Her: A Memoir (16 page)

“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 spent 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,
lonel
y.

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.

“No. No
gracias
.” I did like the mask, but I didn’t want it.

“It’s
grazie
,” Cara corrected. “This isn’t Spain.”

The mask in my hands was the crying Pierrot. I pulled the elastic string on its back, slipped it over my head, adjusted the fit to see and breathe. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said from behind Pierrot, to Cara, changing the subject from language to directions. “We’d better ask someone else or we’ll never find the hotel.” My voice was muffled by the mouthless mask.

“What? I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

I flipped up the mask and showed myself, but Cara wasn’t attempting to hear me; she was admiring herself in the shop’s mirror. She wore a Zanni mask with eyes cut like a cat’s. A plume of feathers covered her forehead. A long nose hooked down over her mouth. I lifted her disguise. “Let’s go.”

“You’re no fun. You’ve never been fun.” Cara frowned at me. “I’ve planned for this, of course, for your lack of funness. We’ll have to have gelato first, then pasta. No one, not even
you
, can mope after gelato.” Cara plucked a tiny chocolate bunny from a dish beside the cash register and tossed it in her mouth. “Tastes like Easter.” She grabbed a second chocolate and placed it in my palm.

“If we ever find our way to the hotel,” I said, “I’m sure I’ll be plenty of fun.”

An hour later, we found our tiny hotel, nestled in the center of a small piazza, next to a pasta restaurant with terrace dining. The bistro wasn’t special, just a stop-off for tourists. We dined outdoors there, sharing a deliciously salty Bolognese. Our room had a view of a fountain in the center of the piazza where teenagers gathered to share wine and soda tonics after dark. At dusk men congregated outside a tavern directly downstairs from our room, hobbyists with guitars and drums. We danced with other girls who were staying in other run-down inns. Two doors down from our abode, the old bell of a gray, stone cathedral rang out every hour.

The hotel was run by a married couple. The innkeeper dressed well in brightly stitched handmade Italian suits sewn from tweed and twill. He combed his hair back in graying blond waves and wore small round wire specs. He was a dead ringer for Jeremy Irons playing Humbert Humbert, his well-practiced Italian charm—the accent, the dress, his harmless seduction—put on in hopes of more advance bookings.

We spent our days wandering the maze of streets and eating gelato and talking about our mother and father, Cara’s divorce and recent romances. Over a plate of grilled sardines, she confided her regret over her infidelity and her fears of ever finding new love.

“Will I always be alone?” she asked, moving a bite of fish around on her plate with her fork. “No one will ever love me. I’m damaged.”

“Don’t say such a thing,” I said. “That’s not fair.”

“You don’t understand.” She set her cutlery down and pouted. “You’re perfect.”

I told my sister her affair was of no consequence, that she should not burden herself with remorse. I understood how she must have needed to feel the warmth of a new body, a lover who hadn’t known her before she’d so nearly been snuffed out. “You’ve survived to live,” I told her, drunk, not knowing what I meant. If only that had been true.

There were many pasta dinners, just as I’d imagined there would be, and shopping trips where we browsed trinkets that we’d never need. I have all of the things Cara bought then on my desk now: a Virgin Mary key chain, four Venetian masks—one with rabbit ears and a crying clown face, and a red leather diary embossed with a roaring lion—this Cara stole, sliding it into her handbag in a crowded shop as the store clerk helped a woman carry a ceramic Jesus to her waiting gondola. We also searched tirelessly for a birthday gift for Jedediah to help him ring in his twenty-eighth year. I would miss his birthday, and thought I should send Cara in my place to have dinner with him and present him with my gift.

I looked and looked but no gift said everything this one needed to: I love you, but I hate you for not being here. Thank you for allowing me to see the world, even if it’s without you.