The five minute ferry ride from the train station across the water in Amsterdam drops its passengers at a dock that’s flanked by a restaurant and a few dessert carts. Holly and River have quickly made a habit of stopping at the carts so that she can get a pastry each time they walk from the ferry to the houseboat they’ve rented on a narrow road called Buiksloterwag.
“You think we should go to Anne Frank’s house?” Holly asks around a bite of a pastry that looks like a toaster waffle and a rainbow sprinkle cupcake had a baby.
“We could do that,” River says amiably, chewing a piece of gum as he walks down the pedestrian sidewalk next to her. Bikes whiz by them on the paved road that’s reserved for cyclists only. “You’re not worried about eating all these desserts?”
“Why should I be?” Holly looks up at him just as she’s about to take another bite.
“I dunno, just wondering. You live in a bikini at home, so I thought you might be worried about putting on five pounds.”
Holly frowns. Is this what he thinks of her? That she’s the kind of girl who’d pass up dessert in a foreign country so that her bathing suit will fit when she gets back home? After thinking about it for a second, she takes another huge bite. “Nope,” she says. “I’m not worried. Life is too short not to eat dessert.”
River waves the waffle away when she holds it out to offer him a bite. “I’m chewing gum,” he says, pointing at his mouth. “And I’m thinking ahead to that film in Dublin. The camera adds ten pounds, so I don’t want to put on any extra padding.” He pats his flat stomach as they walk.
His eyes focus on a spot in the distance as they walk, and Holly knows he’s envisioning that the final ‘yes’ of their trip will be to a film shoot in Ireland. Rather than discuss it, she changes the subject.
“We’ve also got the van Gogh museum to see, and we can do a boat tour of the canals,” Holly says, pulling the tourist map from the back pocket of her jeans and thrusting it at River.
The sun is out and most of the people around them are wearing lightweight dresses and short-sleeved shirts, but the sixty-degree weather feels chilly to Holly’s tropical blood, and she’s got a thick sweatshirt on over her t-shirt. River examines the map as they walk, and—feeling self-conscious about the waffle, though it makes her angry that she’s even giving it a second thought—Holly tosses the remainder of her snack into a trash can and brushes the sprinkles from her hands.
“We could go to the top of that building there and check out the view of the city,” River says. “There’s a swing that goes over the edge of the building so it feels like you’re floating over Amsterdam—it’s the tallest swing in Europe.”
“Nope,” Holly says immediately and without consideration. “No, no, no. And a great big hell no.”
River laughs. “Are you kidding me? This is a once in a lifetime experience. And, may I remind you, the answer to anything on this trip is what?”
Holly inhales and exhales once, standing at the mouth of the ferry as they look up at the A’dam Lookout building to the north. “The answer to everything on this trip is yes,” she says in a flat tone. “Except dessert. The answer to that is apparently no.” She can’t resist adding this last part, though she says it in a half-mumble.
“Oh, come on, Hol. You know I didn’t mean it like that.” River pulls her to the side to avoid being flattened by a Dutch woman in a skirt and clogs as she rolls her bike to a stop in front of the ferry. “Listen, we probably need breakfast—a real breakfast—before we do anything else. Let’s go in here and get some grub, okay? Being hungry makes me grumpy, and living on sugar alone can’t be good for your mood.”
“Or the size of my butt,” she adds unhappily.
They look both ways and enter a small cafe with views of the ferry and the train station on the other side of the ferry route. People stream by the windows as they take a seat in wooden chairs and order two full breakfasts with coffee. They wait quietly for the food to arrive, neither willing to acknowledge the strange turn their moods have taken.
The waitress sets toast, slices of cheese, hardboiled eggs balanced in little egg cups, and dishes of yogurt with granola on the table. River immediately tears off a hunk of bread and cheese.
“So what’s going on here?” he asks, biting into the thick toast.
Holly dips a spoon into the bowl of yogurt in front of her, swirling the chunks of granola and the dab of honey around like she’s stirring a pot of soup. She shrugs.
“Eat something, will you?” River reaches for the small silver pitcher of milk and pours some into his coffee. “I’m not kidding. I know you’re the queen of feasting on whatever is closest and living off the remnants of your bare cupboards, but we’ve been on the go for a couple of days and all I’ve seen you do is snack. Here.” He pushes her egg cup closer and nods at it. “Protein.”
Holly says nothing as she peels the shell from her egg and dips the corner of her toast into its runny center. She takes a bite, then another.
“You’re super-sensitive and I can tell you’re not all here,” River says carefully, looking down at his mug as he clinks a spoon around inside of it, stirring the milk and coffee until the liquid turns a creamy color. “I could tell you weren’t into the modeling gig, and that’s fine.” He sets the spoon on the saucer and picks up his mug. “But that job is basically funding our entire trip, and it’s all because we weren’t afraid to say yes to something crazy. Can’t you see that?”
“I know,” Holly says, picking up her other wedge of toast. “I get that. The saying yes thing is kind of fun, but can I be honest with you?” This would be the perfect time to tell him about the computer at the country house and the emails she got from Bonnie. She could come clean with him and be free of the nagging voice in her head that’s constantly reminding her about the fact that she’s essentially lying to him. All it’ll take is a few words—an honest admission about what happened—and then they can clear the air and go from there.
River pulls back slightly, a worried look on his face. “Of course you can be honest with me. I think you have to, or this is never going to work.” He pushes his bowl of yogurt and granola to the side and focuses on the bread and cheese again.
Holly sighs. She’s ready to tell him the truth. Maybe he’ll laugh and say he knew it all along. Or maybe he’ll feel some sympathy and offer to pull out his phone and charge it up in the boathouse for her so that she can make a call home. But most likely he’ll be disappointed in her for being cagey and secretive. Her heart seizes up as the words stack up on her tongue, ready to spill over.
“I’m just…I guess I’m a little preoccupied about what’s going on at home. I can’t help it,” she says lamely, not able to meet his eye. “When I’m there, it’s all I do—you know that. I plan things, I worry about things, I fix things. And being so far away makes it really hard to know what needs planning, worrying, or fixing.”
River is nodding at her from across the table, his hands laced together on the tabletop, mug of coffee at his elbow. “I get it,” he says kindly. “Christmas Key is in your blood. It’s not just a job for you. That’s one of the things I love most about you.” River’s voice drops a notch or two. “Among other things,” he says with a smile.
This makes Holly feel even worse. In an instant, she’s avoided being honest with him, elicited his sympathy, and gotten him to say nice things to her. The guilt inside of her feels like salt rubbed into a paper cut. Unexpected tears prick at the back of her eyes.
“Hey,” River says, reaching across the table and taking her hands in his. “What’s wrong?” He gives a small, surprised laugh. “Don’t cry.”
His words are like a starter pistol firing into the air, and just like that, Holly’s off to the races. The tears spill over and she pulls her hands from his, picking the napkin up from her lap and holding it over her face as if this will somehow hide her outburst of emotion.
“I’m sorry,” she says from behind her napkin. “It’s been a long time since I was away from the island for this long.” Holly tries a casual laugh, but it comes out like a hiccup. “Maybe I’m just homesick. And I left some things on the burner when I went on vacation, so I’m feeling a little stressed.”
“Don’t be stressed,” River says reassuringly. “Bonnie can handle anything in your absence. She’s a totally capable woman.” The waitress returns with a pot of coffee and a concerned look on her face. “Thank you,” River says to her, smiling to let her know that everything is under control.
“I’ve just never been out of touch this long, and I’m worried that something might happen—”
“What could possibly go wrong?” River’s voice hitches up and a hint of annoyance is evident. “It’s not hurricane season, you don’t have any major weddings or group visits planned, right?”
Holly shakes her head and dabs at her right eye with the napkin.
“When you get back you’ll dive in headfirst and get back to real life. I promise it’ll all be waiting for you the minute you set foot on Christmas Key.”
Holly takes a deep breath and sits up straighter, giving her head a toss like she’s putting it all out of her mind. “You’re right,” she says agreeably. “I know you’re right.”
River takes her hands again from across the table and gives them a squeeze. From the relieved look on his face, Holly can tell that he thinks he’s dodged a bullet. Her guilt at lying to him by omitting the truth about her stolen computer time fades a bit when she realizes just how stubborn he’s going to be about the whole staying-out-of-contact business.
They finish their breakfast amidst Holly’s dissipating sniffles, and after they pay the bill and step outside, River points at the tall A’dam Lookout building again. “So?” he asks hopefully. “What do you think?”
Holly sucks on her teeth. “Well,” she says, looking at the sky deck and the big red swing. “I think we should probably at least go up there and check it out.” She’s working hard to recover her footing after the unexpected emotional outburst at breakfast.
River reaches out and takes her hand in his with an amused grin. “That was a resounding ‘yes’ if ever I heard one. Let’s go.”
The swing is terrifying. The fact that it arcs out over the edge of an incredibly tall building as its riders take in the view of the city below is enough to make Holly feel like she’s having an out-of-body experience. This is the kind of thing she’d never say yes to on her own, and the weightlessness she feels as she flies over a city that looks like Lego buildings below her is surreal.
Her legs are rubber for most of the afternoon as they walk from the Anne Frank house to the Van Gogh museum, and people on bikes blow past them noiselessly, startling her each time they get too close. River plays tour guide, his elation at having gone on the swing filling him with a jovial excitement that Holly almost shares. Almost, but not quite.
After a long day of sightseeing, they end up back at their houseboat around seven, and Holly sends River to the store for tampons and cookies. (Her tears at breakfast should have been her first indication that tampons and cookies would be necessary that day.) The minute he’s out of sight, she slips out the side door of the tiny rental, the ground swaying slightly beneath her as the houseboat rocks with the movement of the tiny river they’re situated on.
The owners of the rental also own a larger houseboat on the same property, and Holly covers the twenty feet between the two homes in seconds, rapping on the door of the main house with urgency.
A blonde woman about fifteen or twenty years older than Holly opens it. “Hello,” she says with a smile. She’s holding a lit cigarette in one hand, wearing jeans and a white shirt that buttons up the front. “How is your stay so far?”
Holly shifts her weight, trying to be patient. “Really good. The house is so cute.”
“Not too small?” The woman’s words are slow, her English lightly accented. She brings the cigarette to her lips, narrowing one eye as she takes a pull and then blows the smoke to the side. “Some people are frightened away by trying to live in a tiny house, but it really has everything you need.”
“It does,” Holly agrees. “Except one thing.”
“Oh?” Her eyebrows lift elegantly and she runs her free hand over her smooth bun.
“Internet. I need to check my email.”
“But the Wifi password—”
“Won’t help me,” Holly finishes for her. “See, the problem is, we got mugged in London, and I lost my cell phone.”
“Oh, no!” The woman leans out to tap her ashes into the gravel next to the front door. “That’s terrible.”
“It was. And the worst part is that River—my boyfriend,” Holly hooks her thumb in the direction of the rental house as if he’s in there, “he wants to pretend like we have no way to check in at home for the whole three weeks of this trip, but I can’t do that.”
“He doesn’t want to check in at all?”
“No! He’s got this weird, romantic idea about saying yes to everything except to me,” Holly goes on, growing slightly hysterical as she explains. “And he went to the store just now and I really need to check my email and let everyone know I’m alive.” Weirdly, the tears Holly felt earlier at breakfast are threatening to return, but this time they feel more like desperation than defeat.
The woman tries to hush Holly, but it sounds more like “Tch, tch, tch.” She looks both ways up and down the sidewalk in front of her property, then reaches out and grabs Holly by the forearm, holding her cigarette in the other hand. “Come in. Hurry, please.” She closes the door behind Holly and leads her through a mostly white house that looks like it was decorated entirely from Ikea catalogs and by watching reruns of mod shows from the 1960s. A thick, white fur rug covers the space in front of a low sectional couch, and a huge pendant lamp dangles from a delicately arched silver stand, its base improbably holding the whole thing upright.
“The computer is here,” the woman says. “And I am Eva.”
“Holly,” Holly says, extending a hand in a belated introduction. “Thank you for this. I really appreciate it.”
Eva points at a spot on the couch and lifts the lid on the laptop. “It’s all yours,” she says, clicking on a tab and closing what she’s been looking at.
“Thank you so much,” Holly says. She sinks into the couch and starts tapping her log in information into the computer. She feels like the hero in an action movie with only seconds left to defuse a bomb as she fights against the clock to get the information from her email account before River gets back from the store.
Eva wanders over to the open kitchen area and stubs her cigarette out in a blue cut-glass ashtray, her eyes focused on the water just beyond the windows. “Men are funny creatures, aren’t they?” she wonders. Her back is to Holly as she watches a bird swoop and dive into the water. “My husband once bought me a cat when I’d already told him that I didn’t want animals in our house.”
“Really?” Holly asks politely, her eyes on the computer screen.
“Yes. He thought I was missing something by not having a pet, but I swore to him I wasn’t missing anything at all.”
“They don’t believe us, do they?” Holly asks distractedly, scanning her inbox for the most important looking messages. It’s Friday evening, which means it’s lunchtime on Christmas Key. Her last email from Bonnie is two days old, and all she talks about is Coco wanting to help out in the B&B office. Not that Coco meddling in B&B business isn’t bad enough, but at least she hasn’t opened an email to find an S.O.S. from Bonnie or a message informing her that Christmas Key has already been bought and paid for by some outside entity.
“It’s not that they don’t believe us,” Eva goes on, oblivious to Holly’s eyes rapidly scanning the computer screen. “It’s that they don’t believe we already know what we want.”
Holly finishes reading Bonnie’s email about Coco rearranging her desk and demanding that she call an impromptu village council meeting. It makes her blood boil to imagine her mother moving her belongings around and answering the office phone, but the real panic sets in when she imagines Coco hearing that Holly is out of reach and hasn’t been heard from.
“But maybe your man isn’t trying to control you by forcing you to say yes to everything,” Eva allows, tearing her eyes from the window so she can find her pack of cigarettes in the fading light. She switches on a lamp on the kitchen counter. “Maybe he really just wants you to see that the world gets, you know…” Eva waves her hand around like she’s searching for words, a new, unlit cigarette already between her fingers, “...bigger. It grows when you say yes to things you otherwise would have said no to.”
Holly pauses, considering this. “You’re right,” she says. “I have definitely said yes to things on this trip that I would have normally said no to.”
“And have you learned anything? Does the world seem bigger?”
“It seems...scarier,” Holly says. “It makes me want to go home right now and not leave my little island ever again.”
“That’s honest.” There is admiration in Eva’s voice. “But when you go home to this little island, do you think you’ll do anything differently?”
Holly thinks for a second before she answers. “You know, I do.” It shocks her to admit it to a woman who is, essentially, a complete stranger, but Holly knows it’s true. “There are some things I could say yes to in my normal life that I would have just been stubborn about before.” She nods, thinking of her life on Christmas Key and her plans for the island.
“Then that’s something, isn’t it?” Eva flicks her lighter and holds the flame to the end of her cigarette.
“I guess it is.” Holly watches as Eva turns back to the window, then she opens up a blank email and addresses it to Bonnie.
Bon—I’m so sorry I haven’t emailed yet! You won’t believe everything that’s happened, but I’m without a phone for the rest of the trip. I’ll check email when I can, but I’m not sure when I’ll have access to a computer again. I hope you’re keeping Coco in line, and I want to hear everything I’m missing—EVERY. SINGLE. THING. I’ll talk to you soon! xoxoxoxo Holly
Holly logs out of her email and gently shuts the lid to the laptop. “Thank you. I really needed this,” Holly says to Eva. She means the use of the computer, but somehow she also means the female companionship and the supportive ear. Eva smiles knowingly.
“You’re welcome. Enjoy the rest of your trip, huh? You’re only young once, and there’s something to be said about enjoying Europe—and life—without being tied to a cell phone.”
Holly follows her through the open living space, pausing on the doorstep as Eva holds it open. The lights are still off in their tiny boathouse next door, so she knows River isn’t back yet.
“Hey,” Holly says, looking at Eva curiously. “Whatever happened to that cat?”
A smile spreads across Eva’s face, and a map of fine lines creases around her kind eyes. “Our neighbors were moving to Norway,” she says, pointing her cigarette at the tall row house across the street. “Their little girl always loved my cat, so I asked her parents if they could take him.”
“Did your husband ever know?”
Eva looks heavenward with her eyes as she tips her head to one side, considering. “No, I don’t think so. I told him the cat ran away. It made sense, because his name was Avontuur.”
Holly frowns, her next question written all over her face.
“It means adventure,” Eva says, winking at Holly before she shuts the door.