Page 35 of What Happens in Amsterdam

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 fewminutes 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 topicturing 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, whenI 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 littleoff, I always told myself, but how many people could say they felt trulyonall the time, or even most of it?

Days later, when I’d still barely moved, so dehydrated it hurt toswallow, 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.

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