We Were Never Here(14)

“Emily.” I heard her walking toward me, toward us, one living person and one dead one. She paused, and her palm found my shoulder. “We have no choice.”





CHAPTER 6


The room disappeared as panic pulled me in like a riptide. I squeezed my eyes tight while gravity reeled around me and I begged, begged, begged the churning tugs to be a wormhole, a passage out of this nightmare.

Eventually the spinning slowed. I cracked my eyes open and the scene filled in, like a Polaroid developing: bright reds and yellows and oranges and greens crisscrossing the darkness, and people swarming around me, parting like I was a rock in a river. A night market—I was standing in the Phnom Penh night market, lanterns dangling in every direction and hawkers in a line selling noodle soup and cheap Cambodian magnets and jewelry dripping with sparkly stones, all bathed orange from the artificial light.

But where was Kristen? I looked out at the stalls and cook smoke and hubbub that unspooled into infinity. Then someone was touching me from behind, stroking my left arm with increasing urgency, and I jumped and whirled around, but no one was there.

“Emily.” Kristen’s voice strained with concern. But where was she? My heart thundered as I looked around, completing a full circle as people bumped past me, as hawkers shouted in Khmer, as teenagers horsed around and two backpackers argued in French and someone grabbed my arm again and I turned to try to catch them and—

“Emily!” Kristen was kneeling above me, clutching my arm and shaking it like a tambourine. I looked at her in wonder.

“Are you okay?” She touched my cheek. “Oh my God, that was so scary. You totally passed out. No, don’t try to get up. Are you dizzy?”

    I peered at her. We were in…Chile, that’s right, in our suite. And that meant…oh God…

“Your eyes rolled back and you slumped to the side, it was terrifying. Stay here, I’ll get you some water.” She scurried off, and I saw the sight that’d knocked me out the first time: Paolo with his doll-like eyes and cratered, weeping skull. I scrambled up to a sitting position and backed away.

“Here, drink this.” She thrust a cup toward me. Her hand was trembling so hard that a patter of drops sloshed over the side.

I took a sip. Thoughts pinged: We could still call the police. How did this happen? What is it about us that this horrible thing happened twice? There’s no way we’ll get away with this a second time. What’s her plan?

“Kristen,” I whispered. “What do we do?”

Her expression drooped toward the floor like melting wax. She crawled over my knees and toward the bathroom, and the retching sounds were so loud, I thought crazily that the noise might wake the neighbors. Never mind the deadly battle I imagined these walls had just absorbed.

I gathered my limbs and climbed to my feet, swaying for a second before following her. I willed my own nausea to freeze in place as I rubbed her back.

“Oh, Emily, I was so scared,” she wailed into the toilet bowl. “It was so sudden, he was being too rough and—the look in his eye…” She gave up trying to talk and I swiped at the tears surging down my own cheeks, hot and raw. I knelt to hug her, our torsos shaking in tandem.

The realization was like a car tearing toward me on the road: You have to step up. You need to pull it together. We haven’t got much time.

“Okay.” I skated my thumb across a tear on her cheek. “We need to think.” I tipped my forehead against hers, exactly as she’d done for me that night in Cambodia. “We could…we could call the police?”

    Alarm blazed in her eyes. “Why would the police here be any better than the police in Cambodia? I’m not going to prison in Chile.”

“We’ll tell them what happened.”

She glanced toward the living room—so much blood—and shook her head urgently. “They won’t believe us.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You could barely communicate well enough to get us checked in.” Her eyes glistened. “The cops will throw us in a cell until they can figure out what’s going on and…and…”

Something rushed up through me, a shriek or sob or bile. “Kristen, this is insane.” My heart beat like a drumroll and my breath sprinted past it, tight and quick and too high up in my ribs. My lungs were on fire, squeezing like two fists.

Concern bloomed on Kristen’s face. “Breathe, Emily.”

Inhaler, I mouthed, unable to muster even a whisper. She bolted into the living room and returned with my purse, and frantically I dug until my fingers closed around the periwinkle plastic. I lifted it to my lips and inhaled the tiniest stream.

Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Exquisite relief as the vapors worked their way into the air sacs. Seven. Six. An internal release, like a tourniquet loosening. I finished the countdown and took another eager dose, puffing my chest and noticing Kristen’s worried expression, her hand on my arm. Rust-colored speckles mottling her skin. We locked eyes as I counted down a second dose, time frozen for ten infinite seconds until I exhaled again, loudly.

“I’m okay.” I pulled away from her. “I don’t understand. How could this happen again? Wasn’t once enough?”

“I don’t know, Emily. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Are you…do you think it’s something I did? That I was asking for it somehow?”