It Was You

I didn't go back to the guesthouse that night. I took his family's guest room — the same one as before — and lay there re-watching all twenty-eight years of my life.

Like a film you only understand on the second viewing.

Age seven: art class, I painted the sea. The teacher said, why has our little Hangzhou girl painted a grey sea? Our West Lake is green. I said I didn't know. I just wanted to paint this one. My mother kept that painting; it's probably still in a cabinet somewhere.

Age twelve: English class, we chose our English names. The other girls fought over Cindy and Amy and Grace. I flipped through the name list at the back of the textbook and stopped my finger on one word. The teacher said: Daisy — little chrysanthemum — that's nice too. Why that one? I couldn't say. I just felt like the name resembled something I knew.

Nineteen: a university library. I stopped in front of a shelf of art books and the one I pulled out was the Dutch Golden Age. Why that one? Couldn't say. Twenty: started saving money, telling everyone I wanted to see the northern seas. Twenty-eight: rerouted, on a whim I couldn't explain, into a fishing village with nothing to see.

Couldn't say, couldn't say, couldn't say. Last night, every couldn't say of my life was reconciled in a single audit.

It was never me who loved a grey sea. A boy in Urk loved it, and since age seven, I had been watching it for him. I never chose the name Daisy. A field of flowers I wouldn't step into for another twenty years reached across time and handed me the name early. I thought I was dreaming. I was living his days.

It was you. It was always, always you.

I came downstairs in the morning with swollen eyes — not from crying; I've told you, I don't cry; from not sleeping. In the kitchen, Old Yang was frying fish. Lucas sat at the table with a very old book open in front of him. When he saw me, he pushed it my way.

Not a book. A hand-copied ledger, leather cover worn round at the corners, filled with centuries of handwriting that changed style generation by generation. The Dutch meant nothing to me. But the things pressed between its pages needed no translation: a yellowed sea chart. Pages of accounts. And a Bible with tiny handwriting crowding every margin.

"Our family's other set of books," Lucas said. "The ledger of dreams."

He turned pages for me. Which year, which man, dreamed which storm — believed it, and lived. Which year, which man, dreamed his own death — and how he chose to spend the rest. Near the middle his finger stopped on a page where the ink had been pressed hard enough to emboss the paper:

"My great-great-grandfather wrote this one." He read: "'Lord, if tomorrow belongs to Thee alone, forgive us these eyes. And if Thou madest these eyes also — tell us: is looking a sin?'"

I raised my head. Old Yang stood at the stove with his back to us, shoulders perfectly still, and I knew he was listening. This family says grace before meals. Sits in the pews on Sunday. Sings those psalms the whole town sings, slow as tides — and, generation upon generation, goes on dreaming the dreams it has been confessing for four hundred years.

"So which do you believe?" I asked quietly. "The Bible, or the mirror?"

It was Old Yang who answered. He set the fish on the table, wiped his hands on the apron, and said the sentence I expect to be turning over for the rest of my life:

"Both." he said. "What else can we do? The eyes won't close. The days must be lived. We settle for a truce: whatever we see, we see because He allows it."

After breakfast, Lucas said he wanted to show me a place. We drove out of town along the great dike for twenty minutes, and he stopped the car at the mouth of a dirt track. At its end stood a low old wooden house.

"My childhood home," he said. "Summers, we lived out here."

Behind the house a long slope ran down to the water — green, ordinary grass. Wrong season; nothing blooming. I stood on the slope and felt nothing in particular — except that the wind was familiar, familiar like an old friend. But wind is wind. On the North Sea coast it's all the same wind.

"When the season comes," Lucas said behind me, quiet, like a man committing to something, "I'll bring you back here."

"Sure," I said. "What's here then?"

He didn't answer.

Twenty-eight years I asked myself: why the Netherlands? Why a grey sea? Why Daisy?

The answer turned out to be one word long — and at that moment it was standing behind me, thin, looking at an unflowered slope, refusing to speak.