I looked for you, I called your name

“A beautiful and compelling read.” Ann Patchett

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 any more,” 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 realised my fingers were sticky with wine. He pulled hand sanitiser from his bag and squirted a dollop into his palm.

“What are you sanitising?” 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 sanitising too.”

I’d been practising 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.”

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 grey 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 colour, 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 practising 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 marvellous 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 centre 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.

Iguazú Falls, Misiones, Argentina. Martin St-Amant/Wikimedia Commons

“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 neighbour’s holiday party. It was snowing that night, and I was the only person not wearing some kind of Christmas sweater; my neighbour, 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.”

George and Christina nodded, then looked at me. “That’s right,” I said. “He brought me a screwdriver. And then we went out for six months and then he proposed one night, when we were on our way home from a movie. It was raining and he stopped on the sidewalk and asked me right there.” I remembered standing under a streetlamp and looking down at his face, his eyelashes thick with rain, and feeling a tremendous surge of hope.

“It was spontaneous,” my husband said. “Possibly the first spontaneous thing I’ve ever done.”

“And possibly the last.” This time, I was the one trying to make a joke, but no one laughed.

The story we were telling was at once true and not true. The facts were right, but certain details had been omitted. I never brought up my intense dislike for screwdrivers, or said that I drank it only because I had been very lonely that year and didn’t want him to stop talking to me. I never brought up all the time I spent in dark movie theatres or playhouses or classical music halls – the hallmarks of my husband’s carefully planned dates – trying to understand what, exactly, I felt for him. An attachment, certainly, though I was never sure it was love. But what did it mean to be in love? Maybe all the things people said about falling in love, about the initial torrent of joy, were a lie. And then there was the matter of how my days and weeks and months had become so unexceptional, they were nearly indistinguishable from one another – marked only by my job at a second-rate law firm and the occasional date and watching the weather shift through my apartment windows.

In Philadelphia, I was close to my parents in Bala Cynwyd, where I had grown up, where my twin sister, when we were just four weeks old, had died a silent, inexplicable death in the crib next to mine. I was too young to remember anything about her; as an adult I had tried and tried. Whenever I took the train from Philadelphia to Bala Cynwyd on the weekends, the absent look on my parents’ faces – it would appear for only an instant, when I emerged from the crowd outside the station and met their eyes through the car windshield – reminded me of how I had failed to fill my life and my sister’s at the same time, a task that had left me with the feeling of always being half-present and half-absent. As the years passed, it became harder to tell the difference between the two, to understand what exactly my capacities were. My husband was an only child. He had come to Philadelphia from Kansas City and saw his parents once a year. He always seemed resolute and sure.

On our dates, I would sit beside him in the dark and gaze at his profile and think all of this through. I was still thinking it through after I moved into his apartment and after we got married. I was still thinking it through as I stood in this hotel lobby in Patagonia, trying to understand, a sketch artist attempting to construct a face from disparate descriptions of noses and ears. But these were the kinds of details that could not be spoken of without inflicting real damage.

“Oh, I just love these kinds of stories,” Christina said.

“Now how are you finding married life?”

“It’s nice,” I said. “A little confusing at times, but mostly nice.” I scratched the side of my nose.

Later that night, when we were back in our room, my husband would tell me how embarrassing it was to hear me describe married life as ‘confusing’. How it made us seem strange and hurt his feelings too. I would point out that I had also used the word ‘nice’, but he would be unmoved, taking a shower that lasted over an hour. But when I’d said it in the hotel lobby, he’d just smiled a flat smile and left to refresh his drink.

Sunset over Iguazú from the Brazilian side. ‘SF Brit’/ Wikimedia Commons

Arranging a trip to Iguazú Falls was surprisingly easy. In the morning, a taxi drove us to the airport, where we took a charter plane. During our flight, I never once looked out the window, sitting straight in my seat and trying to ignore the crushing pain in my nose. My husband’s annoyance with me had lingered; he’d snapped at me when I was slow going through airport security, and on the plane he scrutinised the Iguazú section in his guidebook, ignoring me completely.

At Iguazú, the guide, a short man with a carefully groomed moustache, picked us up. On the way to the falls, he told us about the legend of their creation: a god had planned to marry a woman, but she loved a mortal man. When she tried to escape with him in a canoe, the god divided the river. The waterfalls were formed and the couple would never stop drowning. The guide told us this story without enthusiasm, never once raising his eyes to meet ours in the rear-view. I wondered if the legend was really a legend or just something for the tourists.

“Actually,” my husband said, “the falls are the result of a massive volcanic eruption that occurred approximately two hundred thousand years ago.”

“Garganta del Diablo,” the guide said in response.

“What does that mean?” I whispered to my husband.

“Devil’s Throat,” he said, pointing to a page in his guidebook.

We entered the falls from the Argentinian town of Puerto Iguazú. The horseshoe-shaped cascades spread across two miles of the Iguazú River, the guide explained as we started our tour on a wood-planked walkway. My husband moved briskly. The guide struggled to keep up, and it wasn’t long before I fell behind them both. As we trekked higher, the treetops blended together, making the canopy so dense it obscured the sky. Small brown monkeys swung across the trees. We passed stands of bamboo, orchids, and ceibos, which, my husband called over his shoulder, were the national flower of Argentina. I imagined George and Christina walking this same trail, identifying birds and primates together, reaching down at the same time to touch the velvety leaves of a plant.

When the falls came into view, they were just as spectacular as the Humbolts had said. Water poured over two massive cliffs and pooled in a huge expanse speckled with mossy rocks, as though a lush island had been overtaken by a flood. And then there was the sound, the deep rushing noise that burned away the confusion and the worry. My fingertips tingled and there was a ringing in my ears, but it was pleasant, like distant bells.

“It’s the sound of the drowned lovers,” the guide said to us. “Time has turned them into something beautiful.”

‘One of the seven natural wonders of the world,’ the guide said after we finished. ‘Bug spray?’ I said, and this time, my husband laughed.”

My husband looked at me and slipped his guidebook into his back pocket. He offered me bug repellent. I let him spray his palms and rub my bare arms and legs. He took his time, making sure the backs of my knees and the insides of my elbows had been covered. His fingertips were cool and I relished the sensation of him touching certain parts of my body – the bones in my ankles – for the very first time. I listened to the falls and wondered if what I was feeling could be called love.

“One of the seven natural wonders of the world,” the guide said after we finished.

“Bug spray?” I said, and this time, my husband laughed. A cloud of turquoise-and-black butterflies swarmed around one of the rocks, touched down for a moment, and then scattered.

“Garganta del Diablo,” the guide said again. My husband and I followed him to a footbridge, which, after a great deal of hiking, led us to the Devil’s Throat. It was much larger than the others, with jagged rocks jutting through the curtains of water. The sound was deafening.

“The best one,” he shouted. “Out of hundreds of falls, this is the best one.”

“We’re already seeing the best one?” I called out. We’d only been out for a few hours and had many more ahead of us; it seemed a little disappointing to have already seen the best.

“Yes.” The guide struggled to be heard over the roar of the water. “The very best.”

My husband touched my face and said something I couldn’t understand – I couldn’t hear anything then except for the magnificent thunder of the falls – but I looked at him like I did. The guide produced a camera, and my husband put his arm around me. He had the guide take photos from every angle imaginable; it went on for so long, smiling became painful. The whole time, my husband kept talking to me. I watched his lips move, but I missed every word.

That night, back at Las Grutas, we made love in the shower, the water turned off, his hand wrapped around the back of my neck. Near the end, he accidentally brushed against my nose and I cried out in pain. Afterward, we lay in bed for a long time without speaking; I would have liked to believe it was the blissful quiet that can follow a spectacular day, but it felt like a different kind of silence.

Eventually he fell asleep. I stayed awake. I tried counting backward from five hundred. I tried watching shadows twitch on the ceiling. I tried picturing us standing on that bridge, the Garganta del Diablo cascading behind us, but all I could see was a great wall of water, blindingly white and falling like an avalanche.

I got out of bed, dressed, and slipped out of our room. In the lobby, the manager’s office door was locked, the front desk unattended. I left the hotel and walked down to the beach, thinking about what my husband might have said to me on that bridge. I assumed he was saying beautiful things – how he felt about us, our life together – but maybe I was wrong. Maybe my doubt was infectious. Maybe he was no longer sure what his capacities were. The water was dark and rolling. Something prickly brushed against my ankle. I sat on a rock and faced the ocean. I rested my hands over my nose, as I had on the plane, and listened to the hushed sound of my breath.

The beach was so dark that if the moon hadn’t shifted and cast a fan of light onto the strip of water I happened to be watching, I might have missed her altogether. But when the profile of a swimming woman entered my field of vision, I recognised Christina Humbolt from the way her hair was gathered at the nape, just as it had been at the cocktail reception, and the slim shape of her shoulders. I imagined her husband sleeping soundly in their room, unaware that his wife had slipped into a dimension of her own. Or, for all I knew, she went swimming every night and told her husband about it the next morning over breakfast. Other people’s lives were no less impossible to understand than my own.

I opened my mouth and started packing it with fistfuls of damp sand. The grains scratched the roof of my mouth and got wedged between my teeth. Grit ran down the back of my throat.”

She stopped swimming and looked toward the beach. I waved, first casually and then more vigorously, crisscrossing my arms over my head like I was in need of rescue. I wanted her to come to land. I wanted to ask her things about the life she led. But she just looked in my direction for a long time, her body bobbing in the water, before continuing. She had seen me, I was certain, but she wasn’t coming out to meet me.

I moved my tongue across my teeth, pushing upward until the pressure translated into a bright line of pain. Soon I lost sight of Christina, but I didn’t want to go back to my room. Instead I raked the sand with my fingers and thought about how for as long as I could remember, I’d felt an emptiness where other things were supposed to be.

I opened my mouth and started packing it with fistfuls of damp sand. The grains scratched the roof of my mouth and got wedged between my teeth. Grit ran down the back of my throat. My cheeks ballooned; sand stuck to my gums. It became difficult to breathe. I imagined my body filling up like an hourglass; I imagined my husband or the hotel manager or Christina Humbolt finding me on this rock the next morning, weighted down like a carnival dummy. I kept going until I could barely breathe, until I couldn’t close my mouth, until I was leaking sand. And then I coughed it all out, my shoulders heaving as wet clumps fell to the ground.

Days later, I would still be finding the evidence, a grain stuck in a molar, a scratch on my tongue. One afternoon, at lunch, I would blow my nose and notice specks of sand on the tissue. And years later, after Patagonia was far behind us, this was the moment I would remember – because I had acted inexplicably in the middle of the night and I never had to explain myself.

***

The second thing to go wrong was finding out that my husband had broken my nose. Three days after our trip to Iguazú, I woke to an unbearable cluster of pain in the bridge. My husband was already awake. He was standing at the bathroom mirror and shaving, a white towel wrapped around his waist. I rose and went into the bathroom.

“My god,” he said when he saw me, his face half-full of lather. “The swelling is much worse.”

I looked in the mirror. My nose resembled one of the fat black dates we’d been served at breakfast. I felt something wet coming down my face and held out my palm; I watched as tiny drops of blood dotted my skin.

“I feel dizzy,” I said to my husband, then leaned over and threw up in the toilet. He put down his razor and called the front desk. After he hung up, he helped me back into bed.

“They’re sending a doctor,” he said before returning to the bathroom to finish shaving. From the bed, I could see his arm moving up and down, graceful and controlled. The last three days had been a continuous circuit of morning walks on the beach and afternoon excursions to San Antonio Oeste and cocktail hours in the lobby. The routine had become so familiar, the details of our life in Philadelphia had started to seem vague and remote, as though that existence had never really been ours at all.

Guanacos in Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia. Bernard Gagnon/Wikimedia Commons

The doctor was a tall, hollow-cheeked man with smoke-coloured eyebrows. He wore a khaki suit with a red flower stuck in the lapel and carried a black briefcase.

“Are you the patient?” he asked.

“Yes,” my husband answered for me. He sat at the foot of the bed, dressed and freshly shaved.

The doctor pulled a chair to the bed and asked me to sit up. He pressed the outside of my nose and I gasped. He opened his briefcase and took out an instrument that looked like pliers with a little metal cone attached to the top. He asked me to tilt my head back.

He slipped the cone inside one of my nostrils and I felt the skin stretch. He took out a miniature flashlight and shone it upward. He squinted and muttered and moved the instrument around. My eyes watered and I could see only my husband in my periphery, a faceless blur on the edge of the bed.

The doctor removed the instrument and turned off the flashlight. “It’s broken,” he said, patting my blanketed knee.

“What do we do?” my husband asked. He was standing now, hovering over the doctor and his black case.

“It will heal on its own,” the doctor said. He suggested ice packs and time. “But this will help with the pain.” He took out a prescription bottle, tapped a dozen white pills into his palm, and left them on the bedside table.

He gathered his instruments and washed his hands in the bathroom. My husband brought me a glass of water. The first painkiller was sluggish going down and the aftertaste was that of sand.

“How did this happen again?” the doctor asked, his hand on the door.

“An emergency landing,” my husband said. His tone was suddenly sharp. “There was turbulence. It was an accident.”

“Our plane was on the news,” I added, already drowsy. When the doctor left, it felt like the end of a dream.

“Can you believe he suspected me?” my husband asked when the doctor was gone. He paced in front of the bed. “That’s just insulting.”

The room had become tilted and blurry. He appeared to be standing on a slope and our white ceiling looked like it was made of light. I found a grain of sand hidden beneath my tongue and swallowed it.

“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 leaned 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.”

Sandy gallito (Teledromas fuscus) by John Gerard Keulemans, 1874. Wikimedia Commons

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 recognised 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 awhile, 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 realise 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 sea water – 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 any more, 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.

***

Yellow cardinal (Gubernatrix cristata), female, by Jean-Gabriel Prêtre, 1838. Wikimedia Commons

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 recognised 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.

The stairs were flooded with guests. I grabbed my husband’s elbow and he put his hand over mine. Earlier that night I never went back to the cocktail party. I’d left Christina Humbolt alone in the manager’s office, gone upstairs, taken another pill, and fallen asleep fully clothed on top of the bed. I didn’t know what time my husband came back to the room, only that he didn’t bother waking me, so I was one of the only guests not wearing pyjamas or slippers or bathrobes.

“I hope we don’t die,” I said.

“Don’t be absurd,” my husband replied, squeezing my fingers.

Outside we congregated a safe distance from the hotel, the sea cliffs behind us, a black ridge in the darkness. We watched smoke collect above the resort. It hovered over the building the way smog hangs over a factory. The air thickened and warmed.

By then the drugs had worn off and my nose was killing me. This will never stop, I thought, pressing a fist against my forehead. But within two weeks the pain and the swelling would be gone, the bruising reduced to a yellow spot or two, though my face would never look quite the same. There would always be a slight crook in my nose, only visible if you examined me head-on. Over time, I would come to believe my husband and I were the only ones who knew it was there.

We had been watching the fire for a minute or two before there was a cracking noise and bright orange flames burst through one of the top windows. Someone screamed and I was reminded of how, as our airplane tumbled toward the earth, I’d thought of our passports in their black nylon cases and our plastic toiletries bags and the international cell phone we’d rented, everything tucked neatly away in our suitcases, and was stricken by the notion of rescue workers pulling these possessions from the rubble and using them to determine who we were.

“I think we’re going to have to take another honeymoon,” my husband said. “This can’t be what we think of when we remember our honeymoon. It just can’t.”

“Should we take this as a sign?” I said. “That this whole time we’ve been trailed by disaster?”

“It’s a coincidence,” my husband said. “There’s no such thing as signs.”

I watched fire balloon out of the building.

The guests had scattered, some of them standing near the edge of the sea cliffs and facing the water. I heard sirens, but they sounded too far away to believe they would arrive in time to do much good.

My husband tugged on my sleeve. He was pointing at a group of four that were huddled together. It was the Humbolts and the Meyer-Stewards, all of them in hotel-issued white bathrobes and slippers. “We should be standing with them,” he said.

When he started toward them, I hung back. I was watching Christina Humbolt, who kept untying and retying her sash. Had she been out swimming? Or already returned to her room and, when the alarms woke her husband, pretended she’d been beside him all along? Her face was luminous with sweat; from a distance, her hair appeared darker and sleeker, like it might be damp.

When my husband reached the Humbolts and the Meyer-Stewards, he turned and looked for me, but other people had spilled into the path between us. He waved his hand above his head and called my name, but still I did not go to him. I heard the sirens again, louder now, and the hotel manager had started handing out little fleece blankets and bottled water, just as he had promised. The space between my husband and me grew more congested – I looked for you, he would say when we were finally reunited – and soon I wasn’t able to see him at all.

A boom sounded, loud as the rushing of the Garganta del Diablo. Fire spilled from the hotel like an outstretched hand. Right then I longed to go back inside, to our room that overlooked the sea. To sift through our wallets and the backpacks we carried on day trips, to lay the contents out on the bed like evidence and try to understand what it was that was going to be lost.

From the collection The Isle of Youth.

Laura van den Berg lives in the Boston area and is a Writer-in-Residence at Bard College. She won the O. Henry Award in 2014, the Pushcart Prize in 2009, and has twice been shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Award. The Isle of Youth, her second story collection, is published by Daunt Books. Her other books are What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and the novel Find Me. Read more.
lauravandenberg.com

Author portrait © Paul Yoon

“Uniformly excellent – emotionally complex, very raw – but always a mixture of pathos and humour that made me think of Lorrie Moore.” – Dave Eggers

Laura will be appearing at the London Short Story Festival at Waterstones Piccadilly on Saturday 20 June.
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