Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (36 page)

It wasn't just that Francisco had purchased a fake passport. Based on his most recent e-mail, I had learned that he had accomplished this with the aid of my checkbook. Granted, the five-hundred-dollar check he had forged belonged to an account I had closed long ago, so I wasn't out any money, but who knew what this would do to my credit—and I especially didn't relish the idea of having any document with my name on it in the hands of people who made illegal passports. To do something stupid was one thing; to do something stupid that screwed me in the process—well, this was what got me to thinking about Francisco's hypothetical interstellar disappearance in the first place.

Had I been just a few years younger, I might have looked on it as a challenge to start over again, to go back to Los Angeles and build myself up from nothing, but I was too drained to even contemplate this idea. For once, I wanted to follow the easy path. Returning to Colombia had been my goal for three months now. I didn't have the energy to start looking for someplace new. I had no choice but to move on with what we had planned.

When it comes to relationships, the lesson that has come hard to me is that you'll never get anyone to do anything they don't want to do. Oh, you may do okay at getting your way for a little while, but every tiny success you get is on credit—the bill comes later— and it's itemized.

For me, this lesson occurred four days before I was supposed to leave for Cali. I had my ticket in hand, my bags halfway packed. I had been sorting and re-sorting clothes and bath products into three equal piles so that my suitcases would be evenly weighted—this was when the phone rang.

“Hola, mi amor,”
I said, happy to hear the sound of Francisco's voice. “Can you believe it? Just four days till I see you.” I thought it odd that he didn't answer immediately. After all, I hadn't said anything that required much reflection. “Francisco, are you there?”

It's ironic that I asked if he was there, because he literally wasn't.

“I've left Cali. I'm headed to Europe in the morning.” It was a tone of voice I had never heard him use before. He was so cold and clinical with me, like a doctor detaching himself emotionally in order to break the bad news to the patient.

“Where are you?”

There were over a hundred right answers to this question. I could have forgiven him for being nearly anywhere, in any nation except one. “Costa Rica,” he said.

It was the worst kind of infidelity—he had cheated on me with a country. I had given up everything to get him out of Costa Rica yet he had risked his freedom to go straight back there. I didn't know how he managed to get in, but it didn't matter. Everything we had been through suddenly didn't count anymore—he had wound up exactly where I had first met him, a year and a half of my life in vain.

“I had a layover here. I'm delivering a shipment of shoes to Italy.”

I knew this was code for making a drug run. “Why?” I needed to know.

“I need to earn a living.”

Not the Italy part. “No, I mean, why Costa Rica?”

He took a deep sigh. “I thought I'd stay for a day or two and ask Laura why.”

I couldn't believe it. He said the word Laura with real affection. The bastard. After all that she had done to him, I didn't know how he could stand to even be in the same room with her. He had gone all the way to Costa Rica to see his ex after all that I had endured for him?

I needed to say something. I knew it was the last moment I would ever have to convince him to love me again. It was my last hope to get him back. But nothing occurred to me.

“So, well, take care. I won't bother you again,” he said.

And the line went dead. The man I was never going to leave had dumped me just like that.

This is the lowest point—the nadir, to use a nice literary word. This is as bad as it gets. I have to go through it because we all have to live with the consequences of the decisions we make, as much as we may try to avoid responsibility. We all have to grow up, as painful as it is. But I'm thinking, this is
my
coming of age story. You're completely innocent of the stupid decisions I made. And you're probably a very nice person who has shelled out good money for this book. You don't deserve to have to go through this with me. So if you want to skip on ahead, I won't hold it against you.

Life is hard enough. Come on, avoid the pain, take what happiness you can get.

All I saw was beige. The beige of the carpet. I was lying face down in it and for a minute, I couldn't remember why. I had this nagging feeling that there was something I'd forgotten, but I had no idea what it was. I was staring at each little strand of carpet, marveling at the tiny curl of the fibers.

And suddenly it came back to me. The phone conversation. Francisco. Gone forever. The thought made me want to cry. I touched my face, but it was already all wet. I realized that I had been crying all along. I'd been examining the strands of the carpet and sobbing.

I tried to focus on the carpet again because it seemed less painful than the other topic on my mind, but it didn't work this time. I would never feel his arms around me again, I realized. I would never touch his face. I would never see him walk through the door again. I curled up in a fetal position and shook with sobs.

For a brief moment, I remembered the carpet again. Yes, the carpet. I was able to focus on the rug under my body, but suddenly I hated it. As if the carpet were to blame for everything I was going through, I could no longer stand the sight of it. I hated the feel of it on my skin. I didn't want to see beige anymore. I needed to see black.

I crawled the four feet from Michael and Sharon's living room into my bed and covered myself with a blanket, hoping that by shutting out sound and light I could turn off my brain. It worked for a few seconds. It was quiet and still. Black and calm. I took a deep breath. Oh fuck! It's just not fair. I rolled over onto my stomach and pounded my fists into the mattress.

“You fucker! You bastard! You asshole! You shitface! You—” I had run out of expletives. “Fucking expletives!” I screamed.

Now what? Should I yell some more? Would it help? “Aaaaaaah!” I shouted. “Grauphhhhht!” I added.

I suddenly felt exhausted. I needed to rest. I rolled over onto my back. I was going to sleep. Just for a little while. I would fall asleep and then I would figure things out. I closed my eyes. It was hot. The comforter was too thick. I could barely breathe. Who bought such thick blankets in Florida? I poked my head out.

I sat up in bed and pulled aside the curtain in front of the window. A cricket was in the grass, hopping around just like nothing had happened. How could he be so callous? I wondered. Fucking cricket acting like everything was okay. I hated that cricket.

I felt a sudden surge of energy. I stormed out of bed, marched through the living room and out the front door. There he was, the cricket that had been taunting me. He reminded me of a hornet— he was shiny yellow and black—but he was nearly six inches long and practically as big around as a quarter. I tried to step on him but he just soared into the air and landed a few feet away. He looked evil. Maybe it was a she. No, I hated him—it was definitely a he.

I took a step forward, but ready this time, he wouldn't let me get too close. He jumped a few feet away.

I took off my shoe and aimed, but I was too slow. My shoe landed with a thump. I removed the other one and raised it over my head.

I was ready to fling it at my nemesis when I heard my name being called. “Wendy! Wendy, what are you doing?” It was Sharon. Sharon and Michael had come home. Suddenly I realized that I looked mad—I was barefoot standing in the grass. If anyone attempted to charge me for the attempted murder of an arthropod, I would be exonerated on the grounds of temporary insanity.

I looked at my friends and lowered the shoe. “I hate crickets,” I said. And I hugged Sharon and began to sob.

At first I hated myself, hated how stubborn I was and stupid I was and unlovable I was. I wanted to be a different person, the kind of woman a man would never abandon. That was what I had expected of Francisco. I thought that if I could do enough, if I could stand by him during the worst times of his life when everyone else walked away, he couldn't help but love me. He would be the one person who would never leave. He would fill the void left by my parents. He wouldn't be like them. He would always be there for me, spending the rest of his life trying to make it all up to me.

If it had been me, I would never have deserted someone who had gotten me out of a prison. I would have thought, This person really loves me. I really owe this person one. But then again, I would never have wound up in jail in the first place—and maybe that was the point. I had thought that having an interesting life would be what Francisco and I had in common—when all along the common ground I should have been looking for was someone who had never been incarcerated.

I wasn't sure who I hated more—Francisco for never having taken care of me or myself for being so stupid, for thinking that giving was the same as receiving. I told myself that now at least the only person I would have to take care of was myself, but I missed him in spite of myself. Missing someone I hated—it didn't make a lot of sense, but I didn't care. Neither did my emotions.

Over the next week, each hour that went by was excruciating. All I wanted to do was lie in bed and think about how terrible my life was. I had nothing, no place to go. I had lost the man I loved. I had given up my home, my freelance writing business, my savings. I suddenly understood what the beige carpet must feel. I had been stepped on and sullied and squashed, and then I had been ripped up and replaced without a second's thought.

Anyone else would have gone home. That's what people did when they got in trouble. They went back to the house they grew up in, to the town where everyone knew their name. They went back to homemade dinners made by Mom. They recuperated in the bedroom they had grown up in, slept in a bed still surrounded by trophies and out-of-date posters that had remained in the exact same spot since high school. Subsisting on a steady diet of love and homemade baked goods, a person could recover. It just took enough time, enough hugs, enough chocolate-chip cookies.

I wanted to go back to my childhood home and rest, but to which one? There had been so many. There had been my parents' married student housing dorm in Tucson, the little house out in the desert near Palm Springs, the Victorian home in South Carolina, the Tudor-style structure in Minnesota, even the “station wagon house” in Tennessee, the only time I had been required to share a “room” with my two sisters.

Which house would I go back to? It didn't matter. I'd take any of them. I had the strangest urge to go and knock on the doors of all the places I had lived. I imagined a kindly older couple opening the door and asking me in. Maybe they would have lost a daughter who would have been just about my age and they'd beg me, please, wouldn't I think of staying with them for just a little while? It would be such a comfort to them. I would wake in the morning to fresh orange juice and toast. She would teach me how to quilt and he would proudly show me his prize daffodils, which had won him three blue ribbons at the state fair.

One day, while making fresh bread, I would be inspired to confide in her and I would tell her my history in the house, how I had nursed wounded animals back to health here, how I had collected fireflies in a jar. I would thank her for keeping the bedroom just as her daughter had left it and I would tell her that I knew it meant a lot to her girl. I would lower my voice and confess my dirty secret. Trying to hold back the emotion, I would tell her my parents had disassembled my room before I had even left home. I would explain that I had gone to Germany for my senior year as an exchange student (the old woman would be impressed by that), but when I came back, my posters, my trophies, my clothes, my tapes, my books— all of these things were gone. My sister Heather had taken over my room.

The kindly older woman would look at me with eyes full of compassion, clasp my hand, and ask what I had done. I would lower my gaze and admit: “The basement. They made me sleep in the basement.”

And then I would feel better because I had finally said it out loud. It would all be okay. They were going to take care of me. I was home.

Chapter Twelve

Livin' Bolivian

What I needed was a miracle. Was this too much to ask? It didn't seem like an entirely unrealistic request. After all, the past two and a half years had been full of serendipitous twists. I had defied incredible odds when I had run into Saúl in Costa Rica. There had been Francisco's brush with Fabiola at the prison when we had needed an attorney. And the day that Francisco had walked out of the gates of La Reforma would always be a miraculous occurrence for me, no matter what had happened afterward.

All I needed was one more tiny dose of magic. Not an excessively large miracle. Just your everyday standard-sized supernatural occurrence—a good job offer, for instance, or a friend who was going abroad and needed someone to housesit for a year. There were lots of possibilities.

But nothing happened. I was still working at my temp job at the City Attorney's Office wondering what to do next. I was sending out a stream of résumés for local jobs I was overqualified for but so far had received no response. And I had been calling up everybody I knew, but no one had an extra house they were looking to fill.

If this were a fictitious story, I could have concocted a miracle. I would have made up some fabulous ending: Ed McMahon shows up with a one-million-dollar check, I use the money to go to Spain, and then fall in love with a matador who has a penchant for sequins and overly tight clothing but is otherwise perfect in every way. It would be the granddaddy of all finales. But I can't invent the facts here. This is all true. And what really happened was the smallest most unassuming miracle of all. It was no bigger than a thought.

I had been running at the track (which was now a standard part of my daily routine) while pondering the nature of war. It was a subject that occupied a good portion of my thoughts these days—thinking about conflicts plaguing the countries I had visited was so much more pleasant than dwelling on my own problems. But a neuron must have misfired or a cerebral connection got crossed, because somehow these two disparate subjects got interconnected.

“They're fighting because they want to.” It was such an easy phrase, such a simple yet effective philosophy when trying to understand world events, yet I had never applied it to my own life.

As I thought it over, my relationship with my parents actually did have a lot in common with guerrilla war. Here I was, hiding out from them, depriving them of information of my whereabouts, and reappearing whenever it suited me to deliver a deliberate attack. What was more guerrilla-like than that? I had figured this was normal behavior for a daughter-parent relationship, but now I was starting to suspect that maybe this was normal behavior only for a person intent on overthrowing a right-wing dictatorship.

I was angry and full of resentment, fighting a battle against the people who had raised me. And if I was incapable of getting along with my own family—my own flesh and blood, people who shared the same race, nationality, and genetic makeup—what chance did Muslims have of understanding Jews? What were the odds that the United States would sit down with Castro, that Colombia would achieve peace? If I couldn't resolve my personal issues, how could I expect entire nations to come to an agreement? With people like me, what chance was there for world peace?

What followed was a brilliant moment of clarity, in which I suddenly grasped the answer that could change my life as well as the world. It was this:

War is like chocolate ice cream.

(I know, I know. It sounds more like a Ben & Jerry's tag line than a recipe for world peace, but just bear with me for a minute.) My life experiences had led me to a simple conclusion: There were lots of people running around stressing the virtues of chocolate ice cream and I would never see eye to eye with them. I was a cookies-and-cream, butter-pecan, mint-chocolate-chip girl myself. You could try to convince me that chocolate ice cream was a worthy cause, that it had never done anything to hurt me, that it was a well-meaning and virtuous flavor, but still you'd never get me to come out in favor of it.

Now, if you couldn't persuade me to give a frozen dairy-based dessert a chance, what was the likelihood that you'd get me to change my religion, alter my political stance, diminish my attachment to a certain disputed piece of land? About as probable as the sudden popularity of salmon-flavored ice milk.

What I suddenly grasped was that peace didn't come about by convincing someone to see a conflict from your point of view. Getting along with someone else didn't necessarily mean agreeing with them. Disputes ceased when you were able to view the other's person's opinion as wrong yet accept their privilege to cling to it anyway.

I finally understood that a war ended when being at peace became more important than being right.

Any story can be constructed in many ways. Any conflict has at least two different viewpoints. Take the facts and reorder them and you can come up with a handful of contradictory conclusions.

I had used this reasoning to get Francisco released on bail. The judge had seen a criminal and a flight-risk; I showed him a family man with a long history in Costa Rica. All I had done was present the other side of the story.

And if I had been able to do this for Francisco, perhaps my mother also deserved this same PR makeover. I needed to review the evidence, see the conflict from her point of view. I would reconstruct the story, build my image of her from scratch.

That horrible night so many years ago when I had called my mother from a pay phone to tell her I had become suddenly homeless, what had really happened? Thinking it over, I hadn't really been looking for help. The truth was, I had just called to rub the situation in her face, to let her know how much I was suffering to go to college as a result of the fact that she and my father wouldn't pay for it. I wouldn't have gone home had she begged me to. It would have meant the end of my studies at UCLA. But I had wanted her to ask me anyway. I had been seeking just a smidgen of security, any small sign that my parents would come through for me, not necessarily that night but in the future, that if the time ever came when I was really desperate, if I really had nowhere left to go, that they wouldn't let me down. But no, nothing.

I had carried that night in my mind for so many years now, evidence that I would always have to face my problems alone, but maybe my conclusion had been premature. Maybe my mother had meant something else. It wasn't that she hadn't wanted to help. She just hadn't known how.

Unlike my uncle who felt the need to control everyone around him, my relationship with my mother had always been based on her faith in my ability to make my own decisions. She had never second-guessed me. She believed in me. If I didn't want to go to Arizona, she wasn't going to force me.

Standing alone and afraid at a pay phone in front of my nine-hundred-dollar Mazda parked in the bad part of La Cienega, I hadn't wanted to go to Arizona, I just wanted the invitation. “I'm homeless” meant “Tell me that you'll be there for me.” But my mother hadn't understood this—nuance had never been her strong point. All these years I had blamed my mother for not caring about me when the only thing she was really guilty of was an inability to read between the lines.

Could it possibly be as simple as that? All this time, it was just a misunderstanding? I needed to find out. Trembling, I picked up the phone in Michael and Sharon's living room, dialed my parents' extremely long number, and after a few rings there was my mother's voice, the same way it had sounded so long ago. It had taken me eight years to finally tell her what was on my mind, yet I accomplished it in only five words. I took a deep breath and asked, “Mom, can I come home?”

The road home is never easy. There are always enchanted forests to be crossed, yellow-brick roads to be taken, Greyhound bus rides to be endured. Getting to Cochabamba was going to require a long international flight plus two trips by land, one of which was going to be made on a rickety bus winding its way down through the arid and cold mountainous terrain around La Paz—at thirteen thousand feet, it was the highest capital city in the world. But I didn't mind. Even when our bus was forced to pull off to the shoulder somewhere in the Bolivian
altiplano
and wait idle in the chilly air for four hours while road workers made repairs to the pavement (a process that occurred every day from noon to six), I remained in a good mood. It had taken me nearly a decade to find my way home—what were a few hours more?

Thirty-one hours after I had left Gainesville, I was finally in a cab headed toward my parents' house. The movement of the taxi swirled up a cloud of dust (I was beginning to feel like a Charles Schultz character), but through the haze I could still make out the lofty peak of Mount Tunari in the distance. I scanned the outskirts of the city, and curiously enough, the whole area reminded me of southern California. It was all blue skies and green towering mountains.

The city itself was quaint. It was filled with colonial architecture, artsy cafés, and airy plazas. And how could you not love a place with cobblestone streets! As we bumped our way along the irregular path (I couldn't refuse the childish urge to make the sound “aaaaah,” which came out in staccato bursts as a result of all the bouncing), I decided that no one in their right mind would ever give up a cobblestone street in exchange for a smooth ride. Sometimes beauty had to outweigh convenience.

I assumed we were heading the right way, but my directions had been given to me by my mother. Instead of consisting of useful information, they contained entertaining tidbits such as “We live on the street with the video store that's owned by the communist.” However, as we drove around the perimeter of the newly constructed Mariscal Park, the cabdriver and I weren't having any luck spotting either video stores or Marxists.

“According to my directions, it's on the north side of the park. Is this the north side?”

The cabdriver nodded.

“Wait a minute. Up ahead. What does that sign say?”

Sure enough, it was a video store. This had to be the street. We made a right and followed the road. Just two more blocks and we'd be there.

Seated in my parents' living room, everyone wanted to talk first. I felt like the prodigal son, only instead of being welcomed back with a fattened calf, I was being showered with attention and funny stories. In fact, there was so much chatter going on, I became convinced that my family members had spent the past two years taking notes of the important things they wanted to tell their eldest daughter whenever they saw her next. I could just imagine the journal entries made by my father:

The history of Bolivia, especially the part about Patiño's tin mines. She'll
need to know about that to lead a fulfilling life.

Mining practices of Croatian immigrants to Bolivia in the early twentieth century. Don't forget to mention early smelting practices, which
should provide Wendy with lots of funny stories, not to mention a solid
background in the melting temperatures of alloys.

An explanation of Bolivian vegetation broken down by climate zone.
She'll need this in case she wants to make a salad.

My father had gotten the first half hour practically to himself, a rare opportunity since most conversations were dominated by my talkative mother. My brother had added a few quips here and there, but my mother had remained surprisingly silent, apparently at a loss to add anything to the esoteric subjects my father insisted on tackling. However, the restraint finally proved too much for her and she suggested a change of topic. “Hey Wendy, you want to hear about how we found our maid?”

“Sure. Why not?” I said. I wanted to hear about everything that I'd missed.

“Well, they've really simplified the process of finding good help here,” she said enthusiastically, sitting up in her chair. “It's all very well organized. See, they have a maid market. You go there and they all line up and you check them out—you can ask them any questions you want. I chose Vicenta. She looked very well groomed and has proven to be a good cook.”

My father, the intellectual. My mother, the aspiring slave master. These were the people I had been born to. They spent the rest of that evening cracking me up, filling my head with strange and funny images of my new home, painting a picture of all there was to do and look forward to in the months to come. It was going to be a vacation of sorts—I was in a foreign country with no obligations and no job.

There was a sense of poetic justice to this. I had found irresponsibility at my parents' house. After all, I had tried to use travel as a stand-in for the childhood I had never had, which, looking back, hadn't been such a far-fetched idea. When you're a child, everything is bright and new and amazing, and that's what going to an unfamiliar place is like—foreign places are always new. All of a sudden you are transported to an infantile state, unable to speak the language and unaware of the rules.

Travel is like the high drama of youth. It's the best and worst at the same time. One minute you are flung to the depths of despair, the next, you feel the giddy, exaggerated joy of an adolescent. For me, it had been a chance to make rash decisions, to take wild risks, to lose everything knowing I'd still have plenty of time to earn it all back.

Of course, even foreign places grow familiar given enough time; even novelty grows old. Some would argue that this is what makes travel pointless. And in a sense, it's true—childhoods never last. But everyone deserves one.

Even if they have to wait until they are twenty-seven years old.

I spent the next eight months in relative happiness, living out the carefree adolescence I had never had. I slept in. I ate rich new foods. I left a trail of crumbs in the living room, and since I had a maid following behind me with a dust cloth, I never had to clean anything up.

I read books in Spanish and in English. I walked around the center of town with my brother. I learned the names of a half-dozen different kinds of potato while shopping in the open-air market with my mother. I made friends with an amazing group of artists who threw extravagant parties with live music in a nineteenth-century adobe structure that looked like an ancient church. Occasionally when I felt restless, I'd take a long-distance bus ride up into the mountains and stare out the window at my old friends the llamas, which always brought back memories of my childhood.