The Lost Girls (45 page)

Nora and Eric had what appeared to be a pretty idyllic (and by Carmi's standards fairly prototypical) New Zealand relationship. They'd recently opened a Pilates studio in a trendy Auckland neighborhood, moved into a snug two-bedroom bungalow a block from the beach, and had an adorable one-year-old girl with platinum ringlets named Madison. We wondered if they were married or if Nora just hadn't taken her husband's name (maybe it was one of those independent Kiwi girl things?), but she quickly set the record straight.

“Oh, Eric and I aren't married. Well, not yet,” she said as she cheerfully installed Holly and me in their guestroom. “We've tossed around the idea, but with everything else going on—you know, the baby, the studio—we just haven't gotten around to it.”

She turned to smile at the angelic blond girl on her hip. “Isn't that right, my little darling? Mummy and Daddy are just sooo busy!”

Madison stared at her mom for a second before bursting into giggles and reaching up to pat her cheek. Nora handed the baby to Holly so she could grab a stack of towels.

“So are you girls all set, then? Jen, we'll make up a bed for you tonight on the couch before we all go to sleep. Oh—one more thing.”

She pointed out a small red button on the wall near the bedside lamp. “For some reason, the last people who lived here installed this alarm just in case anyone tried to break in. But don't worry. Auckland's so safe, touch wood, we should never need to use it. Just try not to hit if you're getting up in the middle of the night.”

We promised we'd be careful and thanked Nora again for her hospitality.

“Oh, don't be silly.” Nora waved her hand. “We're always thrilled to have guests. And Eric's doing up a little dinner tonight, so get ready. He's a good cook.”

The “little dinner” turned out to be a feast, and Eric and Nora had even bigger plans for our stomachs the second night. Their friend Ryan from Texas and his very pregnant wife, Kim, were throwing a dinner party for some other couples with kids, and we'd been invited. I was starting to think that Kiwis weren't just friendly to visitors—they actually competed to see who could be more accommodating.

“Don't worry, you won't be the only unattached guests there,” said Nora. “Ryan says he'll invite his single friend Cameron so you girls can chat him up if the rest of us get sidetracked with boring baby stuff.”

Ah—the token single male. I suddenly had a flash of Mark Darcy in a ridiculous reindeer sweater at the Christmas party in the first Bridget Jones movie. Except in our version, there'd be two sad singletons to scrap over him.

“He's mine, ladies,” I joked. “Don't even think about it.”

“Back off, Pressy,” said Jen. “I already claimed him, like, five minutes ago.”

As it turned out, the mysterious Cam was nothing like the frumpy, uptight Mark Darcy. He was a handsome Paul Rudd look-alike who was playing with all the kids when we arrived. I wondered if Jen or I really would want dibs on the guy; besides being supercute, he seemed incredibly sweet.

The hostess, Kim, on the other hand, acted edgy and hormonal around us from the second we walked in the door. We didn't take it personally—the woman was near-to-bursting pregnant—but I was a little surprised when she immediately put us to work in the kitchen slicing up sausages, bread cubes, and cheese.

“Oh, and d'you mind washing up the dishes afterward?” she asked, not waiting for an answer before turning and stalking off.

“Hey, whoa, are those American accents I hear?” Judging from the drawl, I figured the voice belonged to her husband,
Ryan, who tracked us down in the kitchen. He lounged in the doorway with a beer while we sliced. I'd spent half of my childhood in Texas, and this was truly a Lone Star good ol' boy—big, brawny, and loud. I could easily picture him spending late nights drinking at the kind of place where peanut shells on the floor were considered fancy decor.

“So, tell me, ladies. What brings y'all down under? How'd you find yourselves here?”

I'd wondered the same thing about him. A Kiwi-Texan mash-up seemed most unusual. After catching us up on all he missed about his home state (“Real barbecue sauce. And Whataburger fries. Oh, and bars that stay open past midnight”), Ryan walked over to the fridge and asked, since we already had our hands dirty, if we would mind seasoning his meat. We all stared blankly as he pulled out a three-pound slab of steak and slapped it on the cutting board near the sink.

He laughed at his own joke and promised that he'd do it himself. But overhearing his comment from the other room, Kim instantly reappeared to let us know that actually, we should probably mingle with the other guests in the living room.

By now all of the couples had arrived, and we hung out with the young moms and dads, who for the most part seemed interested in hearing our stories from the trip.

“C'mon, fill us in on all the juiciest bits,” said Alice, whose three-year-old son, Kieran, was tearing around the house like an airplane. “We're all mommies and daddies now, so we really don't get the chance to—”

She stopped short as we all heard a crash, followed by a wail. “Oh, crap. Sorry…be right back.”

We soon sat down to dinner, a gourmet multicourse food orgy complete with wines, salads, creamy side dishes, grilled and sliced meats, and a fluffy meringue dessert known as Pavlova. The Kiwis at the table made us promise, when we headed
to their larger neighbor across the Tasman Sea, that we wouldn't believe any of those “Aussie bastards” who tried to say they'd invented the dessert.

“It's always been ours. They keep trying to claim it,” said Alice's husband, Ted.

“Ah, enough with that old Pavlova rivalry!” bellowed Ryan, who was sitting across the table from us next to Cam. With each course (and number of beers consumed), he'd gotten progressively louder and more vocal about expressing how much he missed the “good ol' U.S. of A.” Now he turned his attention to our personal lives. “What I want to know is…which one of you girls doesn't have a boyfriend?”

“Honey…
please
,” said an exasperated Kim, who'd been shooting us sidelong glances for the past two hours and now looked ready to evict us. Or murder her husband. Or both.

“What? What's wrong now? I'm just asking these nice ladies a question on behalf of my good buddy Cam here, who by the way is
totally available
,” he said, nudging his friend, who blushed and shrugged as if to say, “Sorry, I don't actually know this guy.”

“I have an idea.” Kim ignored his comment, hoisting herself with some effort into a standing position. “I think it's time that we all switch the groups around so everyone gets the chance to talk to everyone else. I mean, there's no need to have all of the Americans in one cozy little cluster on one side of the table. C'mon, everybody—up.”

Everyone stared at Kim for a second, unsure whether to follow her instructions. Kim repeated herself, and after the group slowly stood, Ryan told us to sit back down. He wasn't going anywhere, he said. Kim switched tactics, coming to our end of the table and wedging a chair between Ryan and Cam.

“So,
ladies
, I really want to know more about you, too. None of you are married, right? Wow. How old are you again?”

Holly provided our ages, and Kim continued grilling—about our lives back home, Jen's breakup, and Holly's long-distance status, whether we worried that taking a yearlong trip might set us back a few years in the dating-and-mating game.

“I mean, you
do
want to have kids, don't you?” she asked, now incredibly concerned for our welfare and health. “You know that it gets riskier the longer you wait, right?”

After several long minutes spent trying to produce inoffensive answers while a drunk Ryan mocked his wife, Eric and Nora came over to rescue us, saying that they really had to get home to put Madison to bed.

“Well, I can drop the girls off at your place later. Really, it's no problem,” Ryan drawled, insisting that the three of us continue our night with him and Cam at a bar up the road. I couldn't even look at Kim.

We declined the offer (several times, in fact). Cam gave us each a hug and said that if we ever came back through town, to look him up. Kim paced behind her husband in the living room as we walked out and piled in with Madison in the backseat of the car.

“I think that went well,” Eric joked as he pulled out of the driveway.

“I'll call her tomorrow,” said Nora, and that was the last we spoke of dinner.

Later that night I fell into a fitful sleep in the guest room and dreamed that I was in a race chasing after Cam, desperate to win him so he could father my children. I eventually caught him, but when he turned around he'd somehow morphed into Kim, who was furious at me for trying to have an affair with her husband. I woke up sweating and reached over to fumble for the light, only to hear the high-pitched wail of sirens fill the house. Holly shot up in bed next to me and ripped off her sleep mask. “What's happening? What's going on?”

Eric shot into the bedroom, pulled open a panel on the wall, and killed the noise.

Somehow, despite Nora's warnings, I'd hit the panic button.

 

A
fter that, we decided that Carmi was right. It was time to get moving. We thanked Eric and Nora for their hospitality and started planning our road trip.

After some serious deliberation, we decided against the hop-on, hop-off backpacker bus tour through the North and South Islands (otherwise known as the “Kiwi Experience”) in favor of renting our own set of wheels. The bus cost a little less, but the car would offer more freedom and flexibility. No more bus, train, and plane schedules for us, no sir. We couldn't wait to be on the open road, in charge of our own destiny.

And once we made the four-hour drive from Auckland to the volcanic village of Rotorua, we realized we'd made a wise decision. Checking in at the Hot Rock hostel, we watched as an enormous green monster of a bus pulled into the parking lot and sixty bedraggled high school–and college-age backpackers spilled out, straining under the weight of their backpacks, day packs, and plastic bags filled with chips, cereal, candy bars, and loaves of bread. It would have seemed like a dream road trip situation the summer after college (or, um…a few months ago?), but the whole concept just didn't sound quite as appealing to me anymore.

Most backpackers spend about a day or two at most in Rotorua. We'd scheduled four. “Too long! Keep moving!” I could practically hear Carmi shouting, but Jen, Holly, and I were done with blowing into and out of places at warp speed. As we'd learned during the latter half of our Southeast Asia trek, putting too much on your must-see list is the fastest way to ensure that you'll be exhausted and miserable and totally miss the point.

One of the first things we noticed as we approached Rotorua: the town and everything within a ten-kilometer radius smells like the bottom of a diaper pail. We soon learned that the entire area is located on a volcanic plateau, and the same underground forces that fart out a sulfurous rotten-egg smell from deep within the earth also produce geysers, steaming fumaroles, gooey mud pools, boiling waterfalls, and bubbling hot springs.

After a few days spent exploring the mud baths and voluntarily soaring over the world's highest navigable waterfall in a river raft ( Jen's suggestion, of course), Holly decided that she wanted to join up with a crew of backpackers heading over to the Maori Twilight Cultural Tour. Jen and I opted out. It wasn't just that we disliked prepackaged song-and-dance shows. I wanted to talk with Jen about next year—and what she thought she might do after we returned to the States.

We'd planned to walk around Lake Rotorua, but the lack of a path and the overwhelming stench of sulfur forced us to turn back. After chatting with a couple also out for a walk, we learned that there was a far more scenic—and less malodorous—national park just ten minutes' drive from the town center.

The Redwoods Whakarewarewa Forest turned out to be an utterly breathtaking 700-acre world's fair of trees cut through with miles of hiking and biking trails. Jen and I had intended to walk, but after a brief check of the trail map and a glance at each other, we took off running. We sailed up, over and around the gentle curves on the leaf-strewn track, slowing down only to drink in a particularly stunning view through a break in the forest.

“Man, Holly's gonna be…totally crushed…that she…didn't get to see this,” I said, gasping for air when our footsteps slowed to a crawl. Orange-gold slivers of light shot through the trees as the sun sank progressively lower in the sky.

“I know. Maybe we can…take her here…tomorrow?” Jen suggested, although we both knew that we probably had to get on the road again.

We walked in silence for a few minutes, catching our breath, and then I finally broached the topic of “going back” with Jen. Returning to the States still seemed pretty far away, but I knew the time would pass in the blink of an eye. After New Zealand, we had just Australia left and then—what next?

“Oh, man, I don't know,” she said, slowing her steps even more. “I've been thinking a lot about that ever since Thailand, ever since Mark. That whole experience with him…it just really opened my eyes, you know.”

“In what way?” I said, yanking off my long-sleeve shirt and tying it around my waist. The air under the canopy was cool and slightly damp, and revived me like a chilled compress against the back of my neck.

“Well, meeting him made me think twice about whether I want to go back to Manhattan. It's a great place to build a career, to claw your way up the ladder. Not a great place to find the love of your life, to settle down,” Jen tugged off her ponytail holder and reworked the hair into a wispy knot on top of her head. “Not once in New York did I ever meet someone who really just blew me away the way that Mark did. Not once in five years.”