Laura van den Berg: The Isle of Youth: Stories

“It was an accident,” I said before falling asleep.

* * *

A sketch of the suspect: after getting married, I visited my parents only on holidays. Once I saw an X-ray of a heart and I was alarmed by its smallness, its translucence. A thing we ask entirely too much of. On our way to Patagonia I’d watched the planes in holding patterns at the Buenos Aires airport and thought about how that used to be me. I had landed somewhere, finally, even if I couldn’t point it out on a map. After I had been married for a year, I dreamed about my dead sister. In the dream she was a child, maybe six or seven. She didn’t look anything like me. She had dark shiny hair and was jumping rope on a playground. When she saw me, she put down the rope and said, “What the fuck are you doing?” And I said, “This is all your fault.” I was married for three years before I told my husband I wasn’t an only child, like him, and that was just because my mother brought my sister up at Thanksgiving. Once I took a long lunch and went to see a tarot card reader on Tasker Street. It was my first week back from Patagonia and whenever I was stopped at a red light, I had fantasies of simply getting out of the car and walking away, leaving the keys in the ignition, the radio on. When the tarot reader drew the Hanged Man, she said that meant I should do the opposite of what I would normally do. Which was fine advice if you understand what it is that you do.

* * *

I had two more pills before going to the cocktail reception in the lobby, where I drank three medio medios and stood swaying next to my husband as a new couple introduced themselves. They were the Meyer-Stewards and they too were on their honeymoon.

“Married just a week,” Susannah Meyer-Steward said, a martini in one hand and a king crab leg in the other.

“I can’t believe we’re in Patagonia,” Patrick Meyer-Steward said. He was bald except for a thin halo of hair on the back of his head, and drinking scotch on the rocks. “I wanted to go to France.”

“How did you meet?” my husband asked them.

“On a cruise in the Bahamas,” Patrick said. “Last July.”

“It was kind of a singles thing, but of course I didn’t really expect to meet anyone,” Susannah said. “Then one afternoon I saw Patrick, playing shuffleboard on the deck.”

“Shuffleboard!” I called out, louder than I should have. “How charming.”

“We had a shuffleboard game at our wedding,” Patrick said. “It was island-themed. All the bridesmaids wore leis.”

“The newly initiated really do tell the best stories.” I placed my empty glass on the tray of a passing waiter. Across the room, I saw Christina Humbolt standing next to her husband. I could almost hear her making polite party chatter in her easy British way.

“Aren’t you on your honeymoon too?” Susannah asked, her round face crinkling with confusion or the beginnings of worry.

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose we are.” I felt as though I were hovering just above the ground. I hooked myself around my husband’s elbow. “But doesn’t it feel like it’s been ages?” I said. “Ages and ages and ages?”

He pulled away from me and learned toward the Meyer-Stewards. “She broke her nose,” he whispered. “During the emergency landing.”

Patrick sipped his drink; Susannah sucked on her crab leg.

“You broke it,” I said, tapping my cheekbone. “My husband broke my nose.”

“What was that?” Patrick asked, rattling the ice around in his glass.

“My husband broke my nose.” I felt like signing those words to the entire room. “He broke it with his elbow.”

“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” my husband said. “It was an accident.”

The Meyer-Stewards excused themselves to see when dinner would be served. I watched them walk away, Susannah still holding the king crab leg, until they disappeared behind a white marble column.

“You’re drunk,” my husband said, and I suppose that was true, although it didn’t feel that way at the time. I simply knew that I should not tell the Meyer-Stewards about the waterfalls and the beaches and the six endemic species of birds and the medio medios. I should show them the truth because the truth was meant to be seen, not just released in the middle of the night.

“Let’s go to the room.” He stroked the back of my head. I recognized it was happening, but I couldn’t connect with the feeling of his fingers in my hair. “We’ll order up some food.”

“For the first time I feel conscious,” I said.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “What did that doctor give you?”

I shrugged myself free and wandered toward the bathroom. He let me go. I went over to the staircase that led to the dining room and walked up and down the steps for a while, then drifted back toward the lobby. I passed the manager’s office; the door was open, the TV on. I leaned against the doorway and moved my tongue over my gums. It took me a minute to realize that the office wasn’t empty this time. Someone was sitting in the manager’s chair, her back to the door.

“Hola,” I said.

The chair spun around, and there was Christina Humbolt, her legs crossed, a drink in her hand.

I stepped into the office, and right away, I looked for proof of her swimming — a strand of wet hair, the faint scent of seawater — but found nothing.

“Have a sip of this.” She held out her glass. “It’s a medio medio times two.”

I took her drink. The glass was cold and damp and soon my hand went numb.

“I’m finally conscious,” I said to Christina.

“So you are.” She slouched in the chair, her crisp accent dulled. The guanaco scarf hung limply from her neck and she had taken her hair down; the ends, slightly curled, rested on her shoulders.

“And I keep finding sand everywhere,” I told her. “It’s in my mouth. Is it in your mouth too?”

She sighed. “What do you want me to say?”

“Something definitive,” I said. “Something useful.”

She took back the glass and drank. “Your husband seems to think you’re not feeling well.”

“He sent you after me?”

“He thinks he did.”

“How did you know where I’d be?”

“Lucky guess,” she said, handing me the glass. “It’s quiet in here.”

“I’m feeling fine,” I said. “Much better, actually.”

“Don’t expect it to last.”

I finished the drink. She aimed a remote at the TV and turned up the volume.

“What’s on?” I asked.

“Nothing good,” she said. “The news.”

We gazed up at the TV and watched bulldozers and backhoes crowd around an excavation of some sort. Or perhaps the construction of a new building was beginning. A reporter stood in front of the site with a microphone. She was a woman, and the wind blew her hair across her face. The words “dirt” and “night” were all I could understand. On the plane to Brazil, my husband found a National Geographic in his seat pocket and showed me a photo spread of the Karajá, an indigenous group living in the Brazilian Amazon. The photos were from an initiation ceremony. The boys’ faces were painted with black; dark circles had been smudged beneath their eyes. I remembered thinking that they weren’t their real selves anymore, that the self had been forsaken in order to be part of something larger, a lesson I’d tried to teach myself but never really learned.

“Excavación,” the reporter said, which I understood to mean “digging.” Are they digging the sand out of us? I wanted to ask Christina.

“Excavación, excavación,” the reporter said again.

* * *

The third thing to go wrong was the hotel catching fire. We were awoken by an alarm at three in the morning and when we stepped into the hallway, hotel employees, one of whom I recognized as the manager, were herding guests from their rooms. There was a fire on the top floor of the hotel, the manager said when he came upon us, his maroon uniform stained with sweat. A penthouse guest left a cigar burning. We were instructed to take the stairs down to the courtyard outside. Bottled water and blankets would be provided. The manager told us not to worry.