We Were Never Here, page 26
“Thanks. I just needed some space from her. And Arizona is nothing if not space, right?”
“Oh, for sure. And hey, I’m stoked to be away from the ol’ grind and here on, you know. Mars.” He gestured out the window, where the clay-colored ridges resembled a sci-fi comic book. “But I’m glad you told me. I knew something was up.” He drummed his fingers against the parking brake. “You can always talk to me. We all have shit we don’t feel like talking about. And that’s fine! But…I’ve been down that road before, relationships where she—or I—wasn’t willing to let that guard down, you know? And just be real.”
I nodded slowly. It was one of those weird, high-def moments when the conversation is so real, so important, you’re almost detached, floating a few feet above it.
“See, here’s what’s cool.” He yanked the key from the ignition. “You want space, you want to get away—I get that, I’ve done that, I’ve dated people who’ve been like that. But usually that means they run away from me.” He tapped his sternum. “And you insisted we head west! Together! Makes me feel like a million bucks.”
My voice was round and shy as I said: “I always feel happier around you.”
I glanced his way and saw his chest puff, his eyes shine. So I knew I’d said the right thing. But what I thought first was: Right, because I wasn’t running away from you.
* * *
—
The hotel was on the outskirts of town. A faded mural of southwestern motifs spread across the wall behind the check-in desk, and the blue and tan blankets draped over the armchairs looked filched from a yoga studio. Aaron gamely complimented everything in sight, snapping photos and pointing out details, as if he could sense my disappointment. God, he was kind.
On the elevator ride, a wave of exhaustion hit me. I raised an eyebrow. “Those gummies still accessible?”
The room was a bit more promising, with broad windows and a slim balcony facing a crumply mountain we eventually identified as Camelback. Bristly, moss-green trees dusted the flat expanse between us and the mountain ridge, and the thought spilled out before I could cork it: This reminds me of the Elqui Valley.
There it was—the downward rush of THC, like a choir of Gregorian chanters sliiiding an octave down. A whole bunch of monks. What a funny thought: Silent monks opening their mouths to sing, to give their vocal cords a workout, to let the sound waves crash and echo around them. Also, that’s a funny word, monk. Monk. What was I just thinking about?
Oh, right: how very kind Aaron was. And beautiful, kind Aaron wanted to hold me, to kiss me, to make me feel safe. Safety—what did we call it? The opposite of fear? The thought warmed me and I crossed to the wardrobe, where he was diligently sliding his shirts onto hangers. I slipped my arms around his slim waist and kissed his neck. He turned around, his grin matching mine, and then meeting mine, and then our mouths were moving together in a slow, interesting tango, and then our fingertips and soft skin and all our bodies’ corners, inner and outer, concave and convex, moved like one.
It was all feeling so good, stretchy and wide and endless, until the awareness of Kristen, of Sebastian and Paolo and the LAPD began to build in my mind like charged particles, like the sudden viridescent blare of the Northern Lights, and when I gasped it was out of panic, panic like I’d never known, panic that I’d never, ever, ever be free from my nightmare.
Afterward, we lay spooning in the tangled sheets, watching out the window as the crooked horizon grew umber and then politely faded into the background, black.
“I’m starving,” he announced, propping himself up onto an elbow.
“I’m…I might be too high. I’m feeling a little…anxious.”
“Oh no, I’m sorry. About what?”
About Kristen leaking the photo of me and Sebastian, maybe even sweetening it up with an anonymous tip about its connection to Paolo’s case. Or sending in the molten lump, Paolo’s license number still visible, along with my home address. About the calls I keep getting from Chilean and Los Angeles numbers. About the cops breaking down the door, throwing me on the ground and maybe hurting you, too, in the commotion.
“It’s like—I get to the end of a breath and I worry that I’ll forget to take another,” I said, which was true. “Or that I’ll never have the energy to get up again.” It was a lesser concern, but still it registered: I needed to pee and the bathroom was fifteen feet away, and how, hooooow would I ever cross the distance?
“Aw, babe. Guess these gummies are pretty strong for a newbie. What do you need?” He brought me water and found a nearby spot with takeout pizzas. He woke me to say he was going to pick up his order—the only thing I remember before morning. In my dreams, I saw the mama rabbit, her neck so hacked her head clung by a flap of white-red skin. She kept trying to hop but instead limped and hobbled and zigzagged closer and closer to the edge of a Chilean cliff.
* * *
—
When I woke, Aaron was out on the balcony, frowning at his iPhone screen. He was deep in a photoshoot with a tiny gecko that clung to the glass, loving the attention. He stepped inside and asked how I was feeling, but all I could say was that I needed coffee. Suddenly, being here felt ludicrous. Where would I be safe? Should I leave the country, hide out in Canada, hope that no one would extradite me?
“I didn’t see a coffee maker,” Aaron said. “Should we grab breakfast downstairs?”
Normalcy—I had to maintain it, had to fake it. So I brushed my teeth and stepped into some clothes. I’d failed to plug my phone in, and it had died; with a flare of anxiety, I jabbed the charger into the wall and walked away right as the Apple symbol appeared on the screen.
The sight of food made my innards turn: shiny green apples, one of those conveyor-belt toasters, a cauldron of oatmeal with brown sugar and raisins in canisters nearby. I forced down a banana as we sat on the deck, squinting into the sun and paging through a book of local hiking trails. Walking sounded nice, moving through wide-open space when it felt like cardboard walls were pressing in on me from every direction. We selected the lowest-hanging fruit, and I relaxed at having a plan—a three-mile loop that began just a block away from the property, following a country road and then branching off for a final ascent. “Rewarding views” from a portion along a steep ridge.
As Aaron rose to refill his Styrofoam coffee cup, I allowed myself a dreamy moment: What if this could become our lives? Not scraping peanut butter from tiny plastic tubs near an ugly lobby, but living somewhere new, somewhere beautiful. A fresh start totally distinct from Kristen, the past; here, with the sun stamping our table and lizards flicking by our feet, I could almost convince myself that the madness of the months since Cambodia existed on another plane, a different dimension, with no bearing on this one. Maybe this was Arizona’s magic, all that talk of vortexes and UFOs and the connection to the stars: Here, no one could touch us.
We marched inside and prepared for our trek—snacks packed, sunscreen applied, dorky baseball caps perched on our heads. We were halfway through the lobby when a voice made me freeze.
“Emily!”
Aaron whipped around next to me, but I stayed still as an ice sculpture, fragile as a flake of snow.
“Emily.” It was louder now, closer, and a vault opened up inside me, down and down and down. No.
A hand on my shoulder. Like it was a needle and I, a soap bubble, iridescent and doomed.
I turned and blinked at her. Pop.
“I came as fast as I could,” Kristen said. And she pulled me into a one-sided hug.
CHAPTER 37
POLICE RELEASE SKETCH IN APRIL SLAYING OF SPANISH-AMERICAN BACKPACKER
Los Angeles investigators, working with Chilean officials, released a composite drawing in an effort to track down a woman they suspect is connected to the death of a Spanish-American backpacker last month.
Paolo García, 24, was in the middle of a year-long backpacking trip around South America when he disappeared. He was last seen on April 13, and his body (identified by dental records) was found in a shallow grave in Arroyito, a farming area in northern Chile.
Police released a sketch of someone believed to be involved. That person was described as a white female in her 20s, about 5 feet 6 inches tall, with brown hair and a North American accent.
The death of García, who lived in Barcelona but had dual citizenship in Spain and the United States, made headlines on multiple continents and sparked an international manhunt, with García’s family offering a $1 million reward for information that leads to an arrest.
Anyone with information on García’s murder or the person of interest is urged to contact Los Angeles police.
CHAPTER 38
My lips pursed to ask the inevitable: What are you doing here? Then I started to laugh. Of course she was here. I’d asked her that exact question multiple times over the last few weeks. Always when I’d let my guard down, when I’d just begun to relax. She’d have some reasonable-sounding explanation, for sure. She’d be confused and hurt when it was clear I wasn’t thrilled by her sudden appearance. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Aaron asked it for me, his voice bright but baffled. “Kristen, holy shit! Aren’t you in Milwaukee?”
Her eyes flicked toward mine. “I took a red-eye. Just landed. Emily…told me she needs my help.”
“What?” I blurted. Now we all three looked mystified, a Bermuda Triangle of bewilderment.
“Your email…” she said with a meaningful frown.
“How did you find us?” Aaron asked.
“Aaron was…posting photos. With tags.”
“I— What about my email made you think I was telling you to come here?”
She wrinkled her nose. “I thought that’s what your message meant? You said no contact and then you…you contacted me.” She shook her head and laughed bitterly. “Well, if this isn’t some bizarro codependent power play…Jesus, Emily.”
“Excuse me?”
“Whoa, let’s all take a breath.” Aaron had that panicked look on his face, as if some mysterious and ancient female ritual were about to begin.
“No, it’s true, Emily. You say jump and I say how high.”
“I never told you to come!”
“That’s bullshit.” Her voice rang out and the din of the lobby disappeared. I noticed fish-eyed stares from the woman behind reception, a mom with a straggling toddler, a sunburned couple on their way to breakfast.
Kristen glanced around. “Maybe we should discuss this in private.”
“Should we go back to our room?” Aaron held up his key.
No way was I locking us in a room with this woman. They both gazed at me, their eyes pleading. But for such different reasons.
And then it was very clear what I needed to do: protect Aaron at any cost. Her desperate call to him last night hadn’t had the effect she’d hoped; it hadn’t made me hers. What would she do to get him out of the picture now? Who knew what she was capable of?
I did. I was maybe the only person who did. “Aaron, why don’t you head back upstairs?” I gestured into the lobby. “Kristen and I will have a chat.”
“You sure?” he asked, and I nodded. He pressed his palm onto my waist as he passed. I watched the elevator swallow him up, and panic fanned out in my chest.
“Should we go outside or something?” Kristen glanced around. “I really don’t want to talk about this here.”
“No. No one’s listening. We’re talking now.” I strode to a sofa and she shuffled after me. I waited for her to say something, and when she didn’t, curiosity got the better of me: “Where’s your bag? Where are you even staying?”
“Here. They’ve got my suitcase, but the room won’t be ready for a few hours.”
“Oh.” An awkward beat. “You…you really shouldn’t have come.”
“This is ridiculous. You send me that goddamn cryptic email telling me to check the news, and so I see the article about a witness coming forward and I have a heart attack, obviously, and I run to you because all you’ve been saying for weeks is that you need someone to talk to and you’re freaking out.”
I frowned. “So you came because you thought I was going to tell Aaron?”
“No, I came because you’re my best friend.” She opened her hands, exasperated.
We stared at each other, our gazes forming a single laser beam. She gave her head a disgusted shake and muttered, “You say jump…”
Well, how’s that for irony: We both thought the other had us at her beck and call.
Kristen leaned forward and murmured, “Don’t look, but the woman at the front desk is staring.”
“Probably because you’re making a scene.”
She stood. “C’mon. I need to stretch my legs.”
I watched her go, my pulse pounding in my ears. She got to the door and turned to stare at me, an expectant dog impatient to be let out. “You…you don’t want to be alone?” I asked.
“I didn’t fly two thousand miles to be alone, Emily.”
I slid my hand into my backpack and realized, with a crashing sensation, that I didn’t have my phone—it was still plugged in upstairs.
As if she could read my mind, she held up her own cell. “You want me to turn this on and send that stupid photo?”
This time nobody turned, no one gawped at the break in decorum. Because Kristen was so good at this: making the malicious sound innocent, incidental. For all anyone knew, she was just teasing me about a drunken snapshot from our younger days.
Which was the truth, in a way.
Hopelessness swelled, an urge to wail and keen and beat my fists on the homely hotel rug. Instead I followed her to the entrance. The automatic doors slid open, a gasp of hot desert air. Kristen took a few steps and then looked back, her hazel eyes feline and inescapable. I saw her as a mountain lion—face calm, ears pricked, gazing over her shoulder at me with the soft knowledge that I had no choice but to follow.
The hotel dumped us directly out on a busy six-lane road. Kristen turned right and stepped onto the cracked sidewalk. At least we were still out in the open here; a short way down was a strip mall with a nail salon and barre studio and Chinese restaurant. Funny how now I wanted us to be exposed, for people to see us.
“We need to just come right out and say it,” she announced. “This needs to stop.”
“I agree.” Sunlight pressed hard on my scalp; a bead of sweat skidded down my spine. “Well, wait. What are you referring to?”
“This fighting, this tension—everything I say or do, you interpret in the worst possible way. It’s suffocating.” She walked with purpose, and I realized we were nearing the trailhead Aaron and I had picked out over breakfast.
“Well, maybe if you didn’t keep dangling that photo from Cambodia over me, we could both relax. And now the, the glob of Paolo’s melted IDs and stuff? It’s messed up.”
She stopped marching and turned to me. “Well, maybe if you didn’t always seem one step away from losing your damn mind and blowing up our lives, I could get rid of them and still sleep at night. With the knowledge that my best friend wasn’t about to betray me.”
“Kristen, listen to what you’re saying. You’re the one threatening to betray me.”
She scoffed and took off again. The trail marker emerged on the road, a weather-beaten sign with a map covered in squiggly trails and warnings of every kind: pack water, don’t litter, watch out for pumas. If you see one, make yourself big and tall and loud.
The first chunk of the trail was next to a gravel road. I’d go no farther than the big bend up ahead, I decided—not one step more. We climbed in silence for a moment.
“You are relentless, you know that?” Kristen cried. “You’re the most selfish person I’ve ever met. I’ve done everything for you, and it’s like the more I try to be there, to put your needs first, the more you turn away. Like I disgust you. I don’t know what you want.” She whirled around to look at me. “Tell me what you want.”
“I want Paolo to be alive!” I roared. The trail, flanked by cacti, had opened to a wide ridge on one side, and my voice echoed across a canyon. “I want to undo everything we’ve done. I want…I want Sebastian to be alive.” Tears rushed into my eyes.
Kristen’s eyebrows shot up. “He attacked you.”
“I know, but…”
I saw it then, my foot hammering against his ribs again and again and again. Without ambiguity, without doubt. I saw what I’d done. Stop. Stop. Stop.
“I didn’t have to kill him.” I lowered my chin and the tears broke free. The parched earth near my feet sucked up the drips.
Kristen placed a palm on my shoulder. We were too close to the edge, I realized. It was the kind of twisty mountain road you’d drive with your heart pounding, your eyes stretched wide to let it all in, your knuckles on the steering wheel white and bloodless.
“Yes, you did. He was a bad man. You had no choice.” Slowly, slowly, she brought her free hand up to my other shoulder. She pushed down a bit, like a coach giving his star player a pep talk. “But this is the problem. We’re bound by what we’ve done. As long as we’re both here and, and free—we’re both indebted to each other. There’s no way out.”
I was trapped. What flitted through my head in that moment wasn’t Ben’s harsh shove all those years ago, his arms right where Kristen’s were now and then the sharp push, the echoing clang of skull against wall. It wasn’t Sebastian’s hands, either, one against my mouth and the other mashing my wrists into the wall, rendering me as panicked and helpless as a moth in a net.
Instead I flashed to my father’s hands, huge against my tiny frame, grabbing me so suddenly my little legs were still midstride and then smacking my bottom in one swift, discombobulating move. A casual spanking, an automatic, unthinking motion, like hitting the Off button on a noisy toy. I didn’t even have time to stop singing the song I’d learned from Lamb Chop’s Play-Along.
