We Were Never Here(19)

“Go ahead,” I said after a confused, waiting moment.

“You should get out here.”

Cold splashed through my insides. “What? Why?”

“C’mon. Figure out which hill we should be climbing and make sure there are no signs of life—fencing or sheds or anything.”

“You’re going to leave me here alone?”

“Just for a minute. We’re going to lose our sense of where to stop otherwise.”

I stared at her, my heart thrashing.

“Emily, we don’t have all night. Can you please just do this?”

Wind whipped around the brush and through her open window, a hushed, zipping noise. It mingled with the warmth of the car, and with the oxygen churning in and out of my body, my chest heaving as if I’d run a marathon.

Okay, I thought, then realized it was aloud. “Okay. Okay. Okay.” I reached for the door handle and held my breath as I pulled. The dome lights flicked on, spooking us both. Kristen looked pale and childish in the sallow glow.

“I’ll be right back,” she murmured. “Aim your flashlight at the road when you see me.”

I nodded and stepped into the frigid darkness. I swung the door shut and she drove off into the night.

I was alone. The space around me was like something solid, chilled air and night sounds and the cosmos pushing in on me, vibrating on my lips, my scalp, my eardrums. I felt a sudden instinct to pierce it all with a wild scream. Instead I squeezed my fingers into fists and watched Kristen’s taillights shrinking in the distance. They hooked to the right, then disappeared altogether.

    The cold air felt charged and fear mushroomed inside me, a huge desperate thrash. I’d be left alone forever; the whole world had evaporated and it was just me, alone in the Earth’s wrinkled fold. The sky overhead was too bright, too high, too deep. I clicked on my flashlight and swept the feeble beam onto the soil behind me. I wished I had my phone—its light put this one to shame—but Kristen had insisted we leave them at the hotel; even in airplane mode, she said, a phone was traceable, chattering with satellites in the night sky.

Over the last few days, we’d learned what a strange swatch of land the Elqui Valley was: tropical trees and bright flowers on bar patios, fields of tender vegetables stretching from one mountain base to another, but beyond that, an arid moonscape, mountains coated in pebbly gray-brown. The streak of green narrowed in points, like here, where the valley oasis was only as wide as the highway and a few roadside shrubs; in every direction, I saw sloped hills covered in desiccated dirt and the occasional rock. We’ll have to cover our footprints, I thought, and bent to find a bough that’d work as a makeshift broom.

Pinpricks of light in the distance, and my shoulders eased. Only now did I let myself indulge the hellish vision: me abandoned, wandering this mountain road as my tongue grew parched. Kristen speeding toward civilization, alone except for the body in the trunk.

I pointed the flashlight at the pavement, and the pale disc of light shook in time with my hand. Kristen rolled to a stop and climbed out of the car.

“Did you find a good spot?” She crossed to me and put her hands on her hips.

“What? Oh, not really.” How long had she been gone? It’d felt like hours, like days, but I hadn’t actually done any recon. “It’s just sloping land in every direction. Did you see anything?”

“There’s a curve up ahead so I followed it for a while. No signs of anyone using this area. If we’re smart, we should be fine.”

I turned to face uphill. “There are a few big rocks. If we dig right behind one, it’ll be hidden from the road.” I held a boulder in the flashlight’s beam, and Kristen nodded and opened the car door. The shovels leaned against the back seat like awkward teenagers, and they clanged as Kristen yanked them out.

    We set off on the crumbly hillside. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. One task, then another, then another.

“It’s just after one,” I said. “If we want the car back at the hotel before sunrise, we have maybe five hours here.” Car in the lot. Shovels in the shed. Padlock on the door, hardware screwed back into the frame. Our things folded in our suitcases, the hotel suite tidy, like we’d never been in that room, this valley, this country. This quivering, epic nightmare.

“It’s enough time if we keep our heads.” She hesitated on a stone, then pushed off.

My heart boomed. I could feel her listening, waiting for me to add something. “We’re almost there now,” I murmured. “This is almost behind us.”

We climbed in silence, calves clenching, the ground sucking on our toes as we leaned against the pitch. My breath hitched from the hard work—the hard work and the horror.

It’d seemed easier in Cambodia. Or was that only in hindsight? I could remember scenes from that night, the hotel-room cleanup, the search for smooth stones to slip into his pockets. But I’d been numb, so numb. An abrupt cessation of feeling, like someone had switched off a lamp.

The real horror had come afterward, a cocoon of pain.

I froze and looked back toward the car. “Shouldn’t we have brought him with us?”

“What?” Kristen gave her head a little shake. “Em, we’ll find a spot and dig a hole. Then we’ll go back and get the backpack and everything. It’d be awkward to drag all that weight with us.”