The Isle of Youth: Stories (2 page)

*   *   *

Arranging a trip to Iguazú Falls was surprisingly easy. In the morning, a taxi drove us to the airport, where we took a charter plane. During our flight, I never once looked out the window, sitting straight in my seat and trying to ignore the crushing pain in my nose. My husband’s annoyance with me had lingered; he’d snapped at me when I was slow going through airport security, and on the plane he scrutinized the Iguazú section in his guidebook, ignoring me completely.

At Iguazú, the guide, a short man with a carefully groomed mustache, picked us up. On the way to the falls, he told us about the legend of their creation: a god had planned to marry a woman, but she loved a mortal man. When she tried to escape with him in a canoe, the god divided the river. The waterfalls were formed and the couple would never stop drowning. The guide told us this story without enthusiasm, never once raising his eyes to meet ours in the rearview. I wondered if the legend was really a legend or just something for the tourists.

“Actually,” my husband said, “the falls are the result of a massive volcanic eruption that occurred approximately two hundred thousand years ago.”

“Garganta del Diablo,” the guide said in response.

“What does that mean?” I whispered to my husband.

“Devil’s Throat,” he said, pointing to a page in his guidebook.

We entered the falls from the Argentinean town of Puerto Iguazú. The horseshoe-shaped cascades spread across two miles of the Iguazú River, the guide explained as we started our tour on a wood-planked walkway. My husband moved briskly. The guide struggled to keep up, and it wasn’t long before I fell behind them both. As we trekked higher, the treetops blended together, making the canopy so dense it obscured the sky. Small brown monkeys swung across the trees. We passed stands of bamboo, orchids, and ceibos, which, my husband called over his shoulder, were the national flower of Argentina. I imagined George and Christina walking this same trail, identifying birds and primates together, reaching down at the same time to touch the velvety leaves of a plant.

When the falls came into view, they were just as spectacular as the Humbolts had said. Water poured over two massive cliffs and pooled in a huge expanse speckled with mossy rocks, as though a lush island had been overtaken by a flood. And then there was the sound, the deep rushing noise that burned away the confusion and the worry. My fingertips tingled and there was a ringing in my ears, but it was pleasant, like distant bells.

“It’s the sound of the drowned lovers,” the guide said to us. “Time has turned them into something beautiful.”

My husband looked at me and slipped his guidebook into his back pocket. He offered me bug repellent. I let him spray his palms and rub my bare arms and legs. He took his time, making sure the backs of my knees and the insides of my elbows had been covered. His fingertips were cool and I relished the sensation of him touching certain parts of my body—the bones in my ankles—for the very first time. I listened to the falls and wondered if what I was feeling could be called love.

“One of the seven natural wonders of the world,” the guide said after we finished.

“Bug spray?” I said, and this time, my husband laughed.

A cloud of turquoise-and-black butterflies swarmed around one of the rocks, touched down for a moment, and then scattered.

“Garganta del Diablo,” the guide said again. My husband and I followed him to a footbridge, which, after a great deal of hiking, led us to the Devil’s Throat. It was much larger than the others, with jagged rocks jutting through the curtains of water. The sound was deafening.

“The best one,” he shouted. “Out of hundreds of falls, this is the best one.”

“We’re already seeing the best one?” I called out. We’d only been out for a few hours and had many more ahead of us; it seemed a little disappointing to have already seen the best.

“Yes.” The guide struggled to be heard over the roar of the water. “The very best.”

My husband touched my face and said something I couldn’t understand—I couldn’t hear anything then except for the magnificent thunder of the falls—but I looked at him like I did. The guide produced a camera, and my husband put his arm around me. He had the guide take photos from every angle imaginable; it went on for so long, smiling became painful. The whole time, my husband kept talking to me. I watched his lips move, but I missed every word.

*   *   *

That night, back at Las Grutas, we made love in the shower, the water turned off, his hand wrapped around the back of my neck. Near the end, he accidentally brushed against my nose and I cried out in pain. Afterward, we lay in bed for a long time without speaking; I would have liked to believe it was the blissful quiet that can follow a spectacular day, but it felt like a different kind of silence.

Eventually he fell asleep. I stayed awake. I tried counting backward from five hundred. I tried watching shadows twitch on the ceiling. I tried picturing us standing on that bridge, the Garganta del Diablo cascading behind us, but all I could see was a great wall of water, blindingly white and falling like an avalanche.

I got out of bed, dressed, and slipped out of our room. In the lobby, the manager’s office door was locked, the front desk unattended. I left the hotel and walked down to the beach, thinking about what my husband might have said to me on that bridge. I assumed he was saying beautiful things—how he felt about us, our life together—but maybe I was wrong. Maybe my doubt was infectious. Maybe he was no longer sure what his capacities were. The water was dark and rolling. Something prickly brushed against my ankle. I sat on a rock and faced the ocean. I rested my hands over my nose, as I had on the plane, and listened to the hushed sound of my breath.

The beach was so dark that if the moon hadn’t shifted and cast a fan of light onto the strip of water I happened to be watching, I might have missed her altogether. But when the profile of a swimming woman entered my field of vision, I recognized Christina Humbolt from the way her hair was gathered at the nape, just as it had been at the cocktail reception, and the slim shape of her shoulders. I imagined her husband sleeping soundly in their room, unaware that his wife had slipped into a dimension of her own. Or, for all I knew, she went swimming every night and told her husband about it the next morning over breakfast. Other people’s lives were no less impossible to understand than my own.

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.