2005
Kat didn’t know this was the last night of our friendship. I didn’t either, of course. We were both seventeen and spent our July days in one piece, red bathing suits, pretending to look like we could save people. Our customers were most at home bobbing around the man made wave pool like bloated, belly-up otters in the peak of California summer. It was a common thing for tween boys to pull Sandlots on us. They’d slap their arms into the hyper-chlorinated pool, fake a drowning, then make a kissy face while wearing foggy goggles. We did not save one person that summer. I don’t think we could have if we’d tried.
Kat and I worked at Knott’s Soak City: the water park in San Diego, a ten-minute drive from the US-Mexico border. We were AP honors kids and shared crushes on long-haired boys who reckoned they’d become The Beatles. We weren’t best friends, but we were summer friends.
We thought this night would be a normal summer night, one of teen adventure. In reality, this would be one of the last care-free nights of my youth. But I didn’t know this yet, either.
I could hear her in the kitchen of her parents’ home, rattling through sandy oak snack cabinets all the way from the bathroom. Tonight, we were going to a party, and there would probably be cute waterpark boys and alcohol.
“Are you hungry?” Kat hollered.
“Starving.” I turned off my hair straightener, zipped my make-up bag closed, and skipped into the kitchen. I had scarfed down a carne asada burrito earlier, but I was always hungry. She pulled sticky dried mangoes from a ginormous Costco bag. “They’re all I eat,” she said. “I need to lose weight.”
“But you are so skinny.” And she was. A pretty 5’9” brunette Barbie. I rifled through her parents’ snacks and grabbed a mini Milky Way and a box of Ranch Wheat Thins. I’d played a sport almost every season since the eighth grade — water polo, swimming, diving, field hockey — and had become accustomed to eating anything. Kat wasn’t an athlete, though, so food was different for her.
“I want to lose weight in my face mostly,” she said. “It’s so fat.” Her thumb and pointer finger pinched her cheeks together, then blew them out like a blowfish. “See?”
“Well, now I do,” I joked. I dug my hand into the starchy bag of dehydrated mangoes. I’d never tasted them before. “But seriously, cut it out. Your face is cute especially with those freckles,” I told her as I slid a strip of sugar jerky into my mouth. A faint sweetness swam as I chewed and chewed and chewed some more. My teeth split and cubed the mango slices. I couldn’t stop.
We arrived late to the party because we couldn’t decide on what to wear. I was in a studded belt phase, so I wore a navy tee with a Roxy logo on the front with jeans and red Converse. Kat dressed more girly in a teal halter top and bell bottom jeans.
The party was at another lifeguard’s house. On the back patio, I pulled a bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade from a cooler of gas station ice. I had driven my parents’ silver spaceship of a minivan, and I planned to not have more than this. Kat had told her parents we’d return back to her house, late. I’d smiled at Kat’s parents, in agreement. At the party, Kat found a group of people in a room that glowed with cheap disco lights. Someone poured her a cup of Malibu and Coke. At seventeen, every drink was sexy and delicious.
As the night continued, I beckoned Kat to join me for an after party at an older lifeguard’s house at around 11 p.m. Kat’s cheeks were airbrushed red, and she laughed with a group of guys. “Let’s go,” I said, taking her hand. But she pulled away. “I want to stay,” she giggled. Someone said they would bring her home safely. I cannot remember who. I just remembered that I believed them.
The next morning, I peeled my face off a gray plaid couch. I’d ended up sleeping at the after-party house. I hadn’t spent the night at Kat’s like I’d promised.
I clicked on my blue Nokia brick phone and realized I’d made a mistake. The grayscale screen revealed seven missed calls from my mom.
I called her back. She raged. I’d never really been in trouble before. My mom was normally sweet when she spoke, but this morning, the sweet veneer did not shine. She told me Kat’s parents had called to ask my whereabouts when they found Kat at around 4 a.m., after a neighbor called, passed out face first in the front lawn of their house. Like a starfish. I still can never get that image out of my head. My summer friend Kat, face planted in the grass under the palm of the moon while the sprinklers doused her, drowning her flared blue jeans. Her parents rushed her to the ER. She had consumed a dangerous amount of alcohol for her size. They had her stomach pumped. They told my mom they worried if no one found her she would have died. Everyone blamed me.
I was supposed to be watching her. I was supposed to make sure she got home safely. I was sketchy for going to an older guy’s house and doing “who knows what” (spoiler: sleeping) instead of thinking about my friend. The night Kat didn’t eat anything besides dried mangoes became the night our family cat, Sitka, died, too. He was hit by a car. Then he pulled himself back to the front yard, dragging his deflated back legs behind him. He died while sprawled out on our own dewy morning grass. I can’t remember if this was true, but I remembered someone telling me that the cat dying was my fault. A karmic event. Cat died, Kat lived. This summer changed me, and in two years, I’d be rocked by a dire diagnosis. A newborn baby would enter my family. We’d be nineteen years apart, and at four months old he’d be labeled failure to thrive. He’d be diagnosed with a rare disease, with less than 200 patients in the world, one I’d never heard of. A prognosis that would shave the skin off my own body.
But none of that was in my mind yet; it hadn’t happened. But I did take the blame for Kat’s starfish night for years. And the cat’s too. Until a decade and a half later. When I remembered the mangoes.
2011
Six years had passed since the night Kat almost died and mangoes had slipped miles out of my mind. In the last six years, I’d gone from a confident athlete with a 4.2 GPA to a quasi-depressed server who’d barely scraped by in college to earn her bachelor’s. In the last few years my baby brother’s illness had broken my family and me in ways I could have never expected. I’d dropped out of college when I was told my brother was supposed to die. He’d been diagnosed with Aicardi Goutieres-Syndrome, a leukodystrophy. By the time he was one, doctors weren’t sure how his life would turn out. Every day revealed a twisted heartbreaking miracle. Every day meant surviving a hail storm of grief and gratitude. And I understood, now, why it would feel good to only eat dried fruit for dinner. Sadness had taught me that.
At twenty-three, I had started my post-college employment at a restaurant called The Red Marlin (a mythical creature; marlins were never red). On the job, I had met a Boston boy named Nick. We had begun hanging out frequently. Tonight, I had the night off but he told me to grab the key from under a potted succulent and enjoy his apartment on Oliver Avenue in Pacific Beach to myself.
On my way over, I stopped at the grocery store, Vons, to grab something to eat and drink. My sweaty fingers pulled open a freezer door. Lean Cuisines were on sale. I yanked a box of cold Sesame Stir Fry Chicken out of the freezer shelf and slid it into my shopping basket. I’d begun eating Lean Cuisines back in college. When I’d stopped being an athlete, I’d learned my body was no different than Kat’s.
In the alcohol aisle, I drew a fifth of Absolut Mango Vodka from the shelf. It was on sale, only $8.99. The beginning stages of dating often made me freakishly nervous, so I wanted a drink before Nick arrived at the apartment. At the time, I wasn’t sure if this was a low-key date, but I wanted to prepare in case it was. After I checked out, I drove to Nick’s, let myself in, and turned on HBO.
I could not remember much after microwaving my Lean Cuisine because immediately after scarfing it down, I lined up a couple of shots for myself. I’d been out of college for less than a year, where I’d lived with nine other sorority girls on a house overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and I did not yet know that it was not natural adult behavior to take shots by yourself after eating a 280-calorie frozen dinner.
The next thing I knew Nick was shaking me on the couch. “Courtney,” he said. “Are you okay?” he asked. The smell of old chicken and mango burned and whipped through my sinuses.
“Oh no,” I said. “What happened?” Then I saw. Puke doused my jeans, my sweatshirt, and blanketed the couch and my backpack.
Nick had on his blue and white striped long sleeve shirt and khaki pants, our uniform at work, so I could tell he’d just arrived. “I don’t know,” I said. “I had two, maybe three shots,” I stood up, ran to the bathroom and pulled my clothes off my body. I noticed my body for the first time in a while. My muscles had slinked away and I looked thin but not super thin. That morning I had eaten avocado toast for breakfast, maybe I’d forgotten to eat lunch, but this shouldn’t have happened, I thought. I shouldn’t have gotten this sick.
After I washed up, I walked into the living room wearing a pair of Nick’s sweats and sweatshirt and found him cleaning the couch. “I’ve got that,” I said, and ran over, embarrassed.
“I’m almost done,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
I bit my lip and walked into the kitchen, saw the Mango Vodka, maybe one-tenth gone. The bottle nosedived into the trash—I never wanted to see it again.
A couple of months later, Nick and I were officially together (surprising, post-puke and all) and decided to have dinner at The Red Marlin. Christie, the bartender, was our server. She was our good friend and the one who’d encouraged Nick to ask me out on a real first date.
“What’ll it be, you two lovebirds?” Christie asked, smiling. She looked like a cool pin-up girl with dark chocolate hair and red apple lips. A real-life Betty Boop.
“Whatever you need to get rid of,” I said. That was code for free drinks. The bar often had old bottles of liquor hanging around that they needed to move for inventory.
She brought back two drinks. Nick and I clinked our glasses, and I pulled the straw to my lips and sipped. And then I could not stop coughing. “I can’t drink this.”
Nick swigged a sip. “It’s not bad.”
Christie waltzed back five minutes later. “How is everything?”
“It’s great, thank you. Mind telling me what’s in this?”
“Mango vodka, sprite, some orange liquor.”
She left and I immediately turned to Nick, panicking. “I can’t drink this.” My body trembled and had not forgotten its past response. Desperate, I gave the drink to a busser to either drink or dump.
Later, during my next shift at the restaurant, Christie wasn’t speaking to me. “You never send a free drink back,” she said, fire charring through her eyes.
“But,” I said.
“Never.”
I walked away from the bar, head down, with my hands in my white apron pockets.
Later that summer, I brought Nick home on the Fourth of July to meet my family. I’d told him about my brother, now four. Nick was curious, gentle, inquisitive. “What’s wrong with him?” he’d asked when we drove away after a day of BBQ and pool fun. But when he asked this, it wasn’t full of fear, but rather, soft, sincere inquiry. By the end of that summer, Nick and my brother had bonded. Nick loved holding a pacifier in his mouth, rocking him to sleep. I still keep a photo on my phone, the blue blanket wrapped around my brother’s tiny body; Nick’s tan arms bear-hugging him. Even if Christie was going to ignore me, I had Nick’s growing love to look forward to, a love that sank into my whole family.
2014
In a few months, Nick and I would be engaged. My brother had now begun experiencing seizures, so a darkness loomed. Christie hadn’t spoken to me in two years. She’d talked to me, but not in the way we used to talk, like friends. But one night, when it was just the two of us closing down the bar, she snapped her silence.
Christie held my hand and led me downstairs to the basement, where the employee lockers were, then shut the door. Her eyes were watery, red. Her lips were dry, no red lipstick tonight. She looked like a shorter version of Kat, but fierce. She was from Jersey after all.
Her eyes didn’t lose contact with mine as she unbuttoned her uniform, took off her shirt. With only her white tank top on, she pulled my hand to her right breast. She slid my palm under the white cotton, under her bra so I could touch her skin.
“Do you feel it?” she asked.
Her breast was soft with a hard pit, like a mango. I couldn’t lie and say no. The lump was unmistakable. “What is it?”
“Breast cancer,” she said. “Late stage.”
After work, I bought Trader Joe’s out of our favorite snacks, the ones we’d eaten together before our falling out: Hummus trio, peanut butter pretzels, Calabrese salami, honey goat cheese, sesame crackers, two bottles of French wine. I stopped by the gas station to pick up Christie’s favorite slim Capri cigarettes, two packs. When you were dying, cigarettes and calories didn’t matter.
Christie met me at Nick’s place and just the two of us sat on the patio, drinking and eating under the smoggy showcase of stars. I felt her boob again, told her everything would be okay, but these were hollow promises.
As soon as I could, I told her I was sorry. “I should’ve kept that drink,” I said. “I just had this awful experience with Mango Vodka once.” I didn’t normally smoke, but tonight I did, tweezing a Capri from Christie’s fingers.
“I was so stupid for being mad at you for so long,” she said.
“No, no you weren’t. I was the stupid one.” I inhaled. Like the longer I puffed, the longer Christie would stay alive.
2015
A man named Julio held a paper sign outside the San José airport in Costa Rica: Welcome Newlyweds Nick and Courtney! The previous weekend, we’d hosted 180 guests for our wedding. Our ring bearer was my brother who walked down the aisle in his blue walker adorned with white bows, rings tied to the front bar. In that moment, the world had stopped and I’d thought everything had become good; the world was a place we could survive. Toward the end of the reception that night we’d conducted a “money dance” where guests could slip bills into my dress, and Nick’s tuxedo. Traditionally, the bride danced with the men, and the groom with the women. But I’d had one female partner: Christie. Her hair was short, just growing back from chemotherapy. She’d slid a twenty into my bra and whispered in my ear that she was pregnant.
Julio drove the van out of the airport, down the busy bumpy roads that paralleled endless groves of plentiful fruit trees.
“Que es eso?” I pointed to the tall, sparkly green trees, my Spanish a little rusty.
“Mangoes!” he said, enthusiastically.
“No way!” Nick said. “Can we go see?” Nick loved mangoes.
“Sure, sure.” Julio pulled the van off the road, and we bumped closer to the grove. “Vámanos,” he said, opening Nick’s door. He held a flimsy black plastic bag for Nick to fill.
“I’m staying here.” By this time, an inkling had rooted in me: stay away when mangoes were thrown into the mix.
Nick and Julio ran out to the groves, and Julio taught Nick how to shake the trees to move the mangoes to fall. Green blobs tumbled, and Nick’s smile widened to a slice of peach pie.
Twenty-four hours later, the bag of mangoes sat on our TV stand in the hotel room, and Nick woke me in the middle of the night. “Look at my mouth,” he said. He held out his phone flashlight for me to get a better look. I couldn’t see anything so I flipped on the lamp next to my bedside. Pimply red bumps erupted across his lips. “What is wrong with your mouth?” I gasped.
“I think I have Mango Mouth.”
“What?” I’d never heard of a fruit mouth for anything. He showed me his phone again, but this time it was the homepage of WebMD showcasing photos of patients affected by toxic mangoes. I wasn’t sure if the blisters were from the mangoes we ate for our first breakfast in the hotel, overlooking the fizzing Mt. Arenal volcano. From the breakfast buffet, the thick yellow slices were velvety and tasted if they’d been sewn with honey. Or maybe the outbreak was from his adventure in the grove near the airport. I told him we’d go to a pharmacy and see a doctor in the morning.
And it turned out he had contracted Mango Mouth. We learned some mango skins housed the same toxins that poison ivy possessed. Nick happened to be highly sensitive and allergic to poison ivy. Over the course of the next nine days of our honeymoon, red bumps spewed and bloomed over his entire body. Tan legs morphed to red scales. Intimacy became a far-off dream.
2020
In the natural food store, Sprouts, I pushed the grocery cart past the mangoes on sale—two for a dollar. Nick bagged some Brussel sprouts. Our son sat in the front of the cart. I wasn’t sure if he’d ever had a mango, so the slightest thought traversed my mind: maybe try again.
“Want some mangoes?” I asked Nick.
“No way.” He did not hesitate.
My fingers slid across the green waxy skin, electric. The saliva in my mouth bubbled as memories of mangoes churned: What had really happened that one summer night with Kat? Why had I blacked out on Mango Vodka, when I’d drunk similar amounts before? Why did mangoes poison my honeymoon? For answers, I’d turn to the Internet.
Back home, I pulled out my laptop and opened Facebook. I searched for Kat. I wanted to see how her life turned out. I wanted to find a clue to see if that one night had broken something in her and if it was my fault, the mangoes, or something else. She wasn’t there, though, no account existed. I clicked on her older sister, whom I was friends with, recently married. But Kat did not appear in the row of pink bridesmaids. Ah, but then there she was, in 2017, posing with her sister, her face still the perfect heart-shape that it was fifteen years before. But since 2017, it seemed Kat had disappeared.
Christie had disappeared too, but in a different way.
Christie had remained cancer free after chemo. She had her breasts removed, and quit the restaurant to become a yoga instructor. We talked almost daily. But, when she became pregnant, the cancer re-awakened and freestyled through her body, to her brain, slowly poisoning her. The night she died she was the mother of two girls under two. A few days before she died, her girls left Easter gifts on her lap, where she had laid in a hospital bed. To honor Christie on the night she passed, Nick and I shared a bottle of wine, one we used to sell at The Red Marlin, La Crema Pinot Noir, when every night was a summer night.
I clicked on Christie’s Facebook timeline. Her profile picture was of her in a peach dress, representing her beautiful hair-free head. The last posts people had written for her were in July of 2019, wishing her happy birthday. I saw my post. I told her I missed her.
I closed Facebook and dug into articles, digging for a sign. I wondered if all these linked vignettes about mangoes had a deeper message to deliver.
A simple Google search divulged mango crazes, health benefits, popular smoothies. By now my body was the keeper of time, just another thing to deal with, a post-baby campsite that folded and rolled; healthy smoothie recipes were the last thing I wanted. To find anything exposing mangoes for what I desired to pin them for, cursed, the information remained scant. After a while, I grew tired.
I had hoped to find an answer. Something to tell me these moments I regretted were not my fault. Something to tell me I could swim back in time: bring Kat home, not buy the mango vodka, keep the drink, stop Nick from making contact with the fruit. And for what?
Because I believed an answer would replace my fractured pieces, just a little.
I rewound the film of my life and stopped on an image, pinpointing to when my obsessions began: I saw myself at nineteen cradling my four-month-old brother, the size of a small football, wanting to tell him he was not sick. It was the first time I realized how much I wanted to fix something, but couldn’t. My brother’s prognosis in 2007 had turned me into a Fixer. Terminal illness is almost always unfixable, though. It shape-shifts but never goes away. If only I fixed what I could, life would return to a previous state. I thought mangoes had nothing to do with my brother’s illness, but everything constellated. Mangoes were a side effect of a deeper wound.
I closed my laptop and realized there would be more to come—more I couldn’t fix or reverse time and change. I couldn’t change my brother’s illness. I couldn’t change those nights that involved mangoes in varied states of matter: dehydrated, liquid, whole. Blaming mangoes wouldn’t fix anything. And it wasn’t like I was some weird mango hater; I had enjoyed mangoes between those isolated incidents. I’d appreciated mangoes sprinkled with Tajin and lime, mango pico de gallo scooped onto a sweet potato tortilla chip, and spicy mango margaritas on the patio next to the sea.
On the shelf, next to where I sat on the couch, I pulled a hand-made wooden picture frame homing a photo of Nick and me attempting to grip hands on horses in Costa Rica. Nick had decided he’d ride horses for the first time on our honeymoon, Mango Mouth turned Mango Body and all. It was the same frame and photo I stared at after learning the news of Christie passing to the other side. In the photo, we smiled, our bathing suits lurking through our dewy tanks and shorts, on the beach, with a jungle perched behind us. If I looked closely, I couldn’t see the scathing, bleeding, and blistering of Nick’s body. But I still remembered how it felt to rub topical steroid cream up the thick uneven ridges of his scaly legs.
Courtney Lund O’Neil is a PhD candidate at Oklahoma State University, studying Creative Nonfiction. She received her MFA from UC Riverside and is a California native. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Oprah magazine, The Guardian, Harper's Bazaar, The Southampton Review, The Columbia Journal and elsewhere. She is at work on a memoir. You can find her on Twitter, @CourtneyLundO or Instagram, @courtneylund.