We Were Never Here(80)

The song finished with the unhinged shrawww of an electric guitar, and the peppy morning-show DJs sprang into action:

    So, Dave, I’m sure you’ve been hearing about this twenty-four-year-old backpacker whose body was found in Chile.

Oh, everyone’s got a theory. Last week I heard someone say they thought aliens were involved, since that region is famous for its UFO activity.

What I can’t get over is that the parents are—



“You know what’s wild?” Aaron pointed at a speaker. “This dude disappears, probably got himself twisted up in some shady shit. Drugs or whatever. But no one wants to say that—it’s gotta be aliens who are responsible, nothing he could’ve done. ’Cause he’s a dude. Like, remember Natalee Holloway? It was all: Well, why did she leave her friends? And why did they let her go off with a guy she didn’t know that well?”

    It was like all my cells were firing at once and I coughed, an ugly bark, then flipped to a different station.

“Sorry,” I said. “It just freaks me out. Thinking about…scary stuff happening to tourists.”

“Naw, that makes sense. I know you just visited there.”

I willed myself to say something, anything else, but I couldn’t. Finally, he sealed off the topic: “Well, nothing to worry about in the mean streets of Phoenix.”



* * *



—

Aaron ate a gummy before boarding and fell asleep shortly after takeoff. I didn’t want to risk growing (even more) paranoid while in a tin tube improbably sailing through the sky, so I didn’t partake. Solo travelers flanked us on either side, a beefy guy in a Packers hat next to me and a businesswoman next to Aaron, tapping away on her laptop.

The Chilean number hadn’t left a voicemail, but it had called again while we were on the tarmac. I pressed my fingers against my lips, as if to keep from screaming. I thought of Sebastian in Cambodia, his calloused palm against my mouth. Adrenaline coursing through my arms, muscle tissue firing as I fought against his grasp. The penny taste of blood when my teeth closed around his flesh. Had a bit of it come out in my mouth? Had I spit it out in a glob of bloody phlegm as he swore and pulled his hand toward his heart, or had I invented that detail now, in hindsight? The brain is an artist, after all—remixing, shape-shifting by the minute. Editing the feed so that I could convince myself that Kristen, not me, had kicked his trunk, forced his head up against the leg of the bed.

We hit some turbulence and the captain turned on the seatbelt sign. Aaron stirred and went back to snoring, but the woman to his right gripped her armrests and gasped when the plane made a belly-flipping dip. Another rustle of concerned murmurs as the plane jerked again, hard enough to make the tray tables jump.

Turbulence had never bothered me. It was just the plane hurtling through pockets of wind. Me, I preferred to obsess over realistic fears.

    Aaron nestled his head on my shoulder, and I leaned my cheek on his silky hair. My eyes flicked to the screen next to me, where Baseball Cap was flipping through stations of live TV with an aggressive tap, one surely felt by the woman in front of him. He stopped on CNN and I read the ticker crawling along the bottom, an endless feed of fires and invasions and shootings. Above the scrolling headlines, two literal talking heads, a Barbie-esque woman and a man with a handlebar mustache, were discussing an entirely different topic.

And then I saw it. It sucked me down like an open hatch in deep space.

The headline snaked across the screen, right to left, so quickly I thought maybe I’d read it wrong, transposed the letters, conjured up the string of words I feared the most. I felt cold all over, my shoulders and jaw and hands all tensing, and Aaron sat up in his seat and slumped in the opposite direction.

I whipped out my laptop and jabbed at the On button; the hard drive seemed thick and logy as it booted up, different screens appearing and wheels turning languidly. After what felt like hours, I connected to the inflight Wi-Fi. Another short eternity as I waited for CNN.com to load.

I had to scroll down to find it, my eyes devouring the endless headlines, the blue-tinged photos of politicians and pro athletes and health crises and brutal devastation.

And there it was, eight bolded words on the left-hand side, <strong> in code.

Witness Comes Forward in Search for Backpacker’s Killer





CHAPTER 35


    Los Angeles police are focusing on a small farming town in Chile as the last known location of a young man killed while backpacking, and law enforcement officials from several countries are aggressively searching for his killer.

On April 25, the body of Paolo García, age 24, of Barcelona, Spain, was found near Arroyito in a shallow grave about 25 meters from the road, according to reports. He had been missing for approximately four weeks before his body was found. Although a suspect has not been named, a witness claims she spotted García in Quiteria, a remote mountain town, on the night of April 13.

“I can’t believe it. We met in a crowded bar and talked about meeting up for a stargazing tour the next night, and I was surprised when he didn’t show up,” said Tiffany Yagasaki, a British woman who was also backpacking through South America. “I didn’t think about it again until I saw his photo in an article about his body being found. It’s so shocking—he seemed friendly, and everyone at the bar was just chatting and having a good time.”