two of them, Iulia tips her head toward me. “You have Dutch friends already? Very impressive.”
Roos beams right back. “Well, she did marry my brother.”
At that, Iulia’s dark brows leap all the way to her hairline, this expression of sheer confusion.
Oh.
Oh, shit .
As it turns out, I left all my brain cells in North America. Iulia knows I’m out of a job. She knows I’ve only been here for a couple of months, and I can see her putting the pieces together right in front of us.
“It’s, uh—very new,” I manage. Idiot, idiot, idiot. “We dated when we were teenagers, and we just reconnected…” I stumble my way through the spiel, certain I’m giving myself away with every word.
To her credit, Iulia simply puts on a grin. “I had no idea—gefeliciteerd.” Then she motions us toward the electric boat, flashing me a side eye that Roos can’t see. I can only offer an awkward grimace in return. “Let’s get on board and start this thing, shall we?”
She holds out her hand to help us climb inside. The boat rocks for a moment, adjusting to our weight, and then Roos and I take seats on either side of the captain’s chair.
“Here at Dam Fine Boat Tours, we pride ourselves on being Amsterdam’s alternative canal tour company,” Iulia says with all the breeziness of someone who makes this same speech multiple times a day. “Which means you can drink, you can swear, you can ask all your burning questions about the underbelly of the city. Just keep it civil, okay?”
The boat’s motor whirs with a soothing hum as Iulia starts it up and runs through some basic safety information. “At this point in the tour, I usually ask where people are from and what they’ve been doing in Amsterdam so far,” she says. “But you both live here, so…”
“Yes, but we want the full tourist experience,” Roos says. “Please don’t hold back.”
“Roger that.” Iulia says something in Dutch into her radio and, with considerable ease, weaves us around a much larger tourist boat.
We glide underneath a bridge, bicycles locked to every available inch of space. The streets above us might be packed, but there’s a distinct sense of calm here on the water. Sun on my face, wind in my hair—an ideal way to spend the afternoon. The canal houses look even more stunning from this angle, and I’m not sure how I ever thought the color palette was anything less than beautiful.
“I always start with some basic facts about Amsterdam,” Iulia says after opening a cooler and telling us to help ourselves. “And it’s more fun when this is interactive, so feel free to interrupt me at any time. This city was originally a small fishing village in the 1100s, then expanded to become a global power during the Dutch Golden Age in the 1600s. The Dutch East India Company was part of a vast trading network that turned Amsterdam into one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Amsterdam experienced huge economic growth at the time, but there’s a dark history of colonialism and slavery there, too. Fortunately, that’s something the country is starting to speak about much more openly.
“As you probably know, we’re below sea level right now—most of the Netherlands is. The residents built small dikes about two thousand years ago to push back the water, and in the 1200s, they started using windmills to pump the water out. It’s pretty incredible, actually, and it’s a marvel Amsterdam even exists the way it does now,” she says with a flourish of her arm. “Let’s talk about the canals. Can anyone guess how many canals Amsterdam has?”
Roos’s hand shoots up, and Iulia tosses her a smirk. “You’re not allowed to answer.”
“Oh god, the pressure,” I say between sips of a pilsner. “Um…fifty?”
“Try a hundred and sixty-five,” Iulia says. “Seventy-five kilometers. And fifteen thousand bikes are fished out of them each year.”
“One year, two of those were mine.” Roos lifts her beer in tribute. “Dark times.”
“How clean is the water?” I ask.
Iulia holds up a finger, grabs a clear plastic cup, and bends over the side of the boat to scoop some up. “Pretty damn clear,” she says, holding it out so we can see. “I wouldn’t necessarily drink it, though. I used to take a sip every tour—after a month, I got sick.”
Roos shudders. “You see enough people peeing into it, and you never want it to touch any part of your body.”
“True. Guess I like to live on the edge.” With a laugh, she throws out the water before turning back to me. “How long do you think you’ll be here?”
“Well—I initially thought a year or two,” I say, even though I never really thought about it, just took the job and leapt. The ring on my finger reminds me I should be giving a different answer. “But now that I’m married…”
“You know the expat joke, right? You say it’ll be a couple years…and then you blink and it’s been ten or fifteen,” Iulia says. “You and your husband plan to stay here in the Netherlands?” If there’s an extra emphasis on husband , Roos doesn’t seem to notice.
“Yes. Definitely,” I say, and Roos exhales with relief.
I probably deserve to be tossed into the questionable canal water.
We pass the school where I take my Dutch class, the Westerkerk, the Anne Frank House. Maybe it’s just the fact that Roos is an Amsterdam native, but I catch her watching Iulia more than the scenery. Pink tinges her cheeks whenever the captain smiles at her. That’s enough to distract me from all the lies—because here is something pure, something sweet.
Since I’m a tourist today and there’s no shame in it, I take some photos for my parents. There in our chat is the one they sent yesterday from my favorite taco truck, a Jarritos raised in cheers. I know it’s just their way of showing they miss me—but I can’t help wondering if it’s something else, too. A reminder of what I’m missing.
An attempt to lure me back.
We’ve fallen into a regular schedule of Sunday phone calls, evening for me and morning for them, and while they tell me it’s the best way to start their day, I always hang up feeling a bit worse than I did beforehand.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” my mother said last week when I mentioned I’d stopped biking. “You should be wearing a helmet anyway. I still can’t believe no one there does it.”
“Babies do,” I offered, and I could practically hear her rolling her eyes through the phone.
For most of my life, they’ve kept their leashes tight around my ankles. It was for my own benefit, wasn’t it? That was what I told myself every time I thought about pushing back. They just wanted me to be healthy. Happy.
It’s only now that I have space from them that I’m wondering whether I could have been happier without a leash at all.
“Now we’re moving into what used to be the old Jewish quarter,” Iulia says. The architecture here is different. Less charming. Most of these homes were destroyed during World War II and rebuilt as blocky apartments or office buildings, she explains. “The Netherlands had more Jewish victims than any other country. Everyone knows Anne Frank, and as devastating as that story is…it’s only one person. One person out of more than one hundred thousand who were taken to camps, most of whom never came back.”
Of course I knew there was a deep, complex Jewish history in Amsterdam. I was raised secular, and I’ve never been very religious. Never had a bat mitzvah. We belonged to a synagogue but stopped going eventually, when our after-school activities and other responsibilities started feeling more important.
It feels different here, being confronted by the history, and it turns me reverent for the rest of the tour.
“This was amazing,” I tell Iulia as she steers us back to the dock. “Better than any history class. Thank you so much.”
“My pleasure,” she says. “This is the awkward part where I ask you to leave us a five-star review and mention my name.”
Roos swipes around on her phone before holding it up triumphantly. “Already done. My list will be up next week, and you’re definitely going to be at the top.”
Now Iulia blushes before returning her attention to the water, the first moment she hasn’t seemed fully in control. “I always like to end my tours with this,” she says, turning off the boat’s engine. “Right over here, you can see seven bridges all at once, perfectly lined up. It’s my favorite spot in Amsterdam.”
Even though she’s probably done this tour hundreds of times, she sounds a little mesmerized.
From this angle, I have a view of all seven for only a few seconds before the boat nudges one of them from view. Seven concentric semicircles, with the nearest canal framed by leafy green trees. The bikes and the tipsy houses, those Amsterdam trademarks, and the sunlight turning everything golden.
My breath catches in my lungs. It feels like magic, the way time stops for a moment in this city I thought had rejected me—when I only needed to give it a chance to truly come alive.
This place doesn’t have to be an escape from a life that wasn’t making me happy, I realize. It doesn’t have to be temporary, a spot for me to pick up the pieces before moving on to something better.
It could be my home.