We Came Here to Forget

by Andrea Dunlop

  Before any of us see what’s happening, Camilla emerges from behind her and is suddenly in a rapid-fire exchange with the hostess, who moments ago looked like she’d bitten into a lemon and is now laughing merrily at something Camilla says. In the next instant, we’re following the hostess to L’Orangerie, where a table has magically appeared. I can instantly appreciate what a shame it would have been to sit elsewhere. Sun streams in from the large windows on all sides of the glass-enclosed atrium. There are potted and hanging plants everywhere, creating a Babylonian enclave.

  “Well,” Gemma says as she sits and smooths her napkin on her lap, “thank goodness we have some Porteños with us today!” Anders sits next to her and reaches out to take her hand.

  Camilla smiles and shrugs, sitting down between Edward and Gianluca. She talks to both of them in Spanish throughout the tea—which is a succession of sumptuous sandwiches and cakes, along with numerous bottles of champagne. I try not to stare at Gianluca, who is paying far too close attention to Camilla for my taste, with his body turned almost entirely toward her. Do they know each other? They’re talking like old friends, old flames even.

  I focus instead on Anders. I have a special affection for Norwegians; they were always some of my favorite people on the tour. I ask how he ended up in Buenos Aires, and Anders explains that he had been traveling through South America, and on a stopover in Buenos Aires, he’d taken a class with Gianluca and gotten hooked. That was eight months ago, and he’d been here ever since, working at a local café to supplement his income. He’d been a software engineer back home in Norway, but he’d been traveling for a little over a year.

  “That’s so cool. What made you decide to take off?” I ask.

  There’s a heavy moment of silence, and Gemma, who’d been half paying attention, reaches to squeeze Anders’s knee. “Anders’s sister passed away,” she explains.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say.

  “Thank you,” Anders says stiffly. “She would have been twenty-seven next week. Two years older than me.”

  Later as we’re leaving the hotel, I fall back with him.

  “Anders?”

  He looks down at me, seeming to try to relax a bit. I put my hand on his forearm.

  “I just want to say that I’m so sorry about your sister.” He nods and looks at the ground. “I lost my sister too.”

  “You did?”

  I nod. And it’s true. Penny is lost to me. I’m taken aback when Anders sweeps me into a consuming hug. But then I let myself be hugged and it’s a relief; it’s not half the story but it feels good to tell someone something.

  “Everything all right over here?” Gemma asks, her voice inscrutable.

  “Everything is splendid,” Anders says. His English is good, if almost too sharp and sprinkled with the occasional anachronistic vocabulary word. “We’d better sober up before it’s time to dance!”

  Later, we go to the social, and Gianluca has eyes only for Camilla.

  “So what,” I say to Gemma. “She’s the shiny new thing?”

  “Camilla? Oh no, she and Gianluca have some . . . history.”

  “Ah. Who doesn’t he have history with?”

  Gemma laughs. “She’s really something, isn’t she? To be honest, I think she finds me ridiculous. Edward doesn’t see it.”

  “Why’s that?” I don’t want to say that actually, I think he does see it, and that I’m certain Camilla would feel the same about me if she thought about me at all, which I’m sure she hasn’t.

  “I think she has feelings about foreigners coming here and insinuating themselves.”

  “What about Edward?”

  “He’s her family. And you know how that goes.” She sighs. “We’ll forgive our family almost anything.”

  Penny Is the Best Mom in the World

  AS I was back in Park City trying to get in fighting shape for World Cup season and, hopefully, the Turin Olympics, Ava was becoming something of a social media celebrity. Every time I looked on Facebook, there were more comments on Penny’s posts, more names I didn’t recognize on her ever-expanding friends list. The frequent pictures of Ava featured updates on what Penny called her “healing journey.” They would sometimes be written in Penny’s voice, but more often in Ava’s.

  Boy am I giving Mommy lots of laundry to do today, I puked on her three times this morning! I’m sad because we had to put my NG tube back in. But I’m being very brave and giving Mommy lots of snuggles.

  Beneath was a picture of Ava looking forlornly at the camera, her feeding tube snaking out of one of her tiny nostrils. Was this what Ava was really thinking? There seemed no question that Penny could rely on the depth of their connection to speak for her, to be her proxy to the world. The likes on each of Penny’s posts soared into the hundreds with dozens of comments from well-wishers below, mostly other moms. Ava has the best mommy ever! Ava says be brave, Mommy, I’m going to be better soon. Sometimes there were pictures of other infants: Riley is sending Ava big, big hugs. Parker sends kisses to his girlfriend, Ava!

  I was getting the updates directly from Penny, but I still couldn’t tear myself away from her posts. I was searching for something between the lines, though I couldn’t say exactly what. It felt unseemly that Penny was sharing such personal stuff with people who, increasingly, appeared to be strangers. Some of the posts were blatant in their self-pity.

  I love being Ava’s mommy and wouldn’t trade it for the world but it is just SO hard sometimes. I just want her to be healthy. That’s ALL!!!! Is that so much to ask for? I worry about her nonstop and some days I can barely sleep or eat (that’s one way to lose the baby weight LOL. Sigh). But she’s my little angel and I know God has made her a warrior.

  Ava’s problems were endless. She would conquer one milestone: she was sitting up! Only to fall behind in others: she wasn’t reaching for objects as she should be, still wasn’t absorbing enough nutrients, was having trouble keeping food down. She was in a brutal sort of race to claim the basic functions of her humanity. When I saw healthy babies and toddlers on the streets of Park City, it gutted me. Even with all her troubles, Ava was so cute, with sparkling eyes and a smile that made my knees weak; she seemed destined to grow into a beautiful child, if only she could make it there. Eventually, the NG tube was gone from her tiny face and replaced with a G-tube that went through directly into her stomach, giving Penny a way to make sure she was getting enough nutrients and circumventing the problem of her acid reflux.

  “I just don’t understand it,” my mom confessed to me on the phone shortly after the surgery. “Whenever she’s here she seems to eat just fine.”

  I came home to celebrate my twenty-fifth birthday in October with my family, and Ava—seven months old by then—ended up in the hospital for dehydration and a spiking fever. I remember seeing her lying limply on my sister’s lap and being struck with a deep terror. I told myself it was the surroundings—being in a children’s hospital was upsetting—and nothing to do with the oddly serene expression on Penny’s face. Later that day, a picture of Ava hooked up to the IV appeared on Penny’s Facebook.

  Rough day for my little girl today! She’s still having trouble with eating and it’s caused her to get dehydrated. Most of the nurses at Children’s are amazing but today Ava’s nurse was grouchy and couldn’t find her vein! I know I should be patient but it’s just so hard when we’re in the hospital all the time. I’m a mess today, bursting into tears every five minutes.

  This was not the Penny I’d seen in the hospital, looking as calm and majestic holding her daughter as a pietà in a classical painting. But maybe she’d been putting on a brave face for me.

  Back in Park City, I thought about Ava and Penny all the time. I scrolled through Penny’s Facebook like a zombie, my stomach a snarl of guilt, worry, and suspicion I couldn’t yet put a name to.

  Luke tried to bring me around by telling me that Penny wouldn’t want me to be worrying about her. This only showed how little he understood my sister; her only c
omfort these days seemed to be other people worrying about her. Why else would she share all these details online? But then again, it was something new moms just did, right? Isolated at home, they sought out community online. Nothing wrong with that. There’d been a time when Penny had cared about other things—when she’d had hobbies and friends—but those other things had been swept away by Ava’s illness. But what mother wouldn’t be consumed by the constant unexplained illness of her infant daughter? At that point, I still imagined that we were moving toward a future in which Ava was a happy, healthy little girl and Penny would resemble herself again. Some days, I felt like I was holding my breath until that future arrived.

  Penny existed in a constant state of emergency and I would abandon whatever I was doing to pick up her frequent calls, which were dominated by the minutiae of Ava’s health. Given her line of work, there seemed no end to the various treatments, therapies, and courses of action Penny could find to experiment with. She often seemed to know more than the doctors treating her, and several times lost patience with her pediatrician and moved on to another one.

  To the outside world, Penny’s determination was admirable. The Greek chorus of Penny’s Facebook page was in agreement that she was a good mom, the best mom, her little Ava was lucky to have her. And these moms in the chorus, they understood. Many of them seemed to have sick kids themselves, and Penny appeared to spend no small amount of time giving them the benefit of her medical expertise.

  They never would have said anything at the time, but my parents were uncomfortable about Penny sharing all of the details so constantly. Every time they ran into someone they knew—which was all the time in our small town—they were full of concern over Penny’s latest post. Whenever I was home, I had a similar experience. People seemed both horrified by the circumstances and yet oddly ravenous for the details. These were followed by the platitudes about people they’d known with sick kids who’d had stunning turnarounds. According to these stories, the more imperiled the child was in babyhood, the more boisterous, robust, and brilliant they were later on, as though being a sickly child were somehow a harbinger of good things.

  And in this sea of concerned strangers and acquaintances, where was Emily? Where were Penny’s other friends, the ones I’d last seen dancing at her wedding, full of joy?

  My life continued back in Park City but I was only half in it. I’d always felt out of place around my nonathlete peers, but now I felt out of place around my teammates too. Everyone was sympathetic, but athletes are naturally self-centered and mostly very young, and my family’s drama was remote. And there was something I couldn’t articulate to anyone, even if they had been able to hear it, the dark cloud of fear that was creeping in, a nagging sense that there was something we were not saying.

  For a while, my desire not to think too hard about anything else gave me an edge. I threw myself into my training, and somewhat to my surprise, I qualified for the team going to Turin. My focus had been shot for months and I came in twenty-fifth in super-G and eighteenth in downhill, miles away from the medal podium. Blair came home with a bronze medal in slalom and Luke with three silvers and a chip on his shoulder about not getting another gold.

  In March, as the season was winding down, I came home for the weekend to celebrate Ava’s first birthday. My parents hosted the party at their house and the forced joviality of it all was excruciating. Ava looked exhausted and spent much of the time sleeping in Penny’s arms or in my mom’s. Her skin had a yellowish tint, and when one of Penny’s old buddies from the clinic asked about it, I heard her go into a lengthy explanation about some mysterious kidney issues Ava had been having.

  A half hour into the party, I saw a very welcome face coming through the door: Emily. I went straight for her and wrapped my arms around her. I hadn’t seen her since Ava was first born.

  “Sissy! I watched you in the Olympics. I was so proud.”

  “I didn’t do as well as I hoped but . . .”

  “Even to make it though!” she said. I nodded, though of course, being an also-ran didn’t count for much, not for the sponsors, and not for me. It felt like every year, every season went by faster than the last. I’d been mercifully spared any catastrophic injuries, but the wear and tear added up over the years: tendonitis, torn muscles. I was twenty-five: young in the world but getting up there in the skiing world. Every year, there was a new crop of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds coming up. There was a time when I would have been able to say all of this to Emily, but without knowing when or how, the window on that intimacy had closed. So instead I simply said, “Thank you.” She excused herself to go find Penny. I figured I’d catch up to her later. We’d planned the party to stretch on as long as needed into the early spring afternoon. I wanted to find a way to ask her about Penny, to see if she’d been feeling any of the disquiet I could no longer ignore. But before I could get the chance, she was on her way out.

  “You’re leaving already?” I asked, catching her arm.

  “Yeah, sorry, sissy. I just have so many papers to grade this afternoon.” Emily was now a seventh-grade English teacher, a challenging job for which her sweet and patient nature seemed uniquely well suited. “We’ll talk soon though, okay?”

  She’d always felt like our third sister, but as I watched her head up the driveway to her car, I saw the truth: she wasn’t actually family. She could walk away. Maybe they always would have drifted apart; after all, even in small towns not everyone stays close with their childhood friends. But Emily had known Penny all her life, and maybe she felt it too, the wrongness. Emily and I had talked once and only once about the discrepancies in the stories Penny had told us about her previous pregnancy, and then, as if by mutual agreement, we’d closed the door on the incident. But now I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It hovered on the periphery of my mind no matter how hard I tried to push it away. I knew there was a line between Ava and those phantom babies, but I couldn’t bring myself to draw it.

  How fierce is denial when acceptance means losing so much?

  The final day of my visit was a sunny one, and Penny and I took a long walk along the lakeshore, Ava bundled up to protect her from the bracing air. She was livelier that day and when Penny and I stopped to rest for a while on a bench, she squirmed ferociously in my sister’s lap, making us both laugh as she reached for and burbled at the geese who strutted along nearby. The moment of normalcy was like a sliver of light. Maybe everything would be okay.

  On the way home, I stopped by the grocery store to pick up protein bars and tried my mom’s cell to see if she needed anything. She didn’t answer. I tried my dad. Nothing.

  But when I arrived home, both cars were there. In the middle of the day.

  “Mom? Dad?” I called through the foyer. “Hi, buddy,” I said, leaning down to scratch Barry’s ears.

  “In here, Katie.”

  I came down the hallway and was greeted with the strange sight of my mom and dad sitting side by side at the ancient dining set. I noticed with alarm that my father’s eyes were red-rimmed.

  “Hi, honey,” my mom said. “Can you sit with us for a minute? We need to talk to you about Penny.”

  I lowered myself numbly into the chair next to my mom and could feel the dam I’d been patching over for months—years—to forestall this very moment finally bursting. I felt tears springing to my eyes, my breath quickening. That afternoon while I’d walked with Penny and Ava in the park, my parents had been to see Doctor Anderson, our family practitioner of over two decades. They’d laid out for the kind doctor all of the many moments that I’d been trying for years to convince myself were isolated incidents, the products of growing pains and bad boyfriends. Taken together, they added up to a horrible, unspeakable truth. Penny wasn’t simply unlucky, she wasn’t just a worrier or a hypochondriac. She likely suffered from a mysterious disorder known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a grotesque and terrifying disorder that had been a subplot in a popular late 1990s horror film. Her unfortunate health history hadn
’t been some bizarre curse; it had been her creation. And when Ava was born, her focus had shifted to the baby. There wasn’t a great deal known about the disorder, but Penny fit the profile: female, white, middle class, with a job in the medical profession.

  “What the hell are we going to do?” I asked my parents. Without realizing it, I’d clasped my mother’s hand and was squeezing it so hard my knuckles had gone white.

  “We’ll get her help,” my dad said, trying to sound certain. “We’ll stick together. We’ll get through it.”

  In our minds, Penny was a victim as well as Ava. Her own mind had turned on her; we just needed to make her see.

  “I can’t go back to Park City,” I said. “I shouldn’t go back.”

  “Honey, it’s fine,” my mom said. “We’ll keep you posted. You don’t need to stay.”

  I went to take a shower and found myself screaming, the echoes ricocheting off the walls and bringing my poor parents running to the bathroom door. This syndrome was the only thing that made the last ten years of life with Penny make any sense at all, and yet, how could this be true? Where did we go from here?

  The next day, in what I now recognize as a stunning act of bravery, my mother went to speak to Ava’s pediatrician, her third in as many months. My mom filled him in on Penny’s troubling history with illness, and most crucially, the pregnancy, which, my parents at last explained to me, had likely never been real. The doctor appeared to calmly absorb the information, and my mom left his office frustrated and fearful that he didn’t believe her. What she didn’t know was that he legally couldn’t tell my mother how deeply alarmed he was and that once she’d left his office, he’d alerted a hospital authority called the SCAN team—a task force of doctors at Children’s that handled suspected child abuse and neglect—who’d subsequently called Child Protective Services. But this would all come out later.

  It was Stewart who called me in Park City, his voice hysterical. “Katie, they took Ava, they took Ava. Oh my god, oh my god.”