We Came Here to Forget

by Andrea Dunlop

  After that, it all felt much more serious, and we knew we had to tell Blair. The day we decided to come clean, there was fresh powder, so first, we skied. It was a perfect day: the sun was out and beaming down, and soon our jackets were unzipped. I wondered as I watched the two most important men in my life: Was this the last time we would be like this? What if telling Blair about Luke and me was the end of the three of us?

  We ate in the lodge after a spectacular morning on the hill, and as we sat across from Blair exchanging glances, he finally burst out laughing.

  “You guys are ridiculous, you know that?”

  We both stared at him.

  “You’re not that subtle. So are you guys hooking up or what?”

  Luke got defensive. “We’re not just hooking up.”

  “We’re . . .” I began, uncertain of the exact words I was looking for: Together? An item? Boyfriend-girlfriend?

  “Shit,” Blair said. “You guys are in love. I knew there was something up, but I didn’t know it was as serious as all that.” A thousand things raced across his eyes, and I tried to catch hold of at least one—was there sadness, shock?—but then he obliterated it with a smile. “Well, congrats, guys. Just no weird PDA, okay? I still have to live with you.”

  And that, at least for many years to come, was that.

  Liz Is New Here

  ON THE first Sunday in February, the dancers of Tango Fortunado are performing in the Plaza Dorrego, practicing a new routine they’ve put together for an upcoming festival. Unlike many of the street performers—who wear tuxes and sequined dresses even in the middle of the sweltering summer—the girls are in tight, tiny black shorts and the men in dark pants, both with their signature T-shirts broadcasting their allegiance to Gianluca Fortunado.

  I see Gemma sitting with Edward at the edge of a space that’s been cleared for the four couples who make up the performance team, and she waves me over.

  “Edward, darling, look who it is!” Gemma quickly procures an extra wineglass from the waiter and tips the last of their rosé into my glass.

  I kiss their cheeks. Edward smiles at me but looks a bit pained; his sunglasses are pulled down over his eyes.

  “Someone,” Gemma says, “is feeling a little rough after last night. Really, darling, I’m disappointed in you. If a night out with me at La Brigada is going to level you, I don’t know how you’re going to keep up your reputation.”

  “Gemma, an hour out with you would level lesser men.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. By the way, Liz, you should come over tonight. Just a small get-together. They’ll be there.” She gestures at the team.

  “Yes.” Edward smiles. “Please come. I cannot promise I won’t be in the back bedroom with a cold pack, but Gemma will look after you.”

  “You’re going soft!”

  “Three bottles of Malbec with this one last night,” Edwards says. “Plus cocktails before and after.”

  “Jesus,” I say.

  “It was over the course of many hours. And the steaks at La Brigada absorb at least half of that. The only way,” she says, gesturing to the waiter to bring another bottle, “is to keep drinking now, just something light. This rosé is practically water!”

  I notice the crowd growing quiet as Gianluca appears.

  “Bienvenidos todos,” he says. “I am so pleased to present the elite dance team of Tango Fortunado. This is their first time showing off the new choreography that they’ll be performing at the Festival of Dance in Rosario next month. For those who don’t know me, I am Gianluca Fortunado, owner of Tango Fortunado. We have classes Monday through Friday, including drop-in classes each Friday followed by the best student milonga in Buenos Aires. Now, please welcome my dancers.” As he speaks, people wander over—pulled in by that voice—and by the time he makes way for the dancers, a decent-size crowd has formed.

  The performance, though shaky in a few sections, is impressive overall. Cali’s partner is the tall blonde I saw her dancing zouk with at the social. Each pair of partners are good physical complements to one another, and the four couples dance in near-perfect synchronization and, halfway through, each lead dramatically releases his partner to the man next to them, repeating this every few bars until everyone is back with their original partner. Then, suddenly, all the couples break loose and two men dance with each other in the center in a way that looks like a highly choreographed knife fight. Then, two of the women do the same. The gender bending seems to surprise and delight the crowd. It’s all over too quickly.

  The dancers come our way when they’ve finished, and I notice that the crowd parts for them seamlessly. I’m struck by the expressions of the onlookers; the awed stares remind me of my old life, the way the performers become the focal point and the watchers become the background. Gemma introduces everyone almost too quickly for me to follow: Cali I know; her partner is Anders from Norway, Rodrigo and Valentina from Buenos Aires, Ada from Germany, Mateo from Brazil, Beau from France, and Sandra from Shanghai by way of London.

  “And, everyone, this is Liz. She’s new.”

  Cali comes over, kisses my cheeks, and pulls up a chair between Gemma and me.

  “Nice job, Cali.”

  She scrunches her face. “Thanks, but I completely fucked up my dip. Luckily, Anders compensated for me.” I smile. This too feels familiar; I was never satisfied with anything but perfection.

  “How was your lesson with G?” she asks. Had I told her about that?

  “Oh,” I say, “great. Intense, but he’s a good teacher.”

  “Ohhhh, you’re taking private lessons with Gianluca. You minx, you’re blushing!” Gemma says, laughing.

  “Am not.” I am, of course.

  Cali smiles knowingly. “It’s fine. Everyone has a crush on him at first.”

  “Gemma, I’m going,” Edward says. “See you all tonight.”

  “Boo,” Gemma says as Edward leans in and kisses her lightly on the lips. “I hope you’ve a better showing tonight, Edward.”

  He nods and waves at the rest of us.

  “He okay?” Cali asks.

  “I think he’s having trouble sleeping again. Edward has terrible insomnia,” Gemma explains to me. “He used to take Ambien, but at some point it just stopped working. I think he did too much blow in his twenties. So now he’s like a vampire.”

  “You two are close, huh?” I ask.

  “Oh, Edward? Yes, he’s like a brother. But nothing like my actual brother, who’s a bit of a shit, if I’m being honest. To say nothing of my sister, who isn’t even speaking to me at the moment. I know it’s odd to have a man as such a close mate, but Edward’s just always been in my life. People never believe me that there was never anything romantic between us.”

  I nod. “My best friend back home, well, both of my best friends, were guys. Brothers, actually, we practically grew up together.” I can scarcely remember my life without them, and now I have no idea how to have them in it anymore.

  “Your ex didn’t mind you being so close with them?” Gemma asks. “I’ve had some boyfriends who did not fancy my being so close with Edward.”

  “Well, the ex is . . . was . . . the oldest friend.”

  “Damn,” Cali says, “that’s brutal.

  “That’s heartbreaking! Is there any hope of you being friends again?”

  “We tried, but . . .” I trail off; there’s far too much to explain. Luke and I might have survived our failed romance, but not the way it failed. I never felt the loss of myself more keenly than I did when I was with him. And I knew he couldn’t bear to watch me fall apart, to watch me unbecome myself. He pulled away slowly, incrementally, breaking my already shattered heart a little bit at a time until I couldn’t bear it and made him end things. I could feel his revulsion at the tragedy and chaos that descended on me, as though what had happened to me might be contagious. He loved who I’d been before, not this sad, needy doppelgänger who’d taken her place.

  “This is why Edward and I could never
go there. Who would I run to with my boy troubles? Not to mention that I would crush him beneath my Amazonian heft! Besides, I believe in being friends with exes, but he does not. He moves thousands of miles away so he doesn’t have to run into them.”

  “Every time?” Cali says wryly. “That seems unmanageable.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watch for Gianluca and see him standing under one of the giant jacaranda trees with Angelina. Her face is tense and he appears to be placating her. My heart sinks a little with the certainty they’re a couple.

  “Well, Edward’s never had much use—or need, I might add—for practicality,” Gemma continues. “In case you hadn’t gathered this, his family is minted on the British and the Porteño side. He ostensibly works for the family biz but can more or less come and go as he pleases. I’m not sure he’s even bothering with the ruse of work at the moment. Other than his artistic patronage. Edward never stays anywhere long enough for moss to grow, let alone roots to take hold. In that, Buenos Aires suits him perfectly: we’re all on the run from something here.”

  I nod. “My friends back home are all so tight-knit. I didn’t want people to feel like they had to take sides.” This is true, I didn’t want people to choose sides, mostly because I knew they’d choose Luke. Who wouldn’t? Luke is still the golden boy, whereas I’m no one now. I realize that without the additional context, disappearing into a foreign country following a breakup seems dramatic. But for all they know, I’m a big old drama queen and this is just the sort of thing I do. Maybe I am now. Maybe that’s who Liz is.

  “What about the other one, the brother?” Cali asks. I can’t help but smile when I think of him. He’d been so much braver in the end. I see him so clearly now, now that it’s all too late.

  “Blair. We’re still friends. But he doesn’t know I’m here. I told my parents where I was going, that’s about it,” I say.

  “There’s more to that story,” Gemma says knowingly, “and we’ll get it out of you eventually.”

  Penny Is Having a Baby

  THEY WERE always so focused on Katie, they must not have seen it.

  She really was probably neglected.

  Something must have happened to her when she was a kid.

  I don’t pretend to know the shape or the depths of what went wrong with Penny, but I do know that it’s not my parents’ fault. I think anyone close to us knows this too. The public is a different matter. People need there to be a root cause, some defining incident or an entire brutal history that drove Penny to do what she did. If there’s nothing to pin it on, if Penny is just a random aberration, it means it could happen to anyone. It means that their daughters or sisters might also grow up to be monsters.

  If anyone really tortured my parents about Penny, it was my parents. Every incident—every bad boyfriend, every lie she told, every strange overly emotional moment—was reopened like a cold case and examined down to the tiniest detail. As though it might lead us to what? An opportunity to go back and change it? And yes, my skiing, the unevenness of having such different daughters, how that affected their parenting; that’s occurred to them, I know it has, though they’re careful about how they discuss it whenever I’m around. They don’t want me to feel guilty, as though there’s any way they could save me from that. But a look at my cohort shows that this has nothing to do with it; no one else’s siblings turned out like Penny.

  Still, there’s no moment we’ve obsessed over more than Penny’s first pregnancy.

  The year Penny got pregnant was the best year of my life, but the thing about the best year of your life is that when you’re in it, you can only imagine that things will keep getting better. Not only did all three of us make the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, but we all podiumed—Blair with a silver in slalom, Luke with a gold in super-G and a silver in downhill, me with a bronze in super-G. My parents came to watch, along with Penny and Emily. Somewhere in an archive of old television footage, there exists several seconds of them—along with the blended Duncan clan—jumping up and down with signs near the bottom of the course. For once, it felt like Penny was proud of me.

  She’d recently turned twenty-six and was getting rather anxious for Jon, who’d turned out to have some staying power, to propose. Twenty-six wasn’t so young to be getting married in Coeur d’Alene; plenty of people got hitched to their high school or college sweethearts even earlier, and Penny always had dreams of the domestic life that I couldn’t fathom. When she called me to tell me she was engaged, this wasn’t even her biggest piece of news.

  “I haven’t even told Mom and Dad yet,” she said excitedly. “I’m due in March!”

  I was in the midst of gearing up for the beginning of the new season in November, and I was on my way to dryland training when she called.

  “One sec, Pen,” I said. Luke was looking at me expectantly. “Tell Coach I’ll be there when I can.”

  Luke raised his eyebrows at me.

  “Family emergency,” I said helplessly. If I cut Penny short on this call, she’d hold it against me for months. Things were good between us, but her moods were mercurial, and it forever felt like she might just slip through my fingers if I did or said the wrong thing.

  Luke shook his head.

  “Sorry, Pen, go on,” I said.

  “Jon is over the moon. It was so sweet, Katie. I was so nervous when I told him, just because, you never know, right? Obviously we’d talked about marriage and babies and all of that, but it’s totally different when one is on the way. So I tell him at the kitchen table and he, like, jumps up and runs upstairs. I’m thinking: What the hell? He looks excited but I’m also freaking out, and I mean, he ran out of the room. So he sprints back downstairs and basically throws himself at my feet. Suddenly, he’s on one knee with a ring box, and I can’t even tell you what happened after that, I kind of blacked out for a minute. I said yes, obviously.”

  “Wow, the whole package,” I said. I loved Luke, but I couldn’t imagine doing either of these things yet.

  “The great thing is,” Penny continued, “he already had the ring, so I’m not worried that it was a case of, like, Oh, she’s pregnant, I have to propose. It’s the prettiest ring, Katie! A diamond solitaire with a white gold band.”

  “I’m so happy for you, Penny. I know Mom and Dad will be too.”

  “Will they?”

  “Yes.”

  I knew they worried about Penny’s tendency to rush ahead with things. But she seemed more stable now; she’d worked in the family medicine clinic at Kootenai for almost four years. I often came to visit her at her office when I was home, and I loved seeing her in her element. She was clearly beloved in the office; she moved with such confidence there and was so competent and warm with the patients.

  And my parents would make the most adoring grandparents. Their philosophy had always been that, as long as we were happy and safe, they wanted for us only what we wanted for ourselves. I knew they had some misgivings about Jon. He’d been out of work for a while and he and Penny had always seemed like a bit of a mismatch. But when they’d tried to address any of their concerns about Jon with Penny, she collapsed into floods of tears. Whatever issues we had about Jon, it appeared we were stuck with him now.

  With the baby due in March, by the time I came home for Christmas, Penny was obviously, exuberantly pregnant. I was on a very brief visit back from Europe, where I was having the best World Cup season of my career; with wins in Lake Louise and Val d’Isère under my belt, as well as a strong performance on my home turf of Park City, I had a real shot at adding my very first World Cup globe to my collection. I dreamed of the iconic crystalline globe at night, as, I was certain, did Luke, who himself was having an unparalleled hot streak. The general public, when they cared at all, cared only about the Olympics, but for skiers, World Cup racing was an even higher distinction.

  Penny and I had been enjoying a renewed closeness over the previous few months. Many of the other skiers I knew had siblings who were also athletes, the sport be
ing a family tradition. Sarah Sweeny’s older sister had been an even stronger skier than she was, up until a back injury had sidelined her. Now she was part of Sarah’s training team, and I saw them together in Park City—where we all currently lived—constantly. The older Penny and I got, the more we struggled for common ground. But now we were having a parallel experience of hope and excitement, me for my first World Cup title, her for the life growing inside of her. Even though we didn’t understand the shape of one another’s ambitions, we understood the depths of them, the feeling of wanting something so badly that it eclipsed all the minor annoyances of daily life.

  Penny was luminous that year at Christmas, her pert little beach ball of a belly constantly cradled by her hand, her skin glowing, her eyes shining. My parents were happy to have both of their girls home, ecstatic about becoming grandparents. I was more excited to be an auntie than I ever imagined I’d be. I focused so much on what the muscle and sinew of my body could be shaped to do, but here was Penny’s producing life! Pregnancy is only an ordinary kind of miracle when it’s happening to someone else: when it’s your own flesh and blood, it feels like everything.

  The prospect of fatherhood seemed to have brought out the best in Jon; his normally taciturn manner had loosened. He was gregarious with us and solicitous of Penny, fussing over her and running to deliver her anything she asked for.

  As we were preparing for Christmas dinner, Penny said she had something to tell us.

  “I wanted to wait until Katie was here,” she said.

  My parents froze in the kitchen, my mother’s oven-mitted hands halted in midair. We all turned to Penny, who was nursing her one allotted glass of wine—her colleagues from the clinic had assured her that a little bit was fine—and beaming.

  “I’m having twins,” she said in a stage whisper. “Two girls!”

  There was delirious excitement all around, and Jon, who of course already knew, gamely endured an onslaught of good-natured jokes about him being outnumbered.