CAITLIN KILLION - NICE

Caitlin Killion lives in Santiago, Chile. Her writing has appeared in Aquifer: The Florida Review, The Baltimore Review, The Coachella Review, Duende, and Two Hawks Quarterly. 

Nice
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​Have you ever been to southern France? I’m talking the coast. It’s not some place anyone who’s anyone goes to. It’s a place where the cultured elite travels. It’s a place of real wealth, of black-and-white glamour, of To Catch a Thief. It’s beautiful here. Turquoise water and jagged white rocks. Little bakeries they call boulangeries where you can buy a pain au chocolat. You can sit on a stone bench and watch elegant women smoke cigarettes and drive motorcycles on their own. Watch women you can look up to.
            I mean my mother Lucy, she’s never been. I asked her before I left and she told me no. If she were to lie, she would have lied in the other direction. Made up some extravagant story. But when I left, she was in one of her blue periods, she likes to call them, when she never changes out of her striped blue pajamas and she doesn’t turn on the lights or the heat or the fans or anything. So she didn’t bother. 
            I’m here with my friend Christine and her family for two weeks. Her parents invited me because I always make Christine a little calmer, they say. Easier to handle. We’re staying in one of her uncle’s houses. It’s real close to the water and it has three guest rooms so Christine and I wouldn’t even have to share a room if we didn’t want to, like if we got in a fight or something. But for now, we’re together in this room on the back side of the house with two twin pink beds and a little mirror in the bathroom that’s got a frame made out of seashells.
Christine and her family have been here before. They’ve been everywhere in Europe before. They’ve even been to a country in Africa. And Thailand too. I don’t think they’ve ever been to the Dominican Republic though. At least they’ve never mentioned it. That’s the only place I had been to out of the country before this, and I’ve been there three times but I was so young that I can’t really remember it.
Christine’s parents like talking about all their travels, making comparisons about the hotels and the different foods and the types of people. Her mom even has this little notebook she calls her “travel diary” and I swear to God I saw Venn diagrams in there. That’s the way she is, though. She’s dubbed herself the “List Queen” and whenever she brings up the nickname Christine turns bright red and she rolls her blue eyes behind her head so I can’t see the pupil.
Christine’s dad is a little looser. Not so stiff. He used to be a hippie, he tells me a lot. Now he looks nothing like one – he has short, blond-grey hair, he’s always clean-shaven and he mostly wears blue button-downs and khakis. But I can make out the leftover piercing holes in his ears and it makes me smile. He’s the one who thought it might be a good idea for Christine and I to take the train on our own and spend two nights in a youth hostel in Nice, which isn’t too far away from here.
When he suggested it, I watched Christine’s mother’s face squish into wrinkles of disgust. A youth hostel? She sneered. But Christine’s dad insisted it would be good for us. Good for our “spirits,” whatever that means. Besides, he reasoned, we’re sixteen. We’ll be going off to college soon. Her mother had grown so tired of hearing Christine complain about being bored that she finally said whatever. Whatever!
            My mother Lucy would never use that word. “Whatever.” Even in her blue period she’d never say it. You can’t even perfectly translate the word into Spanish. Whatever. I love the word. It’s the word Christine’s parents use when they finally give in and buy us matching sunglasses, what they say when Christine begs for dessert after a fancy dinner. And now this “whatever” has bought us two seats on the train that whizzes along the most breathtaking coast I’ve ever seen.
            The train is half-empty and Christine and I have a cabin of six seats to ourselves. We stretch out our legs and rest our feet on the seats across from us. My left leg runs along Christine’s right one, mine stretching out far beyond hers because I’m too tall for my age. She leans forward and runs the palm of her hand along the crease in between our shins.
            “I wish I were as tan as you,” she whines.
            “But you’re blond,” I say flatly. I look out through the graffitied window, studying the white caps of the waves. We’ve already had this conversation.
“But my cousin Jeanette is blond and she gets almost as tan as you,” Christine says in an even higher pitched voice, leaning her head on my shoulder.
            I have to fight the instinct to shrug her off my shoulder. Instead, I bring my hand to her hair and I comb it with my fingers. 
            “Jeanette’s the cousin with the boyfriend?” I ask, even though I know the answer.
            “Yeah,” Christine says sleepily. “He is H-O-T.”
            I laugh. Christine sits up again and she pulls her feet close towards her chest. Wraps her arms around her knees. Suddenly the side of my leg feels cold and unprotected.
            There’s a horizontal mirror above the seats, I guess to make the cabin feel more expansive. I look up at the one across from us and I can get a view that hits us at our foreheads. Christine likes to take photographs of us from that angle because she thinks it’s most flattering. I always have to be the one to hold the camera because I have the longer arms, she tells me.
I study our un-posed reflections now. My forehead isn’t so tall and narrow like Christine’s. It’s shorter and a little wide. Christine already has these three lines that run across her forehead because she worries too much. But the lines are so faint that only someone like me, her best friend, can really see them.
My hair is long and dark, combed-out curls that are soft from over-washing. I still have that extra-soft baby hair at the crown of my head. Christine’s hair is straight-stiff-shiny and thin blond. That’s pretty much how all our differences go: I’m curly and rolly all over and she’s all sharp and straight with lots of right angles. Her nose, for example, is pinched and it points up. Mine rolls down like a faraway wave that never breaks.
All the girls at school talk nonstop about how lucky Christine is that she’s so skinny and more than half the boys at school think that she’s beautiful. But she tells me she hates how she looks. And she says she’d feel better if she had a boyfriend – but not just any boyfriend; she wants the best. And the “best,” according to her, is Evan Michaels. Who already has a girlfriend, I have to remind her, rolling my eyes. Sometimes I really don’t get Christine. I really don’t.
I’d never tell anyone, but I haven’t even been kissed for real. The only time was when my old neighbor Brewster kissed me, but that was just to experiment. To see what it would feel like.  And the only guy that I know of who’s actually liked me is this kid named Oskar, who’s from Germany and a year ahead of us at Lawn Woods. He always wears green socks and these goofy looking clear-rimmed glasses and he carries his trig book everywhere he goes. He does weird shit like color all his nails with black sharpie. And bring his pet lizard to school. Ugh. I cringe when I think about it. I met him in ceramics class and since there weren’t enough throwing wheels for everyone, Oskar and I were assigned to share one. I guess he and I got to talking a little. He has a real knack for the whole wheel-throwing thing, and it annoyed me that he could make a perfect vase so easily, one that went higher than even his elbow. And I couldn’t seem to construct a tiny cylinder. Every piece of clay I’d touch would just wobble like it was doing the hula, until finally it’d dance right off the wheel.
So Oskar let me have some extra time to practice and once he even helped me to make a mug, bringing his fingers over mine, pressing them down where they needed to go. I was grateful and I told him that, slapping him on the back, proud of my first creation. But after that Oskar started leaving chocolates in my locker. On Valentines Day he gave me a pot of flowers and his hand was shaking so hard that the flowers were all jiggling, and I knew I had to take it fast or else it would fall on the floor, crashing into pieces and making even more of a scene. I stuffed it in my backpack and all the dirt got in between the pages in my schoolbooks. Christine still likes to tease me about him.
She turns to me now. She’s drumming her hands on her thighs and she starts to talk fast. “I’m excited,” she says. “I wonder what the hostel will be like. Do you think it will be dirty? Do you think there will be cute boys?”
I shrug. Christine looks at me for a moment and then laughs. “You haven’t even thought about it, have you, Naelle?” She shakes her head, still staring at me. “God. It seems like you’re never thinking about what’s going to happen next. Not even the next minute. You know you’re the only one of my friends that doesn’t ask every five minutes what do you think college will be like? It’s like you don’t even wonder about the future.”
I can’t tell if she’s complimenting me or making fun of me. But then she smiles and leans forward to kiss me on the cheek. She makes a “muah” sound as she does it. “That’s why I love you best,” she says.
I never say “I love you” to anyone, not even Lucy or my stuffed octopus I call Noodle, and Christine knows that so she doesn’t get offended anymore. I just squeeze her shoulder a little and keep combing through her untangled hair.
“My dad told me that Nice is beautiful,” she goes on. “That it’s the most romantic city. But he also said to be careful, because it’s a ‘city full of liars.’ Isn’t that the strangest thing to say? He never says stuff like that.”
“Maybe there are a lot of pick-pocketers?” I guess. One of Lucy’s old boyfriends, Alfred, used to talk all the time about the ‘damn gypsy pickpockets’ that roamed the streets in his hometown. I forget where that was.
“Nah, I don’t think so. You know what I think? I think he fell in love when he was traveling through Nice,” she says with a smile.
I snort without meaning to. “Yeah, okay,” I say.
“I’m serious! One time I was looking through his old boxes that are in the third-floor-closet, and I found all these photographs of him. He had his arms wrapped around this dark-skinned girl who had thick black curls like yours. Definitely not my mother. Maybe that was in Nice. Maybe that woman broke his heart or something. And that’s why he told me that.”
“You’re crazy, ‘Tine,” I say, pretending I don’t want to hear anymore. But really I’m just jealous that she can make up stories like these, making her parents seem wilder than they really are.
“It’s strange,” she keeps going. “I’ve been thinking about that stuff a lot lately… people who lie. People who live a lie. You know?”
I swallow and I can feel the bones in my body start to stiffen. Christine says the word “lie” like it has sharp razor edges and she has to spit it out quick so it doesn’t cut her throat. She looks past me through the window, and I look outside too. I watch the cliffs blur with the sky and the water.
“It fascinates me,” she says, starting to twirl her hair, pulling it away from my fingers. “Like there was this guy, Marty. Marty Dunbar. He used to live in Lawn Woods. He was two grades ahead of us. I guess he moved out before you moved in.” 
As I listen, my eyes start to dart around the cabin. I take in the details quickly, without thought. Like I’m preparing for something. An escape, maybe, but I don’t quite know from what: metal handle, crack in door, dark spot from gum on the ground, the green mesh in Christine’s tennis shoes. Blue pillows on red velvet seats … everything a little grey from too much use.
            “He used to be this town celebrity,” she goes on. “The first time I heard anything about him was when the police officer came to my fourth-grade classroom for one of those safety-information sessions. You know, those D.A.R.E. things?”
Yeah, I nod.
“Well, he told us about Marty Dunbar. How one day Marty was waiting alone in his family’s car in the parking lot while his mom was grocery-shopping, and he was listening to music in there. And a stranger came and tapped on the window.” Christine leans close towards me and she taps on my shoulder. Slowly. Tap, tap, tap. Her voice gets lower.
“The officer told us how Marty looked back at the stranger and he was like ‘what?’ you know? And the stranger pointed to his wrist like he was wondering about the time. So Marty yelled it out loud, but the stranger pointed to his ear. He was like ‘What? What? I can’t hear you!’ So little Marty he rolled down the window to tell him more clearly that the time was 5:17 or whatever it was, and then the stranger reached in through the open window and he put his hands around Marty’s throat like this, and he got into the car with Marty and everything and he started to drive. Fast. Fast out of Lawn Woods, across Brookline Ave and into the ghetto.”
I can feel my heart beating faster, but Christine looks calm. I look at her eyes that are like light blue seas. It looks like there’s a little silver fish swimming in them. I watch her blink.
“Marty had no idea where he was. I mean he was just a little kid and he was crying and the guy threw him out of the car in the middle of some bad part of the city. And the man drove off, leaving Marty alone just as it was getting dark. So Marty, he went to a payphone and he called his mother to pick him up, and he called 911 too, and they lost the car but they saved him. From then on he became a D.A.R.E. example, our own small-town hero.”
“So he was okay?” I ask. I can feel my eyes are wide.
“Oh, he was okay. But then it came out a few years later that he had invented the entire thing. He was only thirteen but he was the one who drove out of the parking lot. Who drove way into the ghetto and crashed the car somewhere, then walked to find a payphone on his own. Marty made up the whole goddamn story.”
Somehow I start to feel hollow and heavy at the same time. I look back out the window and try to imagine that thirteen-year-old kid. Driving his mom’s SUV through the grid that connected different towns, his eyes open and terrified, probably, as he kept on going, not even knowing how to stop. Not even able to reach the brake, I bet.
Lucy won’t teach me how to drive. She said I’d have to learn on my own; that’s what she had done. But the thing is, she won’t let me touch her car. A few months ago I snuck out in it to practice a little. It’s a little red jeep that’s automatic. My stops were jerky and I drove in little zigzags, I remember, because I couldn’t help shaking like crazy. I was so nervous that she’d catch me. She never noticed, of course.
Now our train slows to a stop and the sun falls into the cabin in these thin strips of pale yellow that looks like dying skin. I look out the window again and standing on the platform just below me is a small girl, holding the hand of an older woman. Her mother, I guess. Or maybe an aunt. They look like one another, the two of them. They both have the same thick black hair with bangs that brush their eyebrows. Olive colored skin. I watch as the little girl begins to jump. She hop, hop, hops, pulling down on the older woman’s wrist. But the woman stays still, her body frozen stiff, only her eyes smiling, bouncing with the girl. I feel jealous of that little girl, I want to tell Christine. But she is already standing up, her back to me, and she’s pulling her bag out from the storage space above us.
***
The hostel is run down but its old furniture makes me feel comfortable, and we hear English everywhere instead of French. There are a few Americans sitting in the lobby.
The first thing I ask: where can I shower?
It’s at the end of the hallway, one of the employees with plain grey eyes tells me. He’s chewing gum and he smiles at me for too long when he says it. It seems strange that he’s looking at me instead of in the direction that he’s pointing, and I wonder if there is something distracting on my cheek. A pimple? A piece of food?
I hesitate, looking away from his eyes because I can see a dim outline of my reflection in them. And for some reason, instead of saying thanks like a normal person, I curtsey. Awkwardly, instinctively, I bend my knees just slightly and I bow my head – as if I’m some hidden member of some stupid royalty.
            He just laughs, though, and I turn around fast and start walking down the hall, suddenly conscious of how I’m bending my knees, how I’m carrying my arms, the whole walk down.
            I reach the shower room, which is a big open room and there is no sign or anything. But the door is open and the room is empty and I can see that someone has left behind a pink hairbrush beside one of the sinks. So I go in.
            I choose a shower stall on the left side of the room because the right side’s all flooded. There is hair everywhere; I find long strands stuck to the brown tile wall in my shower, in crowded chaotic lines like it’s an interstate road map, and it gathers in the drain in between my feet.  I turn the faucet to hot and close my eyes.
            A bathroom should never be brown, Lucy told me once when we were apartment-shopping in New York. She was happy then and feeling rich, I remember. Special. Important. Carrying this oversized gold purse she used to have, and wearing her big sunglasses. Her lips all lush and shiny with her reddish-orange lipstick.
            “It should be white,” she had said to me, looking back over her shoulder. She used a voice that almost erased her accent.
            Of course, our bathroom at home isn’t white either. It’s got wallpaper that’s blue with these little white clouds, and it’s peeling at the edges so that you can see the yellow underneath. And all our towels are all toothpaste-stained and they never seem to match. Not at all like Lucy’s ideal white, minimalist bathroom. Nor is it like the bathrooms in Christine’s house – with the gold trims, the bowls of dried flowers, the lavender soap.
            The water gets hot and it starts to pound hard against my back and I imagine that I am getting a massage. I shut my eyes and pretend that I am in a different shower instead of in here. In the perfect bathroom. I pretend that the shower is all glass, fogged up from the heat so that I could draw palm trees on it if I wanted. The faucet handles are soft as ivory. There is a mint green, monogrammed towel waiting just for me outside the door, folded neatly on top of a mahogany-covered toilet seat.
            Is this strange that I am fantasizing about a bathroom? I wonder. And then all of sudden, there’s deep low masculine hum coming from the shower next to mine. And the hot water beating against my back grows a little cooler. I look down at the swirls of hair wrestling between my feet, and I notice there are feet in the stall next to mine.  And they are big and hairy, and they are feet of – I am certain – of a man’s.
            My heart begins to race more quickly and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m excited or afraid, but without thinking, I hold my breath. Not even bothering to inhale through my nose. The guy starts humming more loudly, almost violently, and then – just as I run out of breath and have to take a big, swooping exhale – he sings. Heavily, unashamed. Full-throated and off-key. Some folk song I’ve never heard of, in a strange, foreign accent. I can’t help but laugh.
            And when he stops all of a sudden, I lose control. I’m giggling without stopping, without breathing, my body bent forward, trapped underneath the now lukewarm, almost cold water that’s trickling down my spine. I can’t help it. I can’t help it, I can’t help it.
            “Hey,” the voice calls out. “I didn’t realize I had an audience.” There is a pause, and slowly, I breathe. In and out, in and out. “And a critical audience, at that!” He adds.
            I’m smiling to myself as I open my mouth to say sorry but it comes out soft I know he can’t hear me. I turn off the shower and wrap my old beach towel around my body and I hobble out of there, shampoo suds still gathered along the crown of my head.
            Christine is sitting on the bottom bunk, reading a guidebook when I come in our room. We’ve got a shared room with two bunk beds and lockers to put our stuff in. No windows. The lights seem dim. A guy with shoulder-length brown hair and round glasses is napping on the top bunk across the room.
            “You have the bottom?” I ask Christine in a whisper. She doesn’t answer. I swallow. “Tine, you know I’m afraid of heights.”
            “You snooze you lose,” she says in a bored voice, not bothering to look up from the book.
            I sigh and start to get dressed. I have to crouch and cover the back of my body with my towel so that this guy across the room – this stranger – doesn’t see me. The floor is freezing from too much air-conditioning. I shudder. This is even worse than some of the places me and Lucy used to live in.
            “That’s Bruce,” Christine says then, nodding her head towards the guy on the other bunk. I turn to smile, still hunched over in my towel, but he doesn’t wake up. “He’s cool,” she adds. “He’s twenty. From Australia. Traveling with his buddy Mark.”
            Once I pull on my blue summer dress, I sit down next to Christine. “Where is Mark?” I ask.
             “Shower,” she smiles.
            His friend Mark comes in a minute later, loud and dripping wet. I see that he also has long hair like Bruce, but it’s lighter – a mixture of tawny blond and red, and he has the same color freckles all over his body and his face. He turns on the lights so that they flicker and then he looks straight at me with his bright green eyes and he points, and I can feel the aim of his finger burning right at that little birth mark I have in between my eyes. He’s staring hard. Hard so that I can’t just laugh it off and look away, focusing instead on the floor, or on the orange locker beside me. No, I’m forced to look right back at him.
            “So!” he shouts, starting to walk towards me. “It’s the giggling culprit.”
And he comes closer, keeping his green eyes intense and focused on mine, until he’s practically on top of me now and when he reaches our bunk bed he kneels down so that his face is level with mine. My throat feels dry and his presence is so big and overwhelming that it feels like he could swallow me whole right there. He’s smiling, though, and I see that he is sunburned. I notice that his teeth on top are all straight but the ones on bottom are all crooked and messed up like they’re at war with one another. His lips are colorless and chapped and I can feel the warmth of his breath hit my nose, my lips, my chin.
            “Your wet hair is the giveaway,” he says then.
            I smile back a little weakly. “Sorry,” I whisper. His eyes finally blink.
            He raises an eyebrow. I can’t tell what he thinks about me. Whether he’s casting me off as a shy loser or as something else all together. He grabs onto the bar on the top bunk and he pulls his body up, turning towards his side of the room. I watch him more freely as he walks away. He shakes Bruce, trying to wake him up.
            “Brucey-Wucey!” he is yelling.
            “He likes you,” Christine whispers in my ear then.
            I roll my eyes and feel my cheeks grow hot. But instead of protesting like I always do when Christine tells me that stuff, I say nothing.
Mark’s got a blue tattoo on his left shoulder. It’s the face of somebody, somebody that has a big open mouth and no teeth, somebody that’s screaming. When he tightens his muscle, the blue man’s face stretches out, and his mouth opens even wider. The blue man’s eyes grow more and more terrified, turning almost yellow.
I clear my throat. “My mom has a tattoo that’s kind of similar.”
I can feel Christine turn to face me, looking a little surprised. She’s only been to our apartment twice, and she’s never met Lucy.
 “Oh yeah?” Mark asks, settling down on his bed. “It can’t be too similar,” he warns. “This one is pretty unique.”
I swallow. The thing is, Lucy’s is similar. Really freaking similar. She has this blue angel that dances with the skin on her hips, moving as she breathes in and out, peering out over her underwear and her bikini bottoms. Almost looks like it’s the female counterpart to his.
“Yeah, I guess it isn’t,” I lie.
            “You got any?” he asks.
            I shake my head too quickly.
            “You want any?”
            I shrug, more casually this time. Christine’s still watching me. “Maybe I’d like one of those Picasso doves,” I say. “On my ankle.” I’m surprised at how quickly I come up with this idea, and part of me knows that I heard it somewhere before. The truth is I’ve never wanted a tattoo. It would be something that would make me a little more like Lucy. A little more like her daughter.
            “Right on,” he smiles. “I study art history in uni.”
            I can feel Christine’s gaze remain heavy on my face, on my shoulders, and I can’t tell if she’s admiring me or annoyed with me.
            “So you girls going out with us tonight?” Bruce asks, still horizontal.
            “Absolutely,” Christin says with her teeth showing.
            I stare down at the tiled floor. Going out. Does that mean a nightclub? Or a bar? I haven’t been to either.  Christine has – she went out all the time last summer when she went on the high school trip to Spain.
            When I don’t say anything she brings her hands to my shoulders, and whispers in my ear, “Come on, Naelle. Loosen up.”
            I nod. Try to roll my eyes. And Mark turns off the lights then and he tells us that we are all going to take a nap before we party tonight. So I climb up into the top bunk, closing my eyes as I do it, and I pull the thin itchy blanket over my body. I’m still shivering because I’m wet and the air-conditioning is set too high, and I can’t fall asleep. So I keep my eyes open and listen to everyone else snore. And slowly, my eyes get accustomed to the darkness.
 
We don’t leave the hostel until it’s almost midnight and the four of us take the cable car down together. It’s filled with kids and I stare at them. Everyone young and alone. Girls my age or a little older wearing deep red lipstick and all black, carrying long brown leather purses. Boys with ties. Boys wearing hats that once belonged to their grandfathers. Their pant legs rolled up. The French are beautiful, I think.
We stop in the old part of the city and walk down a few cobblestone streets. Christine and Bruce lead the way and behind them Mark grabs my hand quickly so that I’m startled when I feel the calluses on his palms, the thin layer of sweat. We walk like that for a little bit and I imagine that he is my boyfriend; that we live here just the two of us, in a small apartment on one of these quaint streets in southern France.
We come to a bar on one of the side streets and a girl wearing a tight, short dress, smoking a cigarette alone, glares at me as we enter. I look down and let go of Mark’s hand as we go down a few steps and enter through another door, where American pop music engulfs us. It seems bright and dark all at the same time and there is hardly any room to move forward; the front room is swarming with people who are standing and laughing, mostly, some leaning forward to order drinks at the bar, and in the room to the right people are dancing, moving close to one another, kissing one another, holding their bottles of beer high up in the air.
“Let’s get drinks,” Christine shouts, moving her hips back and forth just slightly. She pulls out her green credit card and waves it in the air like she’s a movie star, then uses it to buy four beers. The green card is the one her father pays – the blue one is her mother’s, she explained to me once.
I bring the cold bottle to my lips and let the beer sit in a pool in my mouth before I swallow. I try to like the sour, acrid taste. Try to get used to it. I hold my nose in and take a second sip and I feel the cool liquid travel down my throat, down into what feels like my heart.
I keep taking bigger and bigger sips as I scan the room. Everyone around us looks like fellow travelers; I hear some French, but mostly English and some German, I think. No Spanish. Everyone belts out the lyrics to pop songs in off key-voices. But I don’t care that the music is bad, and I don’t even care about the faint smell of vomit, or the little bit of beer someone spills on my back. I look up at Mark and smile the way Lucy does, only one corner of my lips raised to make it look like I’m not impressed when really, I am. I take another sip, and we make our way to the room where people are dancing.
Christine sees it before I do. She opens her mouth like she’s about to scream, but instead she just keeps it open like that, like it’s stuck in time, and she pulls down on my arm.
            “Look,” she murmurs, pointing to the corner of the room.
I look over to where she points, and behind all the people dancing, in that dark, shadowy corner I see a woman, wavering uneasily beside the wall, her body rocking back and forth violently until she collapses. She becomes a crumpled ball of flesh on the floor. Her body just a heap of limbs.
We run towards her. I see that the woman is older than the rest of the crowd here. She wears all black and she has pale skin and she is covered in sweat that sits in the wrinkles that are beside her eyes and in her forehead. I lean forward and I touch the woman’s shoulder, afraid that it will be cold and hard. That it will feel like a corpse. But it’s warm, and her shirt is damp with sweat.
            “Are you alright?” I yell, panicked, over the music.
She opens her eyes halfway but her head just hangs and she doesn’t look up from the floor.
“C’est moi, c’est moi,” she’s mumbling. We don’t move but it seems like everything is dancing in fast motion around us.
Then Mark bends over and pulls the woman’s body up so that she can sit with her back along the wall. Once he lets go of her, she slowly slides down again, a lifeless doll. My heart pounds faster and I look up at Mark. He makes a long, hollow whistle.
“Damn, she’s out,” he says more casually than I expect. “I’ll get her some water.” He starts to walk towards the bar and I follow him.
“Mark!” I call out, quickening my pace to catch up. “Why is that woman like that?”
            “She’s just really drunk,” he sighs.
I look down at the stained wood floor. Someone behind me swings her elbow into my back, pushing me towards Mark. But he turns around, then, smiling, with a cup of water in one hand and a beer in the other.
“Now. Here’s a water for her, and another beer for you. You relax a little,” he says, putting his hand on my lower back once I take it. “Just don’t go and drink as much as that old woman,” he jokes in a low voice, close to my ear.
I take a sip then and he squats down next to the woman, pouring the whole cup into her mouth; some of it dribbling down her chin at first. But slowly, she starts to swallow. She sits up a little.
“Should we ask for help?” Christine wonders, looking up at Bruce.
“Nah. Mark’s got it. She’ll be okay. Let’s just get her a cab home.”
He lifts her body up and leads her through the crowd and we follow. Outside, it’s cold and the streets are empty and I can hear this whistling sound. From the ocean, maybe.
The woman sits down on the curb, her limbs folding together, and she begins to cry. I’m talking these great, big, heaving sobs. Christine and I sit beside her, and Christine puts her hand on the woman’s back. She smells like vomit.
            She speaks in French in between her sobs. “Vignt ans et il triche,” she keeps saying. “Vingt ans et il triche!”
            She’s poor, I can tell. Poorer than me and Lucy, like she can’t even bother to pretend. It’s not just her clothes: she’s got on these old grey pants and her shirt is plain and thin and worn. It’s something else. I don’t know what.
            “It’s okay,” Christine is saying over and over and over again, even though neither of us know what the woman is saying.
            The woman turns to face her and I can’t see the expression on the woman’s face anymore. But I can imagine it’s angry. Fierce eyes, maybe.  Bitter. Like who is this girl who doesn’t understand anything about my life?
            I take another sip of my beer. A long, big, gulp, because the taste doesn’t seem so strong anymore, and I can feel the bubbles stay in my body, floating up to the tip of my head, where Lucy used to put the palm of her hand back when I was still short enough and she was still tall enough.
            “He cheats on me,” the woman suddenly says, surprising us with her English. Her accent is thick. She starts to cry some more. Her nose running. Her body shaking. She looks so old. Is she as old as Lucy? “I have twenty years with him and he cheats,” she cries.
            I look past the woman and I study Christine, who has this face that’s all crumpled. She looks a little pathetic: her features are all mashed together and her lip is even quivering a little and I can tell that she really cares. She’s crushed; she actually feels bad for this woman. Can’t believe a man would do something like that. Can’t believe this could happen in real life.
            I turn away so Christine can’t study my face, and I keep drinking quickly until my bottle is almost empty.
Mark helps the woman into a taxi then and she’s gone. Out of our minds. We turn back into the bar, and I feel so good all of a sudden. I feel so good because everything is bubbling and light and I can laugh so easily.
            Mark looks even taller, now, and I want to tell him that he is the hero of the day. That he saved that woman. And he was so calm. So cool. I know he’s one of the “good guys” Lucy always tells me about; I know it. She says there are only a handful of them in the whole world but if you manage to really find one – actually find one – then you better hold on tight and never let go no matter what he does or how he acts or who he’s with. That was the whole reason Lucy came to the States: for a man like that. A man named Ralph, who could see inside of people, she once told me. I always thought that all that stuff was bullshit, but now I want to believe her. Now I want to think: that’s Mark.
A song comes on and it’s a song in Spanish and I don’t know the words or the name of it or anything but it’s familiar – I recognize it and it’s a dancing song and suddenly I am swinging my hips, back and forth, back and forth like my cousin Yehidi taught me to do in her living room the last time I was in Santo Domingo. I close my eyes and listen to the beat like she told me to, and I dance; I really dance for the first time since I left eight years ago. And it’s like I can feel my cousin’s hands still on my hips and I can hear her still giggling, making fun of me for how gringa I’ve become.
I close my eyes and I just become loose, really loose, and in here, in this place so far away, I let myself remember everything about Santo Domingo that I’ve been trying to forget. I can smell the damp clothes and the onions and cilantro and yucca mixed with that strong perfume that would hang heavy in the air in my godmother’s apartment. I can feel my palms wrapping around the square-shaped window bars that are covered in chipped green paint.  I can feel myself looking outside the window past those bars and feeling like an animal in a cage. And I can hear my mother Lucy’s muffled sobs seeping out from underneath the door in the bathroom, the bathroom she kept herself locked in for so many days.
I can hear my family members muttering in low voices words like chiflada y mental y demente y loca.
I can see the old Haitian women who came because my godmother asked them to. I can hear their chants and I can make out their trembling, wrinkling eyelids that they mostly kept closed, and their sticks and their jars and their medicines.
I can feel Lucy’s hand grabbing mine tight in the airport on our way back, and I can hear her explaining to me that we don’t need any other family because they’re all traitors, she says, and we’ve got each other.
“Besides,” she tells me, just in front of the doors to the gate – bending down in her tight white pants so that she can be at eye-level with me and so that the men behind her can stop to admire – “we’re Americans,” she says. “That’s the best thing you can be in the whole entire world. What they’re all trying to be. So come on,” she says, grabbing my hand too tightly, pulling me down the skyway towards our plane that heads back home. “Let’s forget all this.”
And I remember holding her hand and walking with her, pulling my little-kid suitcase in the other hand, and trying to believe her, trying to forget everything and most of all, trying to forget that my mother was crazy. That she was chiflada.
I open my eyes and I’m still dancing dancing dancing. I’m remembering everything and not trying to hide it, not even trying to hide the little bits of Lucy that are inside of me.
And I look up and I notice that Mark sees me dancing. And like that, I can tell. I can just tell that he really does like me. He does. I know, and not because Christine was just saying it. He does, he does, he really does. And I know because he’s looking at me the way every man looks at my mother Lucy. Like he sees a little bit of her sparkle inside of me.
He comes towards me and he picks me up, then, by the waist so that my feet are dangling in the air and he pulls me in close to his body and he spins me, around and around so that I start laughing as hard as I did in the shower this morning. Laughing and closing my eyes and spinning.
Then he puts me down and he looks at me. I am so close to his smile. So close to his mix-matched teeth and the stubble on his sunburned chin. I am so close to his green eyes that he is all I see. I can’t hear what Christine and Bruce are saying next to me, and I can’t hear the music anymore. 
“Hey,” he whispers.
“What?” I smile.
“You’re sexy,” he says.
And I feel an ocean roll up inside of me, flooding my body, reaching my toes and my fingertips and then, yes, then: he kisses me.
I grab his hand and I say, “Come on.” Come on, Come on. I lead him and he follows, and I take another sip from my cup on the way, because my head is feeling dizzy and I am light and I love it. We walk to where it’s quieter, to a little hallway that leads to the bathrooms, and I lean against the wall.
“I want to tell you something,” I say, looking way up at him because he seems so tall. I start to laugh because I can’t help it. “I want to tell you something I’ve never told anyone.” I bring my hand to my mouth to stop myself from laughing.
He’s got his arm on the wall above me and I feel caged in but it’s a good cage because it feels comfortable and warm. He’s smiling with his mouth stretched out wide and he’s laughing too.
            “What?” He asks. I watch him bring his drink to his lips. I take the last sip of mine.
            I just want to say it. I don’t want advice, I don’t want someone to tell me what to do and I don’t want concern. For the first time in my life, I want to tell someone because I never have, and I only want to tell Mark.
            “My mother. She is crazy. I have a mother who is crazy.”
I start to laugh again, and it comes slowly out of the corners of my mouth and my heart is beating so fast and my face is so hot and my throat feels all closed-up, but soon my laughter starts to die out because Mark isn’t laughing with me. He just looks at me kind of funny with an eyebrow half-raised because he believes me, I think. He really believes me. I don’t even have to use the words I’ve picked up over the years to make him believe: borderline personality disorder. Mentally unstable. Chiflada.
            He leans down and kisses me on the forehead and says, “How about we call a cab for ourselves, huh? Let’s find Bruce and your friend.”
            I look up at him and suddenly I want to cry. I want to curl into a ball like that woman did and sob. But I just nod and I clench my teeth, letting the muscles in my stomach tighten, become stone.
 
***
 
            Two mornings later, Christine and I are running late for the train. We have to race with our bags and we just manage to jump on as it’s starting to leave. We get on at the first-class cabin but we only have regular tickets, so we have to make our way to the back. The first class is luxurious, with plush red seats and gold arm rests.
            “This is bullshit,” Christine is huffing.
            “Oh, come on,” I say from behind her.
            There is only one couple in first class. They’re sitting together and facing backwards, the direction we’re walking in. Their pile of big leather bags takes over the seats in front of them and across the aisle. I turn to look at them as we pass by. The man has this big dark beard and a full mustache and he is a little fat. Wearing a business suit. And the woman beside him is wearing all black and a red little hat, and she’s looking out the window so I can’t see her face. I keep on walking but just before we open the door to leave, I turn back again. And now the woman is looking at me, her face lifeless and worn and familiar.
            I become still. But it’s like she’s looking past me. Like she doesn’t even recognize me from the bar, from the concrete curb we sat on together outside. Our knees touching. Did she even see me that night through all her tears? She turns to look out the window again, and I have to keep following Christine until we find two empty seats on the other side of the train.
            It’s her, it’s her, it’s her, I keep thinking, and it plays as a chant in my head. But I don’t say it out loud. Christine and I barely say a word; we don’t feel like talking about Mark or Bruce right now, or about the bar that night or about how sick and sleepy we felt the day after. We don’t talk about the over-air-conditioned hostel room or the old quarter in Nice. We just look out the window and watch the landscape pass by. I gaze at the white rocks and the turquoise water that reminds me of someplace else.