We Were Never Here(15)

“No! No. That’s not what I meant.” My thoughts were all jangly, coming out wrong. Still, it tugged at me: Were we somehow attracting this kind of awfulness? Putting something out there to lure in the quick-tempered and dangerous? I didn’t think it was Kristen’s fault, not at all. Yet the coincidence couldn’t be ignored. “Are you sure we shouldn’t call the police? I can…I’ll walk to reception, maybe someone’s still there.”

    “No one at the hotel speaks any English.” She touched her fingers to her chin, smeared the blood there. “How will we explain it? What happened?”

I fished around for the words, but my brain was blank. Kill, die, attack, rape—the only translation I could pull up was sangre: blood.

“We’ll act it out,” I said, “show them your injuries.” My palm crept to my neck, where eggplanty bruises had sat swollen and angry for weeks after Phnom Penh. I looked at Kristen’s throat and saw nothing but Paolo’s blood on her alabaster skin. “What did happen?”

“He attacked me,” she said again. She shrunk inward, hunched her graceful shoulders. “He…he got handsy and I told him to stop and then he pushed my shoulders against the wall and I said, ‘Hey!’ and he said, ‘Cállate, puta’ and…” A tear leaked out. “He shoved me again so that the back of my head crashed into the wall. And I was fighting back and he started to close his hands around my throat. And I was terrified, obviously. Afraid for my life. So I reached out and grabbed whatever I could find and my hand closed around a bottle of wine and I swung it, hard, to get him away from me. I swung it without looking—I wasn’t aiming for his head.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said after a moment. “That’s…that’s self-defense.”

She squeezed her eyes closed. “It was last time too. They won’t believe me. No one believes victims. We’re stupid Americans. And I’m wearing booty shorts and a tank top without a bra and we got drunk of our own accord and I took this guy back to our hotel. Willingly, I invited him to my room. We talked through all this in Cambodia, Emily. Do you think it’s suddenly changed?”

I swiped my hand under my nose. She wasn’t wrong—all those how-to-stay-safe-while-traveling articles warned us not to dress provocatively, talk to strangers, leave a friend unchaperoned, bring an unvetted man into one’s room. Though I’d wrestled with the hornetlike thought after Cambodia—Was it something I did?—I couldn’t let Kristen do the same.

    Oh my God. How had this happened twice?

Her eyes popped open. “Remember what I said about Amanda Knox? Everyone attacked her—the media, the goddamn Italian police—because she liked sex and didn’t behave the exact way they wanted her to after a tragedy. Now, she’s a freaking pariah. Her name is synonymous with scandal. This would be a front-page story for months—it would ruin our lives.”

Kristen was right. As always. The horror stories were still fresh in my head: the kid locked up in Acapulco, the woman imprisoned in Argentina. And this was my chance, my turn to protect her like she’d protected me after Cambodia. To finally repay her for what she did for me. I was so tired and confused, and Kristen seemed so sure.

She and I had gotten tattoos together in Vietnam, tiny lotus flowers on our inner ankles. It was her third tattoo but my first. In the second before the tattoo gun had stung my flesh, the artist had looked up at me: Ready?

I felt that same wild rush now, the dark finality. The weight of the moment’s irreversibility.

“I…I guess we need to get rid of the body, then,” I said. “And clean up here.”

“Okay.” She nodded slowly, pulled away from me. “Okay, let’s think.”

“It’s dark.” I leaned against the tub behind me. “That’ll help us.”

“You’re right. That’s good.” She sat back. “Cover of darkness.”

“We’ll wear black.”

“Good.” She tipped her head back and closed her eyes. “But what the hell do we do?”

I reached out and flushed her vomit. We listened to the gurgle.

She glanced at me. “Can we drop it off a cliff?”

It. We’d both noticed the switch.

“Where’s there a cliff?” I asked.

“Next to the main road—it’s so steep.”

    “That’s a drop-off, not a cliff,” I pointed out. “They’ll find him as soon as the sun comes up.”

“You’re right.”

My mind had cued up a supercut, every disposing-of-a-body scene I’d ever watched. Noirs, reenactments, slick crime thrillers. “Isn’t there a dam?” I asked.

“A dam?”

“Someone mentioned it in Vicu?a. Where they dammed up the Elqui River.”

“Oh my God, you’re right.” She chewed on her lip. “We could—we could weigh it down. Like in Cambodia. Do you know where?”

I shook my head. “No idea. But I could look it up?”

“We’re not turning on our phones. Absolutely not.”

“Why not?”

“Because we don’t want anything definitively tying us here.”

We were trapped off the grid at the bottom of the world, on a different plane from our normal existence. The thought was another clanging bell: Shit, she doesn’t know I connected to the Wi-Fi to check my texts.