The Isle of Youth: Stories

by Laura van Den Berg

  She stopped swimming and looked toward the beach. I waved, first casually and then more vigorously, crisscrossing my arms over my head like I was in need of rescue. I wanted her to come to land. I wanted to ask her things about the life she led. But she just looked in my direction for a long time, her body bobbing in the water, before continuing. She had seen me, I was certain, but she wasn’t coming out to meet me.

  I moved my tongue across my teeth, pushing upward until the pressure translated into a bright line of pain. Soon I lost sight of Christina, but I didn’t want to go back to my room. Instead I raked the sand with my fingers and thought about how for as long as I could remember, I’d felt an emptiness where other things were supposed to be.

  I opened my mouth and started packing it with fistfuls of damp sand. The grains scratched the roof of my mouth and got wedged between my teeth. Grit ran down the back of my throat. My cheeks ballooned; sand stuck to my gums. It became difficult to breathe. I imagined my body filling up like an hourglass; I imagined my husband or the hotel manager or Christina Humbolt finding me on this rock the next morning, weighted down like a carnival dummy. I kept going until I could barely breathe, until I couldn’t close my mouth, until I was leaking sand. And then I coughed it all out, my shoulders heaving as wet clumps fell to the ground.

  Days later, I would still be finding the evidence, a grain stuck in a molar, a scratch on my tongue. One afternoon, at lunch, I would blow my nose and notice specks of sand on the tissue. And years later, after Patagonia was far behind us, this was the moment I would remember—because I had acted inexplicably in the middle of the night and I never had to explain myself.

  * * *

  The second thing to go wrong was finding out that my husband had broken my nose. Three days after our trip to Iguazú, I woke to an unbearable cluster of pain in the bridge. My husband was already awake. He was standing at the bathroom mirror and shaving, a white towel wrapped around his waist. I rose and went into the bathroom.

  “My god,” he said when he saw me, his face half-full of lather. “The swelling is much worse.”

  I looked in the mirror. My nose resembled one of the fat black dates we’d been served at breakfast. I felt something wet coming down my face and held out my palm; I watched as tiny drops of blood dotted my skin.

  “I feel dizzy,” I said to my husband, then leaned over and threw up in the toilet. He put down his razor and called the front desk. After he hung up, he helped me back into bed.

  “They’re sending a doctor,” he said before returning to the bathroom to finish shaving. From the bed, I could see his arm moving up and down, graceful and controlled. The last three days had been a continuous circuit of morning walks on the beach and afternoon excursions to San Antonio Oeste and cocktail hours in the lobby. The routine had become so familiar, the details of our life in Philadelphia had started to seem vague and remote, as though that existence had never really been ours at all.

  The doctor was a tall, hollow-cheeked man with smoke-colored eyebrows. He wore a khaki suit with a red flower stuck in the lapel and carried a black briefcase.

  “Are you the patient?” he asked.

  “Yes,” my husband answered for me. He sat at the foot of the bed, dressed and freshly shaved.

  The doctor pulled a chair to the bed and asked me to sit up. He pressed the outside of my nose and I gasped. He opened his briefcase and took out an instrument that looked like pliers with a little metal cone attached to the top. He asked me to tilt my head back.

  He slipped the cone inside one of my nostrils and I felt the skin stretch. He took out a miniature flashlight and shone it upward. He squinted and muttered and moved the instrument around. My eyes watered and I could see only my husband in my periphery, a faceless blur on the edge of the bed.

  The doctor removed the instrument and turned off the flashlight. “It’s broken,” he said, patting my blanketed knee.

  “What do we do?” my husband asked. He was standing now, hovering over the doctor and his black case.

  “It will heal on its own,” the doctor said. He suggested ice packs and time. “But this will help with the pain.” He took out a prescription bottle, tapped a dozen white pills into his palm, and left them on the bedside table.

  He gathered his instruments and washed his hands in the bathroom. My husband brought me a glass of water. The first painkiller was sluggish going down and the aftertaste was that of sand.

  “How did this happen again?” the doctor asked, his hand on the door.

  “An emergency landing,” my husband said. His tone was suddenly sharp. “There was turbulence. It was an accident.”

  “Our plane was on the news,” I added, already drowsy. When the doctor left, it felt like the end of a dream.

  “Can you believe he suspected me?” my husband asked when the doctor was gone. He paced in front of the bed. “That’s just insulting.”

  The room had become tilted and blurry. He appeared to be standing on a slope and our white ceiling looked like it was made of light. I found a grain of sand hidden beneath my tongue and swallowed it.

  “It was an accident,” I said before falling asleep.

  * * *

  A sketch of the suspect: after getting married, I visited my parents only on holidays. Once I saw an X-ray of a heart and I was alarmed by its smallness, its translucence. A thing we ask entirely too much of. On our way to Patagonia I’d watched the planes in holding patterns at the Buenos Aires airport and thought about how that used to be me. I had landed somewhere, finally, even if I couldn’t point it out on a map. After I had been married for a year, I dreamed about my dead sister. In the dream she was a child, maybe six or seven. She didn’t look anything like me. She had dark shiny hair and was jumping rope on a playground. When she saw me, she put down the rope and said, “What the fuck are you doing?” And I said, “This is all your fault.” I was married for three years before I told my husband I wasn’t an only child, like him, and that was just because my mother brought my sister up at Thanksgiving. Once I took a long lunch and went to see a tarot card reader on Tasker Street. It was my first week back from Patagonia and whenever I was stopped at a red light, I had fantasies of simply getting out of the car and walking away, leaving the keys in the ignition, the radio on. When the tarot reader drew the Hanged Man, she said that meant I should do the opposite of what I would normally do. Which was fine advice if you understand what it is that you do.

  * * *

  I had two more pills before going to the cocktail reception in the lobby, where I drank three medio medios and stood swaying next to my husband as a new couple introduced themselves. They were the Meyer-Stewards and they too were on their honeymoon.

  “Married just a week,” Susannah Meyer-Steward said, a martini in one hand and a king crab leg in the other.

  “I can’t believe we’re in Patagonia,” Patrick Meyer-Steward said. He was bald except for a thin halo of hair on the back of his head, and drinking scotch on the rocks. “I wanted to go to France.”

  “How did you meet?” my husband asked them.

  “On a cruise in the Bahamas,” Patrick said. “Last July.”

  “It was kind of a singles thing, but of course I didn’t really expect to meet anyone,” Susannah said. “Then one afternoon I saw Patrick, playing shuffleboard on the deck.”

  “Shuffleboard!” I called out, louder than I should have. “How charming.”

  “We had a shuffleboard game at our wedding,” Patrick said. “It was island-themed. All the bridesmaids wore leis.”

  “The newly initiated really do tell the best stories.” I placed my empty glass on the tray of a passing waiter. Across the room, I saw Christina Humbolt standing next to her husband. I could almost hear her making polite party chatter in her easy British way.

  “Aren’t you on your honeymoon too?” Susannah asked, her round face crinkling with confusion or the beginnings of worry.

  “Yes,” I said. “I suppose we are.” I felt as though I were hov
ering just above the ground. I hooked myself around my husband’s elbow. “But doesn’t it feel like it’s been ages?” I said. “Ages and ages and ages?”

  He pulled away from me and learned toward the Meyer-Stewards. “She broke her nose,” he whispered. “During the emergency landing.”

  Patrick sipped his drink; Susannah sucked on her crab leg.

  “You broke it,” I said, tapping my cheekbone. “My husband broke my nose.”

  “What was that?” Patrick asked, rattling the ice around in his glass.

  “My husband broke my nose.” I felt like signing those words to the entire room. “He broke it with his elbow.”

  “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” my husband said. “It was an accident.”

  The Meyer-Stewards excused themselves to see when dinner would be served. I watched them walk away, Susannah still holding the king crab leg, until they disappeared behind a white marble column.

  “You’re drunk,” my husband said, and I suppose that was true, although it didn’t feel that way at the time. I simply knew that I should not tell the Meyer-Stewards about the waterfalls and the beaches and the six endemic species of birds and the medio medios. I should show them the truth because the truth was meant to be seen, not just released in the middle of the night.

  “Let’s go to the room.” He stroked the back of my head. I recognized it was happening, but I couldn’t connect with the feeling of his fingers in my hair. “We’ll order up some food.”

  “For the first time I feel conscious,” I said.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What did that doctor give you?”

  I shrugged myself free and wandered toward the bathroom. He let me go. I went over to the staircase that led to the dining room and walked up and down the steps for a while, then drifted back toward the lobby. I passed the manager’s office; the door was open, the TV on. I leaned against the doorway and moved my tongue over my gums. It took me a minute to realize that the office wasn’t empty this time. Someone was sitting in the manager’s chair, her back to the door.

  “Hola,” I said.

  The chair spun around, and there was Christina Humbolt, her legs crossed, a drink in her hand.

  I stepped into the office, and right away, I looked for proof of her swimming—a strand of wet hair, the faint scent of seawater—but found nothing.

  “Have a sip of this.” She held out her glass. “It’s a medio medio times two.”

  I took her drink. The glass was cold and damp and soon my hand went numb.

  “I’m finally conscious,” I said to Christina.

  “So you are.” She slouched in the chair, her crisp accent dulled. The guanaco scarf hung limply from her neck and she had taken her hair down; the ends, slightly curled, rested on her shoulders.

  “And I keep finding sand everywhere,” I told her. “It’s in my mouth. Is it in your mouth too?”

  She sighed. “What do you want me to say?”

  “Something definitive,” I said. “Something useful.”

  She took back the glass and drank. “Your husband seems to think you’re not feeling well.”

  “He sent you after me?”

  “He thinks he did.”

  “How did you know where I’d be?”

  “Lucky guess,” she said, handing me the glass. “It’s quiet in here.”

  “I’m feeling fine,” I said. “Much better, actually.”

  “Don’t expect it to last.”

  I finished the drink. She aimed a remote at the TV and turned up the volume.

  “What’s on?” I asked.

  “Nothing good,” she said. “The news.”

  We gazed up at the TV and watched bulldozers and backhoes crowd around an excavation of some sort. Or perhaps the construction of a new building was beginning. A reporter stood in front of the site with a microphone. She was a woman, and the wind blew her hair across her face. The words “dirt” and “night” were all I could understand. On the plane to Brazil, my husband found a National Geographic in his seat pocket and showed me a photo spread of the Karajá, an indigenous group living in the Brazilian Amazon. The photos were from an initiation ceremony. The boys’ faces were painted with black; dark circles had been smudged beneath their eyes. I remembered thinking that they weren’t their real selves anymore, that the self had been forsaken in order to be part of something larger, a lesson I’d tried to teach myself but never really learned.

  “Excavación,” the reporter said, which I understood to mean “digging.” Are they digging the sand out of us? I wanted to ask Christina.

  “Excavación, excavación,” the reporter said again.

  * * *

  The third thing to go wrong was the hotel catching fire. We were awoken by an alarm at three in the morning and when we stepped into the hallway, hotel employees, one of whom I recognized as the manager, were herding guests from their rooms. There was a fire on the top floor of the hotel, the manager said when he came upon us, his maroon uniform stained with sweat. A penthouse guest left a cigar burning. We were instructed to take the stairs down to the courtyard outside. Bottled water and blankets would be provided. The manager told us not to worry.

  The stairs were flooded with guests. I grabbed my husband’s elbow and he put his hand over mine. Earlier that night I never went back to the cocktail party. I’d left Christina Humbolt alone in the manager’s office, gone upstairs, taken another pill, and fallen asleep fully clothed on top of the bed. I didn’t know what time my husband came back to the room, only that he didn’t bother waking me, so I was one of the only guests not wearing pajamas or slippers or bathrobes.

  “I hope we don’t die,” I said.

  “Don’t be absurd,” my husband replied, squeezing my fingers.

  Outside we congregated a safe distance from the hotel, the sea cliffs behind us, a black ridge in the darkness. We watched smoke collect above the resort. It hovered over the building the way smog hangs over a factory. The air thickened and warmed.

  By then the drugs had worn off and my nose was killing me. This will never stop, I thought, pressing a fist against my forehead. But within two weeks the pain and the swelling would be gone, the bruising reduced to a yellow spot or two, though my face would never look quite the same. There would always be a slight crook in my nose, only visible if you examined me head-on. Over time, I would come to believe my husband and I were the only ones who knew it was there.

  We had been watching the fire for a minute or two before there was a cracking noise and bright orange flames burst through one of the top windows. Someone screamed and I was reminded of how, as our airplane tumbled toward the earth, I’d thought of our passports in their black nylon cases and our plastic toiletries bags and the international cell phone we’d rented, everything tucked neatly away in our suitcases, and was stricken by the notion of rescue workers pulling these possessions from the rubble and using them to determine who we were.

  “I think we’re going to have to take another honeymoon,” my husband said. “This can’t be what we think of when we remember our honeymoon. It just can’t.”

  “Should we take this as a sign?” I said. “That this whole time we’ve been trailed by disaster?”

  “It’s a coincidence,” my husband said. “There’s no such thing as signs.”

  I watched fire balloon out of the building.

  The guests had scattered, some of them standing near the edge of the sea cliffs and facing the water. I heard sirens, but they sounded too far away to believe they would arrive in time to do much good.

  My husband tugged on my sleeve. He was pointing at a group of four that were huddled together. It was the Humbolts and the Meyer-Stewards, all of them in hotel-issued white bathrobes and slippers. “We should be standing with them,” he said.

  When he started toward them, I hung back. I was watching Christina Humbolt, who kept untying and retying her sash. Had she been out swimming? Or already returned to her room and, when the alarms woke her husband
, pretended she’d been beside him all along? Her face was luminous with sweat; from a distance, her hair appeared darker and sleeker, like it might be damp.

  When my husband reached the Humbolts and the Meyer-Stewards, he turned and looked for me, but other people had spilled into the path between us. He waved his hand above his head and called my name, but still I did not go to him. I heard the sirens again, louder now, and the hotel manager had started handing out little fleece blankets and bottled water, just as he had promised. The space between my husband and me grew more congested—I looked for you, he would say when we were finally reunited—and soon I wasn’t able to see him at all.

  A boom sounded, loud as the rushing of the Garganta del Diablo. Fire spilled from the hotel like an outstretched hand. Right then I longed to go back inside, to our room that overlooked the sea. To sift through our wallets and the backpacks we carried on day trips, to lay the contents out on the bed like evidence and try to understand what it was that was going to be lost.

  OPA-LOCKA

  My sister was the photographer. From a rooftop deck, nestled between two enormous ferns in clay pots, she photographed our target, Mr. Defonte, entering the adjacent apartment building. He wore a white linen suit, boat shoes, and a straw sun hat with a chin strap that dangled beneath his jaw.

  “Only in Florida,” Julia said, snapping a photo. “Does he think he’s on a safari?”

  Mr. Defonte paused outside and stared at his feet. He was only a few steps away from the entrance of the glossy high-rise building. The doors were made of blue glass with silver handles in the shape of leaping fish. Julia took another picture. I was crouched beside my sister and peering through binoculars. I could see his face in profile, his long downward-sloping nose and soft chin. I knew his full legal name, his social, his date of birth, where he lived, where he worked, his favorite lunch spot, and his license plate number. His wife had hired me and Julia to investigate him. Together we made up Winslow & Co., the private detective firm we’d been running for the last year.