We Came Here to Forget Read online

  “And you guys! Oh my god, you were making out like the whole time.”

  “Ew,” I said, and Penny rolled her eyes.

  “He’s an eighth grader,” she said, as though that explained everything, and it sort of did. Middle school was a treacherous place, throwing together all those children in their various stages of metamorphosis; some of the boys in eighth grade were nearly six feet tall and had begun to resemble impossibly awkward men. Penny smiled slyly and pushed the long curtain of her hair over her shoulder. Emily saw it first.

  “Ahhhhh! You have a hickey!”

  I craned my neck to see, and there it was, a quarter-size red-and-purple welt just underneath Penny’s ear.

  “Mom and Dad are going to kill you,” I said.

  “Not if they don’t know about it,” Penny said, walloping me with a pillow. “It’s no big deal,” she said, “I’ll just wear a scarf.”

  I didn’t want to admit how baffled I was by the hickey. How did you even get such a thing? It involved kissing, obviously, but the mechanics were unclear. I’d learn later that hickeys were a particular teenage phenomenon that was just exactly as stupid as it appeared.

  Back then, the point of all the boy stuff seemed to be more about Emily and Penny than the actual boys themselves. Many hours were devoted to unpacking their crushes’ most minute actions, reading each of the paper notes passed in the hallway—never mind that searching the missives of a fourteen-year-old boy for subtext was, to paraphrase Cher Horowitz, like looking for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie.

  Many years later, I’d search through an old box of Penny’s teenage journals and notes that she’d long ago abandoned in my parents’ house. I was looking for some kind of clue, but the only shocking thing was how ordinary they were. Like generals, she and Emily would plot and strategize their next moves, their next notes, their next phone calls, as though the fate of civilization hung in the balance. But it was the time with each other that seemed to matter, and that I envied. Luke and I talked, but it was to plan adventures, recount adventures; and mostly there was just doing.

  That same year, a girl in the grade between us—Jennifer Baker—died suddenly of meningitis. Neither Penny nor I knew her well, but her death sent shock waves through the school. There was a vigil for her in the school gymnasium, and I remember the drained and haunted faces of her parents, the bewildered grief of her older brother, the way a halo of tragedy seemed to surround them. Our experiences with death before then had been minimal—almost abstract—involving minor pets and other people’s grandparents. Penny marshaled her class to do a fund-raiser for the family and to send them cards and flowers. Even young, she was good in a crisis.

  Thinking back so many years later on Penny as a little girl would bring me both comfort and anguish. Some part of me believed if I could discover the exact moment her unraveling began, if I could just locate the thread, we could reverse what happened. As though we might even put back together what’s come undone.

  Liz Sullivan Is Out of Here

  December 2009

  AS FOR my own unraveling, it begins on a chilly December day that starts out perfectly ordinary and then spirals into something else. My only intention that morning is to quickly cross the state line to go to the Nordstrom in Spokane. I need to buy new pants because none of mine fit any longer. These days I need to give myself discrete, manageable tasks to hang each day on or I’m likely to only make it as far as the couch or not emerge from bed at all. Today: pants.

  As I haul a pile of jeans two sizes bigger than what I used to wear into the dressing room, I try not to feel sad about the weight I’ve gained. It feels too stupid to be sad about. I walk by a row of supersoft T-shirts that are on sale and grab a handful. I get some new underwear and bras as well. I’ve been squeezing my newly voluptuous tits into my 34B bras, and it’s getting obscene. I look at myself in the pallid light of the dressing room, which seemingly illuminates every pore of my tired skin. My hair looks like a neglected animal.

  I leave with a bagful of clothes, and my plan is to go to the gym. I’m dressed for it, since my gym clothes are all that still fit me, and I’m actually going to go today.

  I get in the car with every intention of heading to the mildly depressing big-box gym by my parents’ house. I fucking hate that gym. Last week, a pudgy trainer sidled up to me and gave me some unsolicited (and incorrect) advice on squats in an attempt, I assume, to try to sell me one of the personal training packages they push on new members. It was all I could do not to punch him. But I’m supposed to be exercising regularly. It’s supposed to help.

  Instead of driving to the gym, however, I find myself on a route so familiar I’m practically on autopilot. The airport. I park and head to arrivals, like I’m picking someone up. This series of irrational actions gives me an odd thrill. Am I finally losing it? I’ve spent days—weeks, probably—of my life in airports all over the world, but I’ve never been as fascinated as I suddenly am by this ordinary terminal.

  My therapist, Gena, has been working with me on a technique borrowed from yoga that she refers to as staying in “the witness mind.” She encourages me to try to observe my feelings without judging them so as to avoid getting caught up in self-loathing and blame. But now I feel like I’ve somehow slipped from my body and am watching from above. I don’t think this is what Gena meant. I wonder idly if I am suffering a psychotic break. People are staring at me, but it’s not (necessarily) because I look any more deranged than usual. The white noise of whispers that fills a room when I walk in has become so constant that I hear it even when I’m alone.

  Announcements play on a loop over the airport’s sound system—you must check in two hours prior to international flights, the gate will close ten minutes before departure, allow forty minutes for security—in a robotic-sounding female voice as disembodied and ubiquitous as the voice of God. She repeats herself in Japanese, French, German. Airports seem to exist in a kind of purgatory outside of time and space. You have no control over when those you’re expecting will arrive, or when you’ll be allowed to continue on to your destination. Outside of security, I’m surrounded by people waiting. The travelers pass by me in a rush, off to go stand in a long line to remove their shoes and coats and electronics and three-ounce bottles of liquid from their carry-ons before they disappear on the other side, continuing on to wherever they’re going.

  The longer I stay, the more inconceivable it feels to leave and go to the gym, where rows of middle-aged people huff and puff, trying to stave off holiday weight gain, or to head back home, where my parents are trying so mightily to go on with their lives. I watch the reader boards as they flash the names of dozens of far-flung cities. Some, such as Zurich and Vienna, I’ve flown through many times in another life. Others—Dubai, Phnom Penh—I’ve never even thought about going to. Except now I do; suddenly any place feels preferable to here. Then I see Buenos Aires come up, and it hammers my heart.

  Blair. I haven’t returned his last several phone calls even though I miss him more than I can bear. I’m not sure that night in Buenos Aires would feel like the best night of my life if it hadn’t also been the last night of my life as I knew it. I go to the ticket counter, thinking I’m somehow playing a joke on myself as I ask about the next available flight. But then, I’m pulling out my credit card and my passport. For a moment, I gaze at the latter in amazement, wondering why my passport is in my purse. Then I remember that I lost my driver’s license the other night at Silver Fox. A mortifying sequence of events comes back to me—I’m laughing drunkenly, exuding the licorice smell of Jägermeister, and spilling the contents of my purse on the floor. The license clattering away, gone forever.

  The flight doesn’t leave until later that evening, so I have time to kill. I go back to the car to get the clothes I just purchased. Being outside of the airport makes the fog lift a bit: the crisp, cold, nonrecycled air hits me, and it occurs to me that as easily and senselessly as I arrived here and purchased a ticket, I could turn around,
cancel the flight, and just go home. But standing at the airline counter made me realize how badly I need out of Coeur d’Alene, where everything reminds me of everything. Is that why I bought these clothes? Was I plotting my escape without even knowing it? Dear Gena, my witness mind thinks she’s witnessing a woman having a nervous breakdown.

  I schlep the Nordstrom bags through security past a series of blessedly apathetic TSA agents who seem not to care how I might board with these bags. I buy an overpriced suitcase inside the terminal and decide I’ll just pretend I didn’t know it was too big to carry on, play clueless. A very huffy gate attendant will check it for me as I pretend to be apologetic.

  In the surreal hours between my unplanned arrival at the airport and my flight’s departure, I sit at a lonely airport bar that serves cocktails in pint glasses and tap away at my phone. I send my parents an e-mail to tell them about the trip, attaching my flight info, and letting them know where I left my car, for which they have a spare set of keys at home. I do my best to keep the e-mail light and sane sounding—Just decided to take a little trip last minute. Need to get away for a while. If anyone calls for me just tell them I’m traveling. They’ll be worried, but they’re already worried. The three of us cooped up in our madness together isn’t helping anything. I’m thirty years old, I think, holding up my end of an imaginary argument, I don’t need to ask permission.

  Next, I search Airbnb for a place to stay. I find an apartment in Palermo Soho—one of the nicer neighborhoods in the city, according to Google. My sensory memory of being in Buenos Aires is sharp and clear, but the details—where we stayed, what we visited—have all left me. It’s the feeling that’s indelible: of me before, of Blair, one of my oldest friends, coming into a new and sudden focus. I book the apartment for two weeks. The Internet has made everything so easy! I rarely booked my own travel before, and it’s weirdly thrilling. I’m giddy, ratcheting up toward hysteria. I’m going to sit here at this bleak, nondescript bar, drinking a cocktail that is both too sweet and too strong, and tap, tap, tap my way into another life. Maybe I should take some Spanish classes. Booked. Maybe I will get myself a little job, so I can stay as long as I want. I answer an ad on Craigslist for English-speaking tour guides. Is it really this easy to start a new life? Maybe it is; I’m high on the prospect. From here on out, I’m someone new. I’m Elizabeth Sullivan—my middle name paired with my mom’s maiden name—the fake name I use when I meet strangers in bars to throw them off the scent if they recognize me. Elizabeth? Liz. Liz Sullivan. Here I am.

  As I’m landing in Buenos Aires in the late afternoon after the connecting flight from Lima, my luggage is arriving in São Paulo, Brazil. I don’t know this, of course, until I’ve been standing at the baggage claim carousel at Ministro Pistarini for what feels like an eternity. The two girls who sat next to me on the flight from Lima get their bags right away. They’re from LA—decked out in expensive workout gear, eyes hidden behind massive designer sunglasses—and they talked through the whole flight. Never to me, only to each other. They went through an extensive beauty routine en route, because you know being on a plane just murders your complexion. I’d hoped the wine they were drinking—complimentary on these international flights—might induce a nap, but it only made them louder. They were just so excited to be on their way to BA. WOOHOO! As they disappear into the terminal, I realize I could’ve just introduced myself. It would have been nice to know someone here. But off they go, and I remain, watching the luggage turn and turn until only a few solitary bags are left on the carousel. Who these lonely remaining bags belong to is a mystery; perhaps someone is currently waiting for them in São Paulo.

  I’m third in line at the Aerolíneas counter. I used some of the flight time to brush up on the bit of Spanish I’d picked up from Jorge, a tech coach from Chile who’d worked with the team for years. Equipaje. Right, luggage. I should have gone LAN Argentina, but Aerolíneas was so much cheaper. I have money saved, but I don’t know how long I’ll be here.

  I approach and mumble something in Spanish. The airline representative says something in Portuguese, then immediately switches to English when I don’t respond.

  “Hello, how can I help you, miss?”

  “I’ve lost my luggage.”

  “Okay, excellent. Where you are flying from?”

  “Spokane, Washington,” I say. “I connected through Lima.”

  “Excellent.” She returns to her computer with a great flurry of typing. “Flight number please? Name?” I give her my real name, hoping it’s the last time I’ll have to say it for a while.

  “Excellent,” she tells me. Apparently my name rings no bells. It probably wasn’t a story here. I’ve lost any sense of proportion.

  “Okay.” She smiles, and I want to hug her for some reason. Perhaps because she’s the first person I’ve spoken to in so many hours. “Your luggage was sent to São Paulo. But it’s no problem. You write for me here the address where you are staying and we send it there, one day, two days, maybe, but no more.”

  I write it for her.

  She nods approvingly. “Palermo Soho. Is nice. You know it?”

  I shake my head.

  “You will like it.” She smiles.

  I make my way to the buses heading to the city center. The air outside is pleasant, almost balmy. I’ve left behind winter too; it’s spring in the Southern Hemisphere, soon to be summer. It dawns on me that I don’t have so much as a change of underwear in the gym bag I used as my carry-on: a ghastly rookie mistake for someone as well traveled as I am. I don’t know how to pack for this new life any more than I know how to live in it. I have only the minimal toiletries I bought for the flight and my wallet and passport. I have my Spanish classes and my tour guide orientation in two days and I have only the—surely ripe—travel clothes on my back.

  I wearily file onto a bus, and at first I don’t know what it is that feels so different, that washes me in relief. Then I realize: anonymity. No one’s eyes are following me as I move, there’s no ripple of alarmed whispers as people recognize me and point me out to their companions.

  Buenos Aires was an impulsive choice, but as the bus hurtles toward the city, I feel sure it was a good one. I’m thousands of miles from anyone who knows me or knows of me. The last time I was here was the last time all my dreams for myself—along with any hopes of resolution, of a happy or normal life—felt possible. I can recognize how irrational it is to think there might be some sort of key here, some clue I’ve left for myself, some portal through which I might travel and obliterate what’s happened in between, but it doesn’t stop me from longing for it. I gaze out the window, trying to connect to what I’m seeing, to spark some nostalgia. But the urban sprawl outside the window gives me nothing. I’d forgotten how vast the city is, how one neighborhood tumbles into the next in a web that seems to go on forever. The city center, where the bus leaves off, is crowded with high-rises and clutches of palm trees sprouting between buildings to form little oases.

  According to his bio on Airbnb, the owner of the apartment where I’ll be staying is a fiftyish American expat who moved to the city a decade before with his partner. From the central bus station I take the green line to the Scalabrini Ortiz stop in Palermo as instructed. All the way there I study my map, trying and failing to remain inconspicuous; my height and my blondness attract attention everywhere other than the Nordic countries. But people are just gawking; they don’t recognize me. I suppose I’m uniquely attuned to the difference.

  I try to make sense of the steady stream of Spanish around me, but it washes over me. Everyone looks cheerful; they’re laughing, or maybe it’s simply that these are the only people I’m seeing clearly—my fellow miserables fading to gray in the background. I emerge in what feels like a completely different city, and at last I feel a stirring of familiarity. The afternoon sun is coming through the trees that canopy the wide cobblestone streets, and I pass stylish modern buildings with Spanish-style villas crammed in between. I couldn’t be anywhe
re in the United States.

  “Welcome! Bienvenidos!” Tom, my host, leans in and kisses me on the cheek. “This is the place.” I find myself instinctively searching for signs that he knows—the startled look, the flash of horror—after all he has my real name and my credit card. But if he does recognize me, he betrays nothing. I chastise myself; the world doesn’t revolve around what happened to us.

  “The building is gorgeous,” I say. There’s a pool in the courtyard, and the gates that protect the building are heavy, fortified. Though the other neighborhood streets are teeming, Tom’s apartment is on a quiet, posh-looking block.

  “Isn’t is precious? We got it for a song too. They were practically giving away real estate after the crisis in ’01. Come in, come in.” Tom beckons me from the foyer. The furniture is modern and sharp, and there’s a narrow terrace with a view of the Rio de la Plata. I’m not sure I deserve to stay somewhere so beautiful. “I’ve just made tea, would you like some?” I nod and follow him into the narrow, gleaming kitchen. He pours me a cup, and we sit for a moment. I feel a sudden wave of exhaustion so intense I could collapse on the spot.

  “You know this neighborhood got its nickname because it’s meant to resemble SoHo in New York, but being from there I think that rather flatters New York. Maybe in its heyday. Anyway! This is the perfect neighborhood for a young person. The Argentines, they’re very enterprising, very resilient. After the crash, all of these little artisan boutiques started sprouting up around here, with people converting warehouses into galleries and showrooms. Dreadfully hip. When we first started visiting twenty years ago, this was a rather nothing part of town, but it’s undergone quite the renaissance.” He says the word with its full, flamboyant French pronunciation. “How were your travels, my dear?”

  “Not too bad. Although they’ve lost my luggage. Or, rather, they sent it to São Paulo.”