We Were Never Here(97)

But even as the news coverage intensified, Deirdre’s careful wording did the trick; officers stateside stopped pandering to the Garcías over a case that was never theirs to pursue. It was the Arizona Attorney General’s Office she was worried about—vehicular manslaughter, coercion, conspiracy. And I only cared about getting Aaron off the hook, innocent as he was. So we waited and watched. I wouldn’t speak up until either Aaron or I was charged, she decided—but we’d be ready if that happened. I admired it, the swift computations in her own area of expertise.

Kristen and I had been so worried about the media circus, about being crucified by the court of public opinion, but now I was in the middle of it, surviving. She’d called it onto us that Arizona morning, inviting it in like a congregation crying out for the Holy Spirit. Twenty-four hours a day, I shut out the sunlight, moving around my dim apartment while a swarm of spectators loitered beyond the drawn blinds.

    By the second month, it was getting to me. Aaron suggested I stay in his apartment while he recovered in a nearby hospital, but I needed space from him, as well, to sleep and think and grasp around at my feelings in the dark. Besides, I couldn’t imagine the awkwardness of sharing a bathroom with his roommate or the pang of picking up his scent everywhere, just the ghost of him.

Eventually, I boarded the Amtrak to Minnesota for an indeterminate stint with my mom and her soft-spoken, self-conscious husband. They believed me, thank God, and learned to scan the driveway for the glint of cameras, to screen their calls for reporters. Every time we crossed paths in the hallway or kitchen, they seemed surprised to see me, as if I were a seldom-used appliance they’d tucked into the attic.

I gave Priya the house number since my cell service sucked, and one night she called a little after eleven to check on me. My mother was furious the next morning, admonishing me for disturbing her slumber, and the familiar guilt crackled in my gut. But for the first time, Adrienne’s calm words came to me: You’re not responsible for other people’s actions. I told my mother it wouldn’t happen again but that the mistake was Priya’s, not mine. She clucked and walked away and I made a mental note to tell Adrienne during our next Zoom session.

Then, the following weekend, Mom made French toast for breakfast and asked, her voice gruff, what my Milwaukee friends were up to these days—her version of an apology. I accompanied her on drugstore and grocery runs, and one day she shyly proposed mother-daughter pedicures. And I thought maybe, without Kristen influencing me, isolating me, her voice mosquito-like in my ear, my relationship with my mom could change.

While I was away, Priya was on porch duty: Every few days, she swung by my apartment to collect the lavish flower arrangements stippling the porch. There were gift baskets, too, brimming with wine and snacks and chocolates, and Priya couldn’t believe I didn’t want them, didn’t even want to see photos or hear about them. They were all bribes from cable news programs, begging me for an exclusive, a tell-all, thirty minutes of pouring out my soul. Priya took the comestibles to work, and my former co-workers snacked on the pleas of producers everywhere.

    There was hate mail, too, and once, Priya arrived to find the word MURDERER spray-painted across my door. She called the cops, and my landlord, bless him, didn’t try to end my lease on account of it. I felt myself building up immunity to the vitriol, the judgment. These people didn’t know what really happened, all that Kristen and I had done. I never spoke up about Cambodia. I deleted the Dropbox photo, but Deirdre was unconcerned: No body, no victim, no crime, and even if the photo did surface on a search of Kristen’s hard drive, it’d fall to Cambodian authorities to pursue it—and they had no reason to waste resources on two foreigners, American me and South African Sebastian. The revelation was disorienting and absurd: Now that Kristen was gone, I had nothing to worry about when it came to Phnom Penh.

I told Aaron the truth, but otherwise I kept the secret locked inside. It was ours alone, his and mine, like those sunrises at Northwestern, gulping up the dawn while the rest of the world was asleep. We got away with it. And in a weird way, it was a relief to be free from the assumption that I was “Minnesota nice.”

Aaron quickly grew stronger, shattering the doctors’ expectations. We texted most days, with the occasional FaceTime: I told him about the remote projects I’d picked up in St. Paul, and he gossiped about the nurses and orderlies and fellow patients, who was flirting with whom. He wanted to talk more, but I told him that while I was there for him as a friend, I needed to pump the brakes on our relationship. I had to make sure I wasn’t trading one omnipotent idol for another, the way I had swapped Kristen in for Ben. For now, my decisions needed to be mine alone.

Nana and Bill’s lawyer informed me I would not be welcome at Kristen’s funeral—no surprise there. I imagined randos from her high school showing up in gray and black, titillated by the news trucks outside, the vague thrill of drama by proxy. I pictured Bill suspiciously eyeing all the “friends” Kristen had never made in her short lifetime. And Nana, her eyes at half-mast, knowing the truth. As if these years with her loose cannon of a granddaughter were simply borrowed time, a bizarre period before reality corrected itself.

    Aaron wasn’t welcome at the funeral, either, though it didn’t really matter. Now that he knew the truth, he grieved with me for Kristen but also for Jamie and Sebastian and Paolo, for Kristen’s young parents, snuffed out too soon. The hospital’s psychiatrist helped him find a therapist to deal with the PTSD—his mind, it seemed, had glommed onto that moment on the mountainside, the second when his girlfriend appeared in front of the car—and he was improving, dealing, growing.