We Were Never Here(81)

“This is our first real lead,” Los Angeles Police Captain Miranda Sedivec said in a statement. “We’re grateful to Ms. Yagasaki for coming forward with vital information, and we encourage anyone else who can contribute to the investigation to do the same.”

     On May 1, the García family offered a $1 million reward for information about their son’s death. The family’s lawyer declined to say whether Yagasaki’s cooperation was related to the reward.

Quiteria, a small village with a population of 800, is primarily agricultural. It also welcomes thousands of tourists, mostly in the summer months (December through March), due to its scenic location in the Andes Mountains and its abundance of distilleries making pisco, a white-grape brandy. García’s body was found about 38 kilometers from Quiteria.

Friends in Barcelona described García as a fun-loving young man with a taste for adventure and a love of meeting new people. He was also a thyroid cancer survivor who participated in fundraisers to bolster cancer awareness and research.

“He could talk to anyone, anytime, anywhere,” Valeria Ramos, a friend from university, told Spain’s Agencia EFE news agency. “He could walk into a room full of strangers and make them all smile.”

If you have any information, please contact the Los Angeles Police.



Tiffany Yagasaki—she must’ve been one of the two female backpackers we’d seen at the restaurant, then again at the bar. An internal wail—Oh God oh God oh God—Tiffany and I had talked at the bar, had drunkenly grown chummy while Kristen flirted with Paolo a few yards away. Did she remember us? Had she told anyone? But the most devastating detail was in the first line, of course: Law enforcement officials from several countries are aggressively searching for his killer.

I had to tell Kristen. Without saying something stupid, obviously, something suspicious or incriminating.

I’d tell her to look at a newspaper—that wouldn’t look shady, would it? Although if anyone triangulated our whereabouts that April night and then combed through my messages later…

    I could feel it, the paranoia, growing inside me like a tapeworm, threatening to strangle my viscera.

A code—I’d do a simple one, one she’d quickly grasp but that no one else would notice. Checking again that no one around me was watching, I typed it out, then went back and filled in the words:

Hey Kristen,

I’ve been thinking about the last letter I sent. Just wanted to add that Raquel truly is a

dramatic wench—rude & myopic. Look, that bitch made even Alice grow speechless.

—Emily



Writing it stilled my racing thoughts, slowed my heart rate. The hard enter in the middle of the email, the meticulously crafted second line…Kristen, whose brain I’d once joked was practically fused to mine in a conjoined-twins situation, would know to read the last letter of each word in the second line: Check the news. I pushed my hair off my face and hit Send.

And then I realized I had no idea what I expected her to do. I was on a plane. I’d quite literally left her blubbering in her grandparents’ palatial home. I slipped my laptop into my bag. Though Chile was the more immediate concern, my thoughts flowed back to Cambodia.

For over a year, I’d been working hard to keep the images out of my head. Like an app running in a phone’s background, some part of my mind was always whirring: Keep it buried, keep it buried, keep it buried. Buried like Paolo’s body under the tawny dirt. Buried like Sebastian’s body in Tonle Kak River.

I’d felt so numb that night—this I remembered clearly, a visceral memory of my senses shutting down. With Sebastian’s wound still oozing blood, Kristen had yanked me into the bathroom and turned on the shower, letting steam bead and drip on the mirror and walls and flimsy shower curtain. I shook and shook, my shoulders like a jackhammer, my teeth chattering so hard they rattled my skull, they addled my brain, aren’t you never supposed to shake a baby because the brain will boing around inside their head? That’s what was happening to me as mist settled on my eyelashes, as vapors floated in translucent curls, as Kristen held my shoulders and pushed her forehead against mine.

    I jumped ahead to another scene, also wet and wan. My legs were like jelly and not just from the nerves this time: Together we’d dragged Sebastian up the short but steep hike to a lookout point, a cliff over the foamy waters of Tonle Kak. Thanks to the pollution, the night sky had an eerie yellow tinge to it, like bile. We’d visited this spot two days before, when it was pocked by tourists, young folks like us staging selfies at the cliff’s edge. I’d read aloud from our guidebook, taking on a newscaster voice, all arm flourishes and enthusiasm.

This spot was nicknamed suicide ridge, and we took turns trying to pronounce the many diphthongs and plosive consonants of the Khmer expression. Legend had it that this was where women, married or betrothed but miserable about it, had once loaded their pockets with shale rocks from along the path, then hurled themselves into the water below; though the forty-foot drop would likely do the trick, the heavy stones ensured they’d drown as planned.

We’d thought nothing of it that day, but in our hotel room’s bathroom, mist swirling and our skulls smushed together as if we could co-cogitate through osmosis, Kristen brought it up again. Or had I been the mastermind, the evil genius? Suddenly the boundaries between us were growing threadbare.