We Were Never Here(18)
“I can see enough,” she replied. “I’ll turn on the headlights as soon as we get around the corner.”
“The last thing we need is to go over the side.” A laugh rose through me, neon and hysterical. I turned it into a cough and Kristen glanced at me sharply. “I’m fine.”
The engine seemed impossibly loud, a tank trundling through the silence. Of course, it had to work harder with a 180-pound man in the trunk. Another 40 with his backpack and belongings over and around him. We were lucky he had his bag with him, that he hadn’t checked in anywhere yet. If he’d left all his stuff in a hostel, surely—
Kristen ignited the headlights, then slammed on the brakes. A creature sat in the road, about a foot long, with rippling gray fur and enormous eyes. A rabbit—no, a chinchilla. It fixed us with an accusing stare, then sauntered over to the shoulder. Kristen exhaled and took her foot off the brake. I watched it through the window until its outline melted into the charcoal night.
I kept feeling its obsidian eyes on me, judging, seeing. The incident in Cambodia had felt improbable, out-of-body, the kind of thing that happened in movies and true-crime podcasts but not to me. And yet here I was, blackened by a lightning bolt a second time.
In Phnom Penh I’d been useless, shaking and crying and chattering at the jaw so violently that Kristen had cloistered us in the bathroom with the shower running, the steam turning my cheeks pink and drawing blood back into my hands and feet as if hypothermia were the real problem. She’d pulled it together, because she needed to. Remembered the rushing water of Tonle Kak, the spooky stories of women filling their pockets with rocks before flinging themselves off a cliff, hoping for a riptide. A disappearance if we were lucky, a probable suicide if the body turned up. The plan was harried and haphazard, but it had to work. It had worked.
Now Kristen clung to the wheel, her chin strained forward, the same posture she adopted when she drove through a blizzard. The reel of horror stories looped in my head again, unlucky Americans locked up abroad, and a new thought sent terror up my arms: If someone connected this to Sebastian, we’d be doubly, irreparably screwed. We couldn’t bring Paolo back to life, and just like in Cambodia, our priority must be making it home without leaving breadcrumbs behind.
Kristen hit the brakes in the middle of the street. I glanced around for a stop sign I’d missed. When I turned to her again, she was slumped against the steering wheel.
“This isn’t going to work,” she said, her voice muffled.
A stab of fear. “What?”
She looked up at me. “There are no trees, not even shrubs. We’ll be totally exposed. There’s nothing but red dirt.” She tipped her face back down and a drip hovered on the end of her nose.
A rushing sound filled my ears and I felt cold again, my shoulders and jaw tensing. She’s right. What the hell did I know about evading law enforcement, about ditching a goddamn body? It was hopeless; we were done for.
But then I looked at Kristen, sagging in the driver’s seat, and tenderness sprang up in my chest. I knew how she felt; my brave, beautiful best friend had just been attacked.
I blinked hard. She’d done this for me in Cambodia—I could dig deep, channel her confidence. Be there for her like she’d been for me. “The nothing—that’s why we’re safe,” I said. “There’s nothing out there, so no one will stumble onto the spot where we dig. No hikers or, or campers with their dogs or farmers or alpaca herders or anyone else.”
She wiped her silvery tears and nodded. The car began to move, imperceptibly at first and then with mounting assuredness, as if it, too, were growing in resolve.
There was only one road in and out of Quiteria, as well as all the towns before and after us, a twisty two-lane highway slithering through the valley like a lizard in the shade. I thought back to when we’d first trundled onto it, after a few confused loops around Santiago: flat, open road, how sunlight had beamed into the windshield, as cheery and charmed as the Latin pop Kristen found on the radio. Everything was blasting that day: the bass through the speakers, the sun through the windows, our zippy sedan down an endless road.
Neither of us remembered seeing any side roads up into the mountains—just sudden grids of streets when the road bloated up into towns and villages. Now we were in a barren stretch, with signs placing the next town at eighty kilometers away, and Kristen tasked me with looking for a swath of mountain we could walk out into, something remote and forgettable, and not near farmers’ fields. It was hard work, not least because I was also keeping an eye on the clock: We’d been driving for a half hour, and we needed plenty of time to get back and return the shovels before the sun rose. It was already after one, and the sun would be up at seven. And though I’d never dug a grave, I assumed it would take hours.
“What about here?” I said, so quietly I had to clear my throat and repeat myself. Kristen eased the car to a stop and opened her window. The cold rushed in, eager and uncaring. Foothills loomed on either side of the road, ragged outlines blotting out the stars. There were a few bushes near the road and a smattering of skinny pines, but no sound for miles.
“This could work,” she said. “I’ll drive down and see if there’s a big curve ahead—we don’t want another car appearing out of nowhere.”
We hadn’t seen another soul all night, but it was a smart thing to check.