The Lucky Ones

by Julianne Pachico

  With the next flick, he accidentally hits her full-force on the vagina, a direct bull’s-eye. She immediately collapses on the bed and bursts into tears.

  “Oh my God,” he says immediately, dropping the towel and kneeling. “Lover. I’m so sorry.” He wraps his arms around her and holds her tight. Even though to be perfectly honest it didn’t hurt that much and the stinging sensation is already starting to fade, she still keeps crying hysterically, as though something inside her has suddenly burst, cracked wide open.

  “Fuck,” she says. “I don’t want any drama. I just want to be on vacation. Is that too much to ask for?”

  “No drama,” he says. “Just vacation.”

  She wipes her nose with her bare arm. “Now we’re going to miss the bus.”

  He raises his chin defiantly, as if he’s challenging not her but the notion of time itself. “No, lover,” he says. “We’re not.”

  By some miracle she manages to finish getting dressed while he crams the rest of their clothes into the backpack, smashing down his pages of field notes and interview transcripts with peasant farmers, people whose entire families were slaughtered by paramilitaries as suspected Communists. The two of them are the last passengers to board, him banging on the closed doors and shouting at the driver (“Open up, parcero!”), but they make it just in time: her clutching the white paper bag of antibiotics, him with a plastic bag draped around the crook of each elbow, filled with burning-hot pandebonos and napkins already stained with grease.

  “What did I tell you?” he says, heading down the aisle. Another couple is sitting in their assigned seats, eating plantain chips and scattering crumbs everywhere, so they take the last two empty seats at the back. A rumble begins beneath their feet and the bus lurches forward like an animal finally being released from a chain. Once they’re on the highway, the wind whipping through the windows makes their hair fly back, like they’re models standing in front of a gigantic fan.

  He is careful with her during the journey, tentative and considerate, saying things like “Would you like a sip of water?” while she responds with “Oh, yes please. Thank you very much.” She puts in her earplugs so she can nap and he buys, through the window, a packet of sugar-covered nuts (her favorite) from a street vendor. She wakes up during a traffic jam, and he passes the time by asking her question after question about the books she’ll be teaching her fourth graders this year. “And then what happens?” he says over and over, until she’s basically summarized the entirety of the Narnia series, from the pond-hopping bits in The Magician’s Nephew to Aslan’s final onion-world monologue in The Last Battle.

  When they’re an hour away from Cali, she’s already asked him to explain yet again how everyone in The Godfather trilogy is related to one another (one of his favorite topics) and to tell her for the umpteenth time his first thought when he met her, at a mutual friend’s house party two years ago (“I thought, Who is this beautiful Colombian girl, and how do I get her away from the guacamole dip and talking to me instead?”). They talked together all night, sharing anecdotes, scooping tortilla chips out of the bowl until only tiny broken shards were left. She told him about how back in Cali, her father had received kidnapping threats while serving on the school board, and Eduardo nodded and said, “Most likely from the police.” “Yes!” she said, so excited, she accidentally spilled wine over her arm. “That’s exactly right!” He seemed so serious and intense, staring at her unblinkingly with his bushy mad professor eyebrows, and yet when they walked back to her apartment together, he linked his fingers with hers at the traffic light (his left hand, of course, never his right). Tugging at her insistently like a little kid who needed help crossing the street. She couldn’t help but laugh at the time, but there was something sad about it too.

  That’s what being with Eduardo seems to bring out in her, more than anything else. Laughter and an ache.

  “Lover,” she says. “Tell me a story. The one about the protest?” This one is from when he was a university student, the time he got arrested because he mistook a policeman’s van for a rubbish truck and jumped into it to escape the tear gas. There’s another story she likes, where his brother pooped out a tapeworm and blocked the toilet in their one-bathroom house, and their mother had to fish it out of the pipe with a clothes hanger (this anecdote is inevitably one that makes her squirm with both delight and horror, as he luridly describes the floppy way the tapeworm dangled, exactly like wet spaghetti). Or the story in which his mother gave him condoms before he flew to D.C., telling him, If you’re moving to America, it’s better to be sinful and practical than holy and diseased.

  Instead of retelling any of these, though, Eduardo shakes his head. “No stories,” he says. “Not right now.” His lips pull thinly inward in what might be a smile but might be something else.

  She looks down at the dirty bus floor. “I’m sorry,” she says, though she isn’t exactly sure what she’s apologizing for. He squeezes her arm, but it still feels like she’s done something wrong.

  (She never asks him about the time he took his university girlfriend to a polo match and the girlfriend’s father told him, I won’t have any daughter of mine sitting with a renowned Communist. Or about the morning his editor friend Sergio was found tied to a post, a bullet hole behind his ear, fingers severed, and one eyeball carved out. Or about the night with the men in the alleyway, and the motorcycles, and the machete blades. There are certain stories Eduardo will never tell more than once.)

  “Do you ever think about it?” she says suddenly. “About what it would have been like if you’d stayed?”

  He’s craning his neck, still looking out the window, as though there’s something behind his shoulder he needs to see before it fades out of sight.

  “No,” he says. “I don’t.”

  —

  In Cali they stay at a student hostel in San Antonio, a hip young neighborhood popular with tourists and backpackers. It’s highly rated on TripAdvisor, which emphasizes its “quiet and peaceful atmosphere,” perfect for “a great night’s sleep.” The reception area is decorated with soccer memorabilia, scarves and shirts and framed photographs of Colombia’s national team. “Excellent decorations,” Eduardo says to the young man at the front desk, and they beam manically at each other as though exchanging a vital secret.

  As they hand over their passports, the loudspeakers begin playing a samba song at top volume. “No!” he shouts, almost making her drop her passport. “The music is too loud for la señorita! She won’t be able to sleep!” She frowns at him, embarrassed that he’s making such a fuss on her behalf, but later, as they walk up the freezing-cold stairwell, the samba abruptly stops and is replaced by a lower-volume song, a salsa cover of “Smooth Criminal.”

  “Thank you,” she says, rubbing his back.

  While he takes a shower she opens his laptop. The Word document for his paper is still open, filled with notes. A section in the middle of the page catches her eye:

  “picar para tamal”—to cut up the body of the living victim into small pieces, bit by bit

  “bocachiquiar”—to make hundreds of small body punctures from which the victim slowly bleeds to death

  Eight-year-old schoolgirls raped en masse

  Unborn infants removed by cesarean section; replaced with roosters

  Ears cut off

  Scalps removed

  Include statistics for forced disappearances?

  She reads it one more time. She bites her lip. Then she clicks the little yellow button to minimize it and logs in to his Gmail account. She searches for the name of his ex-girlfriend, a Spanish architect who broke up with him in a tent on the Parque Tayrona beach, but thankfully the last email is from eight months ago, a cordial update she’s already read. Things are going well, thanks. So nice to hear from you. She opens Facebook and types out a name in the search box, then immediately deletes it. She types it out again more slowly, as though that will somehow make it feel less like an irresistible compulsion: Stephanie Lans
ky. As usual, none of the faces that appear look even remotely familiar, and there are no mutual friends in common. It’s the same for Mariela Montoya, who has never been mentioned in any of the articles she’s read about the house, not even in passing. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think Mariela and Stephanie had never existed at all—that they’d simply vanished into thin air. Her fingers hover over the keyboard, but that’s as far as she gets—what was La Flaca’s real name?

  Instead of checking LinkedIn or Instagram, she deletes her browsing history and then heads downstairs. She sits on the couch and looks at her phone, reading the Cali Wikitravel page and Lonely Planet forums, scrolling, scrolling. She tries to find more high-quality photos of the house on Google Images, but the Norwegian blog is still the best source. She clicks on the photo of the ashy hole in the ground, what must have once been the barbecue pit, surrounded by the hunched-over grapefruit and droopy-leafed papaya trees. She copy-pastes a chunk of text into Google Translate and is able to decipher that the Norwegian blogger suggests that renting a motorcycle rickshaw for the day is the best way to get there, as opposed to taking a cab.

  When he finally comes downstairs, her eyes feel cloudy, as though they’re still blinking away pop-up ads. She tells him that according to Wikitravel, the foreigners who teach at the international private schools in Cali tend to live in this neighborhood, the kind of people who would have taught her in kindergarten: Canadian hippies, recent American college graduates on the lookout for a cushy job abroad. There are also a lot of hipsters, DJs, university students, and punk rockers. Maybe the local bands could even include some of her former classmates, transformed from happy-go-lucky fifth graders into bespectacled hipster musicians.

  “Do you think there’s a chance we’ll run into someone you know?” he says.

  She shakes her head just a little too quickly. “No,” she says. “That’s not possible.”

  They go for a walk. They wait for ages to cross the highway, women on motor scooters threading through traffic in semitransparent blouses and super-short shorts, helmeted soldiers staring down from the overpasses. They weave their way through a construction site, the road blasted apart in thick gray chunks, and she tells him that they’re building a special lane for the buses that will speed by the jammed-up regular lanes, just like the ones they have in Europe. “I swear to God,” she says as they pass a grove of trees with white Xs spray-painted on their trunks, “they started building that damn lane the year we left and it’s still not finished.”

  “Nice,” he says. “What else looks different?”

  “How would I know?” she says in a voice that is maybe a little too loud. He frowns, so she makes an effort, says lightly, “I guess there’s more malls.”

  They climb up the hill, passing a gray stone church and plaza filled with families pushing strollers, and cut through the park with its uneven cobblestone path, crushing tiny white flowers beneath their shoes. He borrows her phone and takes carefully framed photos of the surrounding mountains, the twinkling lights of the tin-roofed neighborhoods, the giant crosses on the summit lit up like air traffic control signals for UFOs. When she teases him about being a technology addict he looks genuinely wounded. “They’re memories,” he says solemnly in the professor voice she imagines he uses in lecture halls, “for our children.”

  “Our what?” she says, instantly hating the way her heart flutters. If she were watching from a distance, she’d want to punch herself in the face.

  They sit on a bench by the artesanía marketplace and watch the vendors sell their little chiva magnets, the flag-colored T-shirts, the fuzzy tapestries of rural village scenes. He uses her bottle of water to take a painkiller; the ache in his stumps is bothering him again. She tells him that they’re vaguely near the Baptist church that her family used to attend—she’d slump down in the seat and amuse herself by staring out the window and pretending to be Macaulay Culkin in that one scene in Home Alone, sliding along the telephone wires, hanging on to a clothes hanger.

  “I used to do something similar on the bus,” he says, “except I’d just imagine myself running really fast, smashing through anything that got in my way—dogs, telephone poles, parked cars.” He plants his lips on her chin and sputters gently, Mouse Pilot–style.

  A little kid is staring at them, mouth half-open, while his mother examines a row of dangling earrings. It takes all her energy to restrain herself from frowning back at him, scrunching up her face into a rude monster expression, maybe even saying loudly, “Didn’t your mother teach you it’s not polite to stare?” Somehow he’s sensed it, that inexplicable air around her that screams foreigner, even though she didn’t become a U.S. citizen until she was eighteen years old. What if she were to pull out the battered red Colombian passport in her purse and flap it in his face like a crazed butterfly?

  “Maybe we should travel in the U.S. next summer,” she says to Eduardo. “What do you think?”

  He pauses from nuzzling her neck.

  “We could rent a car and do American stuff. See the fireworks in Philadelphia. Go to Gettysburg for July Fourth.”

  “Gettysburg?”

  She tries to explain it as the dim streetlights around them slowly flicker on. The reenactors dressed up in their blue and gray uniforms, the slow march across the field, the cannonballs, and the tents and umbrellas the website recommends you bring to protect yourself from the sun.

  He straightens up, frowning. “What makes you think I would want to see that?”

  “Because it’s historic. It was the most important battle in the history of the United States.”

  He shakes his head, picking at the splintered wood on the bench. “I’ve seen enough battles.”

  They start walking back before the sky becomes completely dark. Across the street from the hostel is a parked car with the doors wide open, blasting Pitbull at top volume. A group of young men (boys, really) are standing around talking, sitting on the edges of tires, smoking cigarettes, dented cans of Poker beer scattered on the surrounding sidewalk. They’re baby-faced, smooth-skinned, only a few years older than her fourth graders back in D.C. Green-and-red soccer team shirts, caps on backward, shaved heads with black-ink tattoos on their necks and wrists. The volume of the music is turned up so loud her eardrums are already aching. As they pass the car Eduardo speeds up, quickening his pace, but she stops and turns toward them.

  “Excuse me,” she says in Spanish. “Would you mind turning the music down? The guests staying here aren’t going to be able to sleep.”

  They stare at her. She can sense Eduardo standing slightly behind her, torso close, arm hairs brushing urgently against her elbow as though sending her a secret message.

  “Whas yo’ problem,” one of the guys says in English, in an exaggerated American accent. The others laugh.

  “Wow, so polite,” she says as Eduardo begins tugging at her wrist, softly at first, then harder. “Is that what your parents taught you? To be polite like that?”

  They stare back at her, the bass still thrumming away. She can feel it deep in her belly, like a pulse. “Fuck America!” the same guy says, and they all laugh again.

  She can still feel their eyes on her as she turns and walks toward the hostel steps. Eduardo follows behind, calling out over his shoulder toward the car: “Sorry, so sorry!” As she reaches the hostel door she hears the group burst into laughter, calling out and whooping, stray phrases following her inside. Hey gringa, hey beautiful, come back! By the time she bursts into their room her lips are trembling, but she still hasn’t cried.

  “Thanks so much for that,” she says as he sits on the edge of the mattress. “I mean, wow. You were really there for me when I needed you. God, I felt so supported.”

  He’s resting his arms in his lap. Pressing his wrists together.

  “Yeah, really supportive.” She opens her purse and shakes it up and down, scattering her makeup, her hand sanitizer, the silvery packets of antibiotics.

  “Give me my phone,” s
he says. “I’m going to call the police.”

  He’s rocking back and forth. “Please don’t do that.”

  “If you don’t give me my phone, I’m going to go downstairs and ask the front desk to do it.”

  “Lover,” he says. “Please don’t create trouble.”

  She heads downstairs and waits at the desk while the expressionless teenage boy on duty rings the police station three times. Every once in a while she wipes her shaky palms off on her jeans.

  “I left them a message,” the boy says, hanging up. “They should be here soon.”

  She sits on the couch for thirty minutes, staring at the shelves of abandoned books and magazines on the opposite wall. Nobody comes.

  When she finally heads back upstairs he’s working again, left hand tapping at the keyboard, papers scattered around him. The sight of him typing away fills her with the angriest feeling she’s had all night, as though a cloud of red has just descended over her eyes.

  “You,” she says, “are a coward.”

  He looks up from the screen.

  “I needed you. I needed you to be there for me and you weren’t.”

  He shuts the computer and scoots over to her.

  “Why didn’t you stand up for me? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Betsy,” he says, and there’s something steely in his voice now, a tone she hasn’t heard before and doesn’t recognize. “You don’t understand what it’s like here. Things are much better now—safer—but people are still used to solving their problems differently. They solve them with weapons. You think I want to risk that?”

  “I know all that.” She can hear her voice getting more high-pitched and shrill; she sounds as if she’s on the verge of shrieking. She hears the way she sounds to him too: the typical voice of a naïve and deluded American demanding her so-called rights as a citizen, as irritating and ridiculous as a pair of beige zip-off pants, but she doesn’t even care at this point. “You’re talking like I don’t understand how things are—like I live in some dumb, pretend fantasy world. You’re making it sound like I’m the one who’s done something wrong, when you’re the one who’s being passive.”