Early in the fall semester, the brochure had been tacked on the bulletin board in the Languages building on campus. If this wasn’t his program, she told herself, it would still be an adventure. Her parents were surprised, reluctant, and Carey found herself swallowing her own anxiety to build a case: what a good use of her Spanish minor, a worthwhile cultural experience, life-changing.
At that point Carey hadn’t even known his name. Benjamin Curtis Williamson, read the obituary a few months later, and the headstone she’d never seen. Ben’s disappearance, his actual vanishing act, would happen on a night when he was supposed to be with Carey. She’d expected Ben to come loping across the Jardín Unión to meet her. I want to see you again, he’d emailed. Just you. Long-legged stride, ducking under low-hanging tree branches. Curly hair a purposeful mess, maybe tied back with a red bandana.
She waited on a wrought-iron bench that welted the back of her favorite skirt, her runner’s thighs. Her legs were tan, even in late February. The day was clear, high seventies; she’d run five miles, matching her high school cross-country pace. She was semi-attempting to read Don Quixote in Spanish, which she could barely parse. She kept it open on her lap for show. Then Mike emerged from the newsstand. Mike Gibley, Gibs, holding Wired magazine and a glass bottle of Coke. She waved him over. Oh, hey, he’d said, so casually, and she wondered if he knew Ben wasn’t coming.
Andrea Cunningham, the director of their exchange program, would knock on Mike’s dorm room door the next morning and barely register surprise that Carey was there. Carey looked at her flimsy purple skirt waiting in a polite circle on the dark tile floor. She was thinking about O.J. the rooster crowing from a nearby rooftop. He crowed at dawn. He crowed at dusk. He crowed repeatedly in the middle of the night. Carey had asked, Who keeps a rooster in the city? Mike snorted. It’s Mexico.
She didn’t live in the dorms. She lived in a walled-in house on the western hill; the Alarcóns were her host family. Carey hadn’t bothered to let them know she wouldn’t be home. They must have called Andrea, who was at the door in her baggy sweats and a blue oversized sweatshirt stamped with Guanajuato in peeling, glittery script. Lupe would have been polite but urgent. Lupe’s son, Bartolo, four years older than Carey, might’ve sat on the roof in the cool night air, keeping watch. Andrea had seemed so much older than them, wiser, though she was only in her late twenties.
Andrea was at the door with tears in her eyes, and Carey was thinking about her own smeared makeup, her clothes, her alibi. But it wasn’t about her. Ben was missing. His wallet had been found. And Carey rationalized the wallet away until Andrea told them, “They also found a shoe.”
Carey felt a sickening burn at her throat and behind her eyes, and nothing could be done.
No. She wasn’t remembering that right, either. What could have been done should have been done before.
Her synapses fired without her consent, a mind’s movie projector replaying images she didn’t want to see. She could push back these memories if she tried hard enough, if she made herself believe that she had control, like pressing a button on a laptop or VCR. Rewind again. Once more. Now pause here. There was Ben, her boyfriend, looming on the edge of the whitewashed rooftop, late afternoon sun haloing his hair. This rooftop wasn’t theirs but they had claimed it, they could be alone, this was the third visit in a week. A small triumph. This time, to take pictures. Ben raised his camera to one expert eye.
“Wait,” he said. As usual, she did.
He crossed the distance between them to brush a few stray strands of hair off her forehead, tucking them slowly behind one ear. His hand moved as it wanted, resting on the nape of her neck. She could make herself shiver, even now, remembering his hand on her skin.
“Better,” he said. His own hair had a life of its own, curls out of control, more auburn that day than brown. She had to laugh at this image of him with a halo: St. Ben. No such person. Saints kept their word, kept their stories straight.
He returned to the roof’s edge, balancing on the railing for a better angle. Seven years later and she cringed to remember it, but this wasn’t how she’d lose him. Not that day and not like this. His feet turned out on the narrow railing like a dancer’s, and he settled there, focusing his attention on her. Finally.
Carey wanted to create a lasting image. She clasped her hands in front, then let them hang at her sides. She retucked the hair that had already come loose in the mountain breeze. With his eyes on her, it took great concentration not to fidget.
“I don’t know how you want me,” she said.
Ben’s expression softened. He smiled a two-dimpled smile for her, his real smile, and winked, his eye like a shutter.
“Just look at the camera,” he said. “Just look at me.”
An easy assignment. Carey had never told him that she’d been looking at him for some time, that she knew him from Indianapolis, that it was not random chance that had placed the two of them in Central Mexico, in the mountains, with American college students from across the country. She felt that she knew him. Back home, she had watched him walk across the mall food court to where a boy of about ten groped for spare change beneath the pop machines. Ben reached over the kid and fed quarters into the slot, then walked away without a word. Following his shift at Prisanti’s, she had watched Ben flip through CDs at Oliver’s Music, using slow but sure sign language to chat with a deaf customer. Or once, when she was running along 56th Street, he was driving a red sedan filled with little kids in soccer jerseys. She swore later to her best friend, Nicole, that they had made eye contact, even at forty-five miles per hour. She’d never tried to learn his name. Meeting him was not the point. Nor was stalking—she didn’t consider her behavior that dire.
Just look at me.
He aimed and shot and nothing happened. He made a clicking sound with his mouth and turned the camera around to examine it, trying to advance the film. Ben’s camera was his only concession to materialism. He wore the hefty, long-lensed model on a strap around his neck, bouncing against his white t-shirt. Walking the streets of Guanajuato, strangers would wave and smile and ask him to take their picture. Sometimes he would. This was his second year in the program. He was no tourist.
Ben’s green backpack slouched along the wall, and he jumped down to retrieve it, ancient soccer shoes kicking up a tiny cloud of dust. He pulled out the Swiss army knife he’d bought from Bartolo’s shop and traced the knife around the shutter button. He’d loaned the camera to someone, he said, and it hadn’t been the same since. Crusty, he said. Ben buffed the lens with a special chamois and stuffed his tools into the backpack, on top of his journal. Ben always had the leather-bound book with him, always in his green backpack, and sometimes she or Mike would ask what he was writing about.
“The cost of bananas in Costa Rica.”
“A manifesto on how to marry rich and live long.”
“A list of my favorite breakfast foods.”
He climbed back on the railing and applied gentle force to his prized possession—six months of pizza shop money, he once told Carey and Mike. Finally it clicked as he stared into the lens, capturing his self-portrait. For a split-second, he wobbled. The building was five stories high, narrow stone steps they climbed together, single-file. A place they’d been using lately for privacy, though they never discussed Mike’s exclusion. Now Ben’s arms splayed, the camera gripped in one hand. She cried out, and he made eye contact as he wavered. He had to have seen the terror on Carey’s face. This was one odd comfort: that he understood how his absence would devastate her.
Ben fell forward to the roof instead of backward to the street. He went down on one knee to keep his camera from taking the hit, head bowed as if praying. She wasn’t Catholic but had seen Ben genuflect at the Basilica, where she’d attended