We Were Never Here(23)

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It was a ten-hour flight to Atlanta and, in the second-to-last row, my body throbbed through all ten of them. It felt right, like my horror and guilt and sadness had taken physical form, swept through my muscles, bristled my nerve endings, turned my tendons taut. God, it hurt. Had it been this bad after Cambodia? No—I’d been so numb from being attacked myself that my brain hadn’t let me feel it, the soreness, the misery. Kristen’s body must have felt then like mine did now, all agony and aches. She never mentioned it. God, what a selfless friend she was, the crosshairs of her attention squared on me, my pain, my flailing attempts to cope.

After a short eternity, we slammed onto the tarmac and I rushed to check the news: still nothing about a missing backpacker. But that could change at any moment. This was my life now, forever waiting for not one but two shoes to drop.

I shuffled up the aisle, taking in the mess we’d made of the plane. One hundred and fifty feet of bedlam, of an aircraft in shambles as we ambled away from our titanic tin-can trash can. Blankets matted and crumpled, limp greens and errant cherry tomatoes mashed into the aisles, trash splattered like street art over every available surface. We’re all disgusting, every single one of us. Making messes and then wandering away.

    Except that Paolo paid for his sins with his life. What was this stupid voice rushing to pity Paolo, a bad man, a would-be rapist? Before I could stop it, I pictured his lifeless legs, the skin cool and knobby, sliding over bones and tendons as we rolled him onto the shower curtain. Was there a girlfriend he was cheating on back home? A friend somewhere else on the globe planning to see him a few months from now, wondering why Paolo was never on WhatsApp anymore?

I shoved the thoughts aside as I waited for passport control. Welcome to America, a banner screamed. One more flight to go, but I’d done it—I’d made it out of Chile. I couldn’t believe it, kept waiting to blink awake and discover I was still in the Santiago airport, feeling my heart beating in my fingertips.

At my gate, I sat in a worn fabric chair and peeled open a granola bar; it tasted like sand. My mind kept returning to the sudden desert rain, the way your tongue wants to push against a toothache. It wouldn’t expose our shallow grave, would it? No one noticed Paolo chatting with us on the patio last night, did they? The two shiny-haired British girls, the bartender who saw me freaking out about my missing wallet…had we made an impression on any of them? The light blaring on in a window as we sealed the flashlights and shovels back in the shed—that was a coincidence, not a witness, right? Had we cleaned the floor of the suite thoroughly enough? We’d only seen it in the hazy morning light—what if the midday sun was like a spotlight on broad bloodstains we’d missed?

My phone buzzed and I blinked at the text for a minute before it made sense. Aaron, sweetly remembering my return date: “Safe travels today! Remind me when you get back?”

Discomfort buzzed in my hands and feet. The desire to see him, to kiss him, was visceral and thick, but…but what now? I’d always had trouble being vulnerable with guys: unwilling to let myself get excited about them, or—on the rare occasions I did fall hard—braced for things to fall apart. And now? How could I possibly open up and be real with this massive secret encircling me like a moat? Sure, I’d kept Cambodia from him, but by the time we started dating the attack was in the past, the scar tissue gnarled and delicate but there, atop a wound I didn’t want to talk about. Keeping this—this fresh trauma, this clear and present terror—from him felt different.

    Aaron thought I was just your average Midwestern gal, gentle and sweet. Could I really look him in the eye and pretend everything was normal now? I had finally emerged from the nightmares and panic attacks of Cambodia—and now Paolo had opened a trapdoor and spilled me back at square one. I was angry, and it was uncomfortable. Nice girls don’t walk around with anger brewing in their chest. With blood on their palms and dirt under their nails from participating in their own late-night horror story.

Around me, everyone was too loud, too rambunctious—kids screeched and climbed, people brayed into their phones, teenagers giggled, a mom yelled. A screen was blasting the news, with no one watching it: wildfires in the Amazon, a drone strike in Syria. I’d heard once that TV news hits airports on a delay, so they can cut the stream if a story involves a hijacked plane or an active shooter in a terminal. Edit the feed to limit mass hysteria. Maybe something was happening in the air right now.

Edit the feed to limit mass hysteria. Was this something I could do, for internal hysteria? Somehow snip out the memories, one year apart, that threatened to send my world tumbling down? I wished there were a procedure, Eternal Sunshine–style, to erase the events’ fingerprints on my brain. Maybe I could learn to compartmentalize. Pretend everything was fine around my co-workers, my friends. On dates with Aaron. Christ, I so badly wanted to be normal around him, to joke with him and hold him and kiss him and, yes, have sex with him like a regular person—not the broken, guarded, secretive woman I’d become. Doubly so now. My stomach tightened and I unlocked my phone.

“Hey you! Landing around 5 so it’ll be a short eternity getting home in traffic,” I wrote. “How’s it going?”

Normalcy—we had to maintain it, had to behave like nothing was wrong. Like I hadn’t pushed dirt on top of a goddamn body in northern Chile.