We Were Never Here, page 3
I think about that moment a lot, when I patted Kristen’s arm and turned away. How it changed the course of our lives, Kristen’s and mine. How our path forked off and veered, leaving behind so many untouched threads funneling out of the center like a lace doily. One where I gave into the wariness and changed my mind, and Sebastian huffed off into the night. Or I rerouted on the spot and we made out in the bar or on a jungly street corner instead.
But as it was, on the knotted thread I followed that night, Sebastian and I left. As we were heading out, a camera’s light flashed the world away, and when we blinked through it I couldn’t tell who’d taken the shot—one we’d unintentionally photobombed in the little bar. I think about that picture sometimes, too, how someone has it likely locked away in the Cloud, unaware it’s of a missing person in his final public moments. It could be very, very bad if the right person came across it—connected the dots, turned it over to South African authorities. Who knows what else is unwittingly documented in people’s phones and hard drives and dusty photo albums, background noise that would swell with meaning to a different audience?
Sebastian and I walked together through the mosquito-choked air, hand in hand, and his palm slipped down to squeeze my ass as we got to the hotel’s front door. The on-duty employee was asleep on a lobby sofa, and Sebastian’s thumb stroked mine as we waited to be let in. Heat building in my groin, a sexy full-body kiss as soon as we were shut into the room.
The making out was hot at first: I discovered he liked to mix pleasure with pain, catching my lower lip in his teeth, raking my hair back with a sharp tug. Not my thing, but it was a turn-on to feel a bit like prey, so desirable he could barely contain his animalistic urges. And I’d had enough sex education over the years—quizzes in magazines and wine-fueled talks with friends—to know that the way to Blow His Mind, to Be His Best Ever, is to show that you’re into it and read his nonverbal cues. So I gave his blond hair a yank. Turned a neck kiss into a bite. Ran my fingertips over his bare back and abruptly curled my fingers, ten tiny scratches, and smiled against his lips when he moaned with pleasure.
But then—something changed.
And that’s where my brain wants to haze out, switch to another channel. Stop. Stop. Stop.
The sensation of his mouth on my nipple tipped into pain. I gasped and pushed at his cheek, and he moved to kiss me again. Then his fist closed around my hair and tugged so hard tears pricked my eyes. I was surprised and dim, “Hey, not so rough.”
He smiled again, his movements still smooth. “C’mon, we’re just having fun.” His teeth found my earlobe, bit down until I yelped.
I sat up against the headboard. “You’re hurting me.”
“You’re so fucking sexy.”
“I’m serious.” I swatted his hand away from my breast.
He moved as quickly as a Venus flytrap, snatching my wrist in his palm. “You’re going to make me work for it, huh?”
“We’re done.” I clambered off the bed. “I think you should go.”
His eyes hardened. “You’ve been leading me on all night.”
A tear snaked from my eye, but I kept glaring, kept acting tough. “You need to leave.”
But then he reared back and slapped me. “Or maybe this is how you like it?” Shock crystallized on my cheek, the pain like the peal of a bell.
An icy plunge as lust turned to fear, survival mode, fight or flight. I pushed him away, blindly, desperately, and my hand caught his jaw—an accidental punch. Nostrils flaring, he shoved me against the wall by my throat—thwock, a clang against my skull—and my fingers flew to his knuckles, trying to peel his palm back from my neck. His other hand reached down and yanked my underwear to the top of my thighs. I felt an odd pulse of shame, like the moment in a dream when you realize you’re naked.
His hammy fist encircled my wrists and jammed them against the wall over my head—like I was a witch tied to a pyre. I remember this moment in impressions: his hips pinning mine against the wall, his dick pushing up against his shorts. The smile on his sweaty face, the cruelty in his eyes as I started to scream. His free hand lifting in slow motion, then flying up against my mouth. The back of my head slammed into the wall again, harder this time—the same sharp crack from that time with Ben, eight years earlier—and I saw a flash of fuzzy white.
He paused then, and I stopped struggling. Scuba diving—that’s where my mind went, zooming off as if underwater. Kristen had wanted to try it in Vietnam years earlier, and I’d said no because I’d read once that divers die not from running out of oxygen, but from disorientation—they panic and remove whatever’s in front of their nose and mouth. That’s what I thought of as Sebastian concentrated all his weight into my jaw: something in front of my mouth, something I desperately wanted to rip away, but I knew I was screwed either way.
He’s going to kill me.
“Emily!”
We both froze. He turned to look at the door, and though I couldn’t turn my head, I felt the pressure ease. Anger surged as I parted my lips and bit down on a knob of calloused flesh, harder and harder until the tang of iron hit my tongue.
“Fucking bitch!” He released my wrists and stepped back, clutching his bleeding palm. The lace of my underwear cut into my thigh as I brought my knee up, and I surmised from his groan that I’d hit my target. He grabbed his crotch and fell onto me.
A clanging sound and his body moved again, and I scrambled out from under him. Kristen stood above us, chest heaving, teeth bared, a real-life Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She was clutching a heavy standing lamp like a bat, and as I scooted back on my butt she swung it again, and with a sickening thunk it connected with Sebastian’s back. He collapsed to the ground, his head thudding against the floor an inch from a leg of the metal bed frame.
I saw my fury echoed in Kristen’s gaze; for a moment, we locked eyes. Then I detected motion before I could even process it.
“Stop. Stop. Stop.”
I see it in flashes, as if through a strobe light: Sebastian’s head up against the bed frame. Three kicks, four, blood staining the metal leg and pooling into the cracks in the laminate floor. I grabbed Kristen and dragged her away and into a hug. We leaned against each other, shaking.
We stayed like that for a while. Seconds, minutes, possibly hours. Motorbikes streaked past the cheap drawn curtains, a flash and a roar. Sebastian was still. It was Kristen who pulled away first. Her eyes were clear now, narrowed. Her voice was strong.
“We have to get out of here.”
She thought aloud, walked us through our options. She floated the idea of calling the cops: This was clearly self-defense, after all. But our guidebook had brought up the difficulty of working with police here, and I knew from that time with Ben that reporting assault—a move I’d considered then and several times in the months afterward—is more complicated than most people realize. The last thing we wanted was to wind up in a Cambodian jail cell, passports confiscated, accused of murder. We’d seen Brokedown Palace and read about Amanda Knox.
I was shivering and incoherent, but Kristen was magnificent. She checked for a pulse and, finding none, made a plan. Preposterous luck amid an otherwise unlucky night: The barely manned front desk hadn’t looked at our passports when we’d arrived, and we’d prepaid in cash. The bartender had overheard a “Nicole” and a “Joan.” Sebastian had been traveling for nine months, on an open-ended vagabonding tour—and like us, he was proud to eschew social media or regular phone calls home.
We’d weigh down the body, she announced, and heave it over a nearby cliff into the rushing river below. Cover our tracks. Leave Phnom Penh before anyone knew anything was wrong. I felt numb, the tingly kind, as if someone had hooked me up to an IV of Novocain. Kristen and Emily would never dispose of a body, but somehow, Nicole and Joan could. They did. The ensuing hours were a movie montage I will my mind to never, ever cue up. They were grueling and cruel, leaving me sore for a week, but Kristen was tireless, her jaw set, her expression determined. I did exactly what she told me, and miraculously, it worked.
When it was done, we took a bus to Laos, silent and sleepy the whole ten-hour ride, and spent the last few days keeping a low profile in a two-star hotel there. I don’t remember the flight home, the cab ride from the airport, the sleepless night before I returned to work. I kept seeing Sebastian’s skull, dented where it’d met the bedframe’s leg, blood forming an oval like a ruby-colored speech bubble.
I was a mess. My brain felt fuzzy and opaque, coated in black mold. At night I fell into gnarly, restless ten-hour sleeps, and during the day I burst into tears at random. Some mornings I slept through my alarm and wandered into work midday, my eyes puffy and unfocused. I went entire days without eating, then woke in the night with my stomach cramped and empty. My manager warned that if I didn’t get it together, they’d need to let me go. I stared at him blankly, too broken to care.
Sebastian shouldn’t have died: I didn’t support the death penalty and certainly didn’t fancy us vigilantes, taking justice into our own hands. It was an accident, self-defense that went too far. But I didn’t regret getting rid of his body instead of calling the police; I’d come to believe it was our only choice. I did a deep dive on Americans who’d been arrested overseas—across the board, their lives were ruined. A woman from Oregon spent years awaiting trial in Argentina for fatally pushing her pickpocket into traffic. A jailed spring breaker from Virginia insisted he had nothing to do with an attack on a restaurant hostess in Acapulco. So many travelers battling to get home or whiling away their youth in dingy cells. Horror stories, the sickening thrill of that could have been me. But though the stories took the edge off the guilt, they didn’t relieve the trauma, the unfairness of it all. Why had the universe wedged us between Charybdis and Scylla’s sharp-toothed barbarity?
Shortly after we’d returned home, I told Kristen I wanted to talk to a therapist. Patient-client privacy, I reasoned. I knew she’d talked to a therapist as a kid, after her parents’ death, which made her the only person I knew who’d seen a shrink. I liked the sound of a paid, impartial, sympathetic ear. I was having nightmares, panic attacks, painful echoes of the helplessness, the all-consuming fear.
“I’m so sorry to say this,” she’d told me, the call tinny from its nine-thousand-mile journey. “But I don’t think anyone should know the connection between us and that guy.”
“Even if I lie about where and when and…and how it ended, obviously?”
A very long silence. “That’s not really how therapy works.”
“Didn’t it help you, though? When you were going through something…traumatic?”
“I was a kid—I’d lost my parents, and my grandparents had no idea how to talk to me. So Dr. Brightside helped me, like, learn some coping mechanisms. But you’re resilient, Emily. You’re strong as hell. I know you.”
A long silence. Finally: “Was her name really Brightside?”
She snorted. “So on-the-nose, right? Looking back, that must’ve been a nom de plume.” When Kristen spoke again, her voice was soft. “I just want you to be happy. And healthy. You should do whatever you need to do to make that happen.”
But I did see her point. “I know you’re right. I can’t think straight. I’m still processing.”
“It will get easier, I promise. And until then, I’m totally here for you, anytime, day or night. I wasn’t sure if you wanted to talk about it, so I didn’t bring it up, but I’m here.” Bubbles back in her voice: “I can totally be your Dr. Brightside.”
“How does nothing get under your skin?” I tried to say it playfully but landed somewhere between hurt and jealous.
“I don’t want you to think I’m not listening. I hear you, I swear I do.” She infused the words with urgency, and I found myself nodding. “I’ve been struggling since then too. Of course I have. But what always grounds me is knowing you’ve got my back, no matter what. And I’ve got yours. We’re here for each other. Right?”
I didn’t yet know how much she meant it. How, in the weeks and months that followed, she’d call me every single evening—her morning, before work—to check in, to ask how I was feeling, to talk me down or champ me up or catch me off guard with something so funny I couldn’t help but feel like me again. On weekends she stayed on video calls with me for long stretches—once her entire night, a full ten hours—and watched movies with me, ordered food for me, sent services to pick up my laundry and clean my sad, sticky kitchen and do all the things she’d do in person if she could. I knew if she were there she’d be spooning the udon down my throat, tenderly washing my hair and clipping my nails. When she said she’d be my Dr. Brightside, I didn’t yet grasp how she’d save me, piece me back together yet again.
But I knew that she meant it—that she was there for me, come hell or high water. A sob rose and I cleared my throat. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” I told her, tear-stained and almost catatonic in my darkened living room.
She chortled. “Let’s hope we never have to find out.”
CHAPTER 4
“So I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.” Kristen set down her fork and leaned her elbows on the table.
I took a sip of my Carménère, grassy and dark. Chilean wine was consistently delicious. “Oh yeah?” Funny—I was just about to tell her about Aaron.
“I didn’t want to bring it up right away. I wanted to…feel you out first, I guess. But I’ll just come right out and say it.” She spread her palms and I watched them, slow-motion, how her fingertips flared. My innards compressed. It has to do with Cambodia.
Then she pierced the dramatic pause: “I think we should travel the world for six months. Starting this summer. Your summer.”
It didn’t sink in. Like she’d spoken rapid Spanish and now stared expectantly. “ ‘Travel the world’?”
“You have tons of money saved from your cushy cat-food job,” she went on, “and I was thinking of taking a sabbatical at work. My sublet runs out in June. I’m totally serious, Emily. We could do this.”
I shook my head. It was strange enough to imagine Kristen on the underside of the globe, the lilt of her sentences morphing, a thick “roight?” peppering her speech. But Kristen was a trailblazer, an adventurer. I, stable, dependable Emily, simply paid her exciting world the occasional visit. Could I really put my life on hold now, when I was about to turn thirty and finally, finally seeing someone I liked?
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, which people only say when they’re about to insult you, “but what’s keeping you? You’re not tied down—you don’t have snot-nosed kids and a boring husband or a career that feels like your calling or a family you’re close with. Right?”
I bit my lip. She was mostly right: no siblings, a mom and stepdad in St. Paul, a dad and stepmom in northern Iowa, all out of touch for months at a time.
Kristen and I had bonded over this in college: While all our classmates seemed to call their mothers once a day, at minimum, we rarely spoke to our guardians. Around then, I started to realize why—I noticed how casually cruel my parents could be, dismissive and self-centered. Kristen’s grandparents, Nana and Bill, had raised her after her parents died when she was twelve, and though the couple always seemed nice enough when I met them, Kristen claimed Bill was a tyrant and Nana a ball of anxiety.
Kristen glanced around the restaurant and then hit me with a sparkly-eyed smile. I caught her exact meaning, best-friend telepathy: This could be our lives. Traversing the world together. Discovering wild corners of civilization, bathing ourselves in landscapes so surreal they belonged in space operas.
But: Aaron. Not that I should plan my whole life around someone I’d only been on four dates with. But.
She leaned forward. “I remember back when you and Ben broke up, you were like, ‘This is it—now my life can be huge. As expansive as I want it to be.’ ” Her hands shot out. “But…I know it’s different for me because it’s my hometown, but is Milwaukee really where you want to be?”
“I love Milwaukee. Unlike you, I really do love living there.”
“But you were the one who made it sound like an expansive life meant leaving the Midwest.”
“Hmm.”
The waiter appeared and Kristen asked what beers they stocked, and I tugged at a thread coming loose from my placemat.
The breakup with Ben: a knife in my psyche’s tenderest flesh. Banished to Kristen’s apartment, discombobulated and glum. At the time, my friend Angie, a plucky redheaded linguistics major I’d met in chess club, had shared the burden of nursing my broken heart, stepping in with ice cream and sympathy when I needed a break from Kristen’s screw-him MO. When, a few weeks after the split, Angie suggested it would be nice to go home for Christmas and have my mom “dote on me,” I burst out laughing.
“When I told her we broke up, all my mom said was ‘Huh, I was just starting to like Ben.’ ”
Angie’s jaw dropped. “She didn’t, like, ask what happened?”
“Why would she?” My folks, who’d divorced when I was a teenager, had met the physical requirements of Acceptable Child Rearing to a T and, come college, seemed relieved they no longer had to attend to my comings and goings.
Angie considered. “Well, I don’t know what she’s talking about—we all hated him.”
