We Came Here to Forget

by Andrea Dunlop

  The next set begins and while Cali is scooped up by a younger dancer, G leads me to the floor and pulls me into a close embrace. The breaks between songs barely exist and when the set ends, G pulls back from me and looks into my eyes. I’m shocked by his expression because he looks as drugged as I feel. He puts both hands on my face and pulls my ear to his lips.

  “Oh Tiger, Tiger. You’re my special little project, you know? The way we dance, it makes me so badly want to fuck you, but I want to keep you too.”

  I feel my jaw drop but I have been so caught up with him that I don’t see Angelina circling like a shark. Before I can respond, she pulls him away and unleashes a stream of Spanish too angry and fast for me to decipher. First, he’s rolling his eyes but then he’s trying to placate her. I realize I’ve been standing frozen on the dance floor, my eyes wide and my mouth gaping. Before long, the new set starts, and Horatio asks me to dance.

  Two things are true at once that night: I never want to leave and I am longing to be away from the excruciating sight of G with another woman, someone young and beautiful and delicate. I grab a glass of wine with Cali and tell her what happened. The words are out of my mouth before I can worry about the fact that she’s probably closer to him than to me.

  “Are you surprised?” she asks. “You’ve met him.”

  “What does he mean he wants to keep me?”

  Cali rolls her eyes. “Oh, well, that’s a bit of a familiar refrain. For a lot of people, Buenos Aires is a stopover, and that makes G a stopover too. He gets very attached to the people in the studio. And then, he’s always having a dramatic falling-out with someone. Not just the women either.”

  “Is he . . . ?”

  “Oh no, I mean, not that I know of. I don’t know, nothing about G would really surprise me. He never talks about his past in anything other than riddles. Rumors abound, as I’m sure you can imagine. People gossip about him all the time. Especially in the dance community, which is pretty tight-knit.”

  “Ugh, how awful.” My skin crawls with the idea of people talking about me behind my back, the whispers I came thousands of miles to escape.

  “Are you kidding?” Cali says. “He lives for it.”

  Penny Has a Daughter

  FAILURE TO thrive. That’s what they called it when Ava—out of NICU and home at last—still wasn’t gaining weight or hitting her developmental milestones. It seemed like such a gentle term for something so terrible, a catchall phrase that encompassed none of the visceral stress and fear of having an unhealthy baby. Failure to thrive, as though she were a houseplant who’d been potted in the wrong soil. Health is, ultimately, what all new parents wish for their children, and it eluded poor, tiny Ava.

  For the many months—though not quite nine, since Ava came early—of Penny’s pregnancy, I felt as though I were holding my breath. I tried as best I could to put the last time out of my head. I envied Stewart and his family their uncomplicated anticipatory joy. For me, there was a nightmarish déjà vu to it all: I flew home (thankfully only from Park City this time) when Ava came unexpectedly early. At the hospital, I sat next to Penny, squeezing her hand. I kissed her forehead when they wheeled her away for a C-section. Penny returned from that other room on a gurney, tiny Ava with her tiny hands grasping at nothing behind the thick plastic of her incubator. Seeing them, I felt a strange cloud of doubt, like I couldn’t be sure this baby was truly Penny’s. I recognized that this was completely illogical, but when it came to my sister, I could no longer trust even what I saw with my own eyes. It wasn’t that I thought of her as a liar, nothing that simple. It was more that I felt that reality itself became distorted when Penny was involved. This time, I hadn’t dared to love Ava in anticipation of her arrival, so when I finally saw her, when I reached into the incubator to touch her tiny hand, a blinding rush of love hit me all at once.

  Ava was born in March. My season had ended early when I’d caught an edge during one of my final races in San Sicario. I’d gone careening into the nets and shattered my left shinbone. I’d had to be airlifted off the hill and had undergone major surgery. I was still walking with crutches when Ava arrived early, so I moved back to Coeur d’Alene to rehab and be with my sister. For one thing, I needed to be away from the team; it was too hard to watch my healthy teammates moving around me, past me. As long as I came back for regular checkups, my coach was fine with me going home. Not being in Park City would help me resist pushing through the injury too soon, as my coaches knew I might otherwise do.

  Luke didn’t make much of a nurse, acting as though my injury might be catching. It was more than that too. Perhaps I was only projecting onto him, but it was as though he started to worry that I might not blossom into the greatness that everyone had predicted, that my bronze in Salt Lake was going to be the pinnacle of my career rather than the beginning. This made it impossible for me to discuss my fears about the injury or anything else with him. I talked to Blair instead. He came over as I was packing to head back to Coeur d’Alene.

  “The doctors said you’ll be fine in a few months, Katie,” he said when I told him I was worried. “You’ve got time, you’re going to come back and kill it in Turin.”

  “What if I don’t though?”

  The question hung. Blair had continued to have success as a tech skier but, just as I was, was more known for his relationship to Luke than anything. I knew he wanted to do well in Turin as much as I did.

  “You know I believe in you, but you can’t control for everything. None of us can. We’ll all survive.”

  It was a kind of a sacrilege to admit that anything but the best could ever be enough. But it was a relief too. Skiers fell into two camps when it came to thinking about the future: there were those who squeezed in an education so they’d have something to fall back on, and those who so passionately disbelieved in life after skiing that they refused to make any other plans, some declaring they’d prefer to die on the mountain than work a nine-to-five and meaning it with every fiber of their being. Blair was majoring in quantitative social science at Dartmouth, focusing on the relationship between organized sports and low-income communities. He wanted to pass along his love for the sport, a love that was not so tied up with winning as Luke’s was.

  I knew in my heart why I was nervous around Penny and the baby, but I refused to peel back the layers of my fear. We had all moved past it, I told myself. Penny was better, she was married to Captain Stewart now. She was stable and happy and it would all be fine. If only little Ava could make it through the next few weeks.

  The NICU is a liminal space that feels like the worst kind of purgatory. Babies too small and fragile to be in the world take labored breaths and look out with shocked, uncertain eyes from their plastic enclaves. Terrified parents roam the halls like zombies. We made sure Penny was never alone: when Stewart wasn’t there, my parents or I would be, holding Ava when we were allowed to and trying to remain cheerful in the air of the NICU, which was thick with worry and fear. We brought meals for Penny and books to read to Ava. Penny was admirably calm and seemed to have tapped into some deep reserves of resilience. It didn’t occur to me then that she was perhaps eerily calm, considering the circumstances. Penny had always been at her best when she was in the center of a crisis; it’s what made her so good at her job.

  A month after her birth, to everyone’s infinite relief, Ava was released from the hospital. Despite her sickliness, Ava was an adorable baby, and soon she was starting to smile back at us. Even in the face of all that worry, I loved being an auntie even more than I’d imagined I would. The smell of her head, the warmth of her delicate little body, brought out a primal love in me. One afternoon, my mom and I babysat while Penny ran some errands. Ava fell asleep on my chest and my mom snapped a photo of her there. I lay still, marveling at her, a deep joy coursing through me.

  When my parents were with her, I saw a cautious happiness seeping through. The road had been long, Penny’s pregnancy had been difficult, and the NICU had been hellish, but she was
home now. She was safe.

  But “failure to thrive” encompassed a great many small, interwoven evils: she wasn’t gaining weight, her eyes weren’t tracking properly, she wasn’t able to absorb nutrients, so they’d had to attach a feeding tube, a fixture that remained on her even when they weren’t using it. Penny told us she had to cut back to quarter time at work so that she could take her back and forth to all of her various doctor’s appointments. She obsessed over her care, ceased to talk or, seemingly, think of anything else. Penny’s Facebook page was a steady stream of updates about Ava’s condition; the comments below were a tidal wave of support and sympathy from both friends and family and a great many people I’d never heard of from Penny’s ballooning list of friends.

  I hoped that Ava would be on the mend by the time I went back to Park City in the fall, but it felt like medical Whac-A-Mole. New, unrelated issues kept popping up: ear infections, for which she needed tubes, a surgery to implant a different kind of feeding tube. Penny explained that her compromised immune system just exacerbated everything. Everyone told her how strong she was to stay so calm for Ava.

  When I arrived back in Park City in the fall, my shin was healed but I was emotionally exhausted and ready to be absorbed in my training. On the one hand, I had loved being at home with Penny and Ava. I’d always thought it was odd that people talked about the way babies’ heads smelled—until I’d held Ava for the first time. To feel her tiny hand curl around my finger, to absorb the warmth of her as she slept on my chest, leant being human a new and unexpected beauty. But the constant tide of worry was almost unbearable; when would she move on from this place to become a healthy little girl? Because in all the reports from the doctors, there was never any “why”—it was just one of those tragic mysteries.

  “Sorry the little lady isn’t doing well,” Luke said the night I got back to Park City. “I’m sure she’ll turn around. One of my cousins had a preemie and it was rough for the first year but you should see the kid now, he’s a bruiser!”

  Luke knew I was upset with him that he’d only visited me once while I was in CDA, and he was a little upset with me that I was upset with him. This was our deal, we were stronger together than we were apart because we never asked the other to sacrifice any career opportunities. While I’d been with Penny that summer, Luke had been traveling with Red Bull in between training camps, shooting videos of him cross-training, mountain biking, surfing, and interviewing other pro athletes. I was breaking with our pact by expecting him to be by my side. And, as he kept pointing out, there was nothing he could do, as though doing were even the point. When he did visit, he shuffled anxiously around the periphery of my family’s house. Luke had no capacity to give me the kind of calm, tacit support that I needed. Blair, on the other hand, had risen to the occasion during his more frequent visits that summer, spending quiet hours watching movies with my sister and me while Ava slept. Going to the gym with me for my long, tedious rehab workouts. Helping me clean Penny’s kitchen when it got beyond the pale, once even going to the gun range with Stewart to help him blow off steam. Penny was bearing up better than her husband in the face of their child’s setbacks—Stewart’s eyes were purple-rimmed and he looked constantly haunted, while Penny was beatific and brave, tireless in her quest to help her daughter.

  When Blair was with me, he did not see what I saw. Or perhaps it was that he could not feel it: the wrongness that crept in sometimes when Penny was holding Ava or watching her. She said and did all the right things, cooed and cuddled her and smiled at her, but there was a note of discord. But if I was the only one who felt it, maybe I was inventing it.

  I tried to let Luke’s absence that summer go. I knew on some level that it was unfair to expect Luke to morph into someone else in the face of my personal crisis. Loving people meant accepting them as they were.

  “I’m sure she’ll be fine,” I said to Luke that night as I was unpacking and settling back into our condo after the summer away. I could feel how deeply uncomfortable he was talking about Ava, so honestly I didn’t really want to talk to him about it either. I wanted my life to go back to normal, and in that moment, this still felt possible. We were years out of the Duncans’ house at that point and sharing a spacious, rented condo in the heart of Park City. Since we spent so little time here, we kept the neutral anonymous furniture and tasteful ski-themed art that the place had come with. Neither of us felt any urge to nest beyond putting some family photos up here and there, along with some of us as a couple and with our third musketeer, Blair. We framed the SKI magazine cover that had run just prior to the Salt Lake City Olympics. They’d posed us on Baldy on a glorious sunny day. We were in our racing suits, and I was wearing more makeup than I’d ever worn in the rest of my life combined. They’d blown my hair out and it hung down my shoulders in loose waves, a pair of ski goggles pushed perfectly up into my hair. Blair and I stood proudly, holding our sponsored skis to show the logo like we’d been told to do so many times. Luke posed between the two of us, lounging on the glittering snow, looking like he was at the beach. The headline that ran with the piece was: THE HOPEFULS: ARE THREE YOUNG SMALL-TOWN IDAHOANS THE FUTURE OF THE U.S. SKI TEAM? They loved the fact that we’d known each other since we were kids, that we lived together, that Luke and I were a couple. We’d made a running joke of shouting out our answer to the cover’s rhetorical question each time we passed the photo: Hell yes! we’d say, sometimes thumping the wall next to the photo. It had become part of our pregame ritual.

  I wanted to believe that I could come back to the condo, my shin fully healed after a gold-star rehab effort, and just resume my life as it had been before. But I think some part of me was already dislodged and knew nothing would go back to the way it had been.

  Liz at High Tea

  THE DAY comes and I feel the weight of it from the moment I wake up. February 12. The opening ceremonies. I lie in my bed, trying to let the late summer sunshine coming through the cracks in the blinds and the humid February air distract me from the fact that on this very day, many thousands of miles away, nearly everyone I cared about in my old life is gathering for the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver Olympic Games. Whistler was one of my favorite mountains to ski, and it would have been close enough that my family could have easily come to cheer me on. At thirty, I’d be at the peak of my career, with several World Cup globes in my collection, as well as a handful of medals. Speed skiers like me take time to develop and, so long as they can avoid catastrophic injury, get an edge from the extra years of experience and peak later. This was supposed to be my moment.

  I manage to drag myself to my Spanish class, and by the time I’m finished, I have several messages from Gemma, who has decided that we must go to the Alvear Palace for tea that afternoon. I rush back to my apartment to change into a sundress.

  I’ve not yet been to the Alvear, though I’ve suggested it to many a tourist. The hotel is a stunning mass of marble and gold gilt, like the children’s book version of a fancy hotel. The staff wear tuxedos, and the carpets are bloodred. I arrive a few minutes late—after changing my outfit three times—and everyone else has arrived. Gemma, Edward, Cali, Anders, and Gianluca stand on the sunny street outside the hotel; their attention is drawn in a tight circle around a petite woman animatedly telling a story. I find with a stab of dismay that Edward’s cousin Camilla is in the center of the group. When she sees me, curiously, she greets me like I’m a long-lost friend.

  “This place is really something,” I say to Gemma, who takes my arm as we head into the Alvear. She pushes her sunglasses back into her hair and shivers with delight.

  “Isn’t it? I hope you’re ready for the tour.”

  “Please!” I say as we make our way through the massive gilt columns, the chandeliers, the mirrored sconces.

  “Well!” Gemma says, turning her voice toward the whole group, showing off a bit. “It was opened in 1932, and as you can see, the decor is reminiscent of the Louis XV and Louis XVI style. It was originally owned by a
Buenos Aires businessman and socialite who’d spent time in Europe and wanted to bring a bit of that Belle Epoque glamour back to his hometown. This was around the time lots of Europeans were coming to visit, and you know how we Europeans just love to take home with us wherever we go. Oh hello, we’re taking your country away from you, but we’ve brought some lovely tea and some fabulous decor! So yes, one of the original designers was French.”

  As Gemma talks, I notice Edward giving his cousin an indulgent little eye roll; Camilla returns a bemused smile. I feel a flash of tender embarrassment for Gemma, who, fortunately, appears oblivious.

  “Oh wait until you see the L’Orangerie,” Gemma says as we approach the hostess desk, where she asks in English about seating for seven.

  “I am afraid,” the hostess says, her tone frosty, “that there is no room on the patio at the moment, but I can seat you near the window.”

  Gemma looks utterly deflated. I realize suddenly that this outing must have been her idea.