Just One Day

Eighteen
Somehow, using the same we’re-adults-you-have-to-treat-us-that-way argument from the Beer Dinner, plus promising to hire a hotel-approved taxi for the entire night, Melanie and I manage to procure parental permission to go to that New Year’s Eve party. It’s being held on a narrow crescent of sand, all lit up with tiki torches, and at ten o’clock, it’s already slamming. There is a low stage on which the touted Mexican reggae band will play, though right now a d.j. is playing techno.
There are several giant piles of discarded shoes. Melanie tosses off her bright-orange flip-flops. I hesitate before taking off my less conspicuous black leather sandals, hoping I’ll find them again, because if I lose anything else, I swear I will never hear the end of it.
“Quite the bacchanal,” Melanie says approvingly, nodding to the guys in swim trunks holding bottles of tequila by the neck, the girls in sarongs with their hair freshly cornrowed. There are even actual Mexicans here, the guys smartly dressed in sheer white shirts, hair slicked back, and the girls in fancy party dresses, cut up to there, legs long and brown.
“Dance first or drink first?”
I don’t want to dance. So I say drink. We line up at the packed bar. Behind us is a group of French-speaking people, which makes me do a double take. There’s hardly anyone but Americans at our hotel, but of course people from everywhere come to Mexico.
“Here.” Melanie shoves a drink into my hand. It’s in a hollowed-out piece of pineapple. I take a sniff. It smells like suntan lotion. It is sweet and warm and burns slightly going down. “Good girl.”
I think of Ms. Foley. “Don’t call me that.”
“Bad girl.”
“I’m not that either.”
She looks peeved. “Nothing girl.”
We drink our drinks in silence, taking in the growing party. “Let’s dance,” Melanie says, yanking me toward the ring of sand that has been allocated as the dance floor.
I shake my head. “Maybe later.”
And there’s that sigh again. “Are you going to be like this all night?”
“Like what?” I think of what she called me on the tour—adventure averse—and what she said at the pool. “So like me? I thought that’s what you loved about me.”
“What is your problem? You’ve had a stick up your ass this whole trip! It’s not my fault your mom is Study-Hall Nazi.”
“No, but it is your fault for making me feel like crap because I don’t want to dance. I hate techno. I have always hated techno, so you should know that, what with me being so reliably me.”
“Fine. Why don’t you be reliably you and sit on the sidelines while I dance.”
“Fine.”
She leaves me on the perimeter of the circle and goes off and just starts dancing with random people. First she dances with some guy with dreadlocks and then turns and dances with a girl with super-short hair. She seems to be having a fine time out there, swirling, twirling, and it strikes me that if I didn’t already know her, she would no longer be someone I would know.
I watch her for at least twenty minutes. In between the monotonous techno songs, she talks to other people, laughs. After a half hour, I’m getting a headache. I try to catch her eye, but I eventually give up and slip away.
The party stretches all the way down the curve of the water—and into it—where a bunch of people are skinny-dipping in the moonlit sea. A little way’s farther down, it gets more mellow, with a bonfire and people around it playing guitar. I plant myself a few feet away from the bonfire, close enough to feel its heat and hear the crackle of wood. I dig my feet into the sand; the top layer is cool, but underneath it’s still warm from the day’s sunshine.
Down the beach, the techno stops, and the reggae band takes the stage. The more mellow bump-bump-thump is nice. In the water, a girl starts dancing on a guy’s shoulder, pulls off her bikini top, and stands there, half naked like a moonshine mermaid, before diving in with a quiet splash. Behind me, the guys on guitars start up with “Stairway to Heaven.” It mingles strangely well with the reggae.
I lie down in the sand and look up at the sky. From this vantage point, it’s like I have the beach all to myself. The band finishes a song, and the singer announces that it’s a half hour until the New Year. “New Year. A?o nuevo. It’s a tabula rasa. Time to hacer borrón y cuenta nueva,” he chants. “One chance to wipe the board clean.”
Can you really do that? Wipe the board clean? Would I even want to? Would I wipe all of last year away if I could?
“Tabula rasa,” the singer repeats. “A new chance to start over. Start fresh, baby. Make amends. Make ch-ch-changes. To be who you want to be. Come the stroke of midnight, before you kiss your amor, save un beso para tí. Close your eyes, think of the year ahead. This is your chance. This can be the day it all changes.”
Really? It’s a nice idea, but why January first? You might as well say April nineteenth is the day that everything changes. A day is a day is a day. It means nothing.
“At the stroke of midnight, make your wish. Qué es tu deseo? For yourself. For the world.”
It’s New Year’s. Not a birthday cake. And I’m not eight anymore. I don’t believe in wishes coming true. But if I did, what would I wish for? To undo that day? To see him again?
Normally I have such willpower. Like a dieter resisting a cookie, I don’t even let myself go there. But for the briefest second, I do. I picture him right here, walking down the beach, hair reflecting in the flames, eyes dark and light and full of teasing, and of so many other things. And for a second, I almost see him.
As I open myself to the fantasy, I wait for the accompanying clench of pain. But it doesn’t come. Instead my breath slows and something warms inside me. I abandon caution and all good sense and wrap myself in thoughts of him. My own hands circle around my chest, as if he were holding me. For one brief moment, everything feels right.
“I thought I’d never find you!”
I look up. Melanie is striding toward me. “I’ve been right here.”
“I’ve been looking for you for the last half hour! Up and down the beach. I had no idea where you were.”
“I was right here.”
“I looked everywhere for you. The party’s getting totally out of control, like roofies-in-the-punch wild. Some girl just puked six inches from my feet, and guys are hitting on me with the worst pickup lines in the world. I’ve had my ass pinched more times than I can count, and one charming guy just asked me if I wanted a bite of his sandwich—and he wasn’t talking about food!” She shakes her head as if trying to dislodge the memory. “We’re supposed to have each other’s backs!”
“I’m sorry. You were having fun, and I guess I just lost track of time.”
“You lost track of time?”
“I guess so. I’m really sorry you were worried. But I’m fine. Do you want to go back to the party?”
“No! I’m over it. Let’s leave.”
“We don’t have to.” I look toward the bonfire. The flames are dancing, making it hard to pull my gaze away. “I don’t mind staying.” For the first time in a long while, I am having an okay time, I’m okay being where I am.
“Well, I do. I’ve spent the last half hour panicking, and now I’m sober, and I’m beyond over this place. It’s like a Telemundo frat party.”
“Oh, okay. Let’s go then.”
I follow her back to the shoe piles, where it takes ages for her to find her flip-flops, and then we get into our waiting taxi. By the time I think to look at the dashboard clock, it’s twenty past twelve. I don’t really believe what the singer said about midnight wishes, but now that I’ve missed mine, I feel like I should’ve tried before the window of opportunity closed.
We ride home in silence, save for the cab driver softly singing to his radio. When we pull into the gates of the resort, Melanie hands him some bills, and for a minute, I get an idea.
“Melanie. What if we hire this guy in a day or two and go off somewhere, away from the tourists?”
“Why would we want to do that?”
“I don’t know. To see what would happen if we tried something different. Excuse me, se?or, how much would it be for us to hire you for a whole day?”
“Lo siento. No hablo inglés.”
Melanie rolls her eyes at me. “I guess you have to be satisfied with your one big adventure.”
At first I think she means this party, but then I realize she means the ruins. Because I did actually manage to get our families to visit a different ruin. We went to Coba instead of Tulum. And just as I’d hoped, we stopped at a small village along the way, and for a moment there, I’d gotten excited, thinking this was it, I had actually escaped into the real Mexico. Okay, my whole family was in tow, but it was a Mayan village. Except then Susan and my mom went crazy buying beaded jewelry, and the villagers came out and played drums for us, and we all were invited to dance in a circle and then there was even a traditional spiritual cleansing. But everyone was videoing everything, and after his cleansing, my dad “donated” ten dollars to a hat that was conspicuously put in front of us, and I realized that this was no different from being on the tour.
The condo is quiet. The parents are all in bed, though as soon as the door closes Mom pops out of her bedroom. “You’re early,” she says.
“I was tired,” Melanie lies. “Good night. Happy New Year.” She pads off toward our room, and Mom gives me a New Year’s kiss and goes back to hers.
I’m nowhere near tired, so I sit out on the balcony and listen to the dwindling sounds of the hotel’s party. On the horizon, a lightning storm is brewing. I reach into my purse for my phone and, for the first time in months, open the photo album.
His face is so beautiful, it makes my stomach twist. But he seems unreal, not someone I would ever know. But then I look at me, the me in the photo, and I hardly recognize her, either, and not just because the hair is different, but because she seems different. That’s not me. That’s Lulu. And she’s just as gone as he is.
Tabula rasa. That’s what the reggae singer said. Maybe I can’t get my wish, but I can try to wipe the slate clean, try to get over this.
I allow myself look at the picture of Willem and Lulu in Paris for a long minute.
“Happy New Year,” I tell them.
And then I erase them.