We Came Here to Forget

by Andrea Dunlop

  “Edward,” I say. “What really happened in Saint-Tropez? Did he really kill someone?”

  He lets out a long sigh. “It’s complicated. Her husband tried to attack her, he stepped in.”

  “And you saw this with your own eyes?” Cali asks. “Or this is according to him?”

  “I really don’t think,” Edward replies haughtily, “that the countess—whom I’d known for over a decade by the way—would have vouched for him if that hadn’t been the case. It was she who asked me to help him get back to Buenos Aires. Do you really believe,” he said, looking at me now, “that someone would lie about a thing like that?”

  The After

  IT WAS hard to imagine anything worse than what we’d gone through with Penny’s dependency case until I experienced what came after. If I’d known then how very dysfunctional our child welfare system is, perhaps I would have expected it. Penny’s case was complex; she was an aberration that the medical community was not built to withstand. She did not look or act the part of an abusive mother. For those whose interactions with her were brief, nothing about her read “unstable”—to the contrary, she seemed utterly competent and likable. It’s a mark of just how privileged and sheltered I’d been until that moment that I expected the justice system to work, that I couldn’t fathom it failing us as utterly as it did.

  I tried to bury myself in skiing. Blair and Luke knew everything, but most of my coaches and teammates knew only the broad stokes, which was all I could bear to tell them. I learned quickly that most people don’t have the stomach to hear about something like Munchausen syndrome by proxy, so I kept it simpler than that, telling people that my family had been through a big drama that had left me estranged from my sister. On the upside, it meant I didn’t have to relive the details or withstand the looks of horror; on the downside, not knowing how serious it all was lead people to offer me platitudes. I’m sure you’ll work it out, my sister and I fight all the time! You should resolve it, family is the most important thing.

  My beloved tech Bartek chatted with me as he adjusted my skis before the final race of the World Cup season.

  “You are sad, Katie Bomber,” he said, his eyes meeting mine for a moment before returning to my bindings. He always called me this, as though Bomber was a last name instead of a nickname. Bartek was Czech, fortysomething I guessed, though he never shared his actual age; he was relatively sparse on the details of his personal life. He was gruff and I adored him. Techs were our lifelines—they helped us succeed and kept us safe on the course, or as safe as anyone could keep us. “I hear you have problem with family. Is hard.”

  Being that he wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy normally, I was touched by his efforts.

  “My sister is very troubled. I don’t know if I will ever talk to her again,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I have little brother in Ostrava,” he said. “Has drug problem. My family we try and try but he lie and steal from my mother. I love him very much but”—he shrugged—“what can I do? Sometimes nothing.”

  I nodded, grateful that for once someone was not immediately trying to make me feel better.

  He made one last adjustment to the binding and then rattled it and made a satisfied grunt.

  “Some people are like drowning man. If you try to save them, they only pull you down too. Sometimes you need save yourself, Katie Bomber.” He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a paternal smile.

  That season was abysmal, and by the end of it, I was starting to feel the pressure from my sponsors. If I fell any further away from the top ten, I knew some would drop me. Red Bull—by far my most lucrative contract—was already looking itchy. I started seeing Gena the therapist, and for a while things got better. By the time the 2007–2008 season began, I was back on the podium again in my first two races.

  My relationship with Luke was still shaky. I could feel him beginning to inch away from me, and the more he retreated, the harder I clung. After all that I’d lost, adding Luke to the list of casualties just wasn’t an option.

  He’d encouraged me to go to therapy, but as for talking to me about Penny, he’d act sympathetic but shut the conversation down almost instantly. He seemed relieved when I started feeling better.

  “Glad you’re getting back to your old self, Bomber,” he said after my first solid finish of the season. “You were really hard to be around for a while.”

  I feigned a smile, gutted.

  Luke wasn’t skiing well during our final training camp of the off-season in La Parva, and when Blair suggested a side trip to Buenos Aires, Luke shrugged it off.

  Blair and I spent a delirious two days in Buenos Aires. He’d had his best season yet and had nearly taken home the World Cup globe. On our last night, we walked back to our little bed-and-breakfast in Palermo after a good steak and a lot of wine. It was nearly 2:00 a.m. and plenty of people around us seemed to be just starting their night; we hadn’t even closed down the restaurant we’d been in. We got gelato and strolled around the plaza. It was the beginning of fall in Buenos Aires, but they were having an upside-down Indian summer and it was unseasonably warm.

  “Bomber, you seem like you’re doing so much better,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders. “I’m so glad. I really admire you and your parents, you know? You guys really stuck by each other and it can’t have been easy. I’m proud of you, you’re a tough cookie.”

  “I know I wasn’t easy to be around for a while,” I said, parroting Luke without meaning to.

  “I wouldn’t say that. It was hard to watch you go through all of that, sure, but being around you is always good.”

  “I wasn’t exactly at my best,” I said, unsure why I was doubling down.

  “So? I’ll take you at your worst over most people at their best. You know that, Bomber. You know I love ya.”

  “Aw.” I took his arm. “You’re a big softie. Jesus, I thought my career was going to be over last year,” I said. “It was terrifying.”

  “We’re all going to have to face it sometime,” Blair said.

  “I know, I know. Ugh, I hate thinking about it though! It’s like, everyone else our age is just getting going on their careers and ours are going to be over. Skiing is the only thing I ever wanted to do.”

  “Aren’t you a little bit excited for the next part though? I mean, there are some things I won’t miss. The injuries, the constant travel. I want to be in one place for a while. I want to get married and have some kids. I want to be able to own a dog for Christ’s sake.”

  I had a sudden and deep flash of envy for whomever the eventual woman in this scenario would be. Blair had been dating a snowboarder named Kelly for a while—I’d liked her—but they’d broken up midseason. Relationships weren’t easy to maintain in our world. Sometimes, it felt like Luke and I were coasting on our long history until we could reach some better place where we could reconnect.

  “Okay, yeah, I’ll give you that. A little stability probably wouldn’t kill me either. But what are we going to do?”

  “I have this idea,” Blair said, his voice suddenly a little bashful. “I mean, I love skiing so much and I feel like it’s this sport that only a small number of people ever get to try. I want to start a ski school that’s also a nonprofit. We could get kids who normally wouldn’t have access to it up there on the mountain. Kind of like those adventure courses, you know?”

  “Outward Bound?” We softened our voices as we made our way into the hotel.

  “Yes! Exactly. Outward Bound on the snow. If I pitch it the right way, I know I could get Tad’s rich buddies on board. What looks better in a brochure than smiling kids?”

  “That’s a great idea. I don’t have anything anywhere near that cool up my sleeve.”

  “Maybe you could do it with me,” he said softly.

  “Maybe.” I smiled. We’d reached the door of my room. “For now, I don’t want to think about the after.”

  A moment of quiet descended, and out of nowhere there was an en
ergy between us that hadn’t been there before. Or maybe I was like a radio dial that had finally hit the right frequency and was only now picking up on something that had been there all along. Blair leaned forward and brushed his thumb against the corner of my mouth.

  “You eat ice cream like a little kid, Bomber.”

  Then he kissed me. Just briefly, just lightly enough to pass as brotherly but yet decidedly not.

  “You shouldn’t be afraid of the future.” He pulled back, as though just realizing what he’d done. “There was always going to be an after.”

  Liz Wants the Truth

  AT THE social the next Friday, Edward makes a rare appearance. Watching him, I’m surprised anew at what a graceful dancer he is.

  “It’s funny with dancing,” Cali says, settling in next to me on the cozy, voluminous couch. “Men go one way or the other the moment they’re on the floor. If they’re good, they become a thousand times sexier, if they’re awkward, their appeal just leeches right out of them. There’s no neutral ground.”

  “You’re right. That said, I’m surprised Edward isn’t out here all the time.”

  Cali smiles to herself.

  “Hi, girls,” Gianluca says, stopping by between dances. He gives us each an equally brief kiss on the cheek. I’ve been warned that he won’t be overly affectionate when we’re with the dance crowd. It’s just business, he tells me, he can’t appear taken. Maybe that’s what did Angelina in. How can I not wonder if there’s some other girl, some other “special project” he’s dancing with, whispering in her ear that he wants to fuck her? My anxiety isn’t helped by the fact that my period still hasn’t arrived. In the back of my head a tiny voice replays the damning question over and over: Am I pregnant, am I pregnant, am I pregnant?

  “Save me a dance?” he says as he goes back off to the floor. “Both of you?” he adds.

  Cali gives me a hard look as he walks away.

  “It’s fine,” I say, not feeling fine. “It’s work.”

  “Okay, Liz. Okay.”

  That night, G is sweet and soft with me. I know he won’t stay the night, but he lingers after we’ve had sex for an unusually long time. We lie side by side in my narrow bed and he stares into my eyes, unraveling the knot in my chest. We’re in the between space where the postcoital chemicals are still coursing through our veins and my tilting endorphin high hasn’t yet been eclipsed by the anxiety that he’ll leave. Soon, I’ll start watching for signs that he’s on the move: his eyes flickering in the direction of the door, his hand reaching for his pants, his eyes clouding back over with his own separate thoughts, the channel that opens between us closing until next time. A next time that is never promised. I’ll be left here in sheets covered with the scent of him, bereft, and wondering if I’m in love with him because what else could be this potent? How is it this strong if it’s just sex? It’s as though being with him has altered my brain chemistry. But for now he’s here, the connection between us clear and present. I’m searching for a way to ask him about Colonia, but I don’t want to ruin the moment.

  “You’re an incredible woman, do you know that?” he says.

  I smile at him and close my eyes.

  “I don’t want you to ever be with anyone who doesn’t see that.”

  I sigh. This feels like a warning that he has no intention of making this permanent. He looks at me for a long moment, combing my hair behind my ear, his eyes searching my face for something.

  “What happened to you, Tiger?”

  I swallow, propping myself up on my elbow and letting the sheet fall away. Over the last few weeks, I’ve lost some weight, and there is no one I want to notice this more than him. “What do you mean?”

  He cocks his head at me and gives me a patient smile, because I know what he’s asking. I let myself drop back down flat on the bed and stare up at the ceiling.

  “Did you lose someone close to you?”

  I nod.

  “My sister . . .” I begin, but it’s as far as I can get.

  “You lost your sister?”

  “In a way. She’s not dead.” It’s so much worse than that. “We’re estranged. Probably forever.”

  “Oh, Tiger, I’m sorry,” he says. I wonder if he isn’t a little unimpressed. It’s not as dramatic as he’s expecting maybe. “I’d taken you for an only child. You know,” he says, pulling me close to him now, “I had a sibling growing up. A brother, but we don’t speak now.”

  I consider this for a moment, if this is part of our bond, having endured these living deaths.

  “What happened with him?”

  He sighs. “It’s complicated. We never had much in common. To be honest, it always felt strange that he was my brother. And then I discovered that, in fact, he wasn’t.”

  “One of you was adopted?”

  G let out a bitter laugh. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “What does that mean?” I find I’m suddenly desperate to know just one true thing about him. Something that isn’t legend and rumor and bluster.

  G shakes his head and the subtle movement away from me begins: next, he’ll roll onto his side and then with alarming efficiency and speed, he’ll be dressed and gone.

  “G, tell me.” My voice is more insistent than I mean it to be.

  He laughs ruefully, kisses my forehead in a way that means goodbye. “You don’t want to know, Tiger, just trust me.”

  “I do want to know.” His back is to me. His feet hit the floor, and he grabs his pants. I clutch his shoulder and he turns to me, looking annoyed. He smiles as he stands up, but it isn’t a kind smile. He puts his hands on his hips, still shirtless.

  “You’re like a little girl right now.”

  “Fuck you, G,” I mutter, curling my knees to my chest. “Like it’s so wrong to want to know you a little bit.”

  “You want to know me?” he says, crouching down and glaring at me until I have no choice but to look him in the eye. “Ha, okay, Liz, okay. Go ahead, ask whatever you want.”

  “When you first met Edward in Saint-Tropez, the woman on the boat, her husband . . . were you really only trying to protect her?”

  He gives me a look that makes my blood run cold. “This is a very boring question, try again.” In not answering the question, he has. I know him well enough by now to know that if he were really the hero of this story, he’d have answered me.

  “Fine,” I say. “What’s the deal with your family? I’m assuming that you’re not really the illegitimate son of Juan Perón.”

  He steps back and looks at me appraisingly, as though deciding whether I am worthy of knowing.

  “When I was twenty-three, an old woman showed up at my door saying she was my grandmother. I didn’t believe her until she showed me pictures of my parents—who were only a little older than I was when she lost them—I was the spitting image of my father, there was no question.”

  I’d read stories like this. Some of the women who marched in the Plaza de Mayo were grandmothers searching for grandchildren who were lost to them when their adult children were disappeared. Just as with my own parents, the sacred link between generations had been brutally severed.

  “Your real parents were disappeared,” I say, and then I ask the wrong question, “Do you know why?”

  G laughs a horrible laugh. “They didn’t need a reason, being a university student made you automatically suspicious, you could be getting subversive ideas. They were both studying architecture.”

  “How did you end up with your adopted family?”

  “I was one of hundreds of babies who was ‘reappropriated’ to military families while the junta was in power. Meaning that the people I’d grown up calling my parents murdered my real parents; maybe not with their own hands but close enough. I’d always known something was off. I was only eighteen months old when they took them, but I still had memories that I could never explain. My ‘parents’ sent me to a child psychologist to convince me otherwise.”

  Since I’d met him, Gianluca had nev
er seemed quite real. He deliberately made himself larger than life with the web of mysteries and exaggerations he’d woven, more a beautiful, thrilling idea than a person. But for the first time I saw him as he was, an all-too-human man. He wasn’t trying to create a cult with his studio, he was trying to create a family. He was forever reaching for the nearest stranger because he was an eternal stranger to himself.

  “Did you ever find out what happened to them?” I ask, holding his gaze.

  “No,” he says. “Likely they were drugged, blindfolded, and shoved off a helicopter somewhere over the Rio de la Plata. But just like the rest, we’ll never really know. Thirty thousand civilians were ‘disappeared.’ There’s a reason we stick with that romantic term—the truth is too ugly to bear.”

  “G, I’m sorry.” I try to reach for him and he yanks his arm away.

  “Americans,” he says bitterly. “You come for the steak and the exchange rate, and you don’t even know what this country is.”

  He’s out the door before I can say anything else.

  Where Has Penny Gone?

  DURING THE horrific eight months between Penny’s arrest for Ava’s murder and the beginning of her trial, a thousand emotions consumed me, each one fighting for center stage. First, a bottomless well of grief: Ava was gone, and I didn’t need a judge and jury to tell me who’d been responsible. I was angry at Penny, I had been for a long time now. But I felt scared for her too, and the longing I’d felt for her only increased as her absence began to feel permanent. I see from the outside how it all appears unforgivable, but the desire to forgive someone you love blocks out the sun, and I convinced myself that she hadn’t actually meant to kill her daughter, she’d just miscalculated. Because we’d had no contact with Penny or Ava in two years, the whole situation felt surreal. I kept waiting for someone to tell me that they’d been wrong, as though this were all just some kind of nightmarish prank.