We Came Here to Forget

by Andrea Dunlop

  “Oh dear. Aerolíneas, I presume? They always lose luggage.”

  I nod. “Actually,” I continue, “I neglected to bring a change of clothes in my carry-on. Is there somewhere nearby I could go to pick up a few things?”

  Tom sends me to a shopping mall, and just as I arrive there, a new wave of jet lag hits me hard. I feel adrift and disoriented. I’ve been all over the world, but it’s a blur of mountain resorts and ski slopes, with only the occasional brief trip to a capital city where I was surrounded by the considerable buffer of my teammates. Buenos Aires feels more foreign than I expected. I’ve overheard no English. I’m both panicked and relieved by this.

  I skim the racks but can’t find anything in a 36D. All my adult life I’d been a sleek aerodynamic 34B. Being an athlete shielded me from some of the body anxiety that hounded other women my age. At just under six feet, my coaches were happy when I was between 165 and 170. Weight was just a number—like my resting heart rate, my CO2 levels, box jump reps—but now it’s another reason to loathe myself. After I stopped training, I packed on twenty pounds, giving me these never-before-seen knockers. I know I probably look fine, but I feel like the extra weight carries everything that happened, that it’s an outward sign that I’ll never again be what I once was.

  A pretty, minuscule salesgirl appears at my elbow. “¿Necesitas ayuda?” I have to repeat myself twice to get across that I’m not finding anything in my size. My accent needs work. My conversations with Jorge have clearly given me misplaced confidence.

  The salesgirl explains that they only carry B cups there. Later, I’ll wonder about this—do all women in Buenos Aires have the same size breasts?—but for now, I just feel dejected as the kind-eyed salesgirl directs me to a department store. There, in a bleary haze, I buy a granny bra I’ll never wear again, as well as a couple of sundresses, one of which I will later discover was meant to be a bathing suit cover-up. I was never one for fashion.

  When I make it back to my apartment, I’m ravenous and exhausted. I order a trio of greasy empanadas from a bodega across the street, where two old men sit at a rickety table outside smoking and staring at me unabashedly. They’re not exactly leering, but I’m a sore thumb. I see—or perhaps just imagine—some hint of disappointment in their stares, like if the universe were going to cough up a blond foreigner into their midst, couldn’t it have done better than this?

  The grease from my empanadas soaks through their little wax paper bag and the smell of them makes my stomach growl. I take the food and the strange, ugly clothes back to the apartment that’s mine for the next two weeks. Its spotlessness is a reproach to my grubbiness. There’s a laptop computer in the corner, which Tom told me I’m free to use. I log in and connect to the Wi-Fi. I have several e-mails from my parents. Call when you can, my dad writes, your mother is worried. I e-mail them back to tell them I’ve arrived and I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. If only.

  I e-mail Gena the therapist to cancel my next several appointments. I’m taking a trip, I say, I’m in Buenos Aires and not sure how long I’m staying. I know it’s probably a terrible idea, but I needed to get away. I also tell Gena not to worry, though maybe it’s narcissistic to think she would.

  I take a long shower and crawl into the plush bed naked; it’s 8:00 p.m. and I decide I can’t stay awake any longer. Despite how far away I am, the time difference is only three hours. I’ve dealt with much worse jet lag many times, and in those days I had to get up and compete the next day. Now, I have nothing to wake up for. I could sleep for a hundred years.

  I’m starving when I wake up. I spotted a McDonald’s around the corner, and they have good breakfasts everywhere in the world. The Palermo Soho McDonald’s is the chicest fast-food joint I’ve ever seen. The trim dark-eyed girls behind the counter wear smart blue uniforms, and there’s a mini café on the inside that serves espresso and little pastries called medialunas. It’s bustling. I get an egg sandwich and coffee, and it tastes the same as in the U.S. but different too. The smell makes me nostalgic. You know what I mean, that McDonald’s smell. Penny and I are riding in the back of the station wagon, Dad is on dinner duty, which as often as not devolved into pizza or McDonald’s. My sister and I knew how easily he could be swayed. The admonitions of “don’t tell your mother”—who ate organic long before it was a thing—made it all the more delicious.

  Even such a benign memory is not without its dark cloud. The question moves again to the front of my brain like a slide on one of those old-fashioned View-Masters clicking into place. Will I ever feel anything but sadness again? I feel tears coming up and quickly put my sunglasses on. I need to wake myself up, so I keep walking in the direction of the Plaza Serrano. When I reach the square, it’s bustling and shaded by towering rosewood trees, and I’m nearly flattened by a wave of memory. Even though it’s what I was looking for, once it hits me, I’m filled with a melancholy so intense my knees buckle. The place is familiar and distinctive, I’ve been here before. The cafés that line the plaza—their patios spilling out onto the cobblestones and blending into their neighbors—all look similar, and I’m imagining Blair and me sitting at any of them, at all of them. In an instant, my decision to come here feels like a mistake. I can never go back to who I was.

  When I get back to the apartment, I check my e-mail again. One from my mom and one from Gena; two of the only people who have this e-mail address.

  Katie, the e-mail from Gena reads, I don’t think it’s a terrible idea for you to get away for a while, but you need to make sure you’re taking care of yourself too. A change of scene can be a very good idea. You’ve been through a lot, so go easy on yourself, and be kind to yourself. Be careful about drinking. We can Skype if you need to. Love, Gena

  I’d created a new e-mail account that only my parents and therapist know about, and I resist the urge to check the other one. My old e-mail was made public when I was “doxed,” to use the vernacular of the shadowy Internet world that’s become painfully familiar to me. I’ve long since gone dark on social media.

  The sheer number of messages I get—even this long after the fact—never fails to shock me. I would have expected the bizarre people who write hate mail to strangers to have moved on to a fresh kill by now. I’d like to think these people are lonely, angry trolls sitting in their parents’ basements spewing invective because they have nothing better to do. But I once reverse searched a handful of the e-mail addresses on Facebook and they turned up normal-looking men and women smiling and laughing at Christmas parties and in vacation photos; people with friends, families, children of their own. I fought the urge to forward on the death threats and all-caps e-mails condemning me and my family to hell to these friends and family members. Do you know about your husband’s dark furtive habits? I wanted to ask the wife of Joe Pinelli, one of my more dedicated digital tormentors. Do you realize that after he tucks in Aiden, 7, and Hailey, 5, he opens up his laptop to write me pages-long e-mails full of hatred and scripture?

  The problem is, you cannot unsee this side of humanity, and it makes even the most benign-looking strangers appear to you as a potential threat.

  I got some nice messages of support from ski fans, but those made me feel awful in their own way, like I’d let them down. They reminded me, uncomfortably, of who I’d been, a version of myself that had been hurtling away from me at an accelerating speed since that ghastly day. It also kicked back that terrible question: Had my singular focus blinded me? Was there something I could have done?

  Everyone needs to believe they would have seen it sooner, that they would’ve been able to help her. People need this lie to feel certain that nothing like this could ever happen to them, that the Clearys are the stuff of horror movies, rather than ordinary life. The truth is, nothing can prepare you for something like Penny.

  Penny on Christmas

  I WAS ALWAYS especially happy to have a sister on Christmas. Like most siblings, we alternated frequently between being enemies and allies, but Christmas was sacred. Our pare
nts weren’t wealthy like the Duncans, but we always had plenty of presents at Christmas. As the holiday neared, no matter how badly we’d been squabbling, a Christmas truce fell on the Cleary sisters. It was easily my favorite time of year: my mom decorated every inch of the lower floor of our house; a resplendent fir tree we’d chosen as a family took over the living room; little Santas and reindeer and other yuletide knickknacks lined every windowsill; and my mom baked and baked. My dad was almost as excited as I was when Schweitzer opened in late November, and after that he would take me up every weekend. By the time I was ten, I could ski everything he skied. On weekdays when he was working, Blair and Luke’s mom, Ann—who’d left her job after her eldest was born—would often take us up after school. She never liked to ski and so would wait for us in the lodge, reading a book.

  In order to quench the over-the-top excitement of the holiday, my parents let Penny and me open one present on Christmas Eve. Once we were old enough to actually buy gifts with our allowances, we made a tradition of opening each other’s. Penny was always a thoughtful gift giver. Somewhere in the closets of my parents’ house I still have a gorgeous forest-green scarf she gave me when we were teenagers. I remember thinking it was extremely sophisticated, like something I’d see one of the fancy ski bunnies wearing in the lodge.

  After gifts, we’d leave cookies for Santa and carrots for Rudolph, and I’d sleep in the pullout trundle bed in Penny’s room. We’d wake at the crack of dawn and count the minutes until 7:00 a.m., when we were officially allowed to go and wake up our parents. Penny, like all older siblings, discovered the truth about Santa Claus long before I did, so for a couple of years, she was complicit in the ruse along with my parents. Looking back, that seems like a very sweet lie in the midst of many others less benign.

  We would always go skiing with the Duncans on Christmas. Even Penny would come when we were kids, before all of her injuries and ailments began. Blair was a year older than Penny, and, according to her, he was exceptionally cute. And, really, he never did seem to go through much of an awkward phase. Luke and I were already obsessed with skiing, spending hours at his house watching VHS ski videos on his big screen and using the giant trampoline in his backyard to practice tricks and flips in the summer, or doing them straight off their dock into Lake Coeur d’Alene. Normally we didn’t like to ski with anyone other than Blair, but Christmas Day was always just for fun.

  I remember clearly the last time we went as a group because it was days before Tad Duncan left his wife. Tad was trying to give his family one last holiday together, but at twelve, fifteen, and seventeen, respectively, the Duncan kids were old enough to know that something was up.

  We started at the top of the hill together, but soon Luke had rocketed off through the trees by himself. There was no way Penny and the eldest Duncan sibling, Kristina, were going in there, but I nodded to Blair, and we followed him. We’d long been skiing off the runs at Silver Mountain, no matter how much trouble we got into for doing it. But that day Luke was barreling through the trees like a bat out of hell. I skied with Luke often enough to know the difference between him being daring and him being reckless. By the time we cleared the forest, all three of us were breathless.

  “Hey,” I said, clamping a gloved hand on Luke’s shoulder, “you okay?” He was doubled over and breathing hard. He didn’t answer me, and I looked over at Blair, who pulled his mask up, his brow furrowed. It was a rare bluebird December day, and from where we were you could see for miles in any direction. Suddenly, Luke let out a howl that rang out before being swallowed by the crush of snow and tree branches. He collapsed backward, his skis still bound to his feet and sticking straight up.

  “Our parents are getting divorced,” Luke said as I popped my skis off and sat beside him on the snow. I was already outgrowing my nearly new ski pants and I had to maneuver to be able to sit comfortably.

  “What?” I looked to Blair for confirmation. He sighed and sat on the other side of Luke, putting a thick, ski-jacketed arm around his little brother.

  “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “Mom has been crying for two weeks straight! She thinks she’s hiding it. She drank a whole bottle of wine last night at dinner. It’s Bethany, just watch.”

  “Bethany from the company?”

  Tad Duncan had been a lawyer when the kids were born but had for the past several years been developing a communications software system that had started to take off. Bethany was his head of marketing; she was twenty-seven. This detail seems more appalling in retrospect, now that I’ve passed twenty-seven myself and understand how young it actually is.

  “We don’t know anything yet,” Blair said.

  “Kris told me she heard them on the phone,” Luke said. “Like, multiple times. You know she goes with him whenever he travels.”

  Between her rebellious older daughter and her talented sons, Ann never seemed to have a moment for herself. She often drove me to practice when my mom was working, and she always packed snacks for me just as she did for her own kids. I loved her. It seemed unfathomable that Tad would leave her.

  “Kris shouldn’t be telling you any of that, bud,” Blair said.

  “I’m not a kid!” Luke said. “And it’s obvious anyway.”

  With that, he popped back up on his skis and tipped over the cliff more quickly than he should have. It didn’t matter how well we all knew Silver Mountain, it was idiotic to plunge off like that. Luke was reckless then. He never really outgrew it.

  Between Christmas and New Year’s, Tad announced to his family that he was going to be moving to Sun Valley. He’d purchased a five-bedroom house at the base of Bald Mountain, where he would now be living with the soon-to-be Mrs. Duncan, née Bethany Little. From there, the family seemed to swiftly unravel. Kristina wanted nothing to do with him. She was in her senior year of high school and took the excuse to become the wildest girl in Coeur d’Alene before she left for college the next fall. The boys sided with their mother, but their lives were turned upside down. Tad wanted them to come to Sun Valley. There was a well-funded but relatively minor ski club there, and Tad saw his opportunity to be a big fish.

  I remember Penny and me hiding at the top of the stairs, listening in on a conversation between my parents and Ann that spring. Our families had been close for years, and my mom in particular adored Ann; the two of them were forever trading recipes and gardening tips.

  “I know I must seem like an idiot, but I didn’t see it coming. I just never thought Tad would start fucking some twentysomething behind my back.” Penny and I exchanged a horrified smile. The grown-ups in our orbit almost never swore, so this must be serious. “I was just so busy with the boys and their skiing and trying to keep Kristina under control. This was our deal, you know? I did everything at home so that he could focus on the company. I have my degree, I could have worked. I’m so stupid.”

  “You’re not,” I heard my dad say. “He is. I’m just disgusted with him.”

  This was about as harsh as my father got.

  “And now he wants to take the boys away? What am I going to do?”

  “That makes no sense,” my mom said. “You do everything for them. How’s Tad going to even have the time?”

  “Well, he has Bethany now.” Ann said her name as though it tasted bad.

  “I’m sure the boys would rather be with you,” my mom said.

  “You know he has a trump card. Sun Valley is one of the best mountains in the country. Not to mention all Tad’s new rich cronies who fancy themselves patrons of the sport.” She groaned.

  “Skiing isn’t everything. Ann, I know they’re talented but the chances of them going pro . . .” My dad trailed off. I was a little taken aback. My parents had always been so encouraging about my skiing dreams, did they know something I didn’t? I thought uncharitably that this was because my dad had never chased the dream, had acquiesced to having a normal nine-to-five job and a life that didn’t revolve around being on the mountain. I would never do that,
I told myself.

  “I know. But I’m afraid they’ll resent me. Luke especially,” she said.

  They moved into the den, where we could no longer hear them, and I turned to my sister.

  “You don’t think they’ll really move, do you?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  I burst into tears. The thought of losing my two best friends was overwhelming. Other than Penny and my parents, I didn’t really have anyone else. I was too advanced to ski with anyone else my age. Other girls my age were getting into makeup, talking about boys, passing intricately folded notes between classes, and cuffing one another’s wrists with slap bracelets. I couldn’t imagine where I would fit in.

  Penny put her arms around me. Even as a kid, I almost never cried. “Don’t worry, Katie. It will be okay. Let’s just be glad Mom and Dad aren’t like that.”

  At the time, it felt like our family was charmed. From what little information I later found out about other cases like Penny’s, the women’s terrible childhoods were offered as one possible explanation of their behavior. But I think it’s a red herring, an attempt to explain the unexplainable. There is always a chance that something could have happened to Penny that I never knew about, but we had happy childhoods. I know. I was there. It’s one of the only things I can still be certain of.

  I suppose anyone whose family has been blown apart feels it especially acutely around the holidays, but for me, Christmas is a particular touchstone. I always came home for it; no matter where I was in the world, I’d make the trip. And whatever else was going on with Penny, even in the later years, things always seemed to go back to being good between us, at least for a few days. Nowadays, most of the time my feelings about Penny are so complicated that I can’t extract a single emotion from the morass, but on Christmas, I just miss my sister.