Love Her Madly (14 page)

“I can't do this much longer,” she said, sounding suddenly 100 percent sober.

I tried to lean back to get a look at her face, but she wouldn't release me. “No,” she grunted, and held me tighter. I stopped resisting. I looked down at her head, the blond hair darkened to a muddy gold, and wondered what mayhem was transpiring inside that skull.

“You're gonna be okay. You just gotta relax,” I murmured. I caught sight of our reflection in the mirror. Two girls in soaking wet clothes, embracing in a shower. It was almost funny, until I noticed how tightly Cyn was clutching me, and that she had begun to shiver.

There was a light knock at the bathroom door, and Raj appeared bearing sports drink and orange juice. He glimpsed us in the shower and froze.

“How's it going?” he managed. I felt Cyn stiffen at the sound of his voice, but she loosened her grip on me.

“Better. We're feeling a lot cooler. I think this one's even shivering now.” I freed myself from Cyn's grasp and turned off the water.

Raj just stood there. The fear that I'd seen before was gone
from his face. In its place was relief, and maybe some lust. Cyn stepped out of the shower and stared at her reflection with a diffuse awe, as if viewing an aquarium full of tropical fish. Raj's face betrayed similar fascination, except he was looking at both of us. I shooed him out and closed the bathroom door.

I helped Cyn into a dry robe, and when she was ready, Raj guided her to my bed, which had a better view of the TV. Raj had already switched it to some cartoons as a nonthreatening, come-down distraction, but Cyn just closed her eyes. After a few minutes, her breathing slowed down and she seemed to have fallen asleep.

Raj and I looked at one another. A slow grin of relief spread across his face, and he shook his head. I changed into my own robe and switched off the lights. The flicker of the cartoons flashed across Cyn's sleeping form as I made my way over to Raj on Cyn's bed. The music from the party below was intense, and my body began to respond to the rhythm again, as if reawakening. I lay down beside him, and together we watched the colored lights flash across the palm fronds outside of the window.

“We should stay here tonight, just in case,” I whispered. The thumping bass from the party was so loud, I didn't need to fear waking Cyn by speaking, but it was nicer to whisper into Raj's ear anyway.

He responded with a seductive smile, and I felt him slip his hand beneath my robe. I curled toward him, my back to Cyn, and untied the sash. Raj's hands were soon all over me, and we were kissing. With the music and the lights flashing behind my closed lids, I sort of forgot where we were. Before I really realized what was happening, we were having sex. I glanced over at my bed and was relieved to see that Cyn hadn't moved. Raj came shortly afterward, and I rolled out of bed immediately to wash up, hoping to get rid of any evidence of what we'd just done on Cyn's bed, with her right across the room.

The next morning, Cyn was extremely apologetic about the night before. The three of us ate waffles in companionable silence, occasionally pointing out other students stumbling into the cafeteria who looked worse than we felt. I was utterly worn out. Although I didn't share it with my tablemates, I was secretly dying to spend a little time away from school. The previous night's adventure had me worried that we were all spinning out of control.

Cyn promised to visit me at my parents' place for a few days around Christmas, but thankfully, not the entire stretch of winter break. The holidays meant good money at E Two, with generosity and wish-fulfillment perfuming the air, along with the fir boughs and disinfectant spray. While Cyn was quite literally hustling for dough, I was baking cookies with my mom, shaking out the special silver sprinkles, just like I'd always done. Drifting to sleep in my quiet, childhood bedroom, I had the strange sensation of having left my adult self behind on the other coast. I didn't catch myself missing her all that much.

Then, just when the winter holiday pendulum was beginning to swing from pleasantly relaxed to agonizingly boring, Cyn pulled up to my parents' house in her battered red hatchback, with Raj riding shotgun. I'd invited him to stay with us for a night on the way to his own parents' place. Raj introduced himself as my boyfriend and behaved as such, and Cyn, in a wonderful, unspoken gift to me, betrayed no hint of interest in him the entire visit. We drank cocktails and played my old board games into the small hours, laughing. I'd look across my bedroom and see Raj's deep brown eyes on me, and next to him, my best friend, cracking some stupid joke. In those brief flickers, when I could forget everything I knew about the real us, I was truly happy. Then they left, together.

Alone at my parents' place, I found that I weathered the separation well enough during the daylight hours, but as soon as the sun set, I would be hit with a longing for Raj that made me want to keen. It made me nervous and irritable to think about Raj returning to campus in a few days' time. He'd be there with Cyn, and without me, for almost an entire week. I suspected that, in my absence, they'd consummate their relationship. I worried about the potential fallout. I started biting my nails.

I returned to campus for New Year's Eve. Before I had time to blink, we were shoving bathing suits and hiking gear into our thrift-store backpacks. I was out of my head with excitement, barely able to believe that I'd soon be departing for an exotic adventure. The only thing that brought me down was how badly I knew I'd miss Raj.

I slept at the Hubble the night before we left. Raj and I huddled together on the balcony, wrapped in a blanket against the chilly breeze, sharing a bottle of wine. As a plane landed across the freeway, I snuggled in closer, seeking the carnal comfort of Raj's warm body. We didn't talk much. I felt his sadness at our leaving as a palpable force that grew thicker the closer we got to departure.

He'd had a rough time visiting his family. He came out about his acting, and his father, in a knee-jerk reaction, had forbidden it. His mother, he said, had laughed; first at the absurdity of Raj throwing away his scholarship to pursue what she viewed as a hobby, and then at Raj's father's reaction. When the dust settled, she told him to do what he wanted—it was his life—but I think that doubt had taken root. With all of that drama happening, he definitely didn't tell them about his girlfriend. Or his other girlfriend.

The morning Cyn and I left, he was a vortex of gloom, his
jaw grimly set as he chauffeured us to the international airport. Cyn sat in the backseat, her eyes fixed out the window throughout the entire strained and silent ride. Cyn gave Raj a quick kiss good-bye from the backseat and slammed the door, leaving us alone together. Raj looked so miserable that I couldn't walk away without seeing him smile. I kissed him long and slow, and when I pulled away, he pulled me close again. Conscious of Cyn waiting outside on the curb with our bags, I kissed him tenderly one last time and whispered in his ear that I loved him. I'd never said it before, and his stunned smile was worth everything, though he didn't, as I'd hoped, say he loved me back. I locked that smile into my memory and hurried out of the car, and together Cyn and I hustled into the terminal.

All the enthusiasm and glee that we'd been suppressing for the past couple of weeks erupted in the line for security. Other travelers turned to stare as we laughed to the point of tears at nothing in particular, drunk with the knowledge that our adventure was soon beginning.

CHAPTER SIX

We met our group at the gate. There were twelve of us total, as many as could be squeezed into one stretched-out van. Another pair of girls from our Spanish Lit class was also making the trip. Sadie, a wary-eyed, dark-skinned beauty who barely stood five feet tall, and her friend Hannah, who had shaved her head in preparation for the trip.

“Just to clarify, in case there were any doubts, yes, I'm a lesbian,” she quipped as we went around the circle introducing ourselves.

Our group organizer, a tall guy named Pete with thinning hair and a wide, toothy grin, urged us to get all the gringo words out of our systems. Once we landed, we were on our honor to speak only Spanish, even among ourselves.

A few hours later, we emerged from the chilly airport into the swampy embrace of the Costa Rican afternoon. As our van zipped through the narrow streets of San Jose, I peered out past Cyn's shoulder at the tropical pink sky, trying to drink in every detail.

We bunked in a hostel dorm all together for most of the first week. We didn't get great sleep because other backpackers who didn't have to work at a school at eight a.m. would stumble in drunkenly in the small hours. They tried to be quiet, but the overhead lights would snap on and off, followed by the intermi
nable rustling of plastic bags, suppressed giggles, and zipping of zippers. Oh, and snoring.

Cyn had nightmares the first couple of nights. The first time, she was moaning, and Sadie reached across from her neighboring bunk and woke her. A night or two later, the same thing happened. Then one morning she woke up crying but couldn't remember the dream that had preceded it.

“Too many
frijoles
,” Hannah diagnosed at breakfast, but I was a little concerned. Cyn wasn't eating much, or sleeping much, apparently, but she seemed otherwise okay. I figured it was just the change of environment messing up her bio-rhythms.

When our week of school volun-tourism was over, we had a few unscheduled leisure days at Playa Tortuga, a beach town not far from one of the best surfing breaks on the Pacific. Our enthusiasm ballooned as our shuttle van drove up to the hostel, all tricked out in Rasta colors. Cyn pointed out a pot-leaf-adorned tapestry of Bob Marley on the wall and smiled broadly. With any luck, we'd be sharing a well-deserved spliff on the shore by sundown.

We spent all day on the beach, but no one was surfing. The ocean was so flat that the guys who rented boards hadn't even opened up shop. Instead, they splayed across their shack's rotting wooden steps, watching the tourists and shooting the breeze. Hannah and Sadie were with us, both of them reading books, ignoring the parade of local guys who lingered by our blanket, many of them openly staring at Cyn's coral-colored bikini and the shell necklace that dangled between her breasts.

“Hello, beautiful ladies,” one of them said, in English. I liked his voice, so I looked up from the trashy magazine I had bought at the airport. I liked his face, too, and the rest of him. He was clearly a surfer, the ends of his long, dark hair golden from the salt and sun. He also looked like total trouble. He was our guy
if we wanted to find any drugs. Cyn clearly recognized this, too.

“
Hola,
guapo
. Why is the water here so flat? We came here to ride the waves,” she bantered back, in Spanish.

Clearly delighted to be addressed in Spanish by a gringa, his smile expanded into a wolfish grin. “I'm Marco,” he said, and he shook all four of our hands. He even took the time to compliment Hannah on the fuzz that was mushrooming on her scalp. “It's very radical,” he said approvingly. She smiled politely, but I could tell that both Sadie and Hannah also saw what we saw, and didn't like it. They pointedly returned their attentions to their books.

“I don't know what is happening with the waves,” he said with a theatrical shrug. “I am disappointed myself. Maybe tomorrow. How long are you staying in Playa Tortuga?”

“Three nights,” Cyn answered, and laughed when Marco shook his head in exaggerated sadness.

“That is not long enough.”

“It's all we have. We're students,” I explained.

“From America,” he said. “I want to go to America. To Los Angeles.”

“It's not as beautiful as this,” Cyn demurred.

Cyn and Marco chatted a while longer. Cyn asked him about finding some weed, and he said to stop by the reggae bar that night. It was on the far end of the beach, but there was no sign. “The music is the sign.
Hasta pronto
.”

When he walked away, Sadie said, “You're not actually going to go there, are you?”

Cyn laughed. “Why not?”

“Stranger danger?” Hannah suggested sarcastically.

“You used English. You owe us all a beer,” I joked.

“It doesn't rhyme as well in Spanish,” she said with a sigh.

“I don't think it's a good idea,” Sadie warned. “But if you have to go, we should all go together.”

Hannah released a loud hoot. “Oh? We should all go together? We see how it is, you little sneak!”

Sadie blushed. “What? It's for safety!”

“No, it's because that guy is a hottie, and you're hoping he has
amigos
.”

“Whatever.” She snapped her book open, then closed it again in exasperation. “I give up! Am I that transparent?”

“No, honey, but that guy had a body. I may not be straight, but I'm not blind.”

Cyn and I bought some cold-enough beers from a guy who wandered past, selling them out of a backpack, and sat in the sand, watching the sunset.

“Man, I can't wait to get some weed,” she said for the fourth time, her entire demeanor twitchy with the jones. “Sunset and marijuana are like peanut butter and . . . how do you say ‘jelly' in Spanish?”

I shrugged. We sipped our beers, watching the sun sink beneath the horizon.

“It takes a little over eight minutes for light from the sun to reach our eyes here. Eight minutes traveling at the speed of light.” Cyn pointed her bottle at the red orb before us, squinting distrustfully.

“Huh.”

“If the sun just went out, I wonder how cold it would get, and how fast, after that final burst of light, like, right before minute nine.”

“You might not notice right away, if it happened at nighttime.”

“The moon would go out,” she noted.

“Shit, you're right. Like a night-light gone dead.”

“That'd be such a bummer.”

“Yeah. Well, it probably won't happen tonight,” I opined sagely.

“Not before we get high. I'm not gonna go out like that, Glo!” She jumped to her feet and saluted as the sun disappeared into the water.
“¡Hasta mañana, sol!”

It was go time.

We got changed and gathered Sadie and Hannah. Together, we hit the reggae bar, or what we thought was the reggae bar. What we found was a dilapidated beach shack with a string of holiday lights above a weathered bar with a few tables set around it in the sand. The bartender was listening to a soccer game when we arrived, causing us to wonder aloud whether we were at the right place. Since our wondering took place in the local tongue, the bartender confirmed that we were in fact in the reggae bar, and accordingly, switched off the game and turned the music way up. We ordered what he suggested, pink rum punch. It was strong and delicious, so we ordered another. More people from our group showed up, and Sadie and Hannah went to greet them.

Soon it was totally dark, the stars supercharged above the black sea. Cyn was almost finished with her third punch when the bartender brought over two more.

“On the house,” he said, beaming. His ramshackle beach hut was surrounded by thirsty, Spanish-speaking Americans, and because we'd showed up first, he thought we were responsible for the good fortune. Maybe we were.

Cyn took a sip of the new punch and winced. “This dude keeps putting an extra floater on top of our drinks.”

“That's nice of him.”

“It seems nice. It might be hell tomorrow.”

We clinked plastic rims and looked out at the water. In the distance, we could see the glimmering lights of fishing boats. The breeze was cool, and as I dug my toes into the sand under
my chair, I was thinking that the moment was just about perfect. Or it would have been, if only Raj had been there.

Cyn took a long gulp of her drink. “Glo, there's something you should know.”

I picked up my cup and sipped, reflexively. With all the weird stuff going on with Cyn, I'd been anticipating a drunken speech from her. I steeled myself for whatever might be coming.

“You see,” she began, then sighed. “There are some things I do that I tolerate in myself because I can think, ‘That's not really me.' But I've gone to that place so often lately, the place where I'm not me, that it
is
me now. I'm dependent on it. But it's not anything. And when I need to come back to being me again, I'm not sure what it even means anymore.”

“Cyn, if this is about your work, then I can only say . . .” I looked for the words, but my sentence stalled out. My head was too foggy to formulate advice.

“I want you to have Raj.”

I looked at her and saw her eyes were glowing and wet. She nodded at me with certainty.

“I'm not even a whole person anymore.”

At that exact moment, Marco rolled up to our table. I was stunned and speechless, but Cyn was grinning at him warmly. The next thing I knew, I was shaking hands with Hector, a guy who Marco introduced as his brother. They looked so dissimilar that I assumed the “brother” part was slang. Hector was short and stocky, he didn't have a cool hairdo, and he wore glasses. Hector also radiated a much different vibe; while Marco was sex and danger, Hector presented like a shy school teacher.

I excused myself to find the bathroom, which was already occupied by a large green lizard. I went in anyway and watched moths throw themselves against the naked lightbulb above the door. When I was finished, I stood at the sink, feeling dazed. I walked past where Cyn was sitting with Marco and Hector and
stood ankle-deep in the surf. The moon was full, or almost full, and encircled by a misty halo. The ocean mirrored its brightness in a gleaming white streak that appeared to end at my toes.

I took a deep breath and tried to chill out. As much as I wanted to hash the Raj thing out immediately, I knew it was no longer the moment. If she really meant what she said, it could wait a few hours. In truth, I wanted to hear it from her when she was sober so there'd be no taking it back.

When I returned to the shack, Cyn and our new friends were leaning in toward one another, absorbed in fervent conversation. Marco was talking quickly about something or other off the beach a few miles down. When I sat, they explained that there was an island nearby that was supposedly haunted on full moons, when the spirits of Mayans would rise up and walk the jungle. When the tide was out, there was a sandbar that you could walk across to get to it. Oh, and that also, we were all going there tomorrow night, which happened to be a full moon.

Cyn nodded happily. “Marco knows a private cove where we can watch the moonrise and have a bonfire, and he thinks he can find magic mushrooms. It should be amazing,” she followed up, in English.

“Are you nuts?” I said, also in English.

“What's the problem?” she asked, looking genuinely shocked that I wasn't into it.

“You want to go to a haunted island to do drugs in a foreign country with some local guys we just met. That's the problem.”

Cyn laughed, but I was dead serious. Hector was watching me uneasily. “It feels like a lie not to say something. I speak some English. Just so you know,” he said, in English. Then he blushed and looked away.

I blushed, too, embarrassed and growing angrier. Cyn laughed even louder.

“I didn't mean to embarrass you,” he said, his face strawberry red. Marco asked him what was wrong. “
Nada
,” he replied.

Now I felt like a jackass. Hector seemed like a Boy Scout, and if he was friends or brothers with Marco, Marco was probably okay, too. But I had expressed distrust of both like a typical paranoid American. But this is the thing: I Knew It Was a Bad Idea. I wouldn't have done anything like it in the States with guys I didn't know, but now I felt like a racist, or xenophobe, or just an uptight bitch.

And then Cyn said, “Well, I'm going. If you're uncomfortable, you don't have to come.”

I could have throttled her right there. I seethed and finished my drink. There was no way I could let her go alone. If she was determined to do it, that meant, like it or not, I was doing it, too. I vowed that this would be our last trip together. I was furious.

Marco announced that he had some weed. Did we want to smoke? If so, we should take a little walk away from the bar, just to be safe. Cyn nodded, apparently oblivious to how angry I was at her. I followed her out into the darkness, walking side by side with Hector, who wanted to speak a little English. At that moment, I welcomed the distraction. We chatted about college life (he was a student as well) while, in front of me, Marco and Cyn made plans for our haunted island outing.