We Were Never Here

“The sun was sinking, and I realized the city’s vacancy would be an asset: fewer men to bother us, two women walking the streets at night. You know what they say about women traveling alone.”

While Emily often struggles with feelings of guilt about her assault, she frequently scans her surroundings for danger. She is not the kind of person who has a careless sense of invincibility. In addition to showing this character trait, this passage provides a moment of irony; as a fellow “woman traveling alone,” Kristen does not even cross Emily’s radar as a potential danger, despite being her biggest threat.

“I just…wow, I really thought you’d say yes […] I’m bummed, obviously, but I’ll deal with it. Hey, tell me about this guy! There’s a guy?!”

On a first reading, Kristen’s reaction when Emily declines to accompany her on a six-month backpacking trip seems not only reasonable but kind. She is honest about her feelings but accepts Emily’s answer and shows interest in her romantic life. However, on a second reading, the reader can discern that the quick shift to discussing Aaron is Kristen’s first attempt to gather information she will eventually use against Emily.

“He shoved me again so that the back of my head crashed into the wall. And I was fighting back and he started to close his hands around my throat. And I was terrified, obviously. Afraid for my life. So I reached out and grabbed whatever I could find and my hand closed around a bottle of wine and I swung it, hard, to get him away from me.”

Kristen’s account of Paolo’s attack very closely mirrors Sebastian’s attack of Emily. In trying to garner Emily’s sympathy and belief, Kristen almost goes too far in creating a narrative similarity to Emily’s experience. Fortunately for Kristen, Emily is too shocked and frightened to register the suspicious similarity.

“I chose to believe her. Maybe we were never here.”

In the passage containing the novel’s titular phrase, Emily does something she does frequently in the pair’s decade-long friendship: She chooses to believe Kristen. Here, she chooses to believe that they have nothing to fear even though authorities uncover their involvement in Paolo’s death fairly quickly. Previously, she chose to believe Kristen about the quality of her romantic relationships. The two have a dynamic in which choosing to believe Kristen is an essential component of the friendship.

“I shuffled up the aisle, taking in the mess we’d made of the plane. One hundred and fifty feet of bedlam, of an aircraft in shambles as we ambled away from our titanic tin-can trash can […] We’re all disgusting, every single one of us. Making messes and then wandering away.”

As she deboards the plane from Chile to Milwaukee, Emily extrapolates her feeling of guilt onto her fellow plane passengers, theorizing that all humans have a tendency to abandon their own messes. Emily frequently walks a tightrope between feeling guilty but not wanting to feel too guilty, not wanting to believe herself capable of true malice. Here, she demonstrates this habit by generalizing her actions to all humankind, as if leaving garbage on a plane is the same as burying a body in a desert.

“I loved Kristen, would give anything to be physically with her right now as we processed our horror. But clearly, something about us together served as a beacon for very bad things. The two of us traveling alone were a magnet for violence.”

Emily becomes so convinced that she and Kristen are under some sort of travel curse that she hesitates even to accompany Kristen on a trip upstate to Nana and Bill’s lake house. While she does not yet know the truth, her feelings mirror the guilty feelings of many assault survivors who try to reign in their behavior to prevent future attacks, as if they were responsible for their own victimhood.

“Fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain […] maybe men aren’t out to experience pain so much as fear, the icy jolt of feeling alive. They crave it because they have no idea how miserable it is to feel that frigid blast a hundred times a day.”

Emily reflects on the many ways in which men have historically run toward pain and fear rather than away from it. She speculates that they enjoy such a constant feeling of safety in their everyday lives that they must seek out these thrills in order to avoid boredom. Women, by contrast, need no such stimulants as their everyday lives are peppered with sudden possibilities of danger.

“I’d been thrilled when Aaron noticed me, and when, tonight, he called me his girlfriend. But on the street, I tried to creep past any other male gazes, ghostlike. That’s womanhood, I suppose, both craving and feeling repulsed by attention.”

Emily succinctly articulates the catch-22 in which women so often find themselves. Many women feel the need to live up to societal beauty standards in romantic relationships—but the moment a woman’s outward appearance falls under the scrutiny of random men on the street, her attractiveness becomes a liability. The constant threat of violence complicates women’s relationship with their own bodies, a relationship in which they can go from wanting to showcase their bodies to wanting to cover them in a matter of seconds.

“While everyone else in my life had given me their vague, blanket approval of him [Colin] at the time (‘He seems great; glad to see you happy!’), Kristen had been the one to look closely and ask questions. One night she’d pointed out that his irritated response to my canceling plans ‘reeked of a personality disorder.’”

Emily is particularly susceptible to Kristen’s suggestions about boyfriends because her first serious boyfriend, Ben, really did have an anger issue that eventually led to physical violence. As a result, Emily does not trust her own judgment. Add to that the human tendency to believe oneself is right in a disagreement, and Kristen’s speculation that any pushback from Colin is related to a “personality disorder” finds a willing receptor in Emily.

“The castle-like monstrosity on the right had been built over Kristen’s childhood home—the one she shared with her parents before they were killed in a house fire. I’d always found it odd and a little sadistic that her grandparents stayed put: Living with them meant she was always two doors down from the site of that tragedy.”

Kristen’s grandparents, Nana and Bill, remain mysterious figures throughout the novel. They are not kind to Kristen, but it’s unclear whether they suspect, like Emily temporarily does, that Kristen had something to do with her parents’ deaths, or whether they are just not naturally kind people. Either way, Emily rightly observes that they made a peculiarly cruel choice to keep Kristen so close to the site of her parents’ deaths.

“‘I want to exchange numbers in case you ever need anything. Email too. We should have done this a long time ago. I know you’re all set up here, but since your parents are so far away.’ [Nana’s] eyes flickered. ‘Just in case.’”

The brief sentence “Her eyes flickered” may seem incidental, but it provides the first hint that Nana wants to talk to Emily about Kristen but does not know how to do so. The reader never learns how much, if anything, Nana knows about Kristen’s machinations, but she definitely does not trust her granddaughter. She tries again to discuss Kristen with Emily in a later chapter, but Kristen suddenly appears and interrupts them, giving the impression that she is always monitoring Emily.

“‘Was it, like, a freak accident? What started the fire?’

‘I don’t know, what starts any house fire? Faulty wiring or something?’”

Aaron’s question about the cause of the house fire that killed Kristen’s parents should set off alarm bells for the reader. Since Emily does not know the answer, the author has no reason to include this exchange except to plant doubt in the reader’s mind about the fire’s true cause. Though the idea that Kristen set the fire turns out to be a red herring, the actual traumatic cause undoubtedly influenced her development into adulthood.

“Everyone liked those kinds of women—women who were down, who were game, who were cool. They put everyone at ease and shushed the Nervous Nelly hissing, Is this safe? Is this smart? Do we really want to be surprised?”

In an earlier passage, Emily ruminates about the way many women both want and fear being desired. Here, she expresses that women are both lectured about protecting themselves and criticized for being too “uptight” when they actually take protective measures. Maintaining a balance between “fun” and “safe” is often an impossible task.

“One of my earliest memories was of singing ‘This Is the Song that Doesn’t End’ at the top of my lungs as I ran up and down the stairs, a three-year-old whirling dervish. I can still remember the bright, sharp confusion as my father stopped me in my tracks and spanked my tiny buttocks. The memory filled me with steamy shame, too tender-hot to tell Adrienne.”

This incident with Emily’s father is her first memory of being punished for something she did not realize was wrong. She gets the same feeling when she thinks about her near-rape at Sebastian’s hands. In both cases, the intellectual understanding that she was not “misbehaving” does not eliminate her feelings of shame.

“The scavenger hunt did feel a little like a tacit declaration: Nobody knows your brain like I do. But no, it was a labor of love, nothing more. Not a reminder that she would always outwit me, always have the upper hand.”

Throughout the novel, the friends’ secret coded language sometimes strains the boundaries of believability. It requires them to be so precisely in sync with each other’s thought processes that it seems almost impossible. This level of connection underscores both why Emily struggles for so long to believe the worst of Kristen and why Kristen is so adept at manipulating her.

“I can’t go back in time and do things differently, Em. I can’t make it all go away. And the way you look at me ever since then—the way you’re looking at me now, like I’m a monster, like the sight of me makes you sick. It was an accident. I never meant for it to happen the way it did. I hate myself, Emily. I hate myself for putting us through that again, and you hate me too.”

Kristen expertly turns the blame back on Emily when questioned about her blasé attitude about Paolo’s death. Rather than just admitting concern, she takes the opportunity to make Emily feel guilty. This tactic ensures Emily remains under Kristen’s control even while Kristen plays the victim.

“I’d give anything right now for the assurance of safety when it came to our crimes. The promise that no one would arrest us, besmirch our good names, extradite us, or try us in the court of public opinion. Even if I could secure that kind of bubble wrap, it wouldn’t protect me from a lifetime of fear. Fear of verbal abuse, of emotional blackmail, of careless misogyny designed to make me feel small. All the acts of casual violence I attracted, expected, thanks to my designated gender.”

Emily is devastated to realize that even if police close their investigation into Paolo’s death, the emotional aftermath of Sebastian’s attack will not resolve. Being out of legal jeopardy is not the same as being safe. She fears that she may never regain a feeling of true safety.

“Tears brimmed again as the truth lapped at my mind. Unavoidable. Irrefutable. Kristen’s love looks a lot like control.”

This belated realization comes when Emily has no option left but to face it. She owes the reckoning primarily to the expert advice of her therapist, Adrienne, who sees the situation from the objective perspective from which Emily, or even Aaron, cannot see it. Once Emily has this realization, the puzzle pieces of Kristen’s behavior quickly start locking into place.

“Finally I’d heard Kristen’s pleas, distorted as if we were underwater, scuba diving in the deep. Crying, begging me to stop. And I’d turned, grabbed for her. She lunged toward him, murmuring in horror, but I dragged her away and into a hug, and we’d leaned against each other, shaking.”

Here, Emily unlocks a new “memory” of what happened in Cambodia, thanks to Kristen’s insistence. While she had previously remembered herself telling Kristen to stop as Kristen kicked Sebastian repeatedly, she now remembers Kristen pleading this while she, Emily, kicked him. The fact that she visualizes this scene as if from memory demonstrates how unreliable and suggestible memory can be.

“Now I could flick back and forth between the two scenarios, fake and real, the kick coming from her foot, from mine. […] Right? Or was Kristen manipulating me? Maybe she knew if she said it confidently enough, if she looked at me hard like I’d lost my mind, I’d believe her. I’d convince myself I’d done it. So much power. So much confidence. Confidence—that was another item on the list of traits the modern woman is supposed to exude.”

Emily realizes that she is seriously considering believing Kristen’s version of events because Kristen delivers it very confidently. Along with Kristen’s independence and free-spiritedness, her confidence is a trait Emily envies. Emily does not realize that these traits are mostly charades covering for Kristen’s extreme reliance on her.

“No—I was a kind person, a good person, living my little life. I loved animals and nature and yoga and pizza.”

This passage perfectly encapsulates Emily’s belief that she could not be responsible for Sebastian’s murder, or any other nefarious actions, because of her implicit goodness. The childlike way in which she expresses this thought mirrors the thought’s flimsiness. She must know, on some level, that people who like animals, nature, yoga, and pizza are capable of anger and violence, but she desperately wants to avoid thinking of herself this way and therefore clings to her simplistic rubric for “good people” and “bad people.”

“Joy turned to captivity. Agency turned to impotence. Contained, controlled, trapped under the thumb and other fingers of a force who saw me only as the end of a preposition. Daughter of. Result of. Cause of noise and mess and annoyance, disturbing the air molecules around us. Wrath rose up through me, a huge neon plume.”

Emily’s thoughts right before pushing Kristen reveal the intertwining of her feelings about the men in her life and her feelings about Kristen’s manipulations. Her anger has as much to do with the cruelty of her father, Ben, and Sebastian as it does with Kristen. She is tired of them all making her feel wrong, annoying, and small.

“I saw with piercing lucidity that I’d had it all wrong. They had it all wrong. A laugh rumbled through me, light and clear. I was a killer; they should fear me.”

The novel is never clear-cut on whether Emily’s or Kristen’s blows killed Sebastian, but for one moment on the cliff, Emily changes from being horrified at her own potential murderousness to welcoming the thought. Briefly, she revels in the feeling of being dangerous rather than being in danger. While the radical and instantaneous nature of this shift reflects her identity’s instability, she soon comes to her senses.