“Your English is v-very good.” With all my stress and nervousness, my stutter has returned.
“We have many tourists as customers. You should learn Chinese, though. Lukas will teach you.” Helena nods at Lukas, confident in his compliance, then checks out my crumpled black shirt and baggy jeans. “You do not look much like your sister.” Strangely, there’s approval in her voice.
Helena waves a hand at Lukas and he reluctantly kisses me three times too, his skin scratchy with stubble. He smells like something wild and smoky. I’ve learned to stay still and let them do the weaving around. Then I do the three kisses thing again with Willem, who handles me gently, like someone precious to him.
Someone calls out, “Hoi, Lukas!” I look up to see a flight attendant emerge from the gate behind us. She’s wearing an unusual uniform and strides toward us. She grabs Lukas and kisses him full on the lips—wow—and I notice the four stripes on the sleeves of her arms, which are wound around his neck. She’s a pilot, not a flight attendant. She’s still kissing him. No three kisses this time. Finally, they say something in Dutch to each other; he smiles and tosses his arm around her in a loose hug.
Helena and Willem look on, not quite frowning but not beaming either. They probably don’t approve of his non-Chinese girlfriend. Lukas gestures to me and the female pilot turns toward me and grins, extending her hand. “So you are the sister of Sylvie. I am Estelle.”
Her handshake is as confident as her gaze. She and Lukas make a striking couple. Her hair is so light it’s almost white and, with her beside him, Lukas is transformed from shaggy wild man into sexy artist, as if she were a light cast upon him, throwing his features into sharp relief. “I just flew back from Nairobi.”
Something falls out of Estelle’s large sloppy handbag onto the floor and Lukas releases her. He retrieves the silky thing and hands it to her. “Careful. What is this?”
“My headscarf. Carry one with me everywhere I go, have to hide my hair in Muslim countries. I never know when I will need it.” She winks at me as she tucks it back into her purse. I can’t imagine a life that would require such a thing in the handbag. Does she mind needing to hide her hair? Or does she accept that it’s her choice to go there? She speaks English almost as well as a native speaker—only it seems to cost her a bit more effort to shape her mouth around the words.
Lukas says to her in a voice that isn’t completely stable, “Sylvie is missing.”
“What?” She goes completely still. “Did you get in a fight?” A fight? My eyes fly to her face. Her brows are furrowed and her jaw clenched. She’s glaring at Lukas, as if blaming him. Why would Lukas and Sylvie fight?
“I will fill you in later.” Lukas shoots her a quelling look.
Estelle clearly wants to question him further but glances at Helena’s frozen face.
I ask, “Do you know her?”
Her voice is now clipped, the earlier effervescence dissipated. “We were kids together, good friends until she went back to the U.S. I was so happy to see her again this past month.” She shoots another pointed look at Lukas.
“We are all from the same village,” Lukas explains to me, avoiding her eyes.
Helena interrupts, “We’d better go now. Willem and I still have to work today and Amy must be tired after her long flight.”
“You have to work? But it is Liberation Day,” says Estelle. I hadn’t realized today was anything special in the Netherlands.
“Holidays are the busiest time for our business,” says Helena, and I realize that’s why she and Willem are dressed so formally, not for me but because they need to run their large Chinese restaurant in Amsterdam.
“I want to talk to you,” says Estelle to Lukas, her voice steely. “Call me as soon as you can.” Then she turns to me with a smile. “Amy, after you recover a bit from your jet lag, why do you not come out for lunch with us? Maybe tomorrow?”
“I-I’d like that,” I say, even though Lukas looks like he’s swallowed something unpleasant. Not only does Estelle seem kind but I want to find out what she knows about Sylvie.
I am crammed into the back seat of the car with Lukas, who seems to take up all the available oxygen with his general air of surliness. It’s not just his physical size, although he is big; it’s the feeling of wildness around him, like he’s capable of anything. I eye his huge hands, which he flexes often. But then I study his averted profile more carefully, his raw eyes, and I wonder if I’ve mistaken misery for bad temper.
I turn my attention out the window. We pass fields shrouded so thickly in the early-morning mist that I can’t make out the ground underneath. The fog gathers and drifts, collecting in folds around mysterious objects below its unfathomable surface. The disgruntled sky lies low across the land, its gray clouds restless. I gasp in surprise as a ghost boat sails right across the billowing fields, but then Helena turns in the front passenger seat to say, “It is just on a canal that cuts through the middle. There is water everywhere here.”
I say, “It’s strange f-for me to think that this was Sylvie’s home. It’s a bit spooky.”
“Spooky is no problem for Sylvie.” Lukas’s voice holds real affection, which makes me warm to him for the first time. “She is fearless. She can take anything.”
Helena says in a singsong voice, “Oh, Sylvie can take anything and everything, all right.”
My head swivels back and forth between them. What is she implying? What kind of crazy family is this? I remove my glasses to clean them and, when I put them back on, notice Willem watching me in the rearview mirror. His gaze is both intense and tender. Then he focuses on the road again. It could be that he’s a bit dimwitted. Perhaps Helena chose him because of his good looks and decided to overlook any mental deficiencies. I am beginning to feel sorry for Sylvie that she had to live with this group of people for the first part of her life.
The clouds darken and a slow, steady drizzle drums against the outside of the car. After a long silence, I venture to say, “I thought you lived in Amsterdam?”
Lukas scoffs. “All Americans think everyone here lives in Amsterdam. We’re about half an hour away.”
We approach a small village, with old, well-maintained narrow houses no more than three stories high. It looks like the sort of place Hansel and Gretel would have lived, where children could venture forth and be lured into cottages by witches or eaten by wolves. Many of the houses have flagpoles attached to their facade and fly Dutch flags, which flap heavily in the rain and wind. Although the heater in the car is on, I shiver. A tall church looms in the distance, and then we pass into a slightly more modern part of town, with redbrick houses and slanted roofs.
The wheels of the car bounce against the cobblestones and I try not to throw up. A group of men too old to be seen in the skintight black Lycra that they’re wearing zoom past us on racing bicycles, heads ducked against the driving rain, disappearing into the distance like a flock of misshapen crows.
We drive up to a detached house with a separate cottage that looks like it might have been a garage once. The large two-story house stares blindly into the road, its dark windows bleak underneath the slanted roof. Willem parks under a long carport.