Laura van den Berg: The Isle of Youth: Stories

The first thing that went wrong was the emergency landing. My husband and I were both reading In Flight Magazine and enjoying the complimentary wine in first class — I’d never flown first class before, but it was our honeymoon and we thought that was what we were supposed to do; drink in the daytime, luxuriate in our good fortune — when the plane lurched and oxygen masks fell from the ceiling and a passenger in the back screamed. We didn’t know it then, but the pilot was already steering the plane toward an empty brown field, preparing for our descent.

The landing itself was terrifying: a hard, screeching wallop that knocked us around in our seats. Wine spilled in our laps. Bags overturned and people’s possessions spread into the aisle. My husband elbowed me right in the nose and I tasted blood in my mouth. When we finally stopped, the flight attendants, all of them leggy and red-lipped, applauded, as though the emergency landing had been performed for our amusement. I unbuckled my seatbelt and cupped my nose, stunned silent by the pain.

“The seatbelt sign is still on,” my husband said, resting a hand on my back.

I leaned forward, away from his touch. These were the kinds of moments that had been recently giving me pause. We’re new at this , I kept telling myself, but there was no denying that I was often confounded by his priorities.

I sat up and touched my nose. It felt swollen. I looked down at the pool of red in my lap and dipped my pinkie finger into the wine. We thought we had overcome the worst, having endured the flight from Newark to Houston, the ten-hour trip to Buenos Aires, and the connection to El Calafate Airport in Patagonia, but all I could think about was how wrong we’d been.

My husband continued staring at the illuminated seatbelt sign. My entire face hummed with pain.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said to him, licking the wine off my fingertip. “We’re on the ground now.”

* * *

Within an hour, black buses arrived and carried us away from the field and the airplane sitting uselessly in it. A representative from the airline came too, a young man dressed in a pinstriped suit. It was a mechanical error, we were told. The injuries had all been minor: a woman cradling her forearm, a man with a gash on his cheek, my banged nose. A full refund would be forthcoming. The man passed out little cakes in plastic wrappers to the passengers.

In the bus, my husband took my hand, but let go when he realized my fingers were sticky with wine. He pulled hand sanitizer from his bag and squirted a dollop into his palm.

“What are you sanitizing?” I said. “You just touched me.”

“If you’d read the statistics on how many people don’t wash their hands after using public toilets, you’d be sanitizing too.”

I went to the tiny bathroom in the back of the bus and looked in the mirror. My nose was swollen, the nostrils crusted with dried blood. I tore a piece of toilet paper in half and wedged the white clumps into my nose. As I made my way back to my seat, a few of the other passengers stared.

I looked out at the fields dotted with sheep, their coats gray and shaggy. We passed a stone church and a woman selling paper-wrapped fish from a roadside stand. We were outside San Antonio Oeste, where our resort, Las Grutas, was located, on the San Matías Gulf. This was in the province of Río Negro, the northern edge of Patagonia. As we drew closer to Las Grutas, the landscape got rockier; we went by a row of hulking granite formations, reddish in color, like a miniature mountain range. It was January when we left our home in Philadelphia, but in Patagonia it was summer, the weather warm and breezy.

When we finally arrived at the resort, a tall white building with arched windows, we learned we’d been upgraded to a suite, courtesy of the airline. In the lobby, we passed the manager’s office. The door was open. A TV was mounted on the wall and tuned to the news. I glimpsed a reporter standing by the white nose of an airplane and paused, but I didn’t understand enough Spanish to make out what was being said. I’d been practicing Spanish with a Rosetta Stone video, and when I arrived in Patagonia, I was disappointed to learn that I’d retained only a collection of random words, fragments of sentences and thoughts.

From our bedroom, there was a marvelous view of the sea cliffs and the beach beneath them. The sand was powdery and white and marked with dark rocks, including a huge stone in the vague shape of a ship. The tide was going out and every time the waves rolled away they left a sheen on the beach. For the first time since we landed, I felt like everything was going to be okay.

That night, during the cocktail hour held in the lobby, we struck up a conversation with a British couple who were in Patagonia to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary. Around us waiters in maroon uniforms served pastries with cheese in the center and medio medios, cocktails made of white wine and champagne. Before leaving our room, I’d taken the paper out of my nose and noticed that the skin beneath my eyes had started to darken.

“A decade,” the wife kept saying. “Can you believe it?”

“It goes by like that,” the husband would add, snapping his fingers.

They were the Humbolts, George and Christina, and they had already been in Patagonia for a week. George was tall and lanky, an overgrown boy, and wore white socks with his sandals, his toes poking over the edges. Christina was petite and graceful. Her blond hair had been gathered into a loose bun, revealing a slender neck wrapped in a fluffy brown scarf.

“It’s made from guanaco hair,” she said when she caught me eyeing it. “A guanaco is kind of like a llama, but it isn’t actually a llama. It just looks like one.”

“We got that from a market in San Antonio Oeste,” George said.

“You should go this weekend,” she said before filling us in on everything else they’d been doing in Patagonia, encouraging scuba diving and bird-watching especially.

“These waters are the warmest in all of Patagonia,” she said. “And there are six endemic species of bird in the area.”

“Can you name them?” my husband asked.

“Let’s see, there’s the sandy gallito, the white cachalote, and the rusty monjita,” Christina said. “And then there’s some kind of warbling finch, the burrowing parrot, and the yellow cardinal, which is endangered.”

The men raised their glasses, impressed. Christina shrugged and tucked a loose wave of hair behind her ear. “I read a book,” she said.

“Don’t forget Iguazú Falls,” George said. “You have to take a charter plane, but the hotel will set it all up. They’re really something. Taller than Niagara.”

“Not another plane,” I said, touching my nose.

“Oh, you must go.” Christina wrapped her small hand around my forearm. Her fingers were firm and cold. “You really must.”

“We’ll make the arrangements tomorrow morning. I doubt we’ll have two near-death experiences in one trip,” my husband said, and everyone laughed but me.

When George wanted to know how we met, my husband explained that it had been at my neighbor’s holiday party. It was snowing that night, and I was the only person not wearing some kind of Christmas sweater; my neighbor, for example, had worn a red shirt with little gold bells glued onto her nipples and a Santa hat.

“When I first walked in, I saw her,” my husband said, his enthusiasm growing. “I went to the bar and mixed her a drink. I brought it over to her and told her my name and that was that.”