Better Than Fiction 2 (21 page)

Where we were before Idaho was Eugene, Oregon, where we stayed with a couple named Don and Julio. Julio spent the week working in San Francisco. Every Friday he took the same plane home, with the same pilot. Their house was built by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright with breezeways and a fireplace in the center of the open floor plan like an exposed heart. It was a house with important windows, on a hill beneath the flight path of Eugene’s only airport.

Every Friday at 6.35pm, a shadow crossed the house as Julio’s plane flew over. This was Don’s signal. He’d save his work, close his laptop, and start dinner.

Julio’s HIV had not yet progressed to full-blown AIDS, but it was already cruelly tagging his everyday activities. He paused
during conversations to catch his breath.

The fact of that plane, its shadow bleating over the house, triggering the thrill of expectancy: Back when I had no home or romantic partner, it was the most beautiful way I’d ever heard to know your love was near. Now, years later, I have both, and I feel the same.

On our last morning in Idaho we awoke to find Alyssa standing over us, holding her butterfly kite. We had promised her we’d fly it before we left, but there was still no air.

Dana thought of a plan to trick Alyssa into thinking it was flying. Alyssa would hold the butterfly’s string, as Dana held it aloft by its belly. They counted to three and then took off, Alyssa first, hollering and making wild circles on the dead lawn. Alyssa’s job was to keep enough slack in the string while behind her, Dana yelled updates on how high the kite was. ‘It’s really going, Lys! It’s really high, now!’

When they took a break after a few rounds, Alyssa told Dana that she couldn’t actually see the kite flying. ‘Really?’ Dana said. ‘Well, it certainly is. Maybe you’ll see it this time.’

Again they lined up on the grass, Alyssa in front. In a clear voice, the little girl counted to three, then yelled go! They exploded across the yard. Alyssa tried several times to turn around while she ran, but couldn’t as long as she did her job holding the string.

‘Is it flying, Dana?’ she yelled. She was singing, hopeful. ‘Is it flying?’

M
y husband and I had a honeymoon handed to us. We didn’t like the wedding industry, and we didn’t like the honeymoon industry much either, so our general plan had been to put off a trip until the 105° summer heat descended on southern Arizona, where we live.

Our wedding was his second, and a fairly casual event – a ceremony and party outside our house in the desert, surrounded by towering saguaro cacti and blooming prickly pears. The planning had focused mostly on food and drink; we didn’t spend much time on traditional wedding details. I don’t enjoy shopping, for instance, and I almost never wear dresses, so a friend of the family who
did
like shopping and dresses just picked out one and mailed it to me. I accepted this favor gratefully and tried on the outfit only once, briefly, before the day of the ceremony. And the marriage vows didn’t get much
attention either. Both K and I tend to have strong opinions about words, yet our vows were a standard template used by the officiating minister – one of no specific faith that K had found through a quick google. She’d handed the page to us in a crowded, faintly unpleasant coffee shop in a mall and told us to look over it quickly. And look quickly we did, anxious to get away from the latte-drinking hordes.

Friends told me after the ceremony that when I was asked to repeat the line “I will honor you with my body,” I looked quite surprised. I seemed to be hearing it for the first time, they said. Apparently I grimaced and pronounced the words as though they were in air quotes.

But at the reception a generous guest surprised us, gifting us two nights in her condo in a small tourist town named Puerto Peñasco on the Sea of Cortez (‘Rocky Point’ is what the Tucson frat boys call it when they drive down there to party). It was just four hours’ road trip from where we lived, so we thanked her and decided we’d nip down and back in K’s beater truck – feel the ocean breeze on our faces, hear the waves crash on the shore.

We got to the seaside in the afternoon, dumped our overnight bags in the apartment, and drove to the town’s beachside strip, where we promptly found an open-air patio and ordered a couple of margaritas. It was a hotel bar beside the hotel’s swimming pool; its floor was colorful tile and the tables were wrought iron. We sat at a two-top along a wall, peering over the stucco edge at the rocks far below, splattered white by seagulls and awash with sea foam and floating plastic litter. For a minute, with our margaritas on the table between us and the gulls drifting nearby in hopes of table scraps, we had that curious feeling of suspended time you get in the resting stops in travel – the confusion of leisure, the limbo of an empty day. What should we do with it?

We never had to make a choice. We’d taken only a sip of our drinks when there was a muffled
boom
and the place was rocked by an explosion. The floor seemed to shudder beneath our feet; a huge mirror shattered behind the bar. We heard screams and jumped up, staring at each other wide-eyed. This was early 2003, and the attacks of September 11 were still fresh in our minds. When it came to explosions, everyone’s nerves were raw. We abandoned our table and ran for the restaurant next door to the hotel, from which smoke was billowing. The restaurant building was on fire – people, injured, were already tottering dazedly in the streets like zombies, their faces shocked and immobile. On the second floor, we saw two elderly ladies trapped on a balcony.

K climbed up to help them get down safely. They were American tourists like us, it turned out, as we shouted back and forth over the faint background noise of more yelling and sirens. Small black flakes floated in the air – ash, I guessed—and there was a smell of burning. The older of the two wouldn’t agree to be lifted down onto safe ground unless K first took her purse and handed it over to me. (This he did; the purse seemed more important to her in her panic than her own safety.) Then he lifted her off the balcony with me at the bottom to receive her, purse dangling off my forearm. The second woman climbed down with less help, then wandered away the moment our backs were turned. We were focused on Rose – the one who had zealously protected her purse – because we saw, now that our adrenalin rushes were subsiding, that she was terribly hurt: the pale, frail skin of her arms, already as thin as parchment, was deeply burned. She needed medical help right away.

In a moment the sirens were keening close at hand, winding down, and our hopes soared when an ambulance pulled up on the street beside us. But they were quickly dashed when the
rear doors were flung open and two uniformed EMTs jumped out: children. Well, teenagers, we saw on closer inspection, but they looked even younger because their faces were blank and confused. Behind the ambulance, we could see more victims roaming the streets, burned and shell-shocked.

The ambulance contained no equipment save for a single stretcher and blanket. There wasn’t even a first aid kit that we could see – not even a Band-Aid.

Rose spoke no Spanish and the child paramedics spoke no English; she seemed disoriented, even scared, and the teenagers did too. Although our own versions of Spanish were crude, we figured they might be better than nothing. So I asked one of the teens where the ambulance would take Rose, and after we watched it pull away, we ran to our truck, looked up the address on K’s phone, and drove.

It turned out to be a clinic run by the military, maybe four rooms in total: later we found out there’d been so many people wounded in the accident – a boiler explosion – that the survivors had to be spread out among all the town’s medical facilities. We waited as they worked on Rose’s burns, and when she had been treated and lay recovering in her bed, bandaged up, we stood beside the bedside. We did our best to translate what the doctor and nurses said to her, and what her responses were to them. Rose was 93, she told us. She was still shaky, but managed to communicate with us her urgent worry about her traveling companion, Jerry.

‘He’s just a
young
man, you see,’ she said. ‘His name is Jerry. Please, go look for him! I have to know if he’s alive. You see, he’d gone to the back of the restaurant. He got up from the table and went to the bathroom…’ And with that she gave a small sob and closed her eyes as the sedatives kicked in.

We knew from the medical staff’s descriptions of the explosion that this meant Jerry had been nearer the boiler than Rose had – Jerry had been at higher risk. But by now it was late and we could hardly even speak, we were so tired. The doctor told us our search would be more fruitful by daylight, so we went back to the condo and collapsed.

The next morning we got up early and strategized about how to find Jerry. We weren’t confident we could make ourselves understood in Spanish over the phone, or understand anyone else’s Spanish either. We’d have to hit the pavement. So we brewed some coffee to go and started making the rounds in our truck, driving to every medical outpost in town, one after another.

Our worst stop came in the early afternoon: the town’s central hospital. Outside it, milling on the sidewalk, were crowds – families waiting to hear the news and families who had just heard it, standing huddled in pairs or small groups and crying. We walked through these clusters of mourners with our faces down, not wanting to disturb them, trying to be invisible as ghosts. If we’d been home, we would have caught fragments of speech, would have had words to hang onto, words to give the dead and injured, and the people mourning them, detail and personhood. Maybe we would have spoken to someone. Here, where the language wasn’t our own, it was like wading through a sea of grief – we couldn’t see where our feet were.

But Jerry wasn’t there, and he didn’t seem to be anywhere. Again and again, no Jerry. Only after many hours of long and frustrating searching – our childlike Spanish kept our progress through the levels of bureaucracy to a snail’s pace, and some places we visited twice – we finally found our man.

He wasn’t too badly hurt, though he, like Rose, lay weak on his back in a hospital bed. We understood the second we saw
him why our description of ‘young’ Jerry hadn’t resonated with staff at any of the hospitals or clinics: ‘young’ Jerry was in his late seventies. Clearly, by Rose’s standards, he was still a spring chicken. When we told him she was alive, he burst into tears.

After a few minutes he asked us to do something for him while he was bedridden. Could we make a trip to retrieve his documents and money from his car? He’d left them in the compartment under the armrest, he said, because Rose had been paying for their lunch that day. Their passports were in the armrest, he said, with their cash and insurance cards. The vehicle was in the parking lot beside the restaurant; he described its location and gestured for the plastic tray that contained his belongings so we could pick out his key ring.

The lot was cordoned off now, and police were teeming over it, dark forms in the dusk. Once we explained why we were there, they lifted the yellow tape for us. We walked along the rows of cars toward the building wall against which Jerry had left his Jeep parked. And there the Jeep was, or what remained of it. No keys would be needed, clearly. The car was gutted, with nothing left of its body but a few blackened metal bones. We stood beside the husk, looking in between those metal bones. One piece of vinyl had survived completely intact, so pristine that it looked as though it had never been engulfed in flame at all: the armrest compartment on the center console. It was still perfectly whole. We pried open the lid of the compartment, and inside, also in perfect condition, found Jerry’s and Rose’s documents – and hundreds of dollars in mint-looking cash.

A couple of minutes later, trying to leave the parking lot again, we were forced to hand over Jerry’s bundle of bills to the policemen. We counted it carefully first, suspecting corruption (as it turned out, we were able to reclaim the money for Jerry
at the police station the next day after filing about a ream of paperwork). The documents, though, we were allowed to take to the two clinics, Jerry’s and then Rose’s, where we gave them back to their rightful owners. We also had to file a report on what we’d witnessed; for that, too, we spent hours waiting in lines at the police station. And when we weren’t making our way through dense hedges of Spanish-language formalities, we carried messages back and forth between Rose and Jerry. Administrators at Rose’s facility were making plans to airlift her back over the international border, and Jerry needed to be moved to her clinic beforehand so they could ride back in the helicopter together.

By the time we saw them reunited – Jerry at Rose’s bedside, both smiling and crying as they held hands – it was the last day of our trip. After they were airlifted out, we, too, would cross the border and go home, back to everyday routine and our jobs in Tucson.

We ended up at a different bar on our last evening, after saying goodbye to them. (We’d never see them again, as it turned out: we parted company without asking for phone numbers or addresses, and both of their names were common.) This second bar was right next to the condo complex, instead of downtown, and frequented mostly by Anglos. It had a more generic feel – a bar that could have been anywhere, or at least anywhere-USA. Spatially it was in Mexico, but its culture was pure American empire. We drank beers instead of margaritas and walked back to the condo, still exhausted, after only two. The feeling of empty time was gone; leisure had passed us by.

We never did take a classic honeymoon vacation, strolling aimlessly and happily on white sands. Years later, divorced but still close, we came to feel that was alright. The time with Rose
and Jerry and a small-town Mexican bureaucracy had been about shock, the sadness of others and the practical work of picking up the pieces – no idylls at all. Then again, neither of us is really cut out for free time; most hours will find us bent unhealthily over our laptops.

These days, with a little girl who’s 11 and a little boy who’s 7, we travel mostly for work – me to promote my novels, K to promote the conservation of endangered species. We do that travel separately, but we’ve still managed to take the children to Hawaii together, and to Europe, and for road trips and river trips across the West.

For us real travel is travel that isn’t just a commodity or a rest from real life. It’s more often a change of texture, a shift into rawness and vulnerability. When you venture into unknown places, especially places where you don’t speak the language, you give up much of the social power you’ve come to rely on as an adult. Travel has a way of turning us into children again, whether we’re 93 or only 35, and how vulnerable that makes us is mostly a matter of chance, money, and the kindness of strangers.

But as long as we come out in one piece, it’s not so bad to be vulnerable. It’s not so bad to be surprised, even by hardship.