This is the seventh chapter of my novel, Such a Pretty Fiction. Chapter 6 is here.
I couldn’t make sense of the knocking on my door. I sat up. The clock showed 6:00. I wrapped a towel around my waist, opened the door, and there she was. Wide awake and grinning.
“Thought you might need a wake-up call.” She stepped past me into the room. “Plane for Huaraz in three hours.” She plopped down on my bed.
It took me a moment to process. “OK. I’ll need to shower, though.” I stood awkwardly, half naked, clutching the towel.
She grinned. “And?”
“Are you just going to sit there?”
“What if I was?” She stuck out her chin.
“Well… All right!” My backpack was on a table next to the bed. I stepped in front of it, turned my back to her, and dropped the towel. She shrieked with laughter.
Grabbing a pair of boxers, I sidled into the bathroom. When I came out, she was gone. I went down to breakfast and sat across from her, feeling like a gladiator.
“Well played,” she smiled.
The hotel had its own taxi. It crept out of a carriage house and rolled around the fountain, gravel popping under its tires. We climbed in. The driver pulled into the street without stopping, letting the motos bend around him.
As we sat on the tarmac I looked out the window at the jungle. The plane lurched into motion. The trees began to crawl, raced into a blur, and stretched out as we climbed into the air and the world slowed down. The oxbow lakes were there again. Then we were in the clouds and Iquitos was gone.
Huaraz was different. I could tell as soon as we touched down. Walking to the terminal I was almost out of breath. Ten thousand feet above sea level. The airport was laid carefully on the floor of a long valley outside the city. The hills were carpeted in dark green scrub. It looked like the only flat spot for miles.
The road ran south to Huaraz. A cap of gray clouds rested heavily on the valley. Through gaps in the hills were bright flashes of pure white snow, blanketing a mountain that reached up out of view. I pointed it out to Soledad.
“The Cordillera Blanca,” she said. “The Andes.”
“La Cordillera Blanca,” the taxi driver echoed from the front seat. He recognized a native speaker. “Los Andes.” He gestured out the window toward the mountain. “Huascarán.”
“What was that?” I asked Soledad.
“That’s the name of the mountain. The highest in Peru. Huascarán.”
“Huascarán,” the driver repeated solemnly.
“In the seventies an earthquake destroyed most of Huaraz. A glacier on Huascarán collapsed and caused a flood of mud that buried a town called Yungay.”
“Yungay,” said the driver.
“How many people?” I asked.
“Oh, I think about twenty thousand.”
“Twenty thousand people in a mud slide?”
She nodded. “Countries all around the world took in orphaned kids. It was a diaspora. They’ve started coming back. Peruvians are upset. They feel like the country abandoned them.”
“Twenty thousand people…”
“That’s not even the worst part. Before it happened, two American scientists knew the glacier was unstable. They published it in a newspaper, and the government told them get out or go to prison. They fled the country. And then Yungay was destroyed, just like they'd predicted.”
“Yungay,” the driver said again.
Huaraz crept up on us. We drove into a cluster of buildings. It petered out, grew back up again, and suddenly we were in the city.
Our hotel had none of the glamour of the Dawn of the Amazon. The man at the desk knew Soledad. As we approached, his face brightened and they broke into rapid Spanish.
We had two rooms on the top floor. Soledad took the stairs. At the first landing I was breathing hard. “I’m already out of breath.”
“You’ll adapt in a couple days.”
“We’ll be here a couple days?”
She was half a flight ahead of me. She didn’t seem to be affected by the altitude. “Not in Huaraz. Next stop is Cusco, though. Even higher than Huaraz.” She looked down at me from the third floor. “Too high for your lungs, apparently.”
I took the opportunity to catch my breath, pausing on the landing. “Why didn’t we take the elevator?”
“I wanted to see how you handled the stairs.” She smiled imperiously down at me. She wore a t-shirt, a simple blue. The straps on her backpack framed the curve of her chest. Her hands were on her hips.
“You look like Errol Flynn,” I said. “Be like Robin Hood. Be a force for good.”
She threw her head back and faked an old movie laugh, her shoulders rolling with each guffaw. “I rob from the rich and give to the needy. If I can’t do that, I make them take the stairs.”
I huffed up the last flight. “Why I am rich and not needy? Maybe you should be stealing and giving to me.”
“The needy suffer in silence.”
“I can barely breathe.” I took a breath and reached the top, standing next to her. I dropped my backpack on the floor.
“And yet somehow you manage to sound needier and needier.”
She hadn’t moved. Her hands were still on her hips. We were only a foot apart.
She stepped forward and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “I’m glad I didn’t have to leave you for dead on the stairs,” she said softly. She took a step back. “Now pick up that bag and get back to work.” She flashed me her huge smile and set off down the hall.
I dropped my things in my room. She had left her door open, sitting on the edge of her bed with her laptop. I stepped inside.
“What’s the plan now?”
She finished typing and looked up. “Nothing until tomorrow. Want to see Yungay?”
The hotel ran tours. Behind the desk was a poster of people in the snow petting alpacas. It was 2:00 p.m. Normally they didn’t leave in the afternoon, but the hotel liked Soledad, so they agreed to take us. The concierge made a phone call and thirty minutes later a van rumbled in front of the hotel.
It was only the two of us. Soledad sat next to me, our hips touching. We drove back out of Huaraz. The road was rough, and the driver swerved to avoid potholes. We leaned into each other on the turns.
After an hour and a half, the driver pulled into a gravel parking lot. A gate at the far end led to a field. It was covered in patchy grass. Where there wasn’t grass, there was dirt baked hard by the sun. A small brick building sat near the center.
Soledad angled toward it. I followed her, squinting against the sun. Despite the clouds it was very bright, and my eyes hurt to stare toward the mountains. A town peeked out among the foothills far away to our left, but there was nothing closer. A few boulders, some stumps. Nothing to indicate a tragedy had happened nearby.
She stopped in front of the building. I looked closer, expecting to see a sign for a bathroom or a map bolted to the wall. There was nothing. Just pitted bricks the color of sand. Some sort of monument. It was askew, as if beginning to tip over. There weren’t any doors, just strange arched recesses. The top was jagged, like it had been broken off. Then it dawned on me.
“Is this a bell tower?”
Soledad nodded.
It was the bell tower of Yungay, battered by the deluge of mud and rocks that had swept over the town. I turned and looked again across the field, imagining myself looking down from the bell tower of a ruined city. Now it was obvious. The stumps weren’t stumps at all. They were the tops of trees. Thirty feet away was a boulder. It was the front end of a car, the rest having been swallowed by the earth.
I looked at Soledad. She smiled now that the reveal was over.
We wandered through the grounds. The tops of the trees were arranged in squares and parallel lines, where they had grown in plazas or along streets. Tangled masses of cars poked out of the dirt. Back by the parking lot, a hill pressed up from the plain. A path spiraled around it, lined with memorials. At the top of the hill we stood in the wind and looked over the field. Soledad read one of the plaques out loud, translating into English. A Peruvian girl had been adopted in Sweden and come back to commemorate her mother. The two of them had run toward the safety of the high ground on the hill. Her mother was lagging behind, so she let go of her daughter’s hand and told her to run. When the girl looked back, her mother was gone.
“Imagine being that girl,” I said. “Coming back. Seeing the grass. Knowing your mom was a hundred feet away.”
I looked at Soledad, standing next to me on the hill. The wind played with tendrils of her hair. Yesterday I’d thought a teenager was going to die. And she might have if Soledad hadn’t been there to save her.
“The girl yesterday… Has it gone the other way?”
She raised her voice over the wind. “Sure. Less than you’d think. But sure. It’s worth it, though. To be the one that can help.”
“Have you ever wanted to do something else? Something easier?”
She shook head. “What would be the point? Move to LA? Help women with everything that decide at forty-five they’ve always wanted a baby? I’d rather help people that need it.”
She leaned against me on the ride back. The driver asked us questions. Soledad answered. By the time he dropped us at the hotel, the sun had slipped behind the mountains hidden behind the clouds.
Soledad wanted to show me her favorite brewery. We bundled up against the night. There were almost no cars in the narrow streets around the hotel. Voices carried in the thin air, bouncing off the walls. It was cold, and someone had set fires in metal drums on the street corners. We cast long shadows. I was glad I wasn’t alone.
Soledad knew where she was going. The brewery was up a flight of stairs and had a patio overlooking the street. It was bright and warm, crowded with tourists. They wore neon hard shells and puffy coats. It sounded like everyone was shouting, convivial and boisterous around their tables. I felt embarrassed for being nervous in the street.
The beers were named after Inca heroes. Soledad went to the bathroom. I ordered a warrior and a priestess. Everything on the menu catered to Americans. Burgers. Macaroni and cheese. BLTs. I smelled the bacon. It seemed out of place. I thought of breakfast at my parents’ house, the sun glinting off the ocean out the window.
The beers came. I waited for Soledad. Our table was against a wall. I watched the happy people around me.
Soledad sat next to me. “You’re glowering. This isn’t a good place for glowering.”
I turned and smiled down at her. Her head was level with my shoulder. After Candace, Soledad made me feel tall. “Cheers.” I held my glass up and she clinked it with her own.
“Cheers to glowering?”
“No, not cheers to glowering. Cheers to something. I’m not sure what.” She was almost touching me, but not quite. I scooted two inches to the right to press my hip into hers. Her left hand rested on her knee, palm up, fingers relaxed. I took it. It felt like catching my breath. “Cheers to something.” I squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back.
The next beer was named after Atahualpa, the last emperor of the Incas. Soledad told me how the Spanish had captured him in Cajamarca. Atahualpa was on a litter. Pizarro ordered his men to cut off the hands of his attendants. The Incas thought Atahualpa was a god and wouldn’t let him touch the ground, keeping him up with the stumps of their arms. When one fell, another took his place. The Spanish kept cutting. They ransomed Atahualpa for a room full of gold, and a second full of silver. Then they took the treasure and killed him. Another Inca tried to restore the empire by wresting Cusco from the Spanish, but he failed and the Incas were broken.
“Cusco means ‘navel of the world,’” Soledad said. “The capital of the empire was the center of the universe. Pretty modern idea, really.”
Next was an ale named after the first Inca doctor trained in Western medicine. “To the girl yesterday,” I toasted. “And to Western medicine.”
She shrugged. “Western medicine and Western disease.”
“Really? You’re a doctor, though.”
“Sure. You’re not going to catch me with herbs and a horoscope. But progress isn’t free. Everything has a cost.” She pointed at the doctor on the menu. “How many hundreds of years after Pizarro before he was born? That wasn’t by choice.”
I was quiet.
Soledad laughed. “Don’t take it personally. You work in technology. You can’t help yourself.” She squeezed my hand.
The smell of bacon got to me. I ordered a BLT. We split it, cut corner to corner. I told her what the smell of the bacon conjured in my mind, breakfast at a table looking out on the ocean, the kitchen busy behind me. It was easy to talk with the beer and the drone of the other conversations. She was surprised I grew up on an island. I told her about ferries, a small high school, black rocks and the red Madrona bark that was so vivid in my memories of home.
When we finished, I put my arm around her. I turned and kissed her hair, reveling in the floral smell of her shampoo and the pleasant greasy scent of her scalp. She nestled into me, resting her hands on my knee, and we sipped slowly at the doctor, enjoying each other.
Our glasses were empty. We talked about island life, about fishing and pulling up crab pots. The fit men and women in their brightly colored coats had disappeared into the thin air of the night. We were the last table.
I held the door for her, feeling like a gentleman. I watched her walk down the stairs in front of me, wondering how she could look beautiful even under a coat. A pane of white light fell on the street as she opened the door. I felt cold air. We stepped out and the night took us.
We rode up in the elevator. I was drunk. We kissed against the mirrored walls, and again outside her door.
We fell onto the bed. She writhed in delight as I kissed her. When the time came, I told her I didn’t have a condom.
“Bathroom,” she said. “The bag on the counter.” In a zippered pouch was a cache of condoms.
It felt new after four years of being with one person. Sex through the condom was like watching through glass, like it was with Candace, who took pills but didn’t trust them. But it was still a delight. Breathing her in. Feeling the hunger in her mouth as she kissed me while I was inside her.
After, she needed me out, apologizing that she had come first. I laughed and kissed her, elated. She pressed her body against mine as I finished.
We lay together, sweaty and close. The urgency was gone but the intimacy remained. We continued like before, laughing, talking about small things in our lives, until the sweat on our bodies began to chill. She got up and brushed her teeth. I stood in the doorway watching her.
“My toothbrush is in my room.”
“Are you trying to leave?” she asked through a mouth of foam.
“I’d rather stay.”
“Good.” She resumed brushing. “Let’s just go to your room.”
We wrapped towels around ourselves. I was glad no one saw us in the hall, marching from her room to mine. Safe in my room, I brushed my teeth and took out my contacts.
“Nice glasses,” she teased as I came out of the bathroom.
“You’re pretty mean for a do-gooder.”
“You’re too sensitive.”
I crawled into bed.
“Stupid glasses and a crybaby. Life’s going to be hard on you.”
I warmed my hands in the small of her back and she shrieked in protest. We lay together and talked softly, my face in her hair, until the world slipped away.