We Were Never Here, page 23
My mind vaulted back to that night in Phnom Penh. All those times I’d replayed it, the flash in Kristen’s eyes, her lunging her leg back and then swinging it into his body…but no, now that she’d pointed it out, another voice was calling bullshit on that account. That wasn’t the real memory, just one I’d inexpertly pasted on top. Brains can do that, rewrite an ending—funny organs obsessed with self-preservation, with making oneself right. Now I could flick back and forth between the two scenarios, fake and real, the kick coming from her foot, from mine. Like a picture search in a children’s magazine. Scenario A and Scenario B: Spot the difference.
Right? Or was Kristen manipulating me? Maybe she knew if she said it confidently enough, if she looked at me hard like I’d lost my mind, I’d believe her. I’d convince myself I’d done it.
So much power. So much confidence. Confidence—that was another item on the list of traits the modern woman is supposed to exude. Not vanity, not Kardashian bluster, but a deep fearlessness, Lizzo Vibes, Beyoncé Power. Big Dick Energy. It was another trap: They want us fearless but also fearful, our swagger faltering when a passerby tells us what he’d like to do to dat ass. When a man pins you against the wall like a butterfly on a board. I’d felt so scared, and then, just as suddenly, so angry. I’d wanted to make Sebastian afraid. I wanted him to hurt like he’d hurt me.
Now the best thing I could do was act on a thought I’d had earlier: Get away. Put as many miles between myself and Kristen as possible so that I could think, dammit, without the constant fear of her popping into the frame. And I’d bring Aaron with me, lest she have any ideas about eliminating the inconvenient obstacle between her and me.
So I called him. Told him I needed to get away for the weekend, begged him to find someone to cover his shifts at Café Mona. I looked up travel deals as we spoke and one city called out to me, needled at my sense of déjà vu, though I wasn’t sure why. All the sunshine, maybe. No shadows in which to hide.
Aaron promised to see if he could get off work, and we hung up. Panic stretched inside me: What if he couldn’t? What if he backed out now? Would I book a solo trip, grab my things and run so that…what? I could sit in a hotel room and fixate over that murky night with Sebastian, alone?
Stop. Stop. Stop. An hour ago, I’d felt so sure it was in my voice. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, pressing until a spray of lime shot out against the black of my eyelids. Like the Northern Lights.
Finally, finally, my phone vibrated on the coffee table. All of my cells jumped a millimeter toward the sky.
But it wasn’t Aaron. It was Kristen, of course it was Kristen, always Kristen, Kristen, Kristen.
She’d texted, “I’ve been sobbing in my room all night. I can’t believe you.”
Shame swooped through me and I unlocked my phone to reply.
And then I paused. A commercial on the TV was blaring, an annoying jingle about the best wireless network.
Get away. It had been echoing in my head all evening. And yet I was about to engage, knee-jerk, and start the cycle all over again.
I set my phone back on the table. Picked up the remote next to it, cranked up the volume, and settled into the soft sofa behind me.
* * *
—
Aaron texted as soon as I stopped thinking about him: “Wen can cover for me. LET’S DO IT.” Several celebratory emojis, confetti and champagne. I closed my eyes and grinned, pulled the phone against my heart. Thank God.
But as I opened the booking site, doubts crept in. I’d have to pretend to be normal—not just normal, excited—twenty-four hours a day, as Aaron and I wandered the reddish streets and watched the sun dip over distant mountains and ate meals together, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
He texted me his birthday so that I could book our flights: God, I don’t even know his birthday yet. Would we travel well together—would he find me gross? What if I got hangry or sick or snappish or stressed? What if we got into a huge fight?
A fight. With Aaron. In our own oasis, a jumble of glass and steel in the middle of the sunbaked desert.
And then a new thought padded in, as sly and unassuming as a cat.
Is Aaron safe with me?
* * *
—
I woke to a string of texts from Kristen (“Can we talk?” “I really think we need to talk.” “Are you ignoring me?”) and muted the conversation before I even got out of bed. As I neared my desk after a meeting, I saw that my phone was ringing. I was about to snatch up the handset when I realized it was Kristen, one of the few numbers I knew by heart. I jabbed around in the phone’s settings until I found the Do Not Disturb function.
“It’s been ringing off the hook for the last hour,” the designer kitty-corner from me announced.
“Sorry about that.” My stomach tightened like a fist.
I was vacant-eyed in meetings, quietly replaying Sebastian’s final moments: Was that Kristen’s foot bashing into his ribs, or mine? If it was the former, why could I see it so clearly, feel the heavy thump of my toes meeting his flesh? Toward the end of the day, as I passed the floor-to-ceiling windows, an eerie feeling washed over me. I swiveled my gaze to Rogers Street below. Kristen would be out there, I knew it—facing the window, hands in her pockets, solemn and staring and still. The shot in a horror movie stamped with a sudden, dissonant chord.
I scanned the sidewalk through the budded boughs of trees, over the fruit-tree petals stippling the cement. There was a teenager, an old man with a cane, a frazzled-looking woman with a baby strapped to her bosom.
I turned and hurried on. Kristen wasn’t there.
* * *
—
On the drive home from work, my heart pounded at every red light. She’d stopped calling and texting around two, and this was worse, the sudden silence so loud it sizzled against my eardrums. I held my breath as I turned the last corner onto my street, braced to see Kristen out front.
But there was stillness, empty space. Even the birds closed their beaks as I let myself in, locking the door behind me. I was partway through yanking down the blinds when I started to laugh. Here I was, cowering in my own home like Kevin freaking McCallister in fear of my supposed best friend. The friend with whom I’d just spent four days in a remote cabin in the woods. Look what’s become of you.
Then I got a text from Kristen, the first in almost four hours.
My rib cage locked up and my fist flew to my mouth. Bad. This was very, very bad.
It was a screenshot of the tip line for the South African Police Service. Her caption: “Don’t think I won’t turn over that photo.”
CHAPTER 32
I called Kristen immediately, head pounding, jaw juddering like a jackhammer. The first ring cut out after a moment, and then we were both on the line, breathing at each other.
“So that got your attention,” she said.
The lies dripped out of me before I even had time to think—excuses, placations, supplications to please please please not be so mad at me. Natural as slipping out of a foreign language and into my mother tongue. “I’m sorry I missed your calls, it was so busy at work today, and I wanted some time to really think about what I wanted to say—”
“Just stop.” Her voice cracked. “Do you have any idea how awful I’ve felt for the past twenty-four hours? How deeply you hurt me?”
A javelin of guilt went through me, followed by a groundswell of indignation. My Achilles’ heel, the chink in my armor, the soft belly that made me curl up like a pill bug: You hurt me. Over and over, Kristen found it, exploited it, wielded it like a weapon. Like a bottle of Carménère wine, held aloft.
“Kristen, look,” I said softly. “I’m sorry I hurt you. But the photo of me and Sebastian—”
“We really need to talk.” Her voice was a machete, slicing off my words. “Can you come over?”
“What?” My chest tightened. “We’re talking now.”
“You know what I mean. In person.”
“We’re talking right now,” I said again. “I have a lot to do tonight. I’m going out of town tomorrow and I need to pack. I don’t see why either of us should drive twenty miles—”
“Because I don’t think this is a conversation we should have on the phone.” She didn’t quite clear her throat, but the ahem was implied.
I slammed my hand onto the couch cushion. Had Kristen always been this paranoid? Her insistence on squeaky-clean search histories and turned-off phones had always seemed sage—and in stark contrast to her cheerful chatter about our travels. The Instagrams she showed Priya, the easy patter with Aaron. She was the one acting brazen, like she wanted to get caught.
Now she sounded like a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, quivering under a space blanket and tinfoil hat.
“No one is listening, Kristen. No one is freaking tapping the phones of a couple of thirty-year-old white girls in southeastern Wisconsin.”
She scoffed. “What, you think I’m crazy? Do you think your phone just happens to only be listening when you say ‘Hey, Siri’? That it couldn’t hear every single word that came before?” Her voice had a quivering intensity, like a hunting bow pulled taut. “Or, or do you think it’s a coincidence that after someone mentions, like, a museum during a phone call, you start seeing ads for it? Think about it, Emily. Don’t be stupid.”
She had a point, but still I rolled my eyes. “Well, you sound pretty damn sketchy right now. If they weren’t listening before, they sure as hell are now.”
“Stop. This is serious. Just stop, please.”
Stop. Stop. Stop. I wished I could set up something like a police lineup, have her read the line in a hysterical pitch. Had it been her larynx vibrating that night, or mine? The thought rammed me in the gut and I curled over it, my palm on my stomach.
“Come over,” she pleaded, “or I’ll come to you. I don’t want to send the photo, but…you’re not leaving me much choice.”
“That’s how you want to handle this?” I said. “That’s the kind of friendship you wanna have?”
Silence, a long one, two cars playing chicken on a dark country road.
“I’m saying this because I actually care about our friendship.” Her tone was gravelly, preternaturally calm. “And you left me no choice.”
“Kristen—”
Now her words tumbled out, one lightning breath: “Be here in twenty minutes or I’m sending the photo. Don’t test me.” And then she hung up.
* * *
—
I flew down I-94, gravity building in my chest as if I were a meteor hurtling toward Earth. The air was steely and cold, with a charged, loamy smell, and the halos around oncoming headlights were obelisk-shaped, blurring my vision.
I began to change lanes and a semi blasted its horn, sending spiky adrenaline through my limbs. I swerved and gripped the wheel, then watched the Mack truck cruise by. The driver honked again, as if to further admonish me, and I cried out, my frustration mingling with the big rig’s basso honk.
I kept seeing the photo in the windshield, the bright headlights reminiscent of that camera flash, the bang of brilliance as Sebastian and I stumbled toward his demise. Sebastian, blond and broad and overexposed. Sebastian, who was still missing, his body food for sea creatures at the bottom of Tonle Kak.
Kristen’s voice, a whisper: Sebastian, whom you kicked until his skull yielded.
No. The exit sneaked up on me and I jolted into the right lane, slamming on the brakes as the ramp deposited me at a red light. My heart beat in time with my turn signal. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
I passed the darkened peak of King of Kings, and its stained-glass windows caught my headlights as I turned. Inside Nana and Bill’s subdivision, a glint of eyes watched from the curb: another rabbit, its black eyes protruding from the sides of its head. Was it a warning, a portent of doom from the hacked-up animal I’d seen Up North? I never did figure out what kind of predator left axlike gashes in the neck of its prey. The rabbit turned and scurried into a copse of spindly trees.
At Nana and Bill’s, I parked at the end of the driveway and spotted a figure in an upper window, watching me climb toward the front door. A rinse of fear at the sight of her—my best friend, my co-conspirator, my biggest threat. The silhouette turned off the light, dissolving into darkness, and when I steeled myself and reached for the doorbell, Kristen was already there, pale-faced and red-eyed behind the storm door.
“Hi.” I stood hunched, unsure whether she’d go in for a hug. Finally she held the door open for me instead. I hung my thin jacket on a hook inside.
“Can you leave your purse out here too?” She pointed at the foyer’s bench, and I rolled my eyes. Satisfied that the government wouldn’t be listening in on two girls having a heart-to-heart in one of their childhood homes, Kristen led me to her bedroom and closed the door behind us.
Her bed and dresser had been shoved into a corner, and several expensive-looking cardio machines were scattered like sculptures around the rest of the room. A weight bench crouched next to the closet, each dumbbell a gleaming weapon.
She plopped onto her bed, then whisked up a tissue and tossed it into a nearby trash can. The bin was already half full, physical evidence of her grief. Her hurt looked so genuine, so tangible. The appropriate response to learning your best friend has been investigating whether you’re a monster. Doubt prickled anew.
“Should we talk?” I sat on the corner and ran my palm across the smooth duvet.
She curled her knees to her chest. “You only came because I said I’d turn over that photo.”
Yeah, no shit. “I came because I care about you. That made me realize how much you really needed to talk, like, ASAP.” I swallowed. “Because you wouldn’t send that photo and my info to the South African police, right? You know that if someone called me in for questioning, I could name you too.”
She chewed on her lower lip. “But the evidence…it only leads to you.”
“What are you—” But then the truth rocketed through me. In Quiteria, I’d filled out the hotel check-in forms and handled the car rental. The photo from Phnom Penh was of Sebastian…and me. It was my name on all the forms, my face in the photo. It would be her word against mine.
I could claim she’d been involved, sure.
But I couldn’t prove it.
My vision blurred and gravity shifted. I breathed deeply until the room righted itself: Focus, Emily. I tapped her shin. “Tell me what you need—I want to make things right.”
Kristen heaved an unsteady sigh. “It’s such a mess,” she said. “I keep having nightmares that a bunch of guys with guns bust into my bedroom. Or that we’re back in the Elqui Valley with people chasing us around those hairpin turns. And sometimes…” She cried for a few seconds, tears plopping onto her blouse. “Sometimes I dream I’m back in our suite and Paolo is…that I couldn’t stop him. It’s so scary, Emily. I thought I understood what you went through in Cambodia, but I was wrong. It was so much worse.”
I was frozen, every nerve on high alert. Was she referring to the attempted assault? Or…or what came after, when she wrapped her fingers around a bottle of wine?
“What was worse than you thought?” I asked, my voice gossamer-thin.
“The…the trauma, I guess. That moment when he shoved me and my head hit the wall.”
Kristen exhaled with a constricted sigh, ujjayi pranayama in yoga. “I was scared in a way I’ve never been before,” she went on. “It’s like it changed me, irreversibly. You know how someone can drop acid and have a bad trip and then they’re just different from that day onward?”
“And that’s what it was like? An acid trip?” I needed her to clarify: Was she talking about the frightened instant or the one that followed, the one where she swung the bottle like a club?
The thought jabbed at me: If killing Paolo left her this rattled, she couldn’t have been the one to kill Sebastian…could she?
“That moment of fear,” she said, “it’s like it marked me—defined me. And, you know what, it has made me paranoid. All I see are dangers now. Fear of everyone I meet. Fear that…that the people I trust are gonna turn on me.” She smoothed her palms down her thighs. “I thought I was keeping my shit together, keeping my whole world under control. I even went to a therapist. But then”—here her voice wobbled—“then I realized you’d been, like, investigating me behind my back. Like I’m some kind of freak.”
But you threatened me, I wanted to say. You hoarded an old photo and left me breadcrumbs so I’d find it when my own fear bordered on paranoia, after a year of telling me we couldn’t risk keeping any evidence around. But I knew that saying this would buy me another hour on this bed, supplicating at Kristen’s feet. I needed to slap a Band-Aid on her ego and get the hell out of Milwaukee.
“I’m sorry you saw that,” I said gently. “I was spiraling and grasping at straws, you know? The photo you showed me—er, wanted me to find—it threw me.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry you’ve been feeling not like yourself. I went through that last year too. It does get better with time, but…I get that, feeling raw. I want you to be okay.” I patted her knee.
“I thought you were here for me.” She dabbed a tissue under her eyes.
“I am!”
“No, you’re leaving me.”
“Just for the weekend.” I glanced at her. “We’ll both be thinking more clearly after a day or two, right?”
