The Falklands police arranged for me to get to Chile on an English fishing tub. Two days later I watched the sun rise over a gray ocean from the deck of the Fitzroy. I had never been so sick in my life. The sailors were amused, then concerned, as I turned green and weak. I mooned for death on a cot in the stern. It took days for me to get my legs, to keep down a few pieces of bread and a can of sliced peaches. On the fourth day I woke with a steady gut and stepped out onto the icy deck to see the ocean slashed and pitted with the islands of Tierra del Fuego. We were in the Strait of Magellan. Colonies of penguins massed chattering at the water’s edge. The oldest sailor and the sole Spanish speaker on board, who was from the Chilean side of Patagonia, explained his mother’s method for pickling penguin meat while he hauled up nets full of sub-antarctic fish. I couldn’t tell if he was having me on or not. The cook offered hot coffee, and for the first time I gladly accepted it and didn’t vomit over the railing afterward. The ocean was pink to the east, a faint oily pink over a deep gray, and I could see what made people accept this life. It was the feeling of being nowhere. Being nowhere for a long time and continuing to sleep and eat and watch sunrises anyway.
In the strait, the boat lingered on pewter water between bare headlands that were traced with snow. For a whole afternoon we passed slowly by a glacier, a mass of unearthly blue ice that girdled a black mountain and ran down its lap into the sea. The sailors were casual in this landscape, working and chatting, but every time I came up on the deck the cold excoriated me and the mountains made me feel that we were in the presence of ancient forces that were disturbed by our passage. I hid out belowdecks, playing endless games of rummy, taking comfort in the cans of beets and the reeking socks strung on a clothesline made of twine, the pages from dirty magazines neatly cut out and tacked up over the stove. Someone had given me an old coat and a hat with earflaps. I felt tired to my bones. How long had I been so tired?
I said before that the night I ran out on my mother, I made one stop before I drove to Baltimore. I thought of it again while the boat drifted over its fishing nets at the end of the world.
That night, I left the Packard under a horse chestnut tree at the end of Joanne’s block and approached her house on foot. It was only about seven o’clock in the evening, but it had been dark for hours. I was still wild from the fight, my heart racing, sweating under a light wool coat. My lip throbbed where my mother had hit me, and my knuckles throbbed from hitting back. I circled around to the backyard of their big old house and picked up a handful of acorns from under a tree. Joanne’s light was on. I threw the acorns at the glass until a shadow appeared, and the sash lifted with a squeak.
“Vera?”
“It’s me, come down, will you?”
The window closed and I waited in the dark. I kept opening and closing my sore fist. If I had done that, I might do anything. I could do anything. Joanne appeared in silhouette at the back door, pulling on a coat, and then quietly closed it behind her and hurried across the grass.
“What happened? Are you all right?” she said.
“God, I really miss you,” I said.
“You’re going to get me in trouble,” she said, but her voice was warm. She glanced back at the house.
“I’m not going home,” I said. “My mother got my grades and she hit me and I hit her back. I can’t go back there. She’ll kill me. Or I’ll kill her.”
I could just make out the pale oval of Joanne’s face in the dark, the small mouth, and I could see that she was looking me over to see if I’d been hurt. She brushed my hair out of my face and turned me toward the faint yellow of the streetlamps. “She split your lip.”
“Come with me,” I said. “I’m going to Baltimore. I’ll get a job.”
“You’re running away?”
That sounded too juvenile. “I’m leaving. I’ll get my own place. I have some money in the bank.” I had two hundred dollars, years of Christmas money saved from my grandparents.
“What about school?”
“I’m failing school anyway.” I could see it so clearly, an apartment for the two of us, me working as a secretary somewhere, Joanne with her painting things set up in a corner where she could get the light. We had talked about this future, a fantasy of our adult lives, in some space before the real business of living began. But I needed it now. “Come with me,” I said again, and because she didn’t seem to understand what I meant, because she was hesitating as if this were not a matter of life and death, I kissed her.
It was as if I had been picked up by a wave and left in a heap on the beach. I drifted back from the kiss, overcome, with fresh tears in my eyes. She was looking at me; she was immobile, and her pale face, when it resolved in the darkness, was shocked.
“Why did you do that?” she said. She took a step backward.
I couldn’t think of anything to say. She touched her lip with her fingers.
“What’s the matter with you?” she said. “My mother thought—but I told her you weren’t—you weren’t like that.”
I was falling through the ground, into a pit. I turned and walked quickly away. I wanted to vomit. Behind me there was no sound. She didn’t come after me, she didn’t move. She said nothing.
By the time I saw the lights of Baltimore that night, my head throbbed from crying and my mouth was dry, and I knew I would never speak to her again. There was a pain in my chest; I kept putting my hand over it as I drove. Joanne was the last person who could look at me and see me looking back, who could put out her hand and find me there. I wouldn’t let it be so easy again.
It wouldn’t be clear for some time that I would never live in my mother’s house again, but I think I knew that too, that night. There was simply no way to go back. The past is a foreign country, as they say. I lived for nearly a decade as if I had come from nowhere. But there are so many ways to cross a border.
It was weeks to our destination in Chile. I was wearing a spare oilcloth suit when we drifted at last around the Playa Ancha and into the port of San Antonio. I had lost ten pounds and my hands and face were red and rough from the relentless salt in the wind. The ground kept moving beneath me for days after we landed. It moved while I paid for a seat in a minibus headed east, while I haggled with a hotelier in a Santiago street so narrow that the delivery boys on motorbikes put their hands out to brush the wall as they went around the corner. It kept moving while I called Gerry’s number from one pay phone after another through the Barrio Brasil. When I reached him at last, he said he was so relieved to hear from me that he didn’t know what to say.
“You left me to die,” I said. I was standing at a pay phone next to a fruit cart, and the vendor was holding out a luminous melon in my direction.
“I did everything I could,” he said. “We were all shocked at how fast things shut down. They arrested three of ours that first week. We couldn’t be more aggressive.”
“You did nothing for me,” I said.
His voice changed, became smooth. “You’re angry.”
“I expect hazard pay.”
“You’ll get it.”
He wired me, in four separate installments over the course of three days, my final payment for the job. It was more money than I had ever had at one time; it was more money than I had ever seriously considered. I changed hotels immediately, in case someone had noticed all the trips I was making to the Western Union office. I spent three days in the most beautiful hotel in Santiago, reading newsstand paperbacks and ordering room service on a balcony that overlooked a park. Old men sat on a bench across the street, under a spreading plane tree, gossiping and smoking cigars. In the mornings, a bellhop would knock on the door with the paper. It was on that balcony that I read an item in the Cono Sur pages of the morning news:
ARGENTINE STUDENTS RELEASED ONGANÍA REFUSES EXTRADITION
The protagonists of the so-called Falkland Islands Invasion have been released from a Buenos Aires prison on condition of time served, having spent twenty-two days as prisoners . . .
And a photo: Victoria in front, beaming, hand raised in a modest wave, the coat that I remembered folded over her arm. Román a half step behind, easy to overlook. The other co-conspirators carefully watching their feet as they came down the prison steps.
I spent my mornings at the visa office, the American consulate, Pan Am. I was using my real passport now. I was Vera Kelly again.
When I thought about the flight home, even though I knew that I would be flying in a reliable commercial jet, I was tormented by images of the shuddering Britten-Norman, the soccer field sliding into view. Whenever I saw the envelope on the vanity with the airline tickets in it, my chest tightened and my pulse raced. I told the concierge at the hotel that I was afraid to fly, and asked if he knew a doctor. He understood me perfectly. Within an hour I was standing in a dim consulting room in the back of a gaudy apartment just across the park, with a doctor who took his prescription pad out of a drawer before I even removed my coat.
“I’m nervous about flying,” I said.
“You would like half a dozen, or a dozen?” he said.
I hesitated. “A dozen.”
It was because of these pills, the first one taken in the taxi on the way to the airport, that I didn’t flinch when the man at passport control glanced up at me, paged through my documents twice, and then said, “You have no entry stamp.”
“Hm?” I said.
“No entry stamp,” he said. “Where did you come from?”
Because of the pill, the air between myself and the young man was filled with a sweet, benign substance, which muffled his speech and my speech and the commotion of the other passengers around us. “I came from New York,” I said, smiling gently. I took my passport out of his hand, as if he had been offering it, which he had not. “They didn’t stamp me on the way in?”
He frowned and then looked at my other papers, the receipt showing that I had paid the airport fee, the special round of taxes, the visa with its raised seal.
“It appears they did not,” he said.
I yawned. “Should I wait here?” I said, looking around.
He looked past me at the impatient line. “No, miss,” he said. “Enjoy your journey.”