We Were Never Here(2)
“That would be nice.” I’d thrown my name in the hat for a director-level position months ago, but my employer, Kibble, was disorganized and putzy and dragging its feet. I liked my job there, though, promotion or not: project manager of a start-up that shipped raw, organic cat food to pet owners with too much money. I had hip young co-workers, including my work wife, Priya, and cat photos literally everywhere.
Still, I didn’t tell Kristen that my secret wish, whenever I saw a shooting star or caught a dandelion fluff or spotted a clock at 11:11, was to land a great partner, settle down. It felt too antifeminist, too needy to put into words. But with Kristen halfway around the world and all my friends getting married (hell, having kids), my patience was wearing thin. And maybe I was finally headed in the right direction…
“He said they’re gonna start interviewing candidates this month,” I told her. “It’s funny, he acts like there’s no time to even think about the open position. Like he’s too busy saving the world, one feline digestive tract at a time.”
“Cat people are the worst people. I say that as a card-carrying cat lover stymied only by allergies.”
“I think his devotion is kinda sweet!”
Kristen snorted. “It’s an entire business predicated on people being obsessed with a disinterested animal.”
“Russell’s cat isn’t disinterested. Mochi loves him back. I’ve seen the videos.” Kristen rolled her eyes and I leaned forward. “C’mon, I like my job.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry.” She waved a hand. “Okay, now you go.”
“Right. My birthday wish for you, a full four months early, is that, hmm.” I tapped the stem of my glass. That you realize you hate Australia. That you move back to Milwaukee. That we go back to the way things were. “I hope you get your stupid boss fired and your job gets a million times better. Or you find a new job that makes you happy.”
“No fair, you just copied me!”
“This is what our thirties are all about, right? Vaulting forward in our careers. At least we have jobs.”
“True. And thank God we put that disposable income to good use.” She swept her arm out across the vines, whose pristine rows narrowed in the distance. Behind them, rumpled mountains reddened in the dipping sunlight. A bird landed on the edge of the distillery’s deck and uttered a squeaky trill. A cute sierra finch, yellow as an egg yolk—I recognized it from some idle research I’d done at my desk in Milwaukee.
Nearby, a thumping sound. It was probably a woodpecker, but before I realized that, the memory flashed before me: Stop. Stop. Stop. Kristen’s eyes wide as she stepped back, blood speckling her shoes. The moment that changed everything, when life cracked neatly into Before and After.
Kristen slid up her sunglasses and gave me an indulgent smile. I grinned back.
I’d been wrong to worry. Even the incident with the trio of Germans had been harmless. There’d been no strange men hulking in corners, their eyes following us hungrily. No drunken dudes who’d stood a little too close or followed too few steps behind us on darkened streets. No cause for alarm.
I gazed at Kristen and felt a rush of warmth.
Everything had gone perfectly.
A fat bee bumbled around our glasses, and Kristen waved her hand, fearless.
“Feels like we’re the only non-locals for miles,” I said. The isolation was both thrilling and unsettling.
“It won’t last. My guidebook says all the tourist buses arrive on Saturdays.” She stretched her arms, recrossed her muscular legs. Kristen had gotten into CrossFit in Sydney, and sometimes her limbs still looked off to me. Tawny and taut, like they belonged on another body.
Kristen had moved to Sydney eighteen months ago; her market research firm opened up an Australian office and her boss encouraged her to apply. To my dismay, she’d complied, murmuring about how she was over Milwaukee—her hometown—with its smallish size and polarized communities.
Kristen in Australia: It’d seemed like a whim, fleeting and outlandish. I didn’t know adulthood without her, from when we became friends as fellow econ majors at Northwestern to when we both found jobs in Wisconsin and shared a ramshackle apartment off Brady Street. Together we fumbled through our postgrad years, through bad dates and good job news and rough nights and even rougher mornings, until we emerged, fresh-faced and triumphant, in our late twenties, me with my very own apartment in the Fifth Ward, her a few miles away in Riverwest. We spoke casually of how we’d someday be each other’s maids of honor, how she’d eventually be my future children’s “auntie.” I’d grown to love Milwaukee by then, with its broad lakefront and myriad festivals and friendly little art-and-music scene, all of the talent and none of the pretension of larger cities. I’d tried hard not to take her digs at the city personally.
I’d been happy for her, of course, but almost glowing with self-pity: left out and left behind and left, left, left. I dipped into depression in her absence, forcing myself through life as if there were a layer of dust dampening every moment. But we kept up a tradition we’d kicked off in Milwaukee: annual trips to someplace exotic, far-flung places most people never put on their lists.
I’d only been to popular international destinations (London, Cancún, Paris…), so each vacation with Kristen felt like slipping into a wormhole and appearing in another dimension, dizzy with sounds and smells and sights. Vietnam had been first, Hoi An and Hanoi, exploring tube houses and night markets and elaborate temples, more colorful than a field of poppies. Then Uganda, all our savings poured into once-in-a-lifetime experiences that piled up like snow, miraculous at first and then oddly normal: staring into the marble eyes of gorillas in Bwindi, boating past Nile crocodiles and bloats of fat hippopotami, clutching each other from the back of a jeep as a lion regarded us during a game drive in Kidepo Valley.