As quietly as possible, I rush back to Elise’s room, this time shaking her a little more forcibly. “Elise, your brother is here. You have to get up.”
“Dan, plea—WHAT!?” The words finally permeate her slumber, and she jolts up into a sitting position, eyes wide as she clutches the blanket to her bra-clad chest. “Did you say mybrotheris here?”
“Yes, and he’s been here for a while now, so you better hurry up if you don’t want him calling your dad or something. Come on!”
“Scramble” isn’t a word I would normally associate with Elise, but that’s the only way to describe how she explodes out of her bed in a flurry of sheets, blankets, pillows, legs, and arms. I have zero time to appreciate how she’s still in just lingerie, and completely sober and fair game to ogle this time, before she’s wrapping herself in a floor length silver silk robe.
“I liked it better the other way,” I gripe, and she narrows her eyes.
“Andries certainly wouldn’t. Can you… go hide in the study or something? Until he leaves?”
“Am I your dirty little secret now, El?” I can’t help but tease her, but it’s cut off as soon as Andries buzzes the door again, and she looks out toward it with a hefty dose of anxiety.
“Pleasejust go. I’ll text you when it’s safe, okay?”
“Fine, fine,” I say as she pushes me out of her bedroom and onto another room in the hallway.
I close myself into her study, and as soon as I do she’s gone, letting her brother in while I wait here like a teen boy sneaking into his first girlfriend's house. I’m a grown man, dammit, and this really shouldn’t be necessary anymore.
I lean against the door and listen to the siblings as they talk. Andries sounds annoyed at being left in the hall for so long but overly friendly for the most part.
“I wanted to bring you breakfast and thank you for being so mature and coming to the engagement party when I was trying to keep you away.”
There’s a crinkling sound when Elise takes the bag from her brother. “It was nothing. I didn’t want to miss it.”
He chuckles. “You certainly made yourself known. But I want to say that you and Roxanne mending fences means the world to me.” Andries pauses for a moment as if ruminating on something. “Elise, why are you still in a robe? Don’t you have class in like, twenty minutes?”
“Yeah!” she replies sheepishly. “I overslept on accident. To my credit, I didn’t think you’d want to see me so soon after the engagement party.”
There’s a vulnerable thread to Andries’s voice that I haven’t heard before. “I always love spending time with you. I just have Roxanne to think about now too, though.”
“I understand. But it was a beautiful party.”
There’s another long pause, where I assume they are both shuffling their feet and feeling awkward before Elise makes an excuse to go change. Andries calls after her and tells her he’ll walk her to class, and from where I am, I can hear Elise groan slightly. I chuckle under my breath, wishing that I was allowed to be part of this whole interaction. Any other time, I’d be welcome for coffee and croissants, too, but not when I’ve just slept over.
My first sleepover with Elise, and she was drunk while I passed out immediately. What a waste.
I listen to her change in the other room while I pace the study, bored out of my skull. All the niceties between the siblings seemed to take forever, and now it sounds like Elise is doing her best to get cleaned up enough for class after spending a lot of her evening puking. Her organization is a little less stringent here, and there are so many pictures hung on her wall that it’s almost mind-boggling.
My favorite, though, is one I find of Andries, Elise, and I standing together, smiling like fools. Elise went through the effort of getting this specific picture framed, and it makes me happy inside. I was important enough to get space on her wall.
But she seems to have pictures of every other portion of her life, too. There are stunning shots of her horse, a brilliant chestnut mare, pictures of her and her parents, of her and her entire group of siblings, and all combinations of Van Den Bosches. She’s captured everything on film, and each choice of picture is meaningful, and at first, this makes me feel utterly soft inside, but when I come across one last picture, my feelings change like the crack of a whip.
In this last 5x7 frame is a picture of a tall, blond young man, maybe in his late teens or early twenties, standing next to a younger Elise. Her arms are thrown around his neck, pulling him down, and they’re both laughing. Their shirts match, and readSummer Camp 2019. My blood is boiling, and the longerI look at this picture of the two of them, a perfect fit for one another, standing in front of a scenic forest, the more nauseous I become. Even the idea of Elise thinking about being with another man makes me feel crazy.
I snap a quick picture of it, texting it to a hacker friend of mine and requesting an ID. He sends me a ridiculous number for a compensation payment, to which I reluctantly agree. Anything to see what other man was putting that smile on Elise’s face.
Right as I’m considering taking the picture and burning it at home, I hear the door open and shut in the front room and the voices of Andries and Elise fading. She then texts me and says the coast is clear.
I take one more look at the photo, holding my hand to my churning stomach, and decide that I really do need to leave before I do something I regret. Like shattering the glass of that picture all over the ground.
20
Amsterdam, May 24, 2022
Elise
Walking nextto my brother with my head ready to pound itself into a million pieces is harder than I thought it would be, but I manage to keep a neutral face on for him. The caffeine in the coffee he brought me is helping my hangover headache little by little, but I’m afraid not quickly enough that it will be gone before class starts.