At first, Penny cried to us too, but as the details burbled forth, she quickly turned. My mother’s name was all over the paperwork as the person who’d alerted the doctors. And for all of us, there was no going back.
Liz Says Yes
THE NEXT day, Cali and I plan to meet after my Spanish class to grab some lunch and walk through the botanical garden. A group that includes a few Americans and Germans who seem to have become friends are packed in on the small couch in the lounge killing time between classes, and whatever they’re watching is on commercial. I get out early and linger idly there with one eye on the door for Cali. The programming resumes and the familiar image of the start house comes into view. For a moment, I’m transfixed by the sight of one of my old teammates, Andrew Weibrecht, getting prepped by the team’s hype man, Rudy, a bodybuilder Luke brought on as a trainer. His energy became so invaluable that the coaches made him an official part of the staff two years ago. Rudy’s not mic’d up, but I can still hear him, and the memory of his voice reverberates in my brain. I’ve been trying so hard to avoid seeing any footage of the races, but now that it’s in front of me, I can’t take my eyes off it.
“Hey, there you are! I was waiting downstairs but figured I’d just come up. Oh man, the Olympics! I’d totally forgotten they were happening right now,” Cali says, turning to look at what I’m staring at. “Whoa, earth to Liz? Hel-lo.”
I turn to her slowly, trying to force a smile, but given her reaction, I guess it emerges as a grimace.
“Hi, Cali,” I say. I’m trying and failing to regain my composure; my voice sounds as though it’s coming from the bottom of a well.
“Are you okay? Jesus, what’s wrong?”
“Can we just . . . I need to go home.”
“Yeah, of course, come on.”
Cali bustles me out and we’re suddenly in the teeming streets of the Microcentro, with what feels in that moment to be all of humanity: tourists, office workers heading home, little kids. Cali puts her arm in mine and guides me to the subway and to my stop in San Telmo. Mercifully, she doesn’t say anything, just keeps her arm tightly wound around mine.
Back in the courtyard, I try to recenter myself: I’m in Buenos Aires, where I’m having a not bad time. It’s been a week since I’ve had to take an Ativan.
Cali waits for me to say something.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about.” She gives me a sad smile. “I just wish you could tell me what’s going on.”
“I want to,” I say. And it’s true. I know it would be a relief, just to have one person in my new life see me in context. But when I think of telling her, I’m almost immediately engulfed in shame. I don’t want to watch that look of horror widening her eyes.
“For what it’s worth, it was a relief to tell you about what happened to me in New York. I mean, I know your story might be way worse, but I would understand. I promise.”
I nod but say nothing.
“Something with the Olympics?” she tries.
I nod. This part Cali would understand. She trained to do one thing her entire life, built her life around one singular ambition, and in an instant, it was taken away from her. She was cast out. “I used to be a skier,” I manage. “I got injured.”
Cali raises her eyebrows. “Oh. Man, I’m sorry to hear that.” For a moment, we’re both quiet. I feel that if I say one more thing, the whole story will come bursting forth and I’m not ready. “Is that everything?”
I shake my head, thinking that my expression must look desperate because she relents.
“Whenever you’re ready, Liz, I’m here.”
I have a lesson with Gianluca that night, and for the first time since I’ve met him, I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to be swept away by his touch and his scent. I just want to wallow in my sorrows and mourn my lost self. He reminds me too much that I’m not who I was: you would need to lose some weight. The words echo in my mind, and it makes me want to be released from my own skin, though I can’t imagine how I became so invested in the opinion of this man, this fabulist who weaves a net of myths around himself—I think nastily that perhaps the thing he’s really trying to hide is how perfectly ordinary he is.
He senses that something is off right away but I tell him I’m fine, just tired, and we forge ahead with the lesson. But he won’t let it lie.
“Hey,” he says, taking my shoulders in his hands, arresting our movements mid-dance. We’re halfway through our time and I’ve been counting the minutes—there is a bottle of Malbec and a box of alfajores waiting for me at my apartment and I’m anxious to indulge in my misery. “Where are you?”
“Right here,” I say. “I’m just tired.”
I was a champion once and it suddenly infuriates me that he’s never seen this side of me. All he sees is this weakened flabby version of me who’s been leaning into him, practically offering herself up as a sacrifice, giving him whatever of her he’ll take—and somehow right now I feel like she is his fault and all I want is to destroy her.
G drops his hands from my shoulders. “You’re wasting my time,” he says, turning defensive now. “If you’re going to stonewall me, Liz, there’s no point.”
“Why? You’re my dance teacher, so teach me how to dance. Why do you need to know all the intimate details of my life? You keep acting like it’s all so much more and it’s just really”—I’m on a roll now—“melodramatic, you know?” He is ridiculous, I think. Look at him. “I’m not part of your little cult.”
He smiles now. He’s gotten to me and it was all he wanted. “You’re really cute when you’re mad.”
“I am not fucking cute. Goddamn it, Gianluca, you know nothing about me.”
“Okay,” he says, smiling smugly, like he’s already won the argument. “Whatever you say, Tiger. You’ve told me plenty whether you realize it or not.”
I can’t take it. “I haven’t told you the half. I am . . . was one of the best downhill ski racers in the world. I spent my entire life training. I should be at the Olympics right now, and instead my career is fucked and I’m here pretending any of this matters. God, you know what? Forget it.” I stomp off in the direction of the door. I reach the edge of the studio floor and come to a halt, remembering that if I don’t take my shoes off, I’ll wreck them.
But then G’s got my arm. I turn and look at him, that infuriating smile. I shove him away. He laughs. “There she is.”
I lose it. I burst into tears. There are many people who’ve known me most of my life and have never seen me cry. Most of them.
“Come here,” he says. All the fury has gone out of me in a rush, and I let myself be folded into G’s arms.
“I’m sorry,” I say, not exactly sure what I’m apologizing for except that I’m mortified to be crying on this man, who will now pity me when that’s the last thing I want from anyone, but especially from him. He shakes his head, holding me tightly, with one hand around my waist, one stroking my hair.
“Come on,” he says. “Change your shoes.”
Suddenly, I just want to be told what to do next. Put your shoes on, there you go. Come with me, take my hand, that’s it. Here, put the helmet on, and I know it’s warm but take my jacket, I’m not letting you ride with bare arms. Dreamlike, I follow his cues and before I really process what’s happening, I’m straddling the back of his Ducati.
His flat is the upper floor of an old house, a crumbling grand stucco structure at the edge of Caballito. His sprawling studio apartment is in homey, artsy disarray. In one corner, there’s a galley kitchen with mismatched plates, in the other, a bed with rumpled sheets. In between, there is a couch, no television. G continues his soft, persistent instructions. Take your shoes off, sit down. I sink into the old sofa as he pours wine into two small blue glasses and hands me one. “Thanks,” I say, my voice gravelly and strange; it’s the first word I’ve said since we left the studio.
He sits next to me, placing his own wineglass on the crat
e that serves as a coffee table. He watches me take a long sip of the wine. When I put my glass down, he says, “Come here,” and pulls me into his lap. He strokes my hair and it feels like my blood rushes to meet his fingertips wherever they land on my skin.
“Something else happened,” he says, his voice low. “It’s not just the skiing.”
I nod.
“Do you want to tell me?” he asks.
I shake my head. To recount the whole gruesome story right now is the last thing I want.
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know.” Tears are coming to my eyes again.
Gianluca’s hand tightens in my hair and he pulls my head forward and kisses me, and I feel my heartbeat in my stomach, now lower. He pulls me up so that I’m straddling him. He runs his fingers under my shirt, trailing the bare skin of my ribs. I’m so much softer there than I once was, and it strikes me that no one has touched me like this in a long time.
“What do you want?” he asks again. I feel him hardening beneath me.
“I want,” I say, my voice suddenly clear, “to feel something.”
He nods. He takes my shirt off, pausing to look me in the eyes. My heart is racing. He reaches around and unclasps my bra, slips the straps off, and pulls it away. I curl forward a bit, feeling exposed even in the low light of the flat. He pulls my hands to my sides and puts his mouth to my breast.
“But you think I’m . . .” The words, the words.
“I think you’re beautiful. I want to make you feel,” he says. “Is that what you want from me? I need you to tell me you want it.”
“Yes.”
He flips us around, so that I’m sitting and he’s kneeling between my legs.
“Yes what?” he asks as he unbuttons the top of my jeans, unzips them, and begins to slide them down over my hips. My underwear catches on them and I try to reach for them but he gently moves my hand away. He pauses to remove his own shirt, and now I can feel the heat of his skin near mine. He leans forward, resting his chin on my stomach and looking up at me; I can barely catch my breath.
“Tell me what you want,” he says.
“I want . . . I want you,” I manage.
He kisses my stomach, runs his tongue down beneath my navel. “Do you want me to put my mouth on you?”
“Yes.” I feel like I’ll pass out when he does it.
A moment later, he pulls back. “Is that good for you?”
I say yes and my voice sounds guttural, unlike my own.
“I’m going to make you feel,” he says. He puts his mouth back on me and slides first one and then two fingers inside me.
When I’m right on the edge, he stops and stands up. He pulls my hand up and puts it on him, huge and hard in his jeans.
“Do you want me inside of you?”
I nod.
He unbuttons his jeans and the sight of him is sudden and looming. “Tell me. Say the words.”
“I want you inside of me.” I’ve never said words like this aloud; it was never like this with Luke.
He sits down, pulls his pants all the way off. “I want you on top,” he says. “I want to watch your face while I’m inside you.”
Suddenly, I feel too exposed and I feel unsightly and sure this is a mistake.
“I don’t . . .” I curl inward and cover my face with my hand. “I can’t . . .” I’m breathless, confused, feeling a thousand things.
“Don’t think, feel,” G says, pulling my hand away from my face. “Like we’re dancing. Just follow me.”
I let myself unfurl and he pulls my hips over him. Asking me one last time, “Do you want me? I want you so much right now.”
And yes, of course, I say yes.
Penny Is Not a Criminal
ONCE PENNY’S illness had a name, the depth of its roots became suddenly and irrevocably visible. It wasn’t just now with Ava, it was always with everything. It was a lifetime of inexplicable illnesses and injuries, a draw to the sick that masqueraded as compassion, a vast knowledge and infinite obsession with medical details that far exceeded professional usefulness. It was the ghosts of the two little girls who had never been, who lingered now like bad omens, two tiny Cassandras.
Having a name for Penny’s affliction brought scant relief as the treatment possibilities were vague and the outcomes bleak. Most of the cases I read about in my frantic Googling of the disease made headlines because the children in question had died. There seemed to be no stories of people triumphing over the disease to be found anywhere, no kernel of hope to hold on to. Even the notion that Munchausen syndrome by proxy was a treatable disease at all was up for debate; afflicted women were child abusers and monsters, rather than victims themselves suffering from their own dark delusions. We didn’t want Penny punished, we wanted her helped. We wanted her to be protected from herself and Ava to be protected from her.
The only way I could think of the disease was as something entirely separate from my sister, as though it were a parasite that—if we could somehow remove it—she would recover from. Even though I could see now how far the tentacles reached into Penny’s past, my conviction remained that there was still a Penny in there to be saved: the Penny I’d known as a girl, and even as a teenager, the one who was sweet and sensitive and silly. I had so many memories of her laughing and gossiping with Emily, going bonkers over some boy, or prattling on in their shared made-up language—a conflagration of gibberish and the first-year German they’d taken together their freshman year. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her really laugh in what felt like years. But surely there was a way to bring her back.
Penny called me about my mother’s betrayal nearly as soon she discovered it. I was back in the Park City condo then with Luke and Blair had come for dinner; thankfully, it was only the three of us. I took the phone call in the bedroom.
“Katie, Mom is crazy, can you believe her? She called the doctors and told them all these lies about me! What the hell?” Penny was sobbing. The two days since CPS had come had been like a car accident happening in slow motion, the severity of what was taking place deepening by the second. Ava had been returned to her parents quickly, with a court order that required they stay with Penny’s bewildered in-laws under strict supervision.
“All I’ve done this past year is try to help my daughter, and now we have to go stay with Stew’s parents because the court won’t let Ava be with me unless I’m supervised, like I’m some criminal. We’re all crammed in on each other and now I feel like my in-laws are always watching me. It’s so humiliating!”
I thought about Stewart’s retired parents and their tiny two-bedroom house in Hayden. Adding two adults and a baby would be close quarters indeed. My parents had reached out to the Grangers, but they’d seemed wary and hadn’t returned their calls. And who knew what Penny was telling them? The Grangers were simple, unsophisticated people who treasured their quiet, small-town life. Penny was smarter than all of them put together.
“You could stay with Mom and Dad, couldn’t you? At least they have more space.” I wanted Penny to be with my parents; the Grangers had no idea what they were dealing with. I was fantasizing about some scenario in which my sister was forced to retreat to my parents, who seemed like the only ones who could help Penny understand that she was sick, who could help her and in turn help Ava.
“After what Mom did? Are you kidding me?”
“She didn’t know they were going to call CPS, Pen, she was just worried. We’ve all been worried.”
Penny’s sobs abated suddenly.
“Worried about Ava or worried about me with Ava?”
Into the eerie silence that opened came a rush of all the small moments that had built up over a lifetime with Penny, releasing themselves all at once into my bloodstream. I stared at the wall. I was in our third bedroom, where Blair sometimes crashed, where my parents stayed when they came to visit. For some reason, the generic vintage prints of Park City advertisements struck me as absurd, like I couldn’t believe that this was what
I was looking at in this moment. I suppose I knew it was a point of no return. Penny had never come visit me in Park City, despite my many offers to send her a plane ticket. She’d been drifting away for years.
“Penny, I think you need help.”
“What the fuck does that mean, Katie?” Her voice was calm and sharp, the tears from moments ago long gone.
I burst into my own tears of desperation. “Penny, I love you, we all love you. But you need help. We’re so worried about you.” Even then, I couldn’t say the words themselves; I couldn’t name it.
“You knew,” she said, her voice turning to ice. “You knew Mom was going to the doctors. You probably all sat around and talked about it. Goddamn it, it’s always been like this, the three of you against me.”
“Penny, it is not like that. We’re just worried. After everything that happened with the babies three years ago . . . it just . . . we want to help!”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” she said.
Now I started to get angry. She acted as though faking a pregnancy were some normal youthful blunder, an ordinary and irrelevant chapter in her past. Penny lived in the moment in the most terrible way: apathetic to the burning wreckage she’d left in her wake. “Penny!” I said. “Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through? I thought I had two nieces on the way! I bought them toys and books! I mourned them, Penny, when they died.” I couldn’t even say the rest of it: that they never existed. They’d been a delusion at best, a cold-blooded, manipulative lie at worst. She created them and then she killed them. Was my sister crazy or evil? I still don’t know.
“Stop pretending to care about me,” she said dismissively, landing a gut punch and avoiding the accusation in one swift moment.
“Of course I care about you. I love you, you’re my sister!”
“Like that’s ever mattered to you. The only thing you care about is skiing, and being Mom and Dad’s golden child. So just stop it, okay? It’s not like we’re close.”
We Came Here to Forget Page 21
