Grandma set her triangular little chin, so like Ma’s and Amy’s. “So? Too bad for her. By then, the rice will already have been cooked.”
I sighed, thinking of the cruel words I had spoken to Helena. “I suppose you are right.”
Lukas said, “She will lose face. It will be an ugly scene. She might even demand to search your luggage or claim that you stole it from Grandma. Perhaps it is time for thunder from a clear sky. Grandma, maybe you should do things the Western way and tell my mother directly that you are giving your inheritance to Sylvie.”
Both of us put on our huge eyes and stared at him as if we saw water burning.
Grandma said, “We are not Dutch, my heart stem. That would hurt her more than anything else I could do. I am not able to be a human being in such a way. We need to give her a back road for her escape even though she comes to loot a burning house. She also desires to attain it for you, Lukas. I hope you understand?”
Lukas shrugged. “What would I use it for?” But his mouth was strained and I remembered his dreams of owning his own studio.
I said, “She hungers for your love, Grandma.”
“She has it, though she could have been nicer to me through the years. The things I have seen in this house, the way she treated you. You are two who could not live under the same sky.” Grandma’s shoulders drooped. She rubbed the heel of her palm against her bony chest. This was the first time we had ever spoken of it. “I could do so little for you then. This is also why you and your ma need to have the jewelry. It is the smallest boon I can give you, to keep you safe. I understand the problem of Helena. But now you must fight poison with poison, and I have an idea.”
The next morning, I awoke exhausted again. Even with the prescription sleeping pills I had brought from New York, I could barely manage to make it through the nights. I was desperate for rest. I would sleep my entire life away if I could, but the more I longed for it, the more it eluded me, like everything else I desired. I had always been a bad sleeper and in the dark, still Dutch hours, the wreckage of my life caught up to me, worrying at the edges of my mind like a rabid dog—Jim and that girl, the whispers at work, those tender moments with Jim when we had both been so innocent, my phone call with Amy, her blind faith in me, and Grandma, moving further from me every day until she disappeared into the horizon. I took the sleeping pills at night for a bit of oblivion and then amphetamines in the wretched mornings to get me up and moving again.
I was cradling my head in my hands at the dining room table when Lukas entered the room. Grandma was napping upstairs and Willem and Helena had already left for the restaurant.
His gaze lingered on the shadows below my eyes. “Is it going all right?”
“Naturally.” I tried to sound as steady and robust as the Dutch always did, but it only made my headache seem worse.
He scanned the cold kitchen. “You have not even made any tea for yourself.”
“It is the jet lag,” I lied, even though I had been in the Netherlands almost a week by then. It seemed like so much effort to make breakfast for myself, and I often skipped it at home anyway, running to meetings and presentations. “You know what? I used to long to take a vacation, but now that I have free time, I do not know what to do with myself.”
“You were never very good at resting. Always acting, always doing. Sometimes you just need to be, Sylvie.”
“Hamster in a wheel, that’s me.” Eighty to a hundred hours a week at work. The glow of the laptop keeping me company as Jim snored in our bedroom. Flights to city after city. Always another deadline, another crisis. And for what? When it mattered, no one had stood up for me despite all the money I had brought in for the company. I was beginning to realize that I had kept myself so busy to avoid examining my life, and now that I had the chance, I did not like it at all.
Lukas filled the electric kettle with water. The morning sunlight slanted through the window and lit the outline of his broad shoulders. His silky dark hair, almost perfectly straight, had a slight curl to it where it hit the base of his neck. “It is a beautiful day outside and I would like to take some photos. Come with me. I can make us some sandwiches. I know just the place.”
Pedaling away on the pink flowered bicycle Estelle had lent me, I breathed in the faint scent of hyacinths. The open landscape stretched before us, brightly colored fields of crocuses and daffodils waving in the breeze, and I felt something inside me unclench. A flock of wild geese slowly took flight around us, beating their wings, rising up into the air as we passed. I had forgotten how good it felt to have my body balanced on the bicycle’s thin wheels, the freedom of the road speeding underneath me and the joy of the wind in my face.
Lukas took us along a tree-lined stretch by the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal where the deep water sparkled. We finally stopped at a little picnic spot with a bench overlooking the rippling currents. A tree hung low in the waves and there a few ducks floated, cradled in its branches.
As I locked my bike and set it against a tree, I said, “It is strange because I am naturally afraid of water but I love it too.” Lukas unhooked his bicycle bags. Then he took off his shoes and peeled off his socks. He stepped barefoot around the picnic area like a big bulky flamingo. I giggled. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to find a dry spot. Why are you scared of water?” He stomped a few times on one location, grunted, and pulled out a thick pine-green blanket from his bags.
I went over to help him unfurl it over the ground. “Because I can drown in two meters of it, idiot.” I slapped him on the arm, and then sat down cross-legged. I ran a finger over the soft fleece.
“Oh, I forgot.” Lukas grimaced, looking sheepish. Everyone in the Netherlands could swim. He settled down on the corner of the blanket next to me. “Why do you love it, then?”
“It feels like freedom.”
Now he stretched out and lay on his back. Strands of his hair spread over the blanket, shining with the iridescence of a mussel shell washed by the sea surf. He spoke with his eyes closed. “I was in the ocean for a few months during a trip to Alaska. The waves were enormous, so much greater than any of us. The sea was like a graveyard or a utopia, a cavern where ancient worlds were swallowed up and waited to be discovered again.”
I leaned in. He smelled like freshly cut grass, basil, and earth. He was so familiar and yet at the same time utterly new. Such thick lashes, the small freckle underneath the sharp plane of his left cheekbone, the scar threaded through the hair behind his temple from when he had fallen from the jungle gym at school. His bare, hairy feet sticking out from his snug jeans. His full lips. His eyes opened and I jumped back.
I cleared my throat. “Your poetry is lost on me. I am but a simple girl.” I leaped up and looked around for something to do. I stuck my hands in my pockets. I coughed again. Ah, yes, the food. “I will unpack the sandwiches.”
He propped himself on one elbow, the top button of his shirt straining, revealing a sliver of smooth tanned skin. “Ha! Simple. You were devouring books before I even learned the alphabet. You remember everyone could not understand why you were looking at books without pictures? No one guessed you were actually reading already.”
I forced myself to look away and started rummaging in the bicycle bag. I said, translating from Chinese to Dutch, “Dumb birds must start flying early.”