The Lucky Ones

by Julianne Pachico

  Her hands move down from her face and begin squeezing the T-shirt cloth in front of her chest, her fists tightening into balls.

  “The trick is,” he says, “to cook it in the oven. No more than an hour and twenty minutes, exactly. It’s not as fast as frying, but worth it.” He’s heading into the kitchen; he’s opening the pantry door. He takes out three onions, a carrot as long as a witch’s finger, garlic cloves with wispy skins, leafy stalks of celery. “You can cook it by itself, if you want,” he says, opening a drawer and taking out a knife and a cutting board, “but you look like you need some vegetables. Vegetables and gravy.”

  She’s still twisting the cloth of her T-shirt, as though wringing an animal’s neck. He opens a cupboard, reaches down into a cloth sack, pulls out a handful of small yellow potatoes. “Fresh herbs also make a big difference. I bet that your aunt grows some in her garden, doesn’t she? Do you recognize these from Ramiro’s?”

  He’s moved to the windowsill now, is pointing at a row of small black plastic pots. Her hands are still clenching her shirt but her knuckles are no longer white. She shakes her head, nose dripping all over her chin and chest, but she doesn’t make a move to wipe it off, and he doesn’t offer her a kitchen rag.

  It takes hours but she waits for him. She lets him take his time and do it the way he wants to: properly and slowly. She doesn’t ask him questions like “Are you done yet?” or “Is it ready?” Instead she’s patient, even as the house fills with a rich, salty smell and the sky outside the window darkens. She doesn’t move or stir from her chair while he wipes off the counters and sweeps the floor, stiffly yet steadily. He makes a salad in a wooden bowl with lettuce leaves and olives from a dusty jar. She doesn’t act annoyed or confused when he lays out a tablecloth or when he warms the plates and cutlery in the oven just before serving. He cuts off an enormous slab of meat, right from the center of the chicken, before passing her the plate.

  “Here,” he says, watching her take the first bite. He was right about removing the aluminum foil for the last ten minutes. The chicken skin is evenly browned and perfectly crisp, the meat so moist it almost feels like liquid in her mouth. She takes one bite, then another. He sits there watching, his hands folded on the table, fingers interlinked. She only opens her mouth a crack at first; then slowly but surely her bites get bigger, lips opening wide. Grease drips down her chin and stains her shirt but she keeps raising and lowering her fork. Her mouth fills with juices; she can barely move her tongue. She swallows.

  It’s even better than what he promised. Better than what she could have ever imagined.

  CAUCA–VALLE DEL CAUCA

  When Mariela invited us, we all got to go. This was back when kids were expected to invite every single person in the class for their birthday parties. It added up to something like eleven or twelve parties a year for me. I never got to go to any summer ones because I always went to D.C. to visit relatives. Plenty of us had ranches of our own outside the city, of course, but nothing like that. Not like hers.

  It was a pretty great party. Instead of a piñata there was candy thrown out of the window, which everyone screamed and fought for in the grass, and gift bags filled with whistles and sticker sheets, and a pony we could ride around the yard, led by a man in a black-and-white straw hat. I didn’t ride it because I was scared of the way its ribs curved out. We ate hot dogs with black char marks from the grill and chased around baby ducks and chicks that had been dyed pink and purple. There was a monkey that could kick a football, and fuzzy white rabbits with giant pink eyes, and a lion cage that we weren’t allowed to approach, no matter how much we begged the gardener for permission. We went swimming in a pool with blue tiles and dived for the little frogs clinging to the drain covers. And then Sebastián left a brown turd in the corner of the shallow end, and we all jumped out of the pool screaming like a shark was chasing us.

  Then it was time for Mariela to open her presents, which I couldn’t bear to watch. My mother was the one who bought the presents for me to take to all those parties. She must have gotten pretty sick of it. For Mariela, she wrapped up an Eric doll. You know, Eric, the prince from The Little Mermaid. That was a damn ugly doll. His face was all puffy and out of proportion to the rest of his body, like he was recovering from the measles. I felt so humiliated at the prospect of giving such a thing to Mariela, who I always thought was the smartest girl in kindergarten. It didn’t help that there were girls there like Penelope, who had long eyelashes and two Ps in her name, and her best friend, Stephanie Lansky, who had hair down to her waist. The thought of girls like Penelope and Stephanie staring at that dumb-looking doll made me sick to my stomach. So when the moment came that Mariela started unwrapping it, I had to leave the room and ask one of the maids to call my parents to come pick me up. I couldn’t bear the thought of watching it happen. I was a fairly anxious child, you know.

  —

  “No kidding,” he says. “And then what happened?”

  “Well, that was it. I didn’t even get a slice of cake.”

  It was a sponge one too—her favorite, the kind with strawberry jam in the middle. She saw it from a distance, set up behind the pile of presents.

  They’ve been in the Popayán hotel room all day. “When the cleaning staff come,” she tells him, “they’re going to think the room was attacked by an eighties rock band.” She’s not exaggerating: bloodstains on the sheets from her period, shit smears on the heavy wool comforter (now crammed in the corner by the dresser) thanks to a misguided attempt at anal sex, crusty vomit on the carpet from where he leaned over the edge of the mattress and vomited up the aguardiente they’d stayed up all night drinking, up on the rooftop with the Australian tourists.

  “No way,” he says. “Just blame it on Mouse Pilot.” This is one of several imaginary alter egos he adopts around her: a dapper World War II, Han Solo–esque fighting ace. It consists of him sputtering his lips (in imitation of a biplane engine), swaying his head around in slow circles (in imitation of legendary maneuvers made by first-class, world-famous pilots), and bringing his still-sputtering lips close to her body. There was maybe a specific reason why he chose to call this persona Mouse Pilot, as opposed to Fox or Deer or Rabbit, but it was so long ago she no longer remembers. This time around, he chooses to land his biplane lips on her neck.

  “Not on the face!” she says. Even after two years together, she is still ticklish to the point of peeing herself. She covers her mouth and tries not to laugh.

  They eat the rest of the birthday cake he bought her yesterday, one piece at a time. The disappearing slices transform the cake into a tiny Pac-Man, opening his mouth wider and wider. The cake is chocolate with vanilla frosting just the way she likes it, a thin coating rather than a thick slather. She eats the chocolate sprinkles first, picking them off one at a time, while he crams the entire piece into his mouth. He scrapes hardened crumbs off the cardboard with his index finger and lets her slurp down the remaining mush of frosting and cake.

  “I feel sick,” he says.

  “Like vomiting sick?”

  He shakes his head and pulls his knees into his chest, curling up beside her like a prawn. “More like sick in the head.” He buries his face in the crook of her arm.

  “Mouse Pilot,” she says. “What have we done to ourselves?”

  They take a shower together in a pitiful attempt to eliminate their headaches. He stands under the trickle of lukewarm-bordering-on-ice-cold water with his eyes closed, while she presses herself against the tiled wall with her arms crossed over her chest, covered in goosebumps.

  “Ugh, freezing,” she says.

  He leans in to kiss her and knocks over the tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner.

  “Eduardo,” she says. “Be careful.”

  She ends up shaving her legs with his razor in the sink. “Me too?” he says, climbing out of the shower and standing beside her, still naked and dripping wet. “Please?”

  He points at his face with his right hand. Water trick
les off the stumps where his fingers should be: second, third, and pinkie.

  She shaves him carefully, running the blade down his neck and cheeks, the same way she’s done it countless times before. There are many things he can do just fine with his left hand (play basketball with his contemporary Latin American economics students, slice tomatoes for pasta night), but for whatever reason, shaving is not one of them (volleyball, turning certain doorknobs, and playing musical instruments are others).

  Back in bed, wrapped in towels, he works on his paper for the upcoming conference while she watches a tennis match on TV. His left hand picks at the keyboard, thudding out one word at a time. “I should have finished this days ago,” he says, face creased in misery. “What was I thinking?”

  “Can you get an extension?”

  He sighs. The way his hair is drying right now, standing up in fluffy patches, he looks like a balding mad scientist that’s just been electrocuted.

  “Well,” she says. “Let me know if I can help.”

  “No one can help me.” He pauses, as though contemplating his next statement deeply. “I,” he says very seriously, “am totally fucked.”

  She pushes the empty aguardiente bottle off the mattress with her feet. (Did they really sleep with it in bed all night, like the saddest stuffed animal ever?) It lands on the carpeted floor with a thud.

  Despite the very best part of herself, the part that allows her to be the calmest and most considerate of girlfriends, a lovingly present and forgiving partner, it’s times like these when the thoughts come, sneaking across her mind. Army-style, crawling doggedly along on their bellies. Thoughts like: We’ve been planning this trip for months. Why didn’t you just finish it before we left D.C.? Or: You always do this. You always leave things till the absolute last minute.

  “Betsy?”

  She turns her head. His eyes are wide and worried, his Adam’s apple trembling as though there’s something alive hiding in his throat, a tiny animal tucked away and quivering in fear. “Can you write for me?”

  She types on the laptop, taking dictation as he wanders around the room, arms crossed behind his head, talking slowly, stating one painstakingly formed sentence after another. Paper Title: “The Possibility of Peacetime Economics in Colombia.” Abstract: How the potential end of the decades-long conflict and transition into economic stability is a model for other countries to follow for years to come.

  “Um,” she says, fingers skittering over the keyboard. “A bit long.”

  “Write it down,” he says. “We’ll fix it later.” He’s using his teacher voice with her, the one he uses with his undergrads, mastered long ago during his days as an elementary school teacher, high up in the Medellín hills.

  “Whatever you say, profe,” she says, hitting enter on the keyboard, and on the far side of the room he grins.

  On the television, the tennis match ends and turns into the news: It’s a story about the peace negotiations in Havana. Senators in white shirts walk over to a table of seated men wearing camouflage pants and black berets. Everyone’s shaking hands and smiling.

  —

  “All right,” he says the next morning at breakfast. “Next stop, Cali. What’s the plan?”

  The hotel they’re staying at is the classic kind, old and fancy, one of those colonial houses that was once a convent or a seminary; she can’t remember what this one was—there’s a bronze plaque on the wall somewhere that explains it. The courtyard has giant, lumpy cobblestones that make her feet feel like they’re getting massaged every time she walks across them in flip-flops. Popayán has been blessedly quiet, perfect for getting a good night’s sleep and thus worth every penny of the nightly fee (“practically East Coast prices,” he moaned in English at the front desk that first night, yet still handed over his credit card). In the center of the courtyard is a fountain with a statue, some saint or famous monk, presiding worriedly over the mossy water and slimy-looking goldfish. The only other guests sit at the far end of the courtyard, a German couple with enormous backpacks resting near their ankles like loyal dogs, both wearing beige zip-off pants.

  “I already told you,” she says, ripping a croissant in half. “Remember?”

  She shows him the pictures on her phone again. They’re from the blog of a Norwegian photographer, who in addition to shooting abandoned houses in Detroit and Chicago has documented a series of abandoned drug cartel houses—crumbling mansions in Tijuana, empty Mexico City apartments filled with automatic weapons and junk food, Escobar’s infamous ranch on the outskirts of Medellín, with its abandoned giraffes and hippos. And this one.

  “Can you believe I went here as a little kid?” she says, scrolling rapidly through the photos. The stone walls with jagged glass, the ridiculously huge automatic gate, the skinny eucalyptus trees extending their thin branches on the other side of the wall like nervous hands. “Isn’t that crazy?”

  “Why crazy?” he says, using his teeth to tear open a packet of salt, which he then sprinkles over his chunks of pineapple. “You didn’t know what kind of place it was.”

  “Well, of course not. None of us did.” There are no photos of the house’s interior, but there’s one of a dirty patio patterned with dark circles of pavement, evidence of long-gone orange flowerpots, which hid the tiles from years of sun. She recognizes the monkey bars and slides, remembers the yellow butterfly eggs dotting the handlebars. She shows him the rusted drainpipe where they would have waited for the candy to be thrown from the window, taps her fingernails against the abandoned swimming pool, now an empty concrete hole. She holds the phone so close to his face that it almost touches his nose, but he doesn’t flinch. “So that’s where Sebastián pooped,” he says calmly, mouth full of bread. “And where Mariela had her cake.”

  “That’s right.” She looks down at the fruit salad. A wave of nausea has just washed over her—is it possible that she could still be hungover?

  “That’s where I want go,” she says. “I want to see it.”

  A sparrow lands on a nearby cobblestone and immediately flies away as Eduardo sighs heavily through his nose. “Lover,” he says. “You haven’t been here since you were nine. And you want to see that?”

  “Eight.” She was actually ten—ten years old, fifth grade, standing in line with her parents at the American Airlines counter. The contents of their entire house had already been shipped ahead in the belly of an enormous steel shipping container, their new address in D.C. scrawled out in black permanent marker across the cardboard boxes. In college, she sometimes told people that she’d left when she was even younger—five years old, four, sometimes even three. Yeah, I was really young when we moved to the States. That’s why my Spanish isn’t so good anymore, ha-ha. I know, what a shame, right?

  She never wonders what it would have been like if she’d stayed. What would be the point?

  “Well,” he says. “You’re lucky it’s your birthday.”

  She stabs a piece of melon with her fork. “Still?”

  “You didn’t know? With me, holidays last at least a week. Even Christmas.”

  “Lucky me.”

  His hands rest calmly on the table: The left is wide and strong, the palm capable of wrapping around a basketball and shooting a three-pointer with his fingertips. On his right hand, the nubs of his missing three fingers are bulbous and red, like thick tree stumps, the only things left standing in an apocalyptic wasteland. The morning light as it hits his face turns his gray eyebrows white. Even though he’s only eight years older than she, he could pass for a lot more, as though the strain of learning English at community college night school had led to premature aging. Another army-style thought abruptly enters her mind, marching across in heavy boots: Who is this old man having breakfast with me? How on earth did I get here? She chases the thought away by filling her mouth with the last of the pineapple. Chasing away unwanted thoughts is one of her best skills, along with staring down people in bars who make racist comments or ask if Eduardo is her father. In a bar in C
olumbia Heights, a man once half-teasingly asked her, So, does your dad always buy you that many tequila shots? She just smiled at him, her lips still stinging from salt and lime, and said, Only when he wants to fuck me from behind.

  “Okay,” she says, pushing her chair back. “I’ll look up directions for how to get there.”

  As they walk past the German couple, he tells them in English, “Welcome to Colombia!” They look up quickly, flashing brief smiles that are half surprise, half alarm, as though taken aback by his twitchy expression.

  —

  Packing up, she realizes she has some kind of yeast infection. Bacterial, vaginal. Maybe an allergic reaction to the shitty cheap tampons. She tries to hide it but of course it’s impossible. “What’s that smell?” he says, raising his head from in between her reluctantly open legs (“No, baby, not right now, I’m really not in the mood, you know?”). Mad Max (his favorite film ever) blares away on the TV as he reaches for the laptop and tells her to Google fishy-smelling vagina. “Okay, so these are the antibiotics you need to take. Are you writing this down?” He makes her check three different websites, eyes flickering only occasionally to the screen to watch trucks turn over and explode in the Australian desert. “Be sure to write this down. We’ll take you to the pharmacy; there’s one at the bus station, I remember seeing it. And look, it says no dairy for the next couple of days.”

  He lowers his face back toward her crotch and kisses it, her tampon string tickling his nose. “Amazing,” he says, inhaling deeply. “How did you know that fish is my favorite?”

  She covers her face with her hands but can’t help it; she’s smiling.

  Later he roams around the room as she’s trying to get dressed, whipping his towel, pretending to kill imaginary enemies, Street Fighter–style. He’s deep in what she likes to call his “Mad Max persona,” smiling with a crazed glint in his eye, prowling around the bed. “Bam!” he says, snapping the towel sharply by her hip as she struggles to hook her bra. “Got the bastard. Take that.”