Desconectar

An owlish man peers over the back of seat 7C  to read the entertainment section over the shoulder of the woman sitting in front of him and slumps into his seat when she finishes the story about Renee Zellweger’s new face, tucking the newspaper into the pocket in front of her. She pulls out a partially completed needlepoint of a monkey and plunges the needle into what’s shaping up to be an ear.  It is a cartoonish monkey, maybe meant for a child’s bedroom, but I’ve made up the story that the needlepoint is for herself, that she lives in a home filled with monkey paraphernalia—coffee mugs with monkey tail handles, throw pillows of a trio of chimps tugging at a bunch of bananas, tea towels in the guest bath. I sense that Cabo is her final destination and that she won’t be leaving the resort once she gets there. Her husband has been asleep since takeoff, and I suspect that’s his itinerary.

Neither of them has looked over here at me, in 7B, but I go ahead and make up the story I assume they’d make up about me. Clearly flying solo—networking event? An annual girls’ trip, reliving college days while the husbands stay home with the kids? Or, perhaps, that’s a cover, and really it’s a rendezvous with an old flame. So judgmental, I think. As if she heard me, she looks up from her needlepoint, mid-lobe, and smiles at me.

Somewhere in the underbelly of the plane is the overstuffed suitcase that tumped over by the front door and where my eyes landed when I answered a phone call ten minutes before walking out the door. The person on the other end gently revealed that my high school best friend was braindead after suffering a series of strokes. Her family, also on a plane, were flying the opposite direction, to England, to say goodbye to her vacant body before turning off the machines. I didn’t want to lift the suitcase from the floor when my car arrived. The suitcase was a foreign object, a trick that had lured me into the danger of believing that any object or moment in time could be trusted. Tangible proof that I had been a completely different person mere minutes before—someone who’d fretted over a fraying tie on a bikini top, who couldn’t chose between five books and packed them all and then stuffed the liner pocket with hangover remedies: the person I wish to be vs. the person I know I will be, before a third option arrived at the door: a person who could, at any point, not be at all.

The van rides from the Cabo airport to Todos Santos were usually rowdy—friends from all over the country gathered at the same place, every January to perform and attend a music festival in a dusty little town in Mexico. Portlanders, New Yorkers, and Georgians grab to-go margaritas from the stand outside the airport, winter forgotten, toss their guitar cases in the back, and chatter the bumpy ride to our hotels. This year, I am solo—my boyfriend had committed to perform with another band in Australia. We are five or six years into our relationship and his musician friends and their significant others have become some of my closest compadres. Still, I am a little apprehensive about going without him. I wait with the shuttle driver who tells me we are waiting for one more. I have heard about Mary from her husband Josh, who plays with one of the bands when his shows don’t interfere with baseball season—he is the organist for Boston Red Sox—but she and I have never met. Her face is open and joyful and she wants to know, immediately, who you are at the core. She’s so disarming, I break the promise I made to myself not to tell anyone my friend is dying. Her presence calms me, transforms my luggage back into a familiar object, filled with belongings.

I check in to my room, head to the hotel bar, and order a tequila cocktail. Cracking open my laptop, I ask the bartender for the password. He slides a square tab of paper next to the keyboard. The Todos Santos Inn is a historic hotel with 8 rooms. A beautiful open-door bar, fine dining, plants with leaves the size of violins, a deep blue pool, fresh breakfast in the mornings, little jungly nooks to curl into—all in lush contrast to the dusty desert town. None of these details register when I read  the wifi password: desconectar.

Disconnect. The looming moment when the chirping heart monitor rolls long, laboring hills and levels into the coda of a flatline. I imagine her chest ceasing to rise without the respirator filling her lungs with oxygen, the weight of grief her family must be carrying all the way to England to witness their daughter and their mother die. Is she still there or is she already gone? Is there an actual plug that gets pulled? Does a doctor hunker down in the corner of the room,  hand wrapped around a cord and say something like, “1, 2, 3…” and then, an incantation: desconectar! punctuated by the snap of a wand. It dawns on me, eventually, that the world doesn’t revolve around me, that vacationers come here to escape their busy lives, to relax and unwind. The password is a scold: Unplug. Live your life.

Kirsten and I did everything together when we were seventeen. We even lost our virginity to the same man—that did occur independently—and this caused, as you can imagine, a disconnect that rocked not just us, but our entire friend group. We didn’t speak for a month, hadn’t traded the chemistry textbooks we scrawled over in markers and kept as journals for each other. The corner where she waited for me after fourth period was empty until one Thursday, she was standing there.

“We're leaving,” she said.

Our school was a military academy before it became a co-ed private school. You couldn’t just skip class. Bronzed canons poised as threats.

“What? No! Where are we going?”

She grabbed my hand and said, “I don’t know yet, but I’m busting us out of here.”

We ran through the gym into the parking lot, tossed our backpacks in her old diesel Mercedes, and chugged down the highway. For whatever reason, I'd still not gotten my driver's license and when friends poked fun, she told them protectively,  "she's not allowed! She belongs forever in my passenger seat.”

We sipped lemonades in Little Five Points outside the record shop and smoked Camel cigarettes on a bench. We didn’t mention our fight. A leathery man with a drum and a kitten sat under a tree threading beads on a cord. He looked up at us and said, “what are you girls doing here?” Misfits in an area known for its misfits in our gray pleated skirts and white button-down shirts, she in black ballet flats and I in my three hole Docs.

“We escaped!” she said.

“They call me Two Bear. What do they call you?” the man said.

“I’m Kirsten and this is my bestest friend. Her name is Holly.”

We hadn’t spoken in four weeks. No chemistry.

“Today I will give you Native American names,” he said, “you are First Sight of Sun and you,” gesturing his thread of beads toward me, “are Rainwater.”

“Rainwater,” Kirsten breathed, “that’s so you.”

After that, the little blue Mercedes pulled into Chastain Park.

“We are going to swing now and be children and forget about everything.”

Which, of course, made us remember it all.

“I miss us,” she said, “where did you go?” She had her elbows hooked around the swing chain and her hands folded in her lap. White-yellow hair falling in her face, she raked it back and it fell again.

It was too early to be home, so we sneaked-in, which made us laugh, crawling through the bedroom window we usually crawled out, and we drew all over her bedroom walls: our favorite bands, song lyrics, carefully replicating album covers with Crayola markers until her mother caught us just as I was coloring in the tongue on a  Screaming Tree. We froze.

“You girls are such free spirits,” her mother said, and shut the door.

“Let’s be kids for one more day,” she’d said. But years later, we were kids again. She showed up two hours early to my twenty-fifth birthday party with her six year old in tow. We sat in my backyard under a crabapple tree and ate my entire cake before anyone else arrived. Our birthdays a week apart; it was our cake, our world, our disgruntled tree.

She went to culinary school, moved to New Zealand and studied sustainable gardening, relocated to England where she met a man with whom she had a son. We called and emailed, and after years abroad, she came home. Or close to it, in Athens, Georgia, where I happened to be. She was laughing before I opened the car door.

“Did you ever get your license? No, no, don't tell me. That will always will be your seat,” she said, “get in.”

I think of the woman in 7C and wonder if she finished sewing the monkey while the owlish husband slept. Where is the drawing of the Screaming Tree—sanded into dust or ancient hieroglyph buried under paint? Where is the blue Mercedes—refurbished in a garage or sulking in a scrapyard? Where do we go after we leave our bones? Can you bring a pillow? Where is the newspaper—awaiting recycle for its next incarnation or page of history still tucked in the pocket? Where is the cord of beads, how far does it reach, and what never stops thrumming inside of the socket? Is it narrow as a needle’s eye or a loop without end—that brief in-between when the first sight of sun wakes the birds inside the trees before the crickets stop chirping.