Nana and Bill’s lawyer informed me I would not be welcome at Kristen’s funeral—no surprise there. I imagined randos from her high school showing up in gray and black, titillated by the news trucks outside, the vague thrill of drama by proxy. I pictured Bill suspiciously eyeing all the “friends” Kristen had never made in her short lifetime. And Nana, her eyes at half-mast, knowing the truth. As if these years with her loose cannon of a granddaughter were simply borrowed time, a bizarre period before reality corrected itself.
Aaron wasn’t welcome at the funeral, either, though it didn’t really matter. Now that he knew the truth, he grieved with me for Kristen but also for Jamie and Sebastian and Paolo, for Kristen’s young parents, snuffed out too soon. The hospital’s psychiatrist helped him find a therapist to deal with the PTSD—his mind, it seemed, had glommed onto that moment on the mountainside, the second when his girlfriend appeared in front of the car—and he was improving, dealing, growing.
Summer rumbled through the Midwest: farmers’ markets and baseball games, Fourth of July fireworks and the distant smell of brats. Aaron was released from the hospital with nothing but a cane for balance, and we joked about buying him a top hat and choreographing a soft-shoe routine. I laughed harder than I had for months.
In spite of everything, I missed Kristen—mourned for her, in that physical, achy way, as if every time I thought about her someone cracked open my ribs and poked at my heart. For a decade, she’d been my closest friend, my sister, the most important relationship in my life. But there was a tinge of inevitability to the grief, as if things had gone back to the way they were, as if she’d simply moved back to Australia. I sometimes slipped into present tense when talking about her, and I felt her in my friendships, my bond with Aaron, the callow closeness with my mom. Kristen’s life and love and, yes, death had made me the person showing up in those relationships. Sometimes, for a moment, I forgot all about Phoenix, and in my mind Kristen was fine and funny and vivacious and beautiful, charming strangers in remote corners of the world.
* * *
—
The news crews lost interest, and I moved home. Arizona was still trying to drum up charges against us, but Deirdre was confident there wasn’t enough evidence to make a case that Aaron and I had killed Kristen together. No one had seen us on that quiet patch of road, so it was our word against a dead girl’s. Folks in the lobby at Hotel Rosita had seen Kristen scream at me and practically drag me outside, and it wasn’t hard to find character witnesses poking holes in any theory that painted Kristen in an angelic light. In a particularly creepy twist, Kristen’s former employer revealed that the company’s Australian branch had fired Kristen two weeks before our Chile trip. Why? Because she’d assaulted her boss, Lucas, at a company outing. Apparently she shoved the tiny man into a shelf of liquor bottles following an altercation.
Another disturbing detail: Deep in Kristen’s toiletry kit, tucked into her suitcase and left behind the front desk at the Phoenix inn, police found several vials of Rohypnol—the very same sedative Paolo had in his system. Likely not hard to obtain when your grandfather owns a chain of pharmacies.
I had no idea what she planned to do with the drug this time, but it meant that Paolo had been incapacitated by the time Kristen swung that wine bottle. It meant that every word she’d told me in that blood-spattered hotel suite was a lie. She probably thought no one would ever know about the roofies in his system, what with his body decomposing under reddish dirt. Apparently the eyes “resist putrefaction” better than blood. Kristen, with her horrifying compulsions, certainly hadn’t planned on that.
The months ticked on. Fall blew in on a crisp, rustling breeze, then winter, the snow dreamy at first and then cold and unrelenting. Aaron moved in with me and we spent Christmas with his family, New Year’s with a mixed group of our friends. His medical bills had reached ludicrous, almost hilarious figures, and patchy contract work had drained my savings. So we discussed. We figured it out, as we always did. We went with the highest bidder: almost five years’ salary for thirty minutes with a cable news show. I’d been over the story so many times with Deirdre, I was pretty sure I could tell it in my sleep, from the minute Kristen and I hugged hello in an airport in Santiago to now.
Aaron and I held hands throughout the interview, taking turns sharing our story. He understood me so deeply. It was like we shared a nerve network, a brain.
* * *
—
In January, nine months after Kristen and I met up in Chile, Deirdre called with good news: Arizona had dropped the case. Aaron and I knew we had to celebrate—we’d been waiting for this moment for so long.
Two weeks later, Aaron’s gaze found mine. We were in an underground club on a street lined with bars. Tbilisi, Georgia, was nothing like I’d imagined: a beautiful patchwork of tiled mosques and domed brick hammams and windy cobblestone passages, vines clinging to the cliffs around the city’s broad river, and fortresses and castles peeking out from distant sepia mountains. And always wine, so much wine.
I pulled my wallet from my purse—the bag wasn’t leaving my lap this time, no pickpockets for me, thanks—and ordered us another round of chacha, an alarmingly fiery grape brandy the locals drank by the boatload. The bar had vaulted brick ceilings, a mottled orange-white, and the feel of a dungeon; a bartender told me the space had once been home to covert government interrogations.
The night had just made the sudden lurch into shitshow-ery: People were smoking in the dark corners, a Turkish tourist ducked into the stock room with a waitress, and someone dropped a drink, the shrill tinkle cutting through the throbbing bassline. I plucked at Aaron’s elbow, suddenly eager for quiet, for water, for the giggling tango of us tipsily rehashing the night and brushing our teeth before snuggling into our lumpy queen bed. Maybe we’d even find cheese-stuffed bread on the way home. It was everywhere here, golden and gooey, khachapuri on every corner.
But then a woman sat down next to me and, hearing my English, asked where we were from. She was Bulgarian, slim and angular, with a curtain of thick brown hair. She was based in London but had taken the year off to travel, chipping away at her savings while working her way north from Azerbaijan.
I scooted my stool back so that we could form a triangle. She was gregarious and engaging. And traveling alone, she said—moving slowly by bus, taking her time, without an itinerary or advance registrations. So brave of her, feisty.
“What did you say your names are?” she asked, her accent like a gently beaten gong.
“This is Dan,” I said, and reached for Aaron’s hand. When he squeezed it, I felt it all the way down to my heart, my groin, my soul. “And I’m Joan. We just love meeting new people.”
For Jen Weber, my travel buddy and ride-or-die
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, reader, for picking up this book. What an honor, a joy, a goddamn miracle to picture you holding it in your hands right now. Thank you, thank you, thank you for choosing to spend your limited time and energy on this weird and dark adventure cooked up in a hotel suite in Chile. Without you, this story is just a big vat of words; you’re a crucial part of the alchemy, the ingredient that makes the narrative come alive, and I’m beyond grateful. I hope something in these pages resonated with you. Thank you, truly.