Her: A Memoir

by Christa Parravani

  Chapter 15

  In April 2005, Cara and I stood shoulder to shoulder and looked out on the city of Burgos, Spain, watching the sunrise from the balcony of my flat. I was living in Burgos for a spring semester, teaching photography in a study abroad program. Four years had passed since the rape, three years since the trial, and we were leaving for Venice the following night by train. Cara had the idea that if we stayed up all night before our trip, we’d sleep soundly through the eight-hour-long train ride.

  Our bellies were full of a wheel of rich sheep’s milk cheese. Two bottles of wine from Bierzo that I’d been saving for a special occasion rolled around, empty, at our feet. We were drunk and laughing at our silliness; freely, lovingly, poking fun at each other. Early that afternoon, Cara had gone into a salon to have her hair cut. Her poor language skills and elaborate explanation of what she’d wanted had confused the stylist; Cara had left the salon with a pink-streaked asymmetrical bob. That same afternoon, at the cart in the center of the city where I’d daily ordered a cone filled with churritos, a French fry–like doughnut, I’d discovered I’d really been asking for pussy. The word for pussy was coño; the word for cone was cono. I’d switched them. That afternoon, as usual, one of the pair of women who operated the cart had stuffed my pastry, humming along to the plucky music that played over the cart’s loudspeaker (part music box, part Muzak), then handed me my cono, smiling mockingly. The other woman had grinned, too, leaning back, hands in her apron pockets. I’d thanked them both. I’d picked out a fry; it had dissolved sugary and oily on my tongue, and I’d turned back for home, bumping into a woman who’d been standing behind me in line. The woman was mortified. Hands clasped over her mouth. “Basta! Basta!” she yelled at the vendors, wagging a finger at them; then in fluent English, she said to me, “Check the dictionary,” scolding me in the way of a teacher.

  On the balcony of my flat in the dawn, I stood twirling my twin’s curly neon bob in my fingers, while she sweetly called me coño. All of Burgos seemed a less dim, gray place with Cara at my side. The warm golds, taupes, and reds of the buildings collided with the rising sun, and the streets came alive: the local baker pulled up the gates on her panadería, displaying a full case of crusty breads, cookies, and tarts; the cathedral tolled its 7 a.m. bell; the police made morning rounds, joking with one another; farm trucks moved their cargoes of sheep and pigs; children cried out, skipping down the streets toward school.

  I’d spent most of my first few months in Spain in solitude, keeping occasional company with students and with the boys who ran the local Internet café. My vocabulary was limited and I kept it simple at the café—please and thank you and see you tomorrow. I’d pay them and they’d slip me a piece of paper with the number for a computer terminal. Sometimes one or the other of the boys would say thank you and call me guapa, which they called all of the girls.

  I checked my e-mail as often as possible, looking for word from Jedediah. He figured his time alone would be the perfect opportunity to get a leg up on writing his novel, a noir about a detective who investigated crimes people committed while they slept. And I’d needed to take the job in Spain; the teaching experience and pay were both necessities for us. We were bringing in very little money; after Jedediah sold his book we’d begin thinking about starting a family, he said. By then we hoped I’d be able to secure a full-time teaching position in a city we both liked. The idea of my time in Spain had seemed reasonable, practically speaking, but emotionally I wasn’t prepared to handle the time away. And Jedediah had not counted on a miserable wife, a furious and sexually frustrated wife, phoning constantly, weeping into the headset provided for phone conversations at the Internet café. The howling winter wind whipped my bare legs on the walk from my flat to the café.

  “I’m exhausted,” I cried into my headset one evening. “I’m not sleeping without help.”

  “Help?”

  “Ambien,” I told him.

  “Don’t we have enough on our hands with your sister?” Jedediah twisted the H knob of our kitchen sink, the one we’d bought at Ikea and installed just before my trip. I recognized the high-pitched squealing sound the faucet made as the hot water rushed into the pipes; as the rumble of water on metal faded, the pitch of my rage grew. Jedediah had visited for seven weeks, but that time had felt much shorter than it was. He regularly sent thoughtful messages and photographs via e-mail, but they only made my homesickness worse: our dog, Tillie, dreaming in front of a blazing fireplace; the geranium in bloom, reaching toward the window for a drink of muted winter light; the first sprouts of spring grass, poking through melting snow.

  Unlike Jedediah, Cara had been making the effort to visit me monthly from Massachusetts; she had discovered that the pharmacia across the street from me in Burgos dispensed Klonopin without a prescription. She’d go to the pharmacia during the afternoons I taught and fill her cart with boxes of Klonopin. But Cara couldn’t keep her pills a secret. One afternoon, while she napped, I opened her suitcase and found her diary; I picked its lock, read it as if it were my right. I needed to know what she’d been taking. She deserved that the door be closed on her affairs; I could never give her that. There were so many drugs.

  Cara’s penmanship, a bubbly cursive, looked harmless. She wrote in purple ink. The paper stock of her journal was imprinted with a sunflower field in full bloom, buzzing bees at the margin. On that cheery paper, she railed against Kahlil for divorcing her, not so much angry as bereft. There were suitors she mentioned with hope, but never more than a page went by before one name disappeared and was replaced by another. She’d sometimes write about her shame in turning back to heroin.

  MARCH SOMETHING, SHITTY MASSACHUSETTS

  Dear Diary,

  I don’t care to write anything that sounds beautiful. Relapse. I’m a drug addict: veins dead, bitter, drunk on powder. I’m the twin to be ashamed of. Sister would never do such things. How did I become that one person in every family who is sick and needs to be kept hidden?

  The lovers that I have taken are sour replacements for my husband. My wedding rings are on my dresser. Pictures of my husband are in the bureau drawer. When I can’t recognize myself, I remember that egg-frying antidrug commercial from the ’80s:

  Cara, this is your brain. This is your brain after rape. This is your lonely rape grief on drugs. This is the marriage you shoved your husband out of. I can’t ask any questions. There are many, too many to ask—there are things that need doing: miss Christa, forget to dream, sew my skirt.

  In her suitcase, next to her diary, I found five boxes of Klonopin stacked neatly one on top of the other, held together by a thin rubber band stretched to capacity. She’d wrapped the bundle—about a month’s worth of pills—in a light green scarf printed with a tarot motif from the Crowley deck. She’d return to Spain when her supply ran low.

  My husband didn’t move with me to Spain because he had his head buried in a book. My sister visited me because she needed to bury herself in pills.

  In the years since The Meadows, things had spiraled downward. Now that Cara lived alone, she’d disappear for days and tell elaborate lies about where she’d been. I’d been stood up for dinner more times than I could count, only to find her beat-up car parked in front of the dive motel where everyone went to score in Northampton. It became my duty, nearly weekly, to check on Cara in her apartment to make sure she hadn’t offed herself by hanging herself from a chandelier or by finally coming across something sharp enough to slice instead of cut. I didn’t have keys to her place, but I learned how to jump high enough to pull up onto her building’s fire escape, climb the four flights of rickety metal all the way to her kitchen window, and slip inside from there. Of course, I’d never found her dead; I’d only found her with the TV turned up too loud, shopping eBay, speeding on Ritalin.

  “You scared the shit out of me,” she’d say, not at all afraid, just happy for the company.

  But in Europe, I felt I should turn a blind eye to what Cara was doing. I’d spen
t too much of the last four months alone. I was willing to tolerate Cara and her irrational ideas in return for her company. It seemed better to humor her dramatic plans than to face another option: shut her out and spend the next months in near isolation, eating the solitary meals I bought at the supermercado.

  * * *

  Exhausted from having stayed up all night and day, but Venice-bound, Cara and I walked through Burgos in the late evening hours to catch the night train to Ibiza. I’d tried to be penny conscious when I booked our trip to Venice, and I had saved us one hundred and fifty dollars. But in exchange for our savings, we would endure a travel caper: trains to small-town airports to trains to bigger airports that flew planes to smaller towns. The trip would take us one full day.

  At Burgos’s Central Station, an hour early for our train, I pulled my luggage wheelie toward the ticket counter, avoiding eye contact with strangers. The homeless slept on benches. Mothers rocked fussy infants. Men checked wristwatches and newspaper stock pages. Vendors sold day-old jamon and queso sandwiches for half price. I heard the swift dry sweep of a janitor’s broom against the station floor, and only half understood the announcements for train departures. I still only spoke common phrases and used them as frequently as I could: I don’t know. How much? I need a phone card. I’m hungry, tired, thirsty, lonely.

  We were almost at the ticket counter, when a man stepped into our path. His thinning black hair was pomaded and combed back to expose his broad shining forehead. I brushed passed him, but Cara stopped and the two entered into conversation. He looked woozy; he wobbled from side to side, foot to foot. He was drunk or stoned—or both. He licked his lips nervously. The skin at the corners of his mouth was chalky and split. His lips were parched, cracked. He needed a drink of water and a rehabilitation center. He’d made it his mission to include us in his intoxication, skulking in to peddle his wares.

  When we were younger, Cara had been unable to see the clearest signals of menace in a man. She had trusted instantly and universally. Her naïveté was charming. She filled out the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes forms yearly for most of her life. She didn’t hope she might win; she was certain she would. The first year she sent in the paperwork for the contest, she inflated a dozen pink balloons and strung them to our mailbox with silver ribbon. “It’s for Ed McMahon,” she said. “I want to make it easy for him to find us.”

  Cara fell in love with Venice the very first time she laid eyes on it. She was nineteen then; we were juniors at Bard. Her life and dreams for herself were all in front of her. In the photographs I’d seen of her then, in Venice’s piazzas and gardens, she radiated promise. Venice is a city of magic—its narrow streets of stone are really alleys, and they are indulgent, romantic, and impossible—so like Cara.

  But Edgardo Hernandez had beat the hope and wonder out of my sister, and in the Burgos station that early spring night, she was not just making chitchat with a forlorn traveler; she was on the hunt for what had become the great love interest of her twenties: heroin. Her affection for downers had alerted her to every hidden and obvious place to find them. She was far now from the girl who set out balloons for Ed McMahon. When she found her best chance at scoring drugs before our train trip in an unshowered stranger, she took it.

  I walked toward the ticket counter, turning back to see if Cara was following behind. She wasn’t. She was off in a dark corner, digging for euros in her change purse. She handed her cash over to the man. He counted it twice and tucked it quickly into his back pocket, nodding. He carried a backpack from which he produced a small baggie that he slid into her palm. She shoved the baggie into her pocketbook and turned from him, her face bare of expression. Neither the dealer nor my sister was more than a blink to the other, a hallucination to be forgotten. “Sorry,” Cara said. “He was lost. I helped him find his way.”

  We stood in line among the other passengers, near the loitering drug sellers and the handful of homeless. The new Europe milled around us: Moroccan women with baggage and babies at their feet. Tourists shortcutting through the Camino de Santiago, running to catch departing trains. Spring-break youth from everywhere, sleeping in packs on piles of luggage. Of course, by now, the sleeper car was sold out. I frowned at Cara but didn’t mention her drug buy. We slumped toward the train.

  We boarded and pushed our way down the aisle. Our car was filled to capacity, save the two seats we’d been able to reserve: a middle and window seat. The middle seat was next to a guy who’d fallen asleep counting his rosary. The clear carved beads glimmered from the station lights shining through the train’s windows.

  “I’m not sitting next to that guy. He’s drooling.” Cara moved away from her new cabinmate.

  I shoved past her to the window seat and took it. “I think you’ve got something to distract you. You’ll be drooling in no time.” I pushed my carry-on under my seat. The train jolted and chugged forward. “Don’t fuck with me,” I went on. “I’m not keen on spending the night in a Spanish prison.”

  I looked out the window, pleased with my verbal jab. I refused to look at her, but I could feel her squirming next to me, trying to push her snoring cabinmate off her shoulder and onto his side of their shared seat.

  She nudged me with her elbow. “Hey.” She drew her hand up to her face and turned toward me, shielding her mouth from sight. “What’s with those guys?” She nodded toward the trio of men across from us, who watched us bicker. I hadn’t noticed them, but they were unmistakably the least desirable people with whom to share a night ride. They looked like the three stooges, except deranged and fresh from a bank heist.

  Cara hid her overstuffed backpacks under our seats and tried to sleep. Our rail car held twelve strangers. A pair of lovers necked. The stooges talked quietly among themselves. A man gazed out the window and watched the dark fields zip past. A young woman with blond hair held her luggage on her lap and tried to doze, keeping one eye open. Cara and I sat together, fused, I placed my head on her shoulder. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep. Cara pulled away. She took a dollar bill from her wallet and rolled it into a straw. She headed for the train lavatory.

  Cara glided back to her seat, dreamy, drifting down the aisles of the train, palms skimming the headrests of the other night travelers. She walked one foot in front of the other, a line straight as an acrobat on a wire. She tipped back and forth with the sway of the train, reaching out to touch the shoulders of strangers for balance, occasionally gripping one too hard and issuing a breathless apology.

  Beside me, she reached and uncrossed my arms. I’d possessively folded them across my chest to protect my broken heart and help me off to sleep.

  “Remember when we were little and you’d cross your arms?”

  “Yes.” I did. I remembered. I was nearly thirty and still doing it. How could I forget?

  “Grandma always knew you needed a hug when you’d do that. She said you’d go on hugging yourself unless one of us learned to do it for you.”

  “Remember how you’d cry when you didn’t get exactly what you wanted? You’re still doing that too.”

  “Oh Newt,” she whispered. “I love you. I always have.” Cara smiled and put my hands down in my lap, running her fingers against the ridge of my knuckles. “We’re off to Venice. Let’s be happy.”

  I closed my eyes and rested my head on my sister, nuzzling into her neck, nesting, ready to nod off. Cara laid her heavy head down on top of mine, her hair a soft veil falling into my eyes. We were twenty-seven years old. We’d been sleeping that way together since we were girls traveling in our mother’s car. I forgave her. We fit perfect as puzzle pieces.

  Our Burgos train brought us to a tiny town in eastern Spain, where we caught a flight with a bare-bones air carrier. In the early morning hours we flew a discount puddle jumper to Bologna, then caught another train to Venice. The sun was going down as we made our way to the city of water. Daylight had only a handful of hours.

  I sat sideways as we neared Venice, staring blankly at a travel
pamphlet and the discreet empty vomit bag tucked into the seat back in front of me. The pamphlet pictured families eating and shopping. None of them looked to have just bought drugs and none of them were twins. We were nowhere to be found in those brochures. Still, I was deep in imaginings of me and Cara and pizza and pasta. I saw us retiring to soft pillowy beds at the end of a day of touring church museums. She pressed her face up against her seat, indenting her cheek with the upholstery’s zigzag pattern. She smiled sleepily and watched the world pass as our train whizzed by little towns. She saw the Italy she remembered from her travels in college, and she was eager to share this Italy with me. She pointed out goats and sheep and lines of fresh laundry that flapped in the breeze. She’d been waiting since we were nineteen years old to show me the country she loved. Finally, we were here.

  We crossed the footbridge from Marco Polo station into the city, pulling our suitcases along, and for the first time it occurred to me that “city of canals” meant “no cars.” We’d have to carry everything, no matter how far our accommodations.

  “This way.” Cara pointed down a winding street. “I remember.”

  “You’ve never even been to our hotel. You don’t know the way.”

  “I do so. I remember the way to our piazza. It was just past a vendor who sold key chains.”

  I looked from one end of the street to the other, east to west. There were at least two dozen carts selling key chains. I stopped to ask for directions to our hotel at a cart that sold postcards and commedia dell’arte souvenirs. The man shrugged, pushing a mask with a full white face and teardrop into my hands. Its cheeks were painted bright green on the left, yellow on the right; both cheeks rimmed in gold. “You like?” The vendor seemed confident I would.