PAULLINA SIMONS

ROAD TO PARADISE

Copyright

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2007

Copyright © Timshel Books 2007

The extract from “i walked the boulevard” is reprinted from COMPLETE POEMS 1904–1962, by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage, by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. Copyright © 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust and George James Firmage.

Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007241583

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780007283439

Version: 2015-03-09

Map

Dedication

For my husband’s mother, Elaine Ryan, from

the time she was twenty, a mother first

Epigraph

Earth’s crammed with heaven,And every common bush afire with God;But only he who sees, takes off his shoes

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

And all my former life is seenA crazy drowsy beautiful and utterlyappalling dream

ALEXANDER BLOK

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue: “Motel”

One: The Car

1. Topless Imponderables

2. Emma

3. The Gift

Two: Mary’s Land

1. The Pomeranians

2. The Vedantists

3. The Black Truck

Three: On the Erie Canal

1. Ned

2. The Chihuahuas

3. Two Todds

Four: The Light at Picnic Marsh

1. Candy

2. The Price of Stamps

3. Comfort

Five: The Road to St. Louis

1. A Little Buddha

2. A Full Bladder

3. The Least of Candy

Six: Isle of Capri

1. Eighteen and Twenty-one

2. Five Flower

3. A Race Not to the Swift

Seven: New Melleray

1. Hours of the Divine Office

2. Estevan’s Stories

3. Rock, Paper, Eddie

Eight: Looking for the Missouri

1. Gina’s Boredom

2. Hoadley Dean

3. Argosy Pavilion

Nine: Badlands

1. The Bartered Bride

2. Lakota Chapel, All Welcome

3. Broken Hill

Ten: Making Things Wright

1. Surio

2. Hell’s Half-Acre

3. The. Great. Divide

Eleven: Beyond the Great Divide

1. Good Samaritans

2. Open Range

3. The Loneliest Road in America

Twelve: Renoforjesus

1. Lost

2. Balefire

3. Cave, Cave, Deus Videt

Thirteen: You are Ascending into Paradise

1. Endless Skyway

2. Lovely Lane

3. Four Last Things

Epilogue: Maccallum House

Keep Reading

A Note to my Readers

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
“MOTEL”

Do what you like, Shelby Sloane, the bartered bride had said to me, smiling like an enigma, just remember: all roads lead to where you stand.

Back then I said, what does that mean?

This morning I knew. It was the morning of the third day I had been trapped in a room, two miles from the main drag of the Reno strip in a place called “Motel.”

I stood alone, broke, and in Reno.

There is one road that leads to Reno from the east—Interstate 80, and in Salt Lake City, Utah, 569 miles away, there is a bellman at a four-star hotel who, when asked if there is perhaps a more scenic route than the mind-numbing Interstate, blinks at me his contempt in the sunshine before slowly saying, “In Nevada?”

But there is another road in Nevada that takes you almost there: U.S. 50, the loneliest road in America.

Reno is in the high desert valley, 4500 feet above sea level, but the highway climbs into the mountains before twisting down the black unlit slopes to the washbasin where the lights are. The town itself is one street, Virginia, running in a straight line between the mountain passes.

On Virginia stands the Eldorado and the Circus Circus; the Romantic Sensations Club; Horseshoe, the 24-hr pawn shop (“nothing refused!”); the Wild Orchid Club (“Hustler’s All-new Girls!”); Heidi’s Family Restaurant; Adult Bookstore (“Under New Management: More Variety!”); Limericks Pub&Grill (Once a young lass from Mamaroneck/Decided to go on a trek …); Arch Discount Liquors; Adults Only Cabaret (Filipino waitresses in Island outfits); St. Francis Hotel; Ho-Hum Motel; Pioneer and Premier Jewelry&Loan; “Thunderbolt: Buy Here! Pay Here! We buy Clean Cars and Trucks!”; Adventure Inn: Exotic Theme Rooms and Wedding Chapel; a billboard asking, “Is Purity and Truth of Devotion to Jesus Central to your Life?” and “Motel.”

That’s where I am.

“Motel” is a beige, drab two-story structure with rusted landings built around a cement square courtyard that serves both as a parking lot and a deck for the swimming pool. The cars are parked in stalls around the pool right behind the lounge chairs. Not my car, because that’s vanished, but other people’s cars, sure.

I was waiting for the girl in the mini-skirt to come back. She wasn’t supposed to have left in the first place, so waiting for her was rather like waiting for the unscheduled train to run over the car stalled on the tracks. I came back for her, and she had disappeared. Along with my car. The note she left me could have been written in hieroglyphs. “Shel, where are you? I thought you were coming back. Guess not. I’ve gone to look for you. Here’s hoping I find you.” Two kisses followed by two hugs, as if we were sophomores in junior high passing notes back and forth. She had taken her things.

I was half-hoping the “Motel” manager would throw me out, seeing that I had no money and couldn’t pay for the room, but he said with a smile and a wink, “Room’s bought and paid for till the twentieth, dahrlin’.” As I walked away I was tempted to ask the twentieth of what, but didn’t.

The first day I didn’t get that upset. I felt it was penance. I hadn’t done what I was supposed to; it was only right she didn’t do what she was supposed to.

The second day I spent foaming in righteous, purifying fury. I was eighteen, stopping for a day in Reno, on my way even farther west, to help out a fellow pilgrim I met along the way, and look what I got for my troubles. I whiled away the hours compulsively shredding into tinier and tinier strips fashion magazines, an old newspaper, informational brochures on Reno, and gambling tips, then strewing them all over the room. “TOURIST ATTRACTIONS!” “PLACES TO EAT!” “THINGS TO DO!” all sawdust on the floor.

Paradise, California, Butte County, Sierra Nevada Mountains, Tall Pines, Blue Skies, Paradise Pines, Lovelock and Golden Nugget days. Paradise Ridge was inhabited by the Maidu Indians who lived there ten thousand years before white man came. In Magalia, near Paradise, gold was found in 1859. The Magalia Nugget is world renowned, weighing fifty-four pounds, of which forty-nine ounces is pure gold. And my stagecoach of life had stopped in Paradise, near Magalia, on its way out west. It was summer of 1981.

Days in an empty room while outside was full of rain.

Rain, in Reno, in August!

The first day I ate the musty, half-eaten candy bars the girl had kindly left behind and an open bag of potato chips. The second day I finished a bag of peanuts and tortilla chips so stale they tasted like shoe laces, but I ate them anyway and was grateful. I drank water from the tap.

Inside me was detritus from weeks on the open road. The stop sign near Valparaiso, Indiana. The Sand Hills of Nebraska. The Great Divide in Wyoming that, I thought then, split my life into the before and after. Silly me. Yesterday Paradise. Today Reno. Like still frames. Here is Shelby driving her Shelby—the car dreams are made of. I have a picture; it must have happened. Here is the flat road before me. Here are the Pomeranians. Here is the sunset in St. Louis. Here’s the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Black Hills, the Yellow Dunes, the casinos and the slot machines, and Interior, South Dakota, with Floyd, that sad, tattooed boy.

Do what you like.

Indeed.

When we spotted her a second time, we couldn’t believe it was the same gal. I slowed down, we looked. Can it be? we said. It is. Should we stop? No, no. No hitchhikers. But she waved to us; recognized us. Look, it’s fate, I said. What are the chances of running into the same girl in different states, hundreds of miles apart. I don’t believe in fate, said my friend Gina. Come on, I said. You gotta believe in something. What do you believe in?

Not fate, said Gina, pointing. And not her.

I cajoled. We’ll give her a lift down the road. When it stops being convenient, we’ll let her off. I saw her in the rearview mirror running toward us. Running and waving. That frame is on every page in my helpless head. Seeing her get closer and closer. This is what I keep coming back to: I should have kept going.

If only I hadn’t gotten that damn, cursed, awful, hateful, hated car. How I loved that car. Where was it?

At night I paced like a caged tiger, growling under my breath, choking on my frustration. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t lie down, couldn’t watch TV, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. Night was senseless; day was worse.

During the day, I prayed for night to come. But at night I barricaded the front door with two chairs and a dresser; I chained and locked it, and locked the window looking out onto the open landing. I didn’t turn on the TV because I wanted to hear every footstep coming close, but every footstep coming close made my heart rip out of my chest. Now that the others were gone, I thought at any moment “they’d” be coming for me; a few days ago there were three of us and today only I was left. Otherwise how to explain my car’s vanishing, my friends’ vanishing?

On the third day of rain, I thought I was losing my mind. I couldn’t recall the farms of Iowa anymore, or when we crossed the Mississippi. I couldn’t remember if I’d graduated, the last name of my good friend Marc, my home phone number. I didn’t know what to do. The girls were gone, my car was gone, my money was gone, phone numbers had left my head, and a man at the reception desk was smiling at me with his filthy grin saying, “Stay as long as you like, dahrlin’.”

On the third morning I slept. I had nothing to eat and nowhere to go. I didn’t know where relief was going to come from, and I couldn’t allow a single thought without doubling over in fear and despair. Perhaps my hitchhiker was wrong and the Eastern spiritualists right. You should train yourself to let go of all passions. Train yourself to let go of all earthly things, detach yourself from life.

Think only not to think.

Will only not to will.

Feel only not to feel.

God have pity on me, I was crying in my self-pity, on my knees in front of one bed, then the other, my forehead sunk into musty blankets.

Help me. Help me. Please. Why hadn’t I insisted she tell me what the fourteenth station of the cross was? She told me that no prayer asked in faith could remain unanswered at the fourteenth station; and when I asked what it was, she became coy. “You’ll have to learn one to thirteen first,” she said. Where was I supposed to learn this? On U.S. 83 in South Dakota? In the Badlands? From junkyard Floyd? Besides, back then I was curious but fundamentally indifferent. And why not? I was young, the sun was shining, my car was fast like a jet, and on the radio, one way or another, it was paradise by the dashboard light every night for the local girls. I should’ve insisted she tell me, because now, when the only thing that remained true was that I was still eighteen, I didn’t know where to turn.

Maybe that Gideon’s Bible in the musty drawer would shed some light on the fourteen stations, but no. I was by the side of the bed, kneeling in the paper shrapnel, my fingers sightlessly tracing the words I didn’t and couldn’t understand, closing the Book, opening it to a random page, sticking my finger into a paragraph, struggling to focus. This is what I got:

Lift up thy hands, which hang down, and thy feeble knees.

I got up and climbed into bed. It was still raining hard. How could I stand one more day in here, waiting, listening through the curtains for the steps of the one who was coming to kill me? I didn’t know what time it was. It felt early, though I couldn’t be sure because the night before in my helpless terrors, I’d smashed the alarm clock with the heel of one of my newly-bought summer sandals. This morning was so dark and gray, it could’ve been after dusk, or before sunrise. It just was, without dimension.

Suddenly there was a knock on the door. Not the tentative knock of an illegal immigrant asking to clean my room, but the insistent, demanding knock of a man’s fisted knuckles. I jumped out of bed and hid in the closet.

“Police. Open up.”

I threw on some clothes and peeked through the hole in the curtain. I moved furniture out of the way and opened up. Two cops in different uniforms stood outside on the second-floor landing.

“Shelby Sloane?”

“Who wants to know?”

One flashed his badge. “Detective Yeomans. Paradise Police Department.”

The other flashed his badge. “Detective Johnson, Reno Police Department.”

“Do you have anything to eat?” I asked.

“What? No. Are you Shelby?”

I felt like falling down. Nodding, I held on to the door handle. I said nothing; they said nothing.

“We found out what happened to your car.”

“Did you.” It was not a question. It was as if I already knew. I wanted to say, well, took you long enough to find a car of which only a single one—mine—was made in the year 1966. One car, and it’s taken the police departments in two cities three days to find it. Good job.

“I’m real hungry. Is the phone working?”

“How would we know if your phone’s working?” said Yeomans from Paradise. “Where did you call from when you reported the car missing?”

“I don’t know.”

The two cops exchanged an awkward look, then cleared their throats.

“Look, we came to see you on a matter of some urgency.”

“About my car?”

“Uh, not quite,” said Yeomans. “We need you to come with us. We’d like you to come with us.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Did you do anything to cause yourself to be under arrest?”

“No.”

“Then no.”

“Do I have the right to remain silent?”

“You always have that right.”

I chose not to exercise it. “Is something wrong?”

They nodded.

I fought for words. “Is the car in Paradise?”

“No.”

That surprised me. I thought it might be.

“It’s here in Reno. Well,” Johnson amended. “Moran’s junk shop is here in Reno. Moran is now under federal indictment.”

“Has there been”—I couldn’t get the words out—“Has there been an … accident?”

“Not with the car. But … Look, put your shoes on and come with us.” Yeomans from Paradise looked me over. “Wear something warm. It’s cold out.”

I didn’t want to put on my shoes. I became not hungry, not thirsty. I barely moved, dragging my feet, bending low, pretending to look for them under the unmade bed, except there was no under the bed, and I knew it; the shoes were in the closet, but I didn’t want to go get them. I couldn’t find anything except the inappropriate clock-smashing heels. Three-inch stilettos with jeans and a sweatshirt. I moved like a sleeping bear through molasses.

I felt Yeomans staring at my back.

How I got the sandals on, I don’t know. Perhaps Johnson helped me. How I got into the patrol car, I don’t know. It wasn’t a Reno black-and-white. It was a Paradise black-and-white. So they’d come all the way from there. I felt like I was still on the floor, looking under the boarded-up bed, not for my sandals this time but for my lost life.

“Are we going to stop at Moran’s? Get my car?” I asked in my faux calm voice. We were driving down Virginia.

“Unfortunately he doesn’t have your car anymore,” said Johnson. “I’m sorry about that. And no, we’re not going there.”

I was waiting for the rain to let up. We drove slowly, pushing through the wave of oncoming morning rush-hour gambling traffic. She must have taken my car and sold it to Moran’s, the title and registration being conveniently in the glove compartment, and he, who was not allowed to buy cars without checking the identity of the seller, wanted it so bad—and who wouldn’t?—he took it from her anyway, and then, belatedly realizing he was in a deepload of trouble, dismembered my car for parts, while she pocketed the money and split.

Moran’s Auto Salvage, in the middle of an ocean of grass, nested on a sloping bank, just a rusted trailer listing limply, its side wheels missing. It was surrounded by junk cars. We didn’t even slow down as we passed.

“How much did he pay for the car?”

“He said a thousand.”

A thousand! Oh, the gall. The insult. Of him, of her. The pit inside my stomach was a gorge deep.

It was raining, raining. The window in the back was open and the rain was coming in sideways, onto my lap, my seat, the floor of the police vehicle. I didn’t care, they didn’t care. Eventually, they got cold and I rolled up the window.

“How in heaven’s name did you get yourself into this sordid mess?” said Johnson from Reno.

I pressed my face against the damp glass. It was an eternity through the mountain passes and the strawberry fields back to Paradise.

ONE

1
Topless Imponderables

My former friend Gina came up to me when I was changing after track. I was sitting on the bench, still damp from the shower, bent over my knees, rummaging through my sportsbag for a clean bra. All I had on was underwear. Suddenly she was in front of me, pacing, fidgeting a little, obscuring. “Hey, Sloane.”

All my friends called me Sloane instead of Shelby. My friends.

“Whazzup.” I didn’t even look up. Though I was surprised, and wanted to.

“Can you believe we’re graduating?” she said, false-brightly. “I still think of myself as twelve, don’t you, and this summer’s going to be great, isn’t it? I’m thinking of getting a job at Dairy Barn again, I meet so many people, and Eddie, my boyfriend—remember him?—he dropped out. Did you know?”

“Uh—no.” I resumed rummaging.

“Well, he went back to California. His mom’s sick, so he went to be with her. He’ll graduate with an equivalency diploma; he says it’s just as good, and anyway he says he doesn’t need a piece of paper to be a success, he’s very smart, well, I don’t have to tell you, you know.” She paused. I said nothing.

“I watched you out there today, that was amazing, did you run the 440 in fifty-seven seconds?”

That made me look up. “You watched me? Why?”

“Why? You were incredible, that’s why. Remember when we first started to train, you couldn’t run the two-mile in seventeen minutes? What’s your time now?”

I stared calmly at her. “Time’s five to five and I’ve got to get home.”

“Oh, yes. Ha ha.”

Ha ha? She was small and busty, and slightly plump in the stomach. She had long, straight light-brown hair, and used to have a terrible nervous habit of plucking out her eyebrows and eyelashes. When she ran out of hair, she’d pluck the hairs from her scalp. She wore tight jeans and high heels. She wore no underwear. She used to be my best friend.

But that was a while ago.

“I don’t want to keep you,” she said, “but while you’re getting dressed, can I talk to you?”

“Go ahead.” I gave up on the stupid bra; the one I’d worn running was damp, and I suspected I hadn’t brought another. Damn.

My palms pressed against my breasts, I stood in front of her.

“Look how skinny you got, Sloane,” Gina said. “You must be training a lot.”

If I didn’t run I’d be prone to child-bearing hips, but I was always running. I said nothing.

“I heard you were going to California after graduation.”

“You heard that, did you? So?”

“Are you or aren’t you?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Well, if you are, I was wondering if you’d like some company.” She continued before I had a chance to vigorously shake my head. Actually, she continued as I was vigorously shaking my head. “I’d split the expenses with you.” She saw my head spinning from side to side like a pendulum on coke. “And we could share the driving,” she offered. “We’d get there in three days if we did that. How many miles is it? Like a thousand?”

“Three thousand to where I’m going,” I said coolly.

She tried to whistle. “Long way. Well, like I said, I’d help drive, split the gas, and the hotels, you know, it’d be cheaper.”

I was quiet. “You know what’s cheaper?” I said. “Taking the bus. If you take the Greyhound, it’s only a few hundred bucks.”

Gina hemmed and hawed. Finally she said she was scared of buses. Then admitted her mother was scared of buses. I didn’t like buses much myself, but I really wasn’t interested in her or her mother’s opinion of the Greyhound.

“Look, I really gotta go. Emma’s waiting.” Opting for no damp bra, just a T-shirt, breasts poking out, hair wet, jeans barely buttoned, I grabbed my stuff.

She followed me, clutching my arm, but when I gave her a long look, let go. “Promise you’ll think about it?” she said, stepping back. “Just think about it, that’s all. It’ll be easier and faster for you. It’ll be better. And we won’t have to talk much—if you don’t want. We can just listen to eight-tracks.”

Damn Emma. Damn car. Damn ideas. I vowed to just tell her no. Sorry, Geeena, I thought about it, and I don’t think it’s a good idea.

I was wary of her and her intentions. I was wary of her the way some people are of otters. Or leopard seals.

Gina is so ethnic-sounding, like Larchmont. Larchmont may be pretentious, but there is nothing pretentious about Gina.

In the statistics for the most popular names in the last twenty years, Gina has appeared in the top fifty every year. Gina, when she heard this, said, “Groovy!” And flung back her hair. All the boys think Gina is Italian, but there’s not an ounce of Italian blood in her. She just has an ethnic name. I don’t know why this bothers me, except perhaps because every time we went to the amusement park or the beach and the boys would hear her name, their smile would get bigger and they’d drawl, “Ohhhh, you’re Eyetalian …” as if being Italian endowed her with some special gifts, gifts I clearly did not possess. You know what wasn’t lost on me? Their expressions. “Geeeeeena,” they’d call, and every time they did, my irritation quotient twisted up.

I, on the other hand, can only wish I had an anachronistic or ethnic name. Instead mine is just androgynous. Mine isn’t a name, it’s a last name. I’m epicene. Not one thing, not the other.

Whatever it is, you can be sure that not once, not a single time, not when high on Ferris wheels, or dancing in clubs or swimming in the Sound, has any boy ever drawled out my name, with their eyes widening. “Shelbeeeeeee …”

Shelby. This is who I am. Here is my name. I am Shelby.

Gina approached me again the following day. “Are you still thinking?”

“It’s only been a day!”

“Soon summer’ll be over.”

“It’s barely June.”

“I gotta know. I gotta know if I need to make other plans.”

“Okay. I think you should make other plans.”

“Come on, Sloane.”

Sloane! “If you need to know now, my answer is no ’cause I haven’t thought about it.”

“But we’re graduating in two weeks!”

“I know when we’re graduating.”

She lowered her voice. “I gotta make tracks. I gotta get to some place called Bakersfield. I just have to. Don’t ask, okay?”

“Um—okay.” Like I’d ask.

“I have to know soon,” she said, beseechingly. “Because if we’re going, we have to make a plan.”

It was as if she had said a magic word. It was better than please. My whole face softened. “Plan?” I loved plans. I liked to think of myself as a planner.

“Yes. I have to tell my boyfriend when I’m arriving.”

Frowning, I stepped away from her. “That’s the sum total of your plan? Notifying other people?”

She didn’t know what I meant, and frowned, too. I really had to get to my Urban Public Policy class. “What else is there?”

I said nothing. What else was there?

“What? Going cross country? Oh, please.” She waved her hand dismissively. “We get in the car. We go.”

“What about gas?”

“When we run out, we get some.”

“I posit that when we run out, it will be too late.”

“So we’ll get some before. Shel, I’m telling you, you’re overthinking this.”

Ugh. I shook my head. Underthinking, clearly. “I’m not headed to Bakersfield.”

Gina blinked at me. Her blue eyes were slightly too close together, and when she stared, it made her seem vacant and cross-eyed. Perhaps I was being less than totally kind since she was pretty, and all the boys thought so. She was no slouch in the looks department, looked after herself and wore tight jeans, there was just something slightly blank about her eyes when they stared.

“I gotta go. Look, even if I agree to do this,” I said, pressing my books to my chest like palms to my breasts, “you’re going to have to take a bus to Bakersfield. I can drop you off in San Francisco, but then you’re on your own.”

“You want me to take a bus?” Gina said as if I were asking her to eat pig slops.

I moved to go. She caught up with me. “Listen,” she said. “Please say yes. I won’t be able to go without you.” She lowered her voice. “I really need to get to Bakersfield as soon as poss. And Mom won’t let me go unless I go with you.”

“Your mother won’t let you go? What are you, five?”

“That’s what mothers do, Shelby,” said Gina, pompously. “They care what happens to you.”

God! What she didn’t say was, you’d know that, Shelby, if you had a mother.

2
Emma

I was raised in a souped-up boarding house near Mamaroneck, New York, a four-star boarding house, which is akin to saying a sirloin burger. It’s still a burger. Actually, the house I lived in was in Larchmont, next town over, but I enjoy saying Mamaroneck, because it has the word Mama in it, and I don’t like telling people I come from Larchmont, as it carries with it a superior tag I don’t much care for. You have to have a French accent to pronounce it properly. Larsh-MOH. People who don’t know won’t understand, but people who know raise their eyebrows and say, “Oh, Larchmont. Wow.” It is for them I say I live near Mamaroneck. Nobody ever raises their eyebrows at that. It’s suburban-sounding, not French-sounding, unpretentious, not posh—all the things you can’t say about Larchmont, a cosmopolitan, sophisticated, old-world European city in the middle of parochial, provincial suburban America. The streets are winding and canopied, the houses Tudor, compact and esoteric, with square rooms, hardwood floors and tiny kitchens, a town where the Christmas lights get strung up for December down Main Street and twinkle merrily in the snow. Many houses are for rent, and there is one particular furnished Tudor, off Bridge Street, on a cul-de-sac (even that’s French) where Emma and I live in three small rooms above the garage that stands on a driveway overhung by enormous trees that drip sap in the spring and fall, staining my running shoes. We live there for free, but the way washing machines and vacuum cleaners live for free. In exchange for our rooms, we maintain the house. Mostly Emma does this. I help out on the weekends.

I live with Emma. Her last name is Blair. And mine is Sloane. These things I know.

Now for all the things I don’t know. I don’t know who Emma is, why I live with her or who she is to me. When I was a child, I used to call her Aunt Emma, but then I grew up. Always, since then, she has been just Emma.

I also know this. And I only found out because Gina’s friend, the ridiculous and bug-eyed Agnes Tuscadero, eavesdropped on her parents’ very private kitchen conversation late one night a few years ago. Apparently my father, Jed Sloane, while married to my mother, took up with a woman who they think was named Emma, who might or might not have been my mother’s sister/aunt/best friend. So the reason I don’t have a mother is because of Emma. My mother split, leaving me with Dad and his new mistress/lover/fling. Agnes’s parents gossiped and Agnes told Gina who told me that my mother left a letter saying, I know all you ever wanted was your smokes and your drinks and your whore. Well now you can have them. My life and everything in it was a complete waste of time. My mother wrote that, I presume, sometime before she left me.

I don’t know where this letter is, and believe me, that’s not for the lack of looking. Every crevice of every drawer in our two rooms and a living room, I have scraped through, searching for it, wanting to see her handwriting, and her name. Haven’t found it—yet.

Now, I don’t know what my mother looked like, but I know what Emma looks like, and I find it surprising, to put it euphemistically, that any man would leave home for a woman like Emma, who, with her thick ankles, square low-heeled shoes, gray stiff helmet of hair, and matronly dresses, couldn’t engender passion in a rutting stud dog, much less a male human being. She simply seems too Puritan for love of any kind.

What’s interesting, in a purely academic way, of course, is that my father also left. I assume it was soon after my mother, because I don’t remember him. What’s odd is I do remember her, like a pale ghost with warm arms. He left and then died somewhere on the road. That’s all Emma told me, wanted to tell me; that’s all I asked, wanted to ask.

Agnes told Gina who told me he did not leave a letter. Jed Sloane left, died, and left me with “the whore.”

And she raised me.

Who was my father?

Who was my mother?

And if Emma is no good, and my father left her, why am I still with her?

More important, why is she still with me?

Does she feel guilt over me? Do I ask this of her when we’re cleaning the bathrooms of the French U.N. diplomats?

Emma, my father left; why did you stay?

My mother left; why did you stay?

Can you answer me as we wax the floors and cut up onions?

If they all went away, walked away, why didn’t you walk away?

I could not fathom what her answers might be.

Eventually I began to feel that the time for questions had sort of passed; nonetheless, I felt that every day I had to tread carefully, to make sure I walked around the gullet where the fragments of answers had fallen.

Question: irretrievably fallen?

But I have this to add in conclusion. My friend from across the road, Debbie, had been spending a lot of time with us this year. She had two parents, a mother, a father, three brothers, a Beagle; her mother was home with the kids, her dad worked as a manager at the Larchmont hardware store. And yet Debbie, who had a whole family plus pet, was over with petless me and Emma; why? She helped us in the evening, watched TV, and though she lived across the street, would often ask if she could stay over. Emma always said yes. Just yes. No less, no more. Yes.

A few months ago, Debbie finally told me that her father was sick. Our neighbor, Ralphie, was driving him every week to the hospital. Turned out his liver was shot. He needed a transplant in a hurry but couldn’t get one despite having a wife, four kids and no job: he was a drunk, and no one gave fresh liver to alcoholics. So he would drink, scream at his wife and kids, and be sick. When he was sober, Ralphie drove him to the hospital for kidney dialysis and tests. Debbie’s dad was a drunk for twenty years. Ralphie drove him to the hospital for his last two months. One day Debbie’s dad didn’t come home from the hospital, and Debbie’s mom took Debbie and the one brother who was still home and left, possibly for Florida. I missed them when they went. They had seemed like such a nice family.

Emma and I get up at six, prepare the house for morning, work silently. I make the coffee, she empties the dishwasher, we wipe down counters, I take out the trash. My bus comes at seven-thirty. Emma speaks then. “Do you have what you need?”

And I speak, too. “Yes.”

I took typing, so I could have one actual skill when I graduated. I got a D-minus. I do my homework during my free period because at home there’s too much to do. After track I take the late bus and help Emma with dinner, with clean-up, with laundry. Our work is done by eight. The Lambiels like us because we’re quiet, and they’re quiet. The husband is a diplomat and the wife a flight attendant; she’s never home, and he drinks the whole time she’s away. Their only child, Jeanne, a blonde all-that, went to our school for about five minutes, but then, feeling rather ignored by the people she held in such contempt, transferred to a private school for children of foreign diplomats. Certainly when I’m in her house, she doesn’t speak to me. Sometimes she says, “Shell-BEEEE, get us some pop cooorn, s’il vous plaît.”

Okay, so the French chick who can barely speak English drawls out my name like the boys at the ice-cream parlor when she wants me to fetch and carry. Nice.

Six days a week, three hours a day, I run. Our meets are Saturday afternoons. On Sundays, our day of rest, Emma and I cook for the week for us and the Lambiels so all we have to do Monday to Friday is heat stuff up.

If people ask, I say I’m a Christian because Christianity is the one religion where you don’t have to do anything to still be a member. I like that, and since I don’t want to say I’m nothing, I call myself a Christian.

I have never been inside a place of worship of any kind.

I have never had outside work. Emma’s been giving me a little money for helping her. I’ve saved five dollars a week for as long as I can remember, and last I looked, my bank account had $2400 in it. My one continued expense has been my running shoes—new ones every three months. Emma pays half. My few leftover bucks go frivolously on hair gel, mascara and lipgloss, Milky Ways and Love’s Baby Soft.

Two weeks ago, Jeanne Lambiel was caught by her father stealing twenty dollars from his wallet when she wanted to go out with her passé French friends. He screamed at her for half the night; the whole neighborhood heard him. Why would you steal from me, he kept yelling. Why? You have thirteen million in your trust fund! And Jeanne said calmly, “Yes, but, Papa, I needed not thirteen million but twenty bucks.”

I got away from Emma and the Lambiels by running. I’ve been cross country and track and field from the time I was ten. I run the mile and the two-mile. Once I ran the mile so fast I had to go to the hospital. They thought I was dying. So much for go all out, try your best, do your best, stop at nothing. Give 110 percent. Well, I gave 110 percent and it almost killed me. So you can just imagine the kind of life lesson I took away from that: a little less than your best, Shelby Sloane—that will have to be good enough.

3
The Gift

On my eighteenth birthday in May of 1981, which happened this year to fall on a Saturday, Emma said, unduly excited (Emma never got even duly excited about things), “Come outside with me. I want to show you something.”

I followed her down the stairs and out. In the sap-covered driveway on this Saturday May day, parked behind the Lambiels’ government-issue Mercedes, stood a little yellow Mustang. I say little, but to me, it seemed gargantuan like a house, like an airplane hangar. A bright yellow hangar. It had two black stripes running over the roof and hood. It looked both classic and stunning, as if I knew anything about Mustangs. Except we once saw a documentary on them a few years back, and I might have mentioned that it looked like a cool-cat car, but what did I know, I was thirteen at the time, and Emma had been half asleep.

I stood silently, staring.

“It’s for you.” She coughed. “You like it?” She looked alternately exquisitely excited and morbidly uncomfortable. I think she might have been uncomfortable about being so excited. “I wanted to get you something special. You know—for your eighteenth.”

“You bought me a car?”

“Not just a car, Shel. A 1966 Shelby Mustang!”

I was dumbstruck.

“Go ask your friends tonight about a Shelby Mustang. They’ll tell you.”

What it cost her I have no idea; when I asked, she wouldn’t say. She was very proud of it. “Engine’s clean,” she kept repeating. “V-8 350 horsepower. Transmission’s good. No rust.” And then laughed like she was joking. “After he took my check, I slept in the car overnight, until the check cleared the next morning. I was afraid to let anyone else get their hands on it.”

“Emma …”

“You don’t understand. He was the original owner. He had three of them for sale, the other two were fifty percent more expensive and they sold while I was still deciding on this one. I think the only reason it was cheaper and unbought was the color. Back then, he had it painted special because it was his personal racing car. Honestly, there was a very good chance I might not get it.” She clapped her hands. “But it was fate! It was meant to be. A Shelby Mustang for Shelby. I mean, come on.”

I had not seen Emma this animated since—

The dealer who sold it to her, she said, was a born-again Christian. “So I knew he wouldn’t sell me a lemon.”

“Why?” In a daze, I walked around the car. This couldn’t possibly be mine! I asked what he had been before he became born-again. “Maybe he’s a car thief, out on parole? The other day I read in the paper that a murderer on death-row became born-again.”

“Don’t they all become born-again on death-row?” returned an unfazed Emma. She didn’t know what the man had been, “but he asked me to pray in the car with him after he took my money.”

“Wow.” I peered in. It was all black inside. It had a wood wheel. The backseat was the size of a Matchbox car. It could fit a deck of cards and a GI Joe if they squished. But the two front bucket seats were roomy, and shiny.

“All vinyl foam seating. And air conditioning!” Emma said. “Go ahead, open the door.”

I shook my head, patting the hood instead. I touched the glass, the windshield wipers. I left my hands on the hood. “Emma,” I said. “I don’t know what to say. It’s very …” I struggled. “Yellow.”

“Yes! Summer yellow it’s called. The car can go up to 136.7 miles per hour.”

“Is that because of the yellow?”

“Shelby.”

“Driving 136 miles an hour, is that something you’d like to see me do?”

“I’m just saying.”

I peered inside at the controls. “Guess no FM stereo in ’66.”

She straightened up from unbridled to frowning in 1/60 of a second. “No, and don’t you dare touch anything in this car. It’s a classic. There were only 1200 hard-top Shelbys made in ’66, and only one in this color. Only one, do you understand? You can’t change a single thing in it.”

“I know. Like I would.”

She opened the door on the passenger side and got in. More reluctantly than a frightened virgin going to her marriage bed, I got in on the driver’s side. I touched the wheel like it was hot. I tried not to breathe. It was impossible! I couldn’t wait to tell my friend Marc, the car freak. He’d die. Die. He might actually ask me out now.

“Did you?” My hands clutched the wheel.

“Did I what?”

“Pray with him?”

“I did. I prayed: Dear God, please don’t let this car be a lemon.”

Emma laughed, and I laughed. This had been the most she’d said to me, well, ever.

I had been taking driver’s ed classes in high school; now that I had turned eighteen, I could take the road test for a full license. I had learned how to drive on a four-speed manual; this one was a six. It was hard; I didn’t know what I was doing, and painfully ground the gears every time I shifted up. Emma didn’t mind even that.

I took her for a ride. We drove through Larchmont with the windows down; she told me Ford only made four convertibles in 1966, and they were out of her price range. “I don’t want a convertible,” I said. “This is perfect.” The day was cool and breezy, in the low sixties, and it smelled like spring. When you’re young that means something. You always notice when the air smells like summer is coming, because it’s everybody’s favorite part of the year. For a kid, summer is a time of possibilities, even when you stay home and do nothing.

I felt conspicuous, like a streaker at the Oscars. The car was so ridiculously yellow, the hood blinded me with its brightness. I took Emma for ice cream in Mamaroneck on Boston Post Road. We both had lemon sherbet, in honor of the Shelby. We had four people say something to us in the parking lot. And everybody stared.

“Thanks, Emma. Really. Thanks a lot.”

“Happy birthday.”

I had a Shelby Mustang!

I wasn’t sure, though, what I was supposed to do with it.

Why would Emma get me a car?

Me, Shelby, who’d hardly ever been out of Larchmont, barely out of Westchester County, a dozen times to New York City, a handful of daytrips to Connecticut, once to Pennsylvania Dutch Country, once to New Jersey Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park, once on a senior trip to Washington DC, why did this Shelby need a car? Ninety-nine percent of my life, I had never been more than twenty miles from the town where I was born.

“Emma,” I said when a few days had passed, “it’s very generous of you. But why did you buy me a car?”

“I don’t understand the question. Isn’t it self-evident?”

“Well,” I said, trying to appear thoughtful at first, “no.” In case that sounded too abrupt, added, “I don’t go anywhere.”

“Yes,” said Emma. “And now you can.”

I took her for ice cream again a quarter mile down the street. I wondered if this was what she meant.

Days passed, I got my license, June came, the weather got warmer.

I drove myself to high school once or twice and parked in the lot for seniors. I’ll tell you this: for the boys, a yellow Mustang is the equivalent of the name Geeeena. The boys loved my car, and the girls were jealous. “Nice ’Stang,” they all murmured, eyes widening, an inviting smile on their faces. The football jocks, the runners, the basketball players, the debate team, all in unison now, “Niiiiiice ’Stang.”

Tony Bergamino, the captain of the football team, had a tall, blonde gazelle-like girlfriend. Covetously, I used to watch them kissing in the halls between periods. Even he noticed, with a big smile and a thumbs up. “Nice!” He might as well have been checking me out. He, who usually stepped over me like a gnat on his path, smiled at my car, which is the same thing as smiling at me, and said, “Nice car, Shelbeeee.”

My friend Marc hyperventilated for two weeks. “You don’t deserve this car. You know nothing about cars. You can’t drive. You’ve never been out of your house. It’s another proof that there’s no divine justice in the world. The universe is a cruel place.” Marc, brooding and always dressed in black, bow-legged, Afro-haired, wearing a permanent air of studied artistic indifference, couldn’t stop talking about my car. He sat at the lunchroom table and, over a tuna hero with extra mayo, said, “You ask why Emma got you a car? Shelby Sloane, have you considered the possibility that she got you a car because she wants you to go?”

During the few fights Emma and I had had, I kept saying, soon I’ll be grown up and you won’t be able to keep me under your thumb anymore. I’ll be outta here. Won’t like that, will you? Well, here it was, me all grown up, but did I have some place to go that required a car?

How many times can two people have an argument where one person says, “Just you wait till I’m eighteen. I’m leaving here, and I’m never—do you hear me?—never coming back. Then what are you going to do, huh? What are you going to do with your life?” This is what I used to say to Emma when I was angry at her rules, her inordinate strictness, her guidelines, and her unsophisticated ways. And my favorite of all, “You’re not my mother. You can’t tell me what to do.”

How many times can a person hear this spit out before she starts to believe it? Yes, she knows they were angry words, and yes, Shelby always says she didn’t mean them, but why is it, whenever she gets mad, this hurtful thing comes out of her mouth?

I started watching Emma while she dusted, started wanting to ask her things. I’d mumble I really didn’t need such a present.

Marc thought it was hilarious.

“You’re eighteen, and she’s telling you like a stewardess at the end of a very long flight: Take your stuff and get the hell out.”

I regretted ever having had a crush on him, him and his thick mop of chocolate curly hair and his questions about his sexuality—just a fantastic trick for getting girls. Thank God, I was smart enough to stay almost completely away. I don’t count the night his mother was out and we drank her beer, too much of it, and he said, “I think I might be gay.” I fell for it for five minutes, let him test his possible gayness out on me, then his mother came home, so the result remained inconclusive, that is to say unconsummated, at least with me.

In that early June week, when I should have been dreaming about the prom and graduation, limos and dresses and flowers, I had fevered dreams instead about a tiger ripping apart a much larger lion with his teeth. In my other, even more frightening dream I ran into Emma at the local dollar store. She said, Shelby, I can’t talk too long because I’ve got a lot to do. I don’t have time to get into it with you. And then she went about her dollar-store business, cold, unfriendly, cut off.

After that dream I couldn’t talk to her about anything. I was overthinking it. That had always been my problem. I was an over-thinker and an underdoer. So convenient, that. Didn’t someone say that no decision was worse than a bad decision? Not me. I’d never say that.

The radius of my life up to this point had been only a few miles, and I was terrified by what lay beyond my open window, its deep and abiding mystery.

One night I decided to test Emma. We were done with our work and were sitting on the couch between commercials. It was a weeknight, and I was staying in. I said, “Emma, where did you say my mother lives?”

“Your what?” That got her attention.

“My mother,” I said calmly. “Didn’t you once tell me she lived in a town in California? Montecito? Manzanita? Monte Carlo?”

“I never said,” Emma said slowly, “your mother went to California.”

“You did. What was it? Mesa Vista? Mokelumme? Monte Cristo? When I was five, you said she was sick and she went to some town in California to get better.”

“I don’t remember saying that. How do you remember this?”

“It’s just the kind of stuff you remember.” Montesano? Minnesota? Mira Loma?

“I don’t think I said it.” Emma shook her head. “It’s possible I said it, but, Shelby, I was talking to a five-year-old. You asked me when your mother was coming back. What was I supposed to say? I just said something to make you feel better. Like she was far away and couldn’t leave. But honestly …”

Commercial ended; we went back to watching “Dynasty”.

That night, I pulled out a map of the United States. After thirty minutes of carefully combing the fourth largest state in the union, I gave up. Maricopa? Mission Viejo? Mira Flores?

“I don’t think it’s a town,” Emma continued the next day, as if she knew I’d been looking, thinking about it. “I thought she went to have a rest at a mental hospital. Like Bellevue. Or Menninger in Kansas.”

“What was the name of the mental hospital?”

“Shel, I don’t know. I wasn’t serious.”

“You know she went somewhere.”

“I don’t know.”

“You told me a name back then. I know you did. Did she have family from there? Why am I so sure it begins with an M? That it has four syllables?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mariposa? Minnelusa? Miramonte?”

She rubbed her eyes, as if she were tired of me. The commercial ended, “Dallas” came back on, and Emma had no time to respond. Nor did she respond during the next commercial. And then “Dallas” was over and she got up and said, “I’m going to bed. Goodnight.”

“I thought maybe that’s why you got me a car,” I said after her. “So I could go visit my sick mother at the Montezuma mental hospital.”

Emma turned around. “I got you a car,” she said, “so you could be free. You kept saying you wanted to be. So now you are. I don’t know where your mother is. I never knew.”

“I’m not going to be gone long,” I said. “Just a few weeks. Maybe two.”

“Two weeks? Takes longer than that to drive there and back.”

“Nah. I’ll be quick. Maybe two and a half. I’ll be back by the middle of July. You’ll be okay for a couple of weeks, won’t you?”

“I’ll be okay,” said Emma. “But two and a half weeks to where? And starting when?”

I bought a map of California from the Rand McNally store in New York City. I put my finger on the letter M in the town index, and went down, mouthing the names to myself one by one, from Mabel to Mystic, and then back again from Mystic to Mabel.

The third time through, at two in the morning, I found it.

Mendocino.

Men-doh-SEE-no.

Mendocino!

I couldn’t sleep until Emma woke up at five.

“Mendocino!” I exclaimed later, like an operatic clap.

She gazed at me through bleary, blinking eyes, as if she’d just woken up. “You have your notebooks, your running stuff?”

“Emma, Mendocino! Isn’t that right?”

“I think so,” she said. “That sounds almost right. Do you have your lunch, or are you going to buy one in school?”

“I’ll buy one in school. It is, it is right. It feels right.”

“Good. You want some eggs before you go?”

I had eggs. I had orange juice.

Mendocino=Missing Mother.

Emma! I wanted to yell. But yelling’s not our style, unless I’m angry. But how could I be angry? Marc told me Emma could have spent as much as $5000 (though I told him that was impossible) on my car so I could go find my mother. It had been so long since I’d seen her. She might be wondering how I’d been.

I laid out the map of the United States on the floor of my room and studied it like the periodic table. I measured my route with a ruler as I used to in Miss Keller’s class, with an X-axis and a Y-axis and plot points along the way. I measured the miles in days and inches. I used physics (time and distance), geometry (points along the X-axis) and earth science (weather conditions in July) to determine my course. I used my seventh-grade social studies to help me with geography. My trouble was: seventh grade was a really long time ago. I thought after Pennsylvania came Kansas, then Nevada, then California. I took earth science in ninth grade, and geometry in tenth, but physics was a senior year subject, and afraid of flunking I opted out of the physics program, and so was stuck with the most rudimentary knowledge of the space-time continuum. As in: how long does it take to travel 3000 miles? Oh, but the Shelby Mustang can fly at 136.7 mph! The Kitty Hawk didn’t go that fast. Twenty-two hours. I could be there and back in two days. Sweet. Three if I dogged it.

Utah’s time and distance didn’t even make it into my calculations. I don’t have to go through Utah to get to California, I said to myself, and dismissed it. I lost interest in geometry and physics somewhere before crossing the Mississippi.

What became clear to me was this: with my flagrant and obvious limitations, I don’t know what I was thinking, planning to go by myself. After Iowa, I had no strategy for the rest of the country. And I like to nap in the afternoons. How could I nap if I was the only one driving? With so many skillsets clearly missing, a vague half of the western country appearing to me monolithically when I slept—snow and yellow flowers between two vast bodies of water—I was on a rack of doubt.

Which was precisely why when Gina approached my breasts in the locker room and offered to go with me, to split the costs and share the driving and the fear, I did not say no right away. Anxiety danced in me, but summer danced in me, too. I was eighteen, out of high school, and had a 1966 stock-car racing Mustang with black Le Mans stripes. And Gina didn’t. Though she had had other things that I know meant a lot to her. Boyfriends, and things.

Gina and I were like sisters in kindergarten. She lived on Summer Street, a short walk away, and had a stay-at-home mom, a working dad, a grandma living with them, and a sister she didn’t get along with, but still—an actual sister.

Her mother didn’t mind that we used to play mostly at her house; she said she didn’t like the endless parade of strangers through mine. I don’t know quite what she meant by that. Strangers didn’t parade through our rooms above a garage. So there we were, tight and inseparable, and suddenly, just like that, out of the blue, for no good reason, almost to spite me, my bestest bud Gina becomes friends with the mousy, gossipy Agnes Tuscadero, whom I didn’t like to begin with but after the revelations at the Tuscaderos’ idle-talk kitchen table, I hated like Jews hate Hitler. Gina said we could all be friends. She didn’t understand why the three of us could not all be friends. So we feebly played together, got together, walked into town, went to Larchmont beach, talked about being grounded, getting freedom, lying to our parents, and suddenly, just like that, out of the blue, for no good reason, it occurred to me it wasn’t Agnes who was the third wheel.

Marc said Gina was not a serious person, that she was too lightweight for me. I deserved a better, more profound friend. Like him.

Gina maintained we were all still friends. Every Saturday she kept inviting me out, to the beach, to Rye Playland. “Come on, the more the merrier.” She wouldn’t take my no for an answer, though it was the only answer she kept getting. Except once. A year ago June she invited me out to a club with her new boyfriend Eddie. “Come out with us, please? I really want you to meet him. I want him to meet all my best friends. You’ll love him. He is so funny.”

“What about Agnes?” I said glumly.

“She’s not as funny.” Agnes apparently was grounded. I couldn’t believe I agreed to go as Agnes’s pathetic mid-day Friday, afterthought replacement. But I went.

Eddie was pretty funny.

Then Agnes wasn’t grounded anymore, and Gina cold-turkey stopped asking me to go places with her. Nearly the entire senior year had cruised by and we had barely spoken till the afternoon in the locker room.

Gina and I weren’t such strangers once, but there is something so personal about traveling in a car with someone. So intimate. Sharing the minutes of your day, your every minute for days, maybe weeks, with another human being. I couldn’t understand why in the world she’d want to come with me. But the thought of traveling alone was not entirely pleasant. Tension was inherent in both scenarios. On the one hand, Gina, but on the other, terror and alone! It was like that Valentine’s Day Hallmark card for fools: “BEING WITH YOU IS ALMOST LIKE BEING WITH SOMEONE.” Now that was sentiment I responded to. What was better: Gina or violent dread?

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” I told her when she accosted me again in the hall.

“Well, I have to know soon.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why? I have to pack, no? I have to tell my mother. I have to get ready, too.”

“Look, if I agree to do this, you have to agree to take a bus the last leg of your trip. I’m not driving to Bakersfield.”

“You sure about that?” Gina said, and before I could respond, quickly added, “How close is Bakersfield to Mendocino?” a wide smile on her not really Italian face.

About me. First, all the things I’m not. I am not objectively beautiful. I have found very few people who are; is that fair to say? On the bell curve, I fall somewhere near the top of the downward creep toward homeliness, though perhaps more like a drop than a creep first thing in the morning when I don’t wear mascara or lipgloss, but I bet not even Christy Worsoe, the homecoming queen, looks good then. I can be thought of as plain in my unadorned state, but Emma, who has no obligation to make me feel better about myself, says I look cute when I crawl out for Saturday morning French toast with ricotta cheese before track, all sleepy and punk-haired, and because she says this, I don’t feel as homely as I might. There is nothing wrong with my face, but there is nothing extra right with it, either.

Other things about me. I don’t function well at night. I’m a morning person. I deeply believe that in that two-word, sea-like panoply of “morning person” are veiled a thousand tributaries, big and small, which comprise the essence of a human being. I have tested this divide on my friends Marc and Debbie and Tracy, on Emma too, and found it to be true. I get up and function best early in the day. I clean my room, get my work and schoolbooks together, make sure my sneakers are dry and my clothes ready for track. I take a shower, I eat breakfast. I have a list of things to do before the bus comes, and I do them all. My brain works. I get things out of the freezer for dinner, I make coffee for Emma, I check the boiler to make sure the pilot light is on so that the Lambiels have hot water. We once had a big problem with that, and it became my responsibility to check, and I never forget. I go to school. My library books are returned on time, I don’t indulge in compulsive behavior when I have things to do. I don’t leave my schoolwork until the last minute. I don’t put down my library books and then forget where I put them. I don’t squander the little money I have. I help out. When Emma and I are working an evening for the diplomats, I stay until the work is done. I always say, is there anything else I can do? and, what can I do to help?

If Emma wants me to iron, I iron. I don’t like ironing, and once I burned a silk shirt and the top of my hand and still have the scar to prove it (the blouse needed to be thrown out), but I iron anyway.

I don’t cut corners. If I am told to run seven miles to prepare for tomorrow’s 440-meter race, I run seven miles, even if I think it’s excessive. I don’t get so obsessed in watching TV/reading/knitting/washing the car/cleaning that I forget what time it is. That’s the major part of it, I think—I, as a morning person, always keep track of time. I know when it’s time to go to school, and when it’s time to clean, and when it’s time to read, and to rest, and to ask Emma why she has taken care of me for thirteen years (though there’s never been a good time to ask that, so I haven’t). We sometimes stay up and watch a late movie on a Saturday night, but rarely. Once, in 1978, we stayed up for “Towering Inferno” because I wanted to see how it ended. It ended at two, and I’ve never forgotten the feeling of having to drag my sorry ass out of bed four hours later. I sometimes read late, in my bed, but when I see it’s eleven-thirty, I put the book down and go to sleep so I won’t feel like a zombie the next day. I hate feeling like a zombie. I hate that feeling, because it’s not me. It’s not who I am, zombie-like on Sundays because I couldn’t put down The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. I don’t like myself when I lose track of time, so to like myself more, I put down the book and go to sleep.

Now take my friend Marc. Marc doesn’t know the definition of the word “time.” He does stay up till two, three, sometimes all night, and then I don’t see him in school the next day. He is constantly on the verge of failing, making up work, being late with assignments, copying my notes between classes, rushing, dropping things, forgetting things. Oh, does he forget things. Even things that are important to him. He likes to paint; you’d think he’d remember to bring along the tools of his craft, like his brushes and oils. But no. I can’t tell you how many times he doesn’t have his notebooks, or his chalks, or his special coal pencil. He is ridiculous and knows it, doesn’t like himself but can’t help it. His mind is on a thousand things at once, and he can’t remember where he has to be, or what he has to do. Things fall away. And when he’s up, he wants to stay up. And when he’s asleep, he wants to stay asleep. He says: “Whatever I’m doing, I want to continue doing.”

“But what about the things you have to be doing?”

“Not so much for those, Sloane.”

We are quite uncertain about his future at college. He and I are both worried and frankly not optimistic. Fortunately he’s going to New Rochelle, just five miles away, and will commute, so if he flunks out, he’ll still be in his own bed.

Things don’t get away from me.

Guess what kind of person Gina is?

“Four hundred and seventy miles,” I said to Gina in the hall as we walked from Health to English. “From Bakersfield to Mendocino.”

“Well, how would I get there?”

I said nothing. I was providing the use of my outrageous wheels all the way across the country. I wanted to suggest the use of a Greyhound bus all the way across the country. Or perhaps an airplane ticket. I said nothing, hoping she would see reason all by herself, but she spent two or three minutes until the bell rang heartily complaining, after which I said, “Gina, you’ll have to get on a bus. It’s just a few hours.”

“If it’s a few hours, why can’t you drive me?”

“I’m being metaphorical about the few hours. It’s incredibly out of my way.”

“Just a few miles.”

“Four hundred and seventy few miles to be exact. And I don’t know why I have to point out the obvious, but you do realize I have to drive back to Mendocino? That’s two extra days for me. You’re staying in Bakersfield, but I’m actually driving back.”

“I’m not staying in Bakersfield,” she said, sounding defensive. “I’m coming back here. With him.”

“With who?”

“With Eddie, of course. Who do you think I’m going to Bakersfield for?”

I said nothing. Really, there are times in your life when it’s better to say nothing. This was one of them.

Gina’s blue eyes stared at me for a second longer than I was comfortable with, and then ran to class.

My hands itched all through English, I couldn’t hold a pen. What I wanted to say was, are you kidding me? I’m not bringing you and him back to New York. I’m not spending a week with him and you in my car. You might as well ask me to start speaking French or type sixty words a minute. It ain’t happenin’. Mais non. Jamais. Jamais.

Instead of talking about this, the important thing, Gina and I had an arithmetic lesson. An elementary physics lesson. A time and distance lesson. We took minutes, divided them into hours and siphoned miles through time, and time through miles, taking 470 of them, which was almost 480, dividing them by 60 minutes, and concluding with 8 hours without stops, each way, but after 30 minutes of this, Gina still couldn’t grasp what 60 minutes had to do with how fast the car was traveling, as if time and distance were in no way related. She didn’t understand why my 350 horsepower Mustang, traveling at nearly 137 miles per hour, couldn’t get from Mendocino to Bakersfield and back in 55 minutes. While explaining it to her, I could barely understand it myself, and it certainly didn’t help me to understand the most important thing—was she really expecting me to bring her and Eddie back to New York? Jamais!

The preparations were monumental. Maybe it was because I’d never been anywhere. Or because I was a planner and couldn’t plan for two weeks I couldn’t foresee in my pedestrian imagination. I didn’t want Emma to know I was having trouble because I didn’t want her to say, if you can’t pack and plan for a little trip, how are you going to pack for college? I wanted to reply to her unasked question that it’s a lot easier to pack all your stuff than to selectively pack some of it. Like, how am I supposed to know what I’m going to wear in Nevada, on an indefinite tomorrow? Is the temperature the same in Nevada as in Larchmont? “Probably a touch warmer,” said Emma.

Are there mosquitoes? “There are mosquitoes everywhere.”

“Really, everywhere? But there’s no water in Nevada. Aren’t mosquitoes swamp creatures?”

“Well, then, you’ve answered your own question.”

“No water?” said Gina when she heard. “What about Lake Tahoe?”

“What do you know about Lake Tahoe, Reed?” exclaimed Marc. He called all the girls by their last name. Took the sex right out of them. And mine stuck. This took place during lunch.

“Nothing,” Gina defended. “Except Fredo Corleone was killed on it, and it was in Nevada.”

“Oh, Fredo Corleone. Well, then, absolutely. Better bring repellant.”

Did it get cold at night? No one knew, not even Gina; that part wasn’t in “The Godfather.”

Was it windy? We decided it was. We packed some breakers.

Do I bring hairspray? Extra underwear? Warm socks?

“I don’t think it’s ever a bad idea to pack extra underwear and socks,” said Emma. “But you don’t wear hairspray here; why would you start there?”

Maybe I was going to be a different person there.

Challengingly I bought hairspray.

Are hotel rooms warm or cold? Do they give you towels? Extra blankets? Sometimes I get cold at night.

“In the summer?”

We circled the horses around to the original question. Did it get cold at night and are hotel rooms warm or cold?

“Does it get cold at night where?” said Marc. “In Nevada? You’ll blow through the state in four hours. What about South Dakota? Iowa? Utah? Wyoming? Why don’t you care if it gets cold there?”

What did Utah have to do with my business, and should I bring my favorite pillow?

Should I bring a camera, my Kodak Instamatic? Or will Emma lend me her Polaroid, and what’s better, the top-notch quality of my Instamatic, or the stick-it-in-the-darkroom-of-a-partially-closed-drawer quality of the Polaroid?

Should I bring books to read?

“Do you plan to be doing much reading while you’re driving?” Marc asked. He asked this slowly to convey what he really thought of my question.

“Aren’t you all Walden Pondy,” I said, shoving him. “Go sketch something while I do all the work.”

He was sitting in my room doing nothing. He sketched me packing.

“Perhaps a book for a rainy day?” I asked. Why did I always sound so defensive, even with my friends?

“You won’t be driving in the rain, then?”

Should I bring cash?

“Yes, Sloane,” said Marc even more slowly, the wretch. “You should bring some money. After all, you might need gas.”

I threw my pillow at him, knocking the coal pencils out of his hands.

“I mean,” I said, “cash or Travelers’ checks? And if I bring cash, where do I stash it? Do I hide it?”

“Hide it from who? Gina?”

“Well, I don’t know. Can I trust her?”

“Can she trust you?” said Marc, and I didn’t have a pillow left to throw.

“One more comment like this, and you’ll have to walk home.”

“Where are you going to hide your money from her in your little Shelby car? How hard would you have to hide it before she a, realizes what you’re doing and b, takes it personally?”

I sighed. “You’re exasperating.”

“I’m exasperating?” He went back to sketching.

“How much money will I need? Do I bring more than I need? Or just enough? And what if I run out? How will I get more? I have no credit card, and who’d give me one anyway? I have no job.”

Marc got up and handed me his drawing. “I’m going home,” he said, wearily. “I’m glad I’m broke, and can’t go, and don’t have your problems.”

After he left, I wished he could come with us. He’d drawn me like a brown flurry in the middle of a messy room, with greenbacks flying in the air. I taped it to my wall, as I figured things out.

By my estimation we would be gone fifteen days and fourteen nights. We needed gas for 6000 miles. But what if it was 6500? And what if on uphill slopes, the Mustang’s gas mileage dipped from twenty-three miles per gallon to twenty?

“So?” said Marc when I called to discuss the imponderables. “On downhill slopes, mileage will be twenty-six. You better hope it’ll all even out.”

But that’s the whole thing right there. What if it didn’t even out? What if Gina twisted my arm and I had to drive her 480 miles to Bakersfield, go north to Mendocino and then head back south again to pick her up? Pas possible! How did I calculate for that kind of unknown?

The hotel room. Fifteen nights. But what if it turned out to be sixteen? What if it took me a few extra days to locate the woman who gave birth to me? What if Gina wanted to spend a few extra days in Eddie’s stellar company?

“So? Sleep in the car,” Marc said, in a “Freebird” voice that said it would be the height of adventure to sleep in the car because you ran out of money.

I calculated fifty dollars a night for a motel for sixteen nights. But what if it was sixty dollars? And what about room tax?

“Yes, room tax is different in every state,” Marc said. “And parking? And what if you lose your room key and have to pay ten bucks for a new one? I don’t think you’re planning enough, Sloane.”

I agreed. Food. Did we have to eat three times a day? Plus water for the drive. Maybe an adult beverage, once, twice, in a bar somewhere?

“Yes, good, plan for a drunken binge,” said Marc. “But what about a cover charge?”

The car will need an oil change.

“Every 3000 miles. Your car, maybe more often. And incidentals?”

“I budgeted for them. Like what?”

“Well, I don’t know. That’s why they’re called incidentals.”

I thought about it. “You mean like nail polish?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what came to my mind. And acetone. And aspirin.”

“Forget it. I’ll live with a headache.” I bit my nails to eschew the incidentals.

“A flat tire?”

“Okay, I’ll bring an extra forty dollars.”

“What if you hit a deer and get another flat tire?”

“Why would I hit a deer?”

“Sloane, I don’t know why you do many of the things you do.”

“Shut up.”

I calculated. Hotel: seventeen days at sixty bucks a day. Gas: 7000 miles at twenty miles a gallon at a buck twenty-five. I factored in three cans of oil, another pair of windshield wipers, jumper cables, a tire jack, a poncho. Plus: enough cash for three daily squares, ice cream seven times, two daily Cokes, a daily coffee. Also: six adult beverages, forty bucks for a flat tire, another fifty bucks for just in case, and twenty dollars for a gift for Emma. I added it up. I divided by me and Gina.

It came out to $1700. Each. Plus a gift for Emma, so my share was $1720!!!

Perhaps it was a blessing Gina was coming with me. When I told her how much her share was, she didn’t pause, didn’t blink. “That’s all? Hmm. I thought it was going to be more. But I’m going to bring an extra hundred for clothes, because I love clothes, and another hundred just to be on the safe side.” She sounded almost like a morning person. So clear-headed. I applauded her cautiousness and followed her example. Gina said she worked in a Dairy Barn for two years, saved a little. She was a saver, too! Was I wrong about her?

I took all my money out of the bank—or what was left of it after new running shoes and a prom dress and paying for a quarter of the prom limo I was sharing with my friends Marc, Cindy, and Jessica.

Emma offered me an extra $300.

“No, Em. You already did plenty.” I tried to think of what she’d done. “You got me a car!” I said brightly, hoping she’d notice.

She didn’t. “Take it,” she said sensibly, and then—non-sensically, “Believe me, you’ll need it.”

More? Less?

“No, no, I’ll be fine. I planned it all out.” Then I remembered. What about shampoo, conditioner?

“Hotels give you that.” Emma paused. “Maybe not conditioner.” She paused again. “Maybe not motels.”

“Maybe not motels what? Not give you shampoo or conditioner?”

“Either.”

“Oh.”

Hotels were going to be too expensive. Which led me back to my question: how much shampoo, how much conditioner? A bottle of “Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific” usually lasted a month. I decided to bring two of each, just to be on the safe side. Emma paid for those.

Gina and I didn’t get together for an inventory before we left. We should have, and wanted to, but I was busy, and she was busy. I went to four parties, there was a graduation, a senior picnic, a prom, packing, planning. We didn’t have time. We didn’t make time.

I did make some time for Tony Bergamino, though. Rather, he made time for me. He came up to me after the prom, told me he thought I looked good and danced well. “Gee, thanks.” If I were a peacock, I would’ve opened up my tail.

“I heard you were driving to California.”

“How’d you hear?”

“What d’you mean? Everybody heard.”

I tried not to smile. Tony Bergamino heard I was going to California! I was a ten-inch red balloon with twelve inches’ worth of helium under his unprecedented attention.

“You taking Gina with you?”

“I’m not taking her with me. We’re going together. We’re sharing the costs.”

“Of course. She’s a firecracker. I didn’t know you two were friends.”

“Yeah, used to be … friends.”

“Must have been a long time ago.” He glanced at me funny, like he knew things.

“It was.”

He shuffled his feet. Someone called for him (perhaps his lover, Gazelle?).

“Well, good luck. Have a great trip.”

“Thanks. You too.” Oh, idiot! And he smiled at me like I was an idiot.

And then, because he was a peacock, he opened up his tail. “Feel like getting together before you go? There’s this great place down the coast, in Newport. We could drive.” He hemmed. “Maybe I could drive?” he asked sheepishly, shining down at me his football-jocky, legs-apart smile.

Hallelujah!

Hallelujah, hallelujah!

“Yeah, sure, you can drive. If you want to. When would we go?”

We went overnight, right before the end. Newport possibly was a nice town. Beachy. White. Quaint, with ships and sails. I heard it was by the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea … but the place we stayed was inland.

“Emma,” I said the evening before I was leaving. “Tell me about my dad.”

It took me thirteen years to ask this question. I thought at first she didn’t hear me. You know, when your own voice is just an echo, and you start to doubt whether you spoke at all; start to doubt whether you are at all because the largest, loudest questions in your head are never answered.

She was so quiet. She was listening to the answers on “Jeopardy.” The largest of the Great Lakes for 10,000. Apparently it was Lake Superior.

When they went to commercial, she turned the volume down. “You really want to know?” She sounded pained. But no matter how tense her words, her hands were composed and on her lap, threaded together. “He got into a bar fight. It went terribly wrong and he killed a man. The prosecution said he didn’t use equal force. The dead man used a bottle on your father, but your father used a bat. The bottle was broken, though, jagged edges everywhere. Your father clearly felt threatened. No matter. The man he killed was a local and well-liked, and your father was a journeyman, just passing through. He was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and went to prison for ten years. He got sick in there and died. They said pneumonia. But it could’ve been from his congestive heart failure. He always had a bad heart.” She stood, picked up her empty teacup with a steady hand.

I didn’t know what to say. “How come you never told me?”

“You never asked. I told you your daddy had died. I thought that was enough. I didn’t want to upset you. You were always so sensitive. I thought when you were ready you would ask.”

“How come we never visited him in prison?”

“He was too far. He was tried and convicted in California. I didn’t want to take you on the bus. I was saving up my money for us to fly, but then he up and died.” She stood in front of me, still holding her teacup, her gray hair set in curlers, her houserobe clean and smelling of detergent.

“What was he doing in California?”

Emma didn’t answer at first, rubbing her cup. “I reckon,” she said at last, “the same thing you’re about to do.”

She was right. I hadn’t been ready, and was still not ready. Only when she had fallen silent did I catch the hook between the lines: your father went to find your mother and he ended up dying in prison. And now you’re going.

Straining hard to be grown-up, but staring hard to glean her reaction, I asked, “You think my mother is still alive?” I was hoping she’d say, no, Shel, she’s long dead. Don’t go anywhere. Please. Stay here.

I wanted her to say it.

“How would I know, Shelby?” she said. “Perhaps.”

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. What does one say to that?

“Where’s the letter she wrote him before she left?”

“What letter?” Puzzled at first, suddenly she frowned. Her neutral gaze darkened. “Oh my God. Have you been believing vicious gossip all these years? What’s wrong with you? Why are you so eager to make up things about your life? What, life isn’t hard enough?”

Life was hard enough. “Am I making it up?” I mouthed.

“What do you think is going on around here?” Emma clunked her cup down! “Who do you think I am? Who do you think has been raising you all these years?”

I didn’t answer, but she glared at me as if expecting an answer. So finally I said, “I thought my father left my mother to be with you. So she left.”

Gasping and falling speechless Emma straightened, her usually kind and casual eyes flushed with incomprehension. “I simply don’t understand who you are. Shelby, your father didn’t leave your mother. Your mother left him. And for your information, I am not your father’s slutty mistress. I am his sister.”

I sucked in my breath. “You are?” I was dumbfounded. “How can that be?” I stammered after minutes of silent shame. “You—you—have different last names.”

“So, expert on names? We had one mother. Your father was ten years younger than me.”

“You are my aunt?” This could not have been said with more incredulity than if I had said, you are a man?

“Why do you think you called me Aunt Emma?”

“I was just a kid then,” I muttered.

“Yes, and with more sense than now, after twelve years of school. When your father set out to look for your mother, he said he’d be back in two weeks. I agreed to watch over you. Two weeks turned out to be thirteen years. He left you with me because there was nowhere else for you to go.”

I was ashamed and ashen. Humiliation sometimes turns into a parade of pride. It did so with me. To cover up, I said, “Well, why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“You called me Aunt Emma!” she nearly yelled.

“Just a name,” I doggedly repeated.

She shook her head. “Yes. Just a name of your daddy’s sister.” She was breathing heavily, gathering her thoughts. “Does it benefit you to talk down your life? To make it up out of damaged cloth? Did you ever ask yourself why a jilted and abandoned woman would raise her ex-lover’s wayward, ungrateful and preposterous child?” I asked myself this a thousand times a day.

“Because that’s you, Shelby,” Emma continued. “Preposterous and ungrateful. You’ve been spinning and believing these lies about yourself, but it’s not to make yourself feel better. It was always to make yourself feel worse.”

I had nothing to say after that.

Neither did she.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said. “And I’m not coming back till I find my mother.”

“Good,” she said. “By all means, I beg of you, do keep open the questions of youth. As if they’re the important thing.” She turned to go. “That’s what your father said, too, by the way. But perhaps you’ll need your mother’s name, if you’re going to be looking for her, and all.” She fell silent and waited.

Why was she waiting? As if she were holding her breath for me to choose to stay or choose to go. But she gave me a car! I had to go.

I had to.

“What was her name?” I asked, defiantly.

Emma lifted her teacup off the table, her gray face tight, her gray eyes sober. “Lorna Moor.”

Lorna Moor!

My mother hadn’t left a letter. But she did send a postcard. Emma showed it to me. It had daffodils on a Main Street and beyond them cliffs and a hard-breaking ocean. Mendocino, California, the card’s location read, and in small sloppy handwriting, “Say hi to Shelby.”

This is how you move toward the rest of your life: sometimes by repetition and, sometimes, by revolution.

TWO

1
The Pomeranians

It was a beautiful late June morning when I set off. I got to Gina’s house around nine. It had taken longer than expected to pack up and get out. I had told Gina to be ready at eight. I think I milled around for a few extra minutes to see if Emma would say something to me. What, no words of wisdom? She said, “Do you have what you need?”

And I said, “Yes.”

“You don’t.” She brought something out from my bedroom. “You forgot this.” She was holding my pillow with the pink cotton jersey cover. “You know how you don’t like to sleep without it.”

She was right, I didn’t like to sleep without my pillow. “I don’t want to take it, Emma,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m going to forget it in a motel room. I’d rather have it waiting for me when I come back.”

Emma laid it down on the kitchen table. “Okay.”

Absurdly I kept feeling my cash, all of it in one large manila folder. It made me feel vulnerable carrying it like that; one snatch, the whole trip over. I should have bought a purse. But what was I going to do, carry $2000 in my purse to the convenience stores to get a Coke? But now what to do with it? Leave it in the glove compartment? I opted for the bottom of my suitcase, all except twenty bucks in the back of my shorts for drinks and things.

Emma gave me a pat with a little squeeze. “Be well,” she said. “Be good.” She didn’t even say be careful. Personally I would’ve thought that was a prerequisite, but what do I know. Perhaps a mother would’ve said it.

At Gina’s house, her mother, Kathy Reed, was fussing over her like … well, like a mother whose eldest daughter was taking an unprecedented trek across the country. Morning, evening, Kathy Reed was always exceptionally coiffed and this morning was no exception. Made up and in a soft-knit skirt, she carried Gina’s suitcase to the car herself, stepping across the lawn in her beige three-inch heels. “Shelby! I haven’t seen you in ages.” She hugged me, smiled. “How’ve you been?”

“Very good, Mrs. Reed,” I said, but she was already walking back to the house to fetch another bag. I hoped it would fit in my trunk.

Gina’s grandmother was there, too, hobbling on her cane, muttering, trying to dispense advice. “Bring a jacket. You’ll get cold.” “Bring a book. Shelby, did you bring a book?” “Bring all the telephone numbers in case of emergency.”

All telephone numbers? I mouthed to Gina. Like all telephone numbers? She laughed.

“Bring quarters.” The dogs were barking, the cat was underfoot.

I kept my distance from the goings-on; to me Gina didn’t look ready to go, and I didn’t want to be in her way. I kept glancing at my watch, hoping that would give somebody a sense of urgency. We needed to get through New Jersey and Pennsylvania today, stop somewhere in Ohio. That was 500 miles away, but we could do it if we left immediately, hit only a little traffic going through New York City, maintained 50 mph on I-78 west, and kept the stops to a minimum. One for gas, one for drinks …

“Remember, don’t eat any of the cannoli,” I overheard Mrs. Reed instructing. “My sister loves these. She can’t get them in Baltimore.”

I came out of my geographical reverie, narrowed my eyes. Suddenly I was paying attention. Mrs. Reed might as well have slapped her hands together at the end of my nose.

“Um,” I said, aptly. “Um, excuse me, your sister?”

“Yes, you know Flo, Shelby,” said Mrs. Reed. “Gina’s aunt. You’ve met her many times at Christmas. She lives in Baltimore.”

“Of course. I like her very much. Does she … live in Baltimore? When did she move there?” I thought Flo lived right around the corner. Didn’t all aunts?

“Well, Kathy, actually, near Baltimore,” the mother-in-law, propped by her cane, corrected her daughter-in-law about the whereabouts of her daughter-in-law’s sister. “Near the airport.”

“Scottie,” said Mrs. Reed impatiently, “Glen Burnie is still considered Baltimore.”

“Well, it’s really its own little town. Probably better to say near Baltimore …”

I cleared my throat, trying to catch Gina’s eye and anybody’s attention. “Gina?”

Gina said nothing, busying herself with looking through her bag, muttering, “I hope I have everything …”

“Now, Gina, remember …”

“Wait, wait,” I cut in. “What does Baltimore have to do with us? We’re not going to Baltimore.”

“Not going to Baltimore?” said Mrs. Reed. “Then how are you going to get the Pomeranians to Aunt Flo if you’re not going to Baltimore?”

“The whatteranians?”

Gina was still studiously ascertaining if her bag was ready for travel. We were standing on the brick path near the front lawn, the birds were chirping and she was solemnly bent over, rummaging for hair clips. That’s when I noticed the barking cage. It was pointed out to me by Gina’s mother and grandmother, the latter with her cane, that was now a canine pointer-outer.

“Gina!” That was Mrs. Reed, not me. “You told me Shelby was all right with it. You told me you spoke to her!”

“I was going to, Mom, but we got so busy, and went away to Mystic, and it slipped my mind. Sorry, Sloane. Sorry, Mom.”

“But you told me you spoke to her!”

“Sorry, Mom. Sorry, Sloane. I thought you wouldn’t mind. I thought it was on our way. Isn’t it?”

This coming from a girl who thought Bakersfield and Mendocino were neighboring towns, separated by a mere 500 miles! What was I supposed to do? The dogs were anxiously looking up through the bars of their crate.

Mrs. Reed rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Shelby, I hope you don’t mind. My Rosie had puppies recently and I promised two of them to Flo. And it’s a little on the way, isn’t it?” She said this sheepishly, beseechingly, as if she was pretty sure it might not be quite on the way, but perhaps I wouldn’t notice.

“I think it’s a little out of the way,” I said, sounding like such a stickler. “I’m sure it won’t be too bad.”

Mrs. Reed smiled warmly. “I’m pleased. My sister was sick last Christmas and hasn’t seen the girls. Or you. She’ll be very happy.”

“We can stay with Aunt Flo and it won’t cost us,” said Gina, trying to organize her half-dozen pairs of sandals into a small shopping bag. “That’s good, right? We save a little money. And she loves cannolis.”

“Who doesn’t?” I grumbled. Baltimore! I showed them my back so they wouldn’t see me grind my teeth together. Surreptitiously, I flapped open the map. Sure enough, Baltimore was a miserable 200-mile detour south when we were heading west. Well, not anymore. Now we were heading south.

“Come on, Sloane,” Gina said, coming up to the car. “It’s just an adventure. I know it’s not on your list.”

“No, no, it’s fine. It’s going to add a day to the trip, get us to California later, but that’s okay, I guess. One day won’t hurt us. I’ll adjust it on my calendar. I don’t mind.”

When I folded the map and turned around, Gina’s mother had her hands on Gina’s shoulders and was dispensing more advice. “Now remember, don’t stop for anyone. Do you hear?”

“I hear.”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise.”

“Shelby, you promise? Be safe.”

“Yes, of course, Mrs. Reed. I would never.”

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about Shelby, Mom.” Gina laughed. “You know there’s no one less likely in the world to pick up a hitchhiker than her.”

“I know. That’s why I’m letting you go with her,” said Mrs. Reed. “And don’t lose your money. And have breakfast every day. Don’t forget to drink fluids on the road. And lock the car when you stop to go to the potty.” I blinked. Did she use the word potty to an eighteen-year-old?

“I will.” “I won’t.” “I will.” “I won’t.” “I will.”

“Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t even look at them.”

“I won’t.”

While still holding on to Gina’s shoulders, Mrs. Reed turned her head to me. “And, Shelby, when the tank is half full, gas up. No reason to wait till it’s empty.”

“We will, Mrs. Reed.” She was preaching to the converted.

“No, no, not we. You. Don’t let Gina touch the gas. The fumes will give her a fierce headache. Gina, when Shelby gasses up, you run to the bathroom, okay?”

“Okay, Mom.”

“Don’t stay near the pumps. Don’t inhale.” She turned to me. “And remember, she’s allergic to peanuts. So no peanuts.”

“No peanuts, got it. What about peanut butter?” When I saw her face, I said, all teeth, “Just kidding?”

She calmly continued. “Shelby, she’s also allergic to bees and wasps. She’ll swell up something awful if she’s stung. Don’t drive around country roads with the windows open. Just stay on the Interstate. We have such a good system of highways in this country. I heard someone made it from New York to California in three days!”

“Probably without diverting to Baltimore,” I muttered, almost inaudibly.

“Be safe,” she said firmly, after a sideways glance. “Don’t speed. Keep to the speed limit. It’s fifty-five. I don’t care what kind of car you have. And don’t pass trucks on the right. Let the trucks pass. They win all ties. And avoid aggressive drivers. Shelby, okay?”

“Okay, Mrs. Reed.”

“How long have you had your license?”

“My student license for a year. My full license just since this month.”

“Okay. You’ll do well to be careful on the road. You’re a new driver. Don’t drive at night. When it starts to get dark, stop. Have dinner, then stop for the night. No reason to keep going like maniacs. You’re not running to a fire. Better safe than sorry. Remember the story of the tortoise and the hare?”

Did she mean running from a fire? I thought it best not to ask. And didn’t she just say someone made it from New York to California in three days? Was that the tortoise or the hare?

At no point did Gina say, Mom, we have to go. She just stood there, with her mother’s arms on her shoulders, listening and nodding. After Mrs. Reed appeared to be done by having fallen silent, Gina said she was going to make one last “potty” break and disappeared inside. I was left with the two Mrs. Reeds standing looking me up and down. There was nothing to me this morning. I was wearing jean shorts with silver studs on the pockets the shape of roses and a beige Aerosmith T-shirt. My hair was clean, so were my teeth. I barely had on any makeup. Really, nothing to see here, folks. Yet they examined me, perused me. Mulled, like I was an indecent painting they thought was overpriced. “Shelby, you’ll take good care of our Gina, right?” finally said the younger Mrs. Reed.

I had no idea what that meant. I hadn’t taken care of anything my whole life. I couldn’t get a one-eyed frog to last through winter. Naturally I said, “Yes, of course, Mrs. Reed. But Gina and I are friends. We look out for each other.”

“You’re her keeper now, Shelby,” Mrs. Reed continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “You know I’ve always thought of you as her older sister.”

“Absolutely. Me, too. Well, actually, she’s ten months older, but I know what you mean. And you know sisters, they take care of each other.”

“She’s in good hands. I know you’ll watch out for her. I’ve always liked you. You really don’t mind taking the dogs to Baltimore, do you?” She offered me fifty dollars for my trouble. I have a hard time saying no when people offer me money (it happens so rarely) and I didn’t say no then.

“And Molly promises she’ll be no trouble.”

Dumbly I said, Molly? The time was nearing eleven. I was too afraid to look at my watch. I ripped it off my wrist and threw it in the backseat, as if removing the time counter from my person allowed me the illusion of control, as in, if I don’t know what time it is, then it’s not really that late, is it?

Gina returned. Behind her trailed a grumpy, barely awoken, unbrushed young girl. Molly, Gina’s sister! I hadn’t seen her in two years, and since then, she’d sprung things on her body, like boobs and hips. Back when I knew Gina’s sister, she was a kid. Now she was twelve and unrecognizable. Cheerfully, to balance her sister’s sulky pre-teen face, Gina said, “My mom wanted my sister to come along, too.”

“Gina, don’t lie,” said Molly. “You invited me.”

Flushed, Gina glared at her sister and to me said, “I thought it’d be fun, don’t you think?”

“Is she coming with you all the way to Bakersfield?” I asked, not so carefully.

“Shh! Don’t be silly. No, no,” Gina quickly said, not looking at me.

Molly, as it turned out, was even less prepared than Gina. She had gone to get her toothbrush, a book to read (though she didn’t look like the type that read books; that read period), her rather large cassette player, and her makeup. What else did a twelve-year-old bring to her aunt’s? What else was there? Miniature golf clubs? She said she had to sit in the front. “I get dizzy in the back.”

Gina agreed! Gina was going to sit in the back?

I shook my head. “Molly, do you know how to read a map?”

“Yes,” she said defiantly.

“Oh, good. Because I don’t know where your aunt lives, so you’ll have to direct me out of New York, all right?”

“I can’t read in the car. It makes me dizzy,” said Molly.

“I see.” I nodded. “Perhaps best to sit in the back, then.”

“I can’t sit in the back. It makes me dizzy. Besides, backseat’s too small.”

“Well, that’s perfect, because you’re small, too.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Moll, give Sloane a break, will you?” said Gina with hostility. I suddenly remembered that Gina hated Molly. They never got along. Gina said Molly was spoiled and selfish. Why in the world would she invite her with us to Baltimore? Like children, we stared at Molly, and then pleadingly at Molly’s mother, who pointed a finger at her daughter. “You’ve got one second to get in the back or march right upstairs, young lady.”

Mrs. Reed’s words made no impression on Molly other than to cause a hysterical fit, during which she stormed off upstairs screaming she wasn’t going “Anywhere!” Mrs. Reed soothingly followed. I, for lack of anything to do, other than feel like a dumb ass, brushed my hair. My hair is thin and easy-care, and takes no time at all to brush out. I keep it fairly short for running. I brushed for fifteen minutes. Everyone by this time had left the lawn: the cane-carrying grandmother had gone inside, and Gina had forgotten “one more lipgloss.” Only me and the Pomeranians remained. They had stopped barking and were whimpering now. I knew how they felt.

It was noon. Taking out my spiral notebook, I adjusted my schedule, wrote down the mileage from Larchmont to Glen Burnie (about 250 miles, measured by my pin-point scientific thumb), noted the time, the starting mileage …

By about twelve-thirty, when I had pulled out all of my thin, light, straight as a pin, easy-care-for hair and was debating picking up Gina’s eyelash-tearing habit, a wet-faced Molly reappeared on the grass, mollified. She would sit in the back, “like a good girl,” and would get a hundred dollars for her trouble.

“Ready?” I said to Gina, through my teeth. Molly and the mutts were squeezed in the back. “How about if I drive this leg, and you take the next?”

“What do you mean, take the next?” said Mrs. Reed, leaning in to kiss her daughter goodbye. “Gina doesn’t know how to drive.”

We were on the New England Thruway, and I was yelling. Me, yelling. “You don’t know how to drive? Gina, you told me you had your license! You told me you’d share the driving!”

“I know, I know,” Gina said guiltily. “I’m sorry. I did have my permit, just like you.”

“So what happened? You still have it?”

“Well, no. You know how we’re not supposed to drive at night. In April, I had a little mishap. Drove at night, very slightly teeny bit buzzed. Got stopped. Hence, no license.”

“Oh.” I brightened. “But you do know how to drive, then?”

“No. This wasn’t this past April, but a year ago April. I hadn’t even started my driver’s ed. Sorry, Sloane.”

“Unbelievable. But I kept saying how we would share the driving!”

“I know. I thought you meant that metaphorically.”

“Metaphorically? How do you mean something like that metaphorically?”

From the back the twelve-year-old pulled off one of the headphones on the recently released and all the rage Sony Walkman. “Oh, shut up, already. I can’t hear Journey.”

I lowered my voice. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

“I thought you wouldn’t let me come if I told you,” said Gina.

She was right. I wouldn’t have. I had been hoping she’d drive in the afternoons so I could nap, and now that was out the window; I’d have to readjust my schedule that I’d so carefully written up. But she had disarmed me with her honesty, because I wasn’t used to it. I let it go. What choice did I have? Turn around and bring her back home? After all, I had calculated my expenses for two.

Besides, who was I to lecture Gina on honesty and forthrightness?

We drove a little while in silence.

Well, silence if by silence I mean two squabbling orange furballs and a snoring adolescent with earphones that blasted “Don’t Stop Believin”’ to everyone in the car (how in the world could she sleep to that?).

“So we’re off,” Gina said. “Are you excited?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I’m so excited! I like your car,” she added, as we approached New York City.

“Goes fast, don’t it?” We were moving at a clip of about twelve miles per hour.

It was two in the afternoon.

By five, we were still in New York City, having gone four miles in three hours (construction and two accidents), but on the plus side, it looked as if by sundown we might get to the Battery Tunnel (about forty miles from my house). Still more than 200 miles from our destination of Glen Burnie. And 3200 miles from Mendocino. Gina suddenly seemed a little less excited. We had long eaten all the cannolis.

Molly woke up and asked if we were there yet. I told her I didn’t know what she meant by there, but if she meant downtown New York, then yes, we were. After whining in disbelief for twenty minutes, she announced she was thirsty. Then she was hungry. She had to make a stop. “And the dogs certainly do. Gina, you’re supposed to be responsible for them.”

“They’re fine.” She hadn’t even looked back at the dogs to check. She was wearing tight jean shorts and a blue-striped sleeveless tunic, and was humming along to the radio.

The gas tank was half empty. But we were in the tunnel now. And in Brooklyn, I wasn’t about to get off anywhere. I’d never find my way back to the BQE. And now look. The Verrazano Bridge was rising up out of the water in front of me, and it was five-thirty at night! “I hope Aunt Flo isn’t going to get upset about our late arrival.”

“She’s expecting us for dinner,” Molly said from the back. “And I’m thirsty.”

“It’ll have to be a late dinner,” I shot right back. “Because it’s dinnertime now, and we’re 200 miles from her house.”

Was this how I’d been planning my first day of freedom? My frustration tasted like metal in my mouth.

“I know this is a little slower than we’d hoped, Sloane,” said Gina, “but it’s okay, it’s all part of it.”

“Part of what?”

“Did you girls know,” said Gina, “that there is one letter of the alphabet that does not appear in any of the states’ names. Which—”

“Z!” yelled Molly from the back.

“No, and don’t shout,” said Gina. “Sloane?”

“I’m not playing,” I said. “Q?”

“Yes, very good. Q is correct.”

“Where does Z appear?”

“The Ozarks,” said Molly.

“The Ozarks are not a state, Molly.”

“Missouri, then.”

“Missouri has no Z.” Gina rolled her eyes.

Molly mouthed it to herself a few times and then exclaimed, “Arizona!”

“Very good. It wasn’t a question, but very good.”

I glanced at Gina as we were pulling off on Victory Boulevard in Staten Island. “How do you know this?”

She shrugged. “I know a few things.”

“What letter doesn’t appear in any of the states? That’s knowing a few things?”

She was philosophical. “And a few things more.”

“When did you learn all this?”

“Dad loves trivia. And he’s so competitive and critical, I had to read up on things.”

“He’s supposed to be critical,” said Molly. “He’s Dad.”

“No, he’s right,” said Gina. “I’m going to be a teacher. I have to be smart.” She adjusted the straps of her black bra.

We got gas at a gunky rest-stop; I pumped while Gina walked the dogs; we were back on the road by six-thirty. As we were getting on the expressway, I noticed a young, barely clad lad with a guitar on his back standing by the side of the road with his thumb out. Gina rolled down the window, stuck her head out, and yelled, “Need a ride, cowboy?”

“Gina!” I pulled her back in.

She waved, blew him a kiss. “Maybe next time, huh?” she shouted.

“What are you doing? We agreed!”

“I’m just joking, Sloane,” she said pretend-solemnly. “Just having fun.” She smiled. “He was cute, though.”

“He could be Robert Redford, we’re not picking anyone up, okay?”

“Oh, come on, you wouldn’t pick up Robert Redford?”

She was right, so I shut up until we got to Goethals Bridge forty-five minutes later and crossed into New Jersey when it was nearing seven o’clock. The sun was hazy in the sky, the noxious industry around us.

One of the passing trucks beeped his jolting loud horn and gave me the thumbs up, which I didn’t understand. We turned up the radio. BBBBBennie and the Jets were plugging us kids into the faithless.

“Are we almost there?” asked Molly again.

“No.”

“Are we almost there?”

“No.”

“Are we almost there?”

“No.”

We drove like this for two interminable New Jersey exits.

“Gina, Molly wears a lot of makeup for a twelve-year-old.”

“I’m gonna be thirteen soon,” said Molly, “and what’s it to you?”

“I’m just saying,” I continued to Gina.

Gina shrugged. “Who does it hurt?”

“She is twelve.”

“Thirteen soon!”

“How soon?”

“May.”

“Thirteen in eleven months?” I shook my head. “Like I was saying.”

“I’m thirsty.”

“I’m really getting hungry.”

“I think I need to make another stop.”

“No way am I stopping again. No stopping till Aunt Flo’s.”

“Are we there yet?”

“Stop it!”

“I think the dogs have to go again.”

I glanced at Gina. “You sure you don’t want to take your sister and the dogs to California with us? Come on. It’ll be fun.”

Gina snorted.

“I’ll go with you guys to California,” Molly said brightly. “This is fun.”

Now it was my turn to snort.

“You should feed her, Sloane,” Gina said. “Did you know that if the stomach doesn’t produce a new layer of mucus every fourteen days, its digestive juices will cause it to digest itself?”

From the back came Molly’s revolted screeching. “Hmm,” I said, stepping on the gas. “So the good news is, only thirteen days to go.”

I watched Molly’s warpainted face in the rearview mirror when she wasn’t bent over the crate playing with the dogs. She was such a kid, yet the makeup made her look seven, eight years older. She wasn’t my sister, and I couldn’t quite articulate what I felt, but what I felt was this. Why did a twelve-year-old need to look older? Why did a twelve-year-old need cherry-red lipstick, the brightness of which Debbie from Dallas would shy away from? Come on, Sloane, I chided myself. Stop being so old.

“The New Jersey Turnpike is arguably the dullest stretch of land in all of America,” I said.

“Do you know that studies have shown,” Gina said, “that more accidents with people falling asleep at the wheel happen on the Jersey Turnpike than anywhere else in the country?”

“Really?”

Gina shrugged. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But if it isn’t true, it should be.”

Molly piped up once more. “Hey, Shelby, we haven’t seen you in a long time. Where you been?”

“I’ve been around.”

“Not around our house.”

“No.” I trailed off. I didn’t really know what to say. And Gina interestingly didn’t say anything. What do you say? What did Gina say to her mother when her “sister” Shelby had disappeared as if vaporized? I didn’t like Gina’s silence on the subject. She was usually so chirpy. But both her mouth and hands had tensed. She seemed to be almost actively not responding to her sister’s question. We just stopped being friends, that’s all, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Things change, you know? You’ll find out soon enough, Molly. Don’t forget your extra layer of black eyeliner.

Finally! Two hours later, Delaware Memorial Bridge and a wide rushing river; it was the first pretty we’d seen.

“Did you know that the Hudson becomes the Delaware?” asked Gina. “It flows from St. Lawrence in Canada, and then turns into this river.”

“Really?” She was so geographical, this Gina.

“Are we there yet?”

We were there an hour and a half later, at almost eleven.

Aunt Flo, hectored by Gina’s mother, had called the police, alerting them of a mysterious disappearance of a bright yellow Mustang, three “children” inside it (this is how a frantic Mrs. Reed described us to the police officer who came to retrieve us from the Maryland phone booth from which we called for directions) and two small, “very expensive” dogs. While Gina was on the phone with her mother (telling her to calm down or “the trip will be ruined for sure, Mom!”), Aunt Flo could not understand why it took me so long to go two hundred miles. The Maryland state trooper who helped us find the house was nonchalant. “Hit some traffic, did you?” he said.

“Yes, and it hit back.” I poked Gina’s arm, still holding on to maternal telecommunication. “I hope it’s not a harbinger of things to come, going 200 miles in fourteen hours on the road.”

Barely listening, she poked me back. “We weren’t on the road fourteen hours, and you know it damn well is a harbinger of things to come. Mom, I have to go.” Pause. “Yes, of course, we’ll be careful. No, of course, I haven’t pumped any gas. No, of course we haven’t picked up any hitchhikers.” She winked at me.

Aunt Flo, who looked like a carbon copy of Gina’s grandmother Scottie, to whom she was not remotely related, kept berating before salutations. “There was nothing we could do,” Gina endlessly repeated. “We. Were. Stuck. In. Traffic. Remember Shelby, Aunt Flo? Say hello, Shelby.”

“Hello, Shelby,” I said.

Aunt Flo barely nodded my way. “Where are my cannolis, Shelby?” and then without a breath, “But why would you go through New York City? That’s your number one mistake right there.”

So after eleven hours of driving, before being fed or shown our rooms, or given a drink, we parried another fifteen minutes of post-mortem critique about all the wrong roads we took to get to Glen Burnie, Maryland.

I lay in bed that night, my hands under my head, staring at the ceiling. If Marc were here, he wouldn’t stop taunting until Wyoming. He’d say it was definitely my fault. What was I doing in a car with a girl who made my hands anxious and my brain malfunction, a girl who brought her odd sister to be a buffer between us, a girl who could not drive? I hoped Gina could read a map. I missed my comfy pink-roses bed.

Lorna Moor.

My mother’s name filled my insides with an ache like freezing, but all around that aching was a peculiar sort of heat. Emma was related to me. Emma was my aunt. By blood. I was her niece by blood. I had a connection to her. She had a connection to my father. That’s why she didn’t leave, and in Glen Burnie, Maryland, with the planes sounding like they were landing on the roof of our house, that knowledge made me feel better.

Still, my first day of travel had turned out to have in it nothing I wanted, or had prepared for, or planned. I took out my spiral notebook from my duffel and looked over my schedule. We weren’t in Ohio. We weren’t west. We hadn’t gone 500 miles. On the plus side, the lodging was free. Recalling Gina’s little trivia diversions made me smile a bit, but otherwise, I couldn’t relax, or even look forward to tomorrow. But I knew what would make me relax: checking off the items on the agenda for today. Didn’t forget anything. Left on time. Headed in the right direction. Did not get lost. Oh well …

I made a list for tomorrow. That did make me feel better. Number one: Leave no later than nine. I couldn’t make any more plans as I’d left my maps and atlas in the car, and also because I had fallen asleep.

2
The Vedantists

Number one in my plan was out the window at nine-thirty because no one had woken up, not Gina, not Molly, and almost not me.

“How long are we planning to stay?” I asked Gina, when she finally tumbled out of her room around eleven.

“At least a week,” said Aunt Flo, who overheard. “Haven’t seen my darlings in years.”

“Yes, yes, of course. And I hope we have a nice visit.” A week! “It’s just that …” I became tongue-tied. What was there to do in Baltimore for a week? And I had a mission! I had to get to Mendocino. I’d rather spend a week looking for my mother than be here in Glen Burnie. Not wanting to be impolite, I stared at Gina until she said something, about ten minutes later.

“Shelby has to get to California, Aunt Flo. Mom told you. We’ll leave Molly here, but Shel can’t stay that long. She has to be back to get ready for college. And me, too.”

“Yes, so true!” I piped up. “I told Emma I’d be getting back in a few weeks. Plus Gina has to get to—”

“Shh!” Gina interrupted, glaring.

“What’s the hurry?” said Aunt Flo. “It’s supposed to be a fun trip. An adventure. Stay a few days, relax. Then you can drive your sister back, so she doesn’t have to take a bus home.”

“Aunt Flo!” That was Gina. “We’re not driving Molly back. Mom and I agreed. We’re going cross country. We’re not commuting back and forth along the Eastern seaboard.” Way to go, Gina. But to me she said, “She’s right. What’s the rush?”

No, no rush. In one day I was going to chew off my own skin, piece by piece, beginning with my hands.

“You’re right to go,” Marc had said. “This is the only time in your life to take a trip like this, Shelby. Once you start college, you’ll have to work during the summer. You’ll be an intern. And then you’ll have a job in the city. When you have a real job, you’ll have an apartment, bills, a dog. And then even you might find a husband—and then forget everything. Once the kids come, you’ll never willingly get in the car again.” Marc talked of these things as if he knew. “I do know,” he said indignantly. “My older sister has four kids. You should see her. You won’t believe she’s a member of our species.” He drew her bent over the corn bread; the corn bread a happy yellow, and she all in gray. Later, when he showed me the picture, I said, don’t show it to your sister, but he told me she had had it enlarged and framed.

Gina and I went downtown to Harborplace Mall, looked around, flirted with some boys, bought nothing. The following day we went to the town pools. That was okay, even though we took Molly with us. We also took Molly to Burger King and to see “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” That night I lay fretting, and when I woke up, it was another day. In Glen Burnie. Close to the factories and the Camden Yards and the airport; just another drab neighborhood, familiar enough and bland, but how was staying in a small house with a large yard helping me get to California on my road to self-discovery? I took my Folgers instant coffee outside.

The backyard was home to dozens of Flo’s dogs, small and smaller, running around, yapping. It was the yapping that got to me. I wasn’t used to the cacophony. My inner life was quiet, so too my life with Emma. Sometimes my friends were loud, but they were loud temporarily, and then I went home, retreating into quiet again. I liked to listen to music, but quietly, even rock. When Emma and I cleaned or cooked, the house was quiet. Sometimes Emma would put something classical on. I enjoyed that; but this? A constant high-pitched, grating yelping? My point isn’t that it was unpleasant. Undeniably it was. My point is this: someone had chosen this voluntarily; a green backyard with trees and ungroomed flowers, filled with a running mass of barking fecal matter. I then realized. Flo couldn’t hear them. After an hour outside, I couldn’t hear them either. The house was under the path of planes landing at BWI airport four blocks away. Every five to seven minutes a deafening roar in the clouds muted any dog mewling which seemed like Bach’s cello concertos by comparison.

“Girls, why don’t you do something? Why are you sitting around? It’s a beautiful day. Drive down to Annapolis, see the harbor. There’s so much to do around here.”

“We were thinking of leaving to do something,” I said.

Gina kicked me under the table. Aunt Flo said, “Yes, yes, good. There’s an afternoon game today, why don’t you go? The Orioles are playing the Yankees.”

My interest in baseball was only slightly below that of cleaning a yard full of dog poop. And that, at least, would take less time. Besides, we didn’t budget for ballgame tickets. But Gina wanted to go, though she also had no interest in baseball. “Come on, we’ll get some bleacher tickets, they’re cheap.”

Aunt Flo picked up the shovel scooper. “I have to keep at it, otherwise they overrun me.”

“Really?” I said, neutrally.

“Oh, yes, yes. I have to clean the yard four to six times a day. Well, just imagine—twenty-four dogs, pooping at least three times each. Some as many as six.”

“I can’t imagine.”

Gina kicked me again.

“Twenty-four dogs, really? That’s a lot.” Nodding, muttering, I turned my head away so I wouldn’t have to watch a heavy-set, middle-aged woman spending her brilliant summer morning cleaning dog poo. If man is the dog’s master, then why was she picking up their poo and not the other way around? I got up to say we really had to be going. But how do you say this to someone who is fecally engaged? I waited. She was at it a long time. I went into the house, got my things together, my toothbrush, my shoes.

“Come on, let’s go,” Gina said, coming into my bedroom. “She’ll give us money for the ballgame.”

“Why do you want to go to a stupid ballgame?”

“You don’t understand anything. Bleachers are full of single guys. Jocks. Sports lovers.” She grinned. “Nothing they like better than two goils interested in baseball.” She threw back her hair.

“Are you kidding?”

“Not at all.”

“But we’re not interested in baseball!”

“And they’ll know this how?”

“Gina! Don’t you have to be in Bakersfield?”

“Shh!” There was just us two in the room.

“Why do you keep telling me to shh,” I exclaimed, “every time I say the word Bakersfield?”

“Because no one knows I’m going there. I told them I was just going with you for the ride. That you wanted some company. This is what friends do. That’s why they think there’s no hurry.”

What could I do but shake my incredulous head? “I thought you wanted to get to”—I waved my hand around—“as soon as possible? To get to him?”

“Why do you keep referring to Eddie as him?” she asked, her blue eyes narrowing.

“As opposed to what?”

“As opposed to Eddie.”

“He’s not here,” I said, taking out my spiral notebook and my Bic pen. “I can refer to someone in the pronoun form when he’s not here. It’s not rude.”

“It’s weird is what it is.”

Oh, that’s not the weird thing, I thought, writing down: Number 1: Must leave, must go, must get going! “Besides,” I said, “why do you say, keep referring to him, as if we talk about him non-stop?”

“Yes, okay, you’re right, you win, you can have the last word.”

“Fine, you can have the last word. So when we go out cruising for boy toys, is your twelve-year-old sister coming with us?”

“She can if she wants,” said Gina. But even Molly refused. We went by ourselves. Gina turned up the radio real loud, and the only discussion we had was about whether or not the Nazis in “Raiders” had been destroyed when they opened the Ark of the Covenant because the Ark was not to be a tool in human hands. Gina maintained it could have been opened and looked at by the good guys.

“Gina, you think if Indy opened that Ark, he wouldn’t have gone up in flames?”

“No, I don’t think he would’ve.”

“He most certainly would. Why did he tell Marion to close her eyes, to not look? They only made it because they didn’t look!”

“You’re wrong. He told her just in case, not because they couldn’t look.”

“You’re so wrong.”

“No, you’re wrong.”

I think the Yankees lost. They could’ve won. It was hard to tell sitting a mile away in the bleachers. Men hit a small ball with a stick, ran about, then the game was over. Everyone around us had too much beer and was therefore unappetizing to Gina.

As we were returning to Aunt Flo’s house, I told Gina we had to leave tomorrow.

“Okay,” she said.

It took us another two days to get out.

Aunt Flo, to help us, I hope, told Gina and me that Aunt Betty, whom Gina hadn’t seen in years and who loved Gina and liked me, too, lived near Toledo which was on the way. “Why don’t you stay with her, save yourselves some money? I’ll call her while you’re getting ready.”

I didn’t want to say that I’d been ready for days. “On the way to where?” I cut in.

“To California.”

“Toledo is on the way to California?” Once more I wished I had a clearer idea of what the U.S. looked like. An adult woman was saying to me Toledo was on the way; what was I going to do? Say excuse me while I skeptically check the map, because I don’t believe you; check the map in front of you, just to prove you wrong? So I said nothing, thereby, with my ignorant silence, tacitly agreeing that Aunt Betty was “near” Toledo.

“Shelby, why do you always look like you know best?” Aunt Flo threw open the map. “Look. Toledo is right off Interstate 80, and you have to take I-80 to California, don’t you?”

Well, now I definitely couldn’t even glance at the map in front of her. “Of course, you’re right,” I agreed. “I got confused in my head.”

“Oh, we’d love to, Aunt Flo,” said Gina. “What a great idea. Aunt Betty’s wonderful. Molly, you want to come with us?”

I widened my eyes. Gina did not (would not?) return my gaze. Wow. Gina really didn’t want to be alone in the car with me. By some miracle, Molly declined. She said she didn’t like Aunt Betty’s companion, Uncle Ned. “He makes me feel weird,” she said. “He is weird. A starer.” She made a yuk sound.

Visibly disappointed, Gina tried to convince her. “He’s not so bad. He’s quiet.”

“Yes,” said Molly. “A quiet starer. Nothing worse. So, good luck with that.”

Finally around noon of the nth day, sunny, possibly a Wednesday, though it could’ve been Friday, I screeched out of the driveway, going from nought to 136.7 in three seconds.

“How can your aunt live in that house with so many yapping animals?” I finally asked, after the radio was the only sound in our car for twenty minutes.

“You know what I think?” Gina said casually, tossing her hair about. “I think you’re not a dog person. You don’t like dogs.”

What was she talking about? I loved dogs. I just didn’t love them in my brand new beautiful yellow car on my all-vinyl black seat, barking for 200 miles, needing to go “potty”. I liked my dogs bigger. And farther away. I liked dogs the way dog people like children.

“You have to give them a chance,” Gina continued, putting on peach lipgloss. She was wearing a white tube top and jean shorts today. “Dogs are wonderful. And therapeutic. Did you know they bring terriers to terminally ill patients in hospitals to comfort them?”

“What? And who’s they?”

“Like my mother said, you should keep an open mind, Sloane. You’re narrow-minded. You’re not open to other ideas.”

“Open to ideas about dogs?”

“No. Dogs as an idea. An ideal of affection and comfort.” What was she talking about? Why did she sound annoyed? I had driven her mother’s dogs, hadn’t I? It wasn’t enough for me to drive them, I was supposed to love them, too?

She put on the radio to drown out the barking silence.

David Soul beseeched me not to give up on us but then Mac Davis begged me not to get hooked on him and Toni Tennille wished things to be done to her one more time. Woof, woof.

Finally I had to know. “So what’s with the dogs? That’s new. Your mom, Aunt Flo. I don’t remember them being like that.”

“Aunt Betty, too,” said Gina. “All the sisters got into dogs. They breed them, sell them.”

“Really?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, nothing at all.” I coughed. “It takes time, though. And what about Hathayoga? Your mom was obsessed with that. She was so into …” I tried to remember the name. “… Swami Maharishi?”

“You mean Baba Muktananda?”

“That’s it.”

“My mother’s moved on from Baba,” said Gina. “She and all my aunts.”

“From Baba to dogs?”

“She keeps busy, makes a little money.” Gina turned her face away from me to the passenger window. “Dogs are kind and loving, gentle creatures.” When Mrs. Reed had discovered Eastern spiritualism, she spent four Christmases in a row trying to convert me. Get in touch with your inner Chakra, Shelby. You are one with everything, and everything is one with you. I kept telling her I could not be converted because that would imply a verting. I’m just trying to open your eyes, Shelby, open your eyes to the truth that’s out there. I listened politely, ate turkey at her house, and opened my Christmas presents.

We were going rather slow on Liberty Street, with strip malls all around, stopping at every light. I didn’t care, I was so happy to be on the road again. Number 1: Leave Glen Burnie at 9 a.m. Number 2: Gas up, buy Cokes, potato chips. Number 3: Keep conversation with Gina light. Number 4: Drive 500 miles to Toledo, OH. According to the map, in one and a half inches we would be near the Appalachian Trail and then the Pennsylvania Turnpike would take us north to I-80. Mrs. Reed and her three sisters had been into the reality of yoga and the oneness of the swami so seriously, they even persuaded their brother, a classics professor at University of Connecticut, to come with them to the Ashram, their upstate monistic Upanishad retreat. How many miles had we gone on Liberty Street, ten? It was one in the afternoon. Gina had taken off her sandals and put her bare feet up on the windshield.

“What happened with the yoga?”

Gina sounded reluctant. “Nothing. The dogs have replaced Baba.”

“Why?”

Looking away into the passenger window, Gina said, “Aunt Ethel killed herself.”

“She did?” I tried to keep the wheel straight. It wasn’t easy.

Gina shrugged. She still wasn’t looking at me. “It was called a car accident. But we knew. A clear blue day, no drugs, no alcohol, no heart attack, and she’d been depressed for years. Really depressed. The Ashram didn’t help one bit.”

“No, of course not,” I muttered, clutching the wheel. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know.”

“How could you not know? Agnes told everybody.”

“I make it a point,” I said, “to immediately stop listening to anything that’s begins with the word Agnes.”

As we drove past the bars and the tattoo parlors, I thought about Aunt Ethel. She was beautiful, soft-spoken and loving. “Her poor kids.”

“They’re okay. Daughter is grown. The son has a year left of high school.”

“What about the husband?”

“My mother thinks he’s the reason my aunt killed herself.”

I clutched the wheel tighter. I remembered him, with his overgrown beard and intense eyes. He never quite fit in the family celebrations. “What’s he doing now?” I asked carefully.

“I don’t know. We don’t see him anymore. He never liked our family.”

That was true. He always seemed like an outsider. I had thought Aunt Ethel was the only one he actually liked. He looked at her fondly when he said her name. “Ethel.” Yet I also remember feeling there was something slightly creepy about him, the way he stared at me longer than appropriate, the way he tried to engage me in conversation, and how, once, after Ethel and Mrs. Reed were done regaling me with the consciousness of the yogic vision and the attainment of the Moksha, he recited Donne’s poetry to me. I will not look upon the quickening sun/but straight her beauty to my sense shall run/the air shall note her soft, the fire, most pure/waters suggest her clear, and the earth sure.

I had been hoping he was talking about Ethel, beautiful for an aunt, and said nothing, embarrassed under his gaze. I was relieved when I didn’t see him at Easter.

How gravely Gina and I had grown apart, that not a rumor, a rustle had blown my way, not even from scandalous Agnes. “When did your aunt die?” We used to talk about everything. Every day. Not a day would go by without Gina knowing every minute of my life and me knowing every minute of hers.

“A year this November.”

This made me sad, made me think about things I didn’t want to think about—reminders of the past I wanted put away. Here I was, leaving home for parts unknown and still couldn’t leave them behind. Gina and I used to babysit for Jules and Jim, Aunt Ethel’s kids. Ethel would feed us dinner, and then she and her husband would go out to the movies. They had a beautiful house on the water in Rye. They had a boat, their own slip, eighty feet of private beach, a membership to the yacht club, and both the elementary school and Rye Playland were within walking distance. To Gina and me they had seemed to live an enchanted life, but I guess it was more like enchanter’s nightshade. Beautiful on the outside, poison underneath.

“My mom couldn’t forgive the Vedantists for not bringing my aunt any peace or comfort,” said Gina, “when she needed peace and comfort most. See what I mean about religion?”

I didn’t see what she meant, but I did finally begin to notice that nearly every road we crossed was named Divine Way, Mary’s Way, Cross Way, Holy Road, Holy Family Road, Trinity Drive, Spirit Way. And on every corner rose a church, sandwiched between tattoo parlors and a Jack in the Box. Or were the tattoo parlors sandwiched between the churches? The only thing I noticed about the one church remotely near us in Larchmont was that on Monday each week, the bulletin board in the front would change its inspirational message. “JESUS IS THE ANSWER.” “JESUS IS THE ANSWER TO EVERY QUESTION.”

“Gina, look at all the churches. I’ve never seen anything like it. Have you?”

“Well, there aren’t any churches on the Jersey Turnpike. So no. But I wouldn’t have noticed even these had you not mentioned them. I don’t notice things like that.”

“Hmm. Hard to miss.”

Gina must have been thinking troubling things, difficult things—her eyes were unseeing. “What a weird life it must be around here,” she finally said, coming out of her reverie. “What do you think these people do all the time?”

“Well, judging from the road, get tattoos and go to church.”

She laughed. “I’d die if I lived here. Absolutely die.”

I stopped at a light. The road was called St. John’s Path. A white church on one corner, a white church on the other. We waited. There were no more strip malls or Burger Kings. Now, beyond the white spires were rolling fields of green, shivering trees, and sunshine.

“Did you know,” Gina said, “that 57 percent of all people who get tattoos regret them later in life? And that number goes up to 71 percent for women. More men get them, but more women regret them. And tattoos for females are on the rise. Like smoking. Apparently it’s the next trend. Women getting tattooed. Interesting, eh?”

“Yeah, very.” I was only half-listening, trying to figure out a mathematical riddle on the white board.

1 Cross

+ 3 Nails

_________

= 4 Given

I was stuck on the numbers. One plus three did equal four, but what did it have to do with Given? I couldn’t decipher the meaning. Gina glanced at it and instantly said, oh how stupid. It took me another shameful mile to figure it out. Then I felt stupid. And resented her, like it was her fault. But numbers sometimes confuse me. I can’t see past them. RUL8? Master’s Ministry proclaimed I was, but they were praying I wasn’t 2L8.

“I’m a good person, I have nothing to be forgiven for,” Gina said. “I’m so beyond that.”

Didn’t Emma once tell me, when I was preening, that just as you’re about to put yourself on a pedestal for being good, the devil knocks you down with pride right back where you belong. I kept quiet.

Chapel View, Chapel Lane, Chapel Hill. Freedom.

3
The Black Truck

The road wound through the fields. We rolled down the windows, turned up the music, the wind blowing through our hair. The Climax Blues Band yelled that we couldn’t get it right, and Kiki Dee croaked that she had the music in her. It was on Liberty Road, past Freedom, when the Blockheads were hitting us with their rhythm stick and I was flying, showing off my Shelby GT 350 to the blue skies, that I suddenly had to slam on the brakes for a black truck ahead of us.

“God, it’s crawling,” I said. In reality, though, it was probably doing forty. Gina groaned, I groaned. We continued singing, but it was one thing to sing and speed but another to sing at the top of your lungs, slam on your brakes, then dawdle along almost at walking pace.

The medium-sized, four-wheel utility truck in front of us was from the coal mines. Not painted black, but dirty black, covered with tar-like nicotine, its two smokestacks emitting black plumes. What was happening inside that it needed two smokestacks? Not only was it dilly-dallying as if on the way to execution, but it couldn’t stay in its lane. It kept rolling out to oncoming traffic. There was no traffic, but that was beside the point. It was a menace. We stopped singing.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

“Maybe he’s drunk.”

“It’s Wednesday morning.”

“What, people can’t get drunk on a Wednesday? And it’s not Wednesday morning. It’s Tuesday afternoon.”

We passed a billboard, huge black letters on white board. “WILL THE ROAD YOU’RE ON LEAD YOU TO ME?”

“Did you know that reading billboards is responsible for eleven percent of all vehicular accidents?” stated Gina.

“Is that so?” But I wasn’t paying much attention to her or the billboards. I was entirely focused on the increasingly erratic truck. The driver could’ve fallen asleep at the wheel. I gave him plenty of room. No reason to tailgate; a good safe distance is what he obviously needed. We were two car lengths behind.

He had a bumper sticker on the back tail—everyone was so clever in this neck of the woods with their little aphorisms—I speeded up so I could read it: “I DO ME … YOU DO YOU.”

“Oh, ain’t he the comedian.” Gina laughed. “It’s supposed to be I do you, you do me.”

“He frightens me.”

“Ha,” she said. “I like him better already. He says leave me the hell alone and let me tend to my business. That’s priceless.”

“Yes, but what business could he possibly have that he’s weaving all over the road like that?”

“So slow down. Give him some room.”

“Any more room, and I’ll be in another state.”

“Maybe he’ll turn soon.”

“Turn where?” The empty country road stretched between fields and forests.

“Wait, what’s he doing?” Gina said.

At first it looked like he was turning, but he wasn’t. He was stopping. Suddenly and without preamble, his coal-tar vehicle zigzagged to a halt in the middle of the road right in front of us. We had no choice but to stop, too. Like for a school bus. Maybe he was in trouble. I didn’t know, didn’t want to know and didn’t want to be any part of his trouble. I didn’t want to help him. What if he had run out of gas? What if his door opened and he asked us for a ride to the nearest gas station? My insides filled with liquid nitrogen. No way! No rides to weaving strangers driving black trucks.

The passenger door flung open. There was shouting, and suddenly a girl was propelled from the truck onto the grassy edge. She didn’t hop out, she fell yelling, “You bastard! Hey, give me my stuff!” A hobo bag flew through the air, landing heavily on the grass. A man’s hand reached for the door, pulled it violently shut and the truck peeled away, leaving smoking tire tracks on the pavement, black fumes piping furiously out of the stacks. He drove fast now, and straight.

“Asshole!” the girl yelled after him, getting up, dusting herself off. She didn’t seem to be hurt, though I was trying not to look too closely. I put the ’Stang in gear and accelerated, not like the truck—in anger—but in fear. The girl stood, picked up her bag, turned to us, smiled, and stuck out her hitching thumb. She waved with the other hand. She was young, heavily made up, wearing not summer-in-the city shorts, but a white mini-skirt, a small electric-blue halter and lots of flashy costume jewelry. We passed her slowly, pretending like we didn’t even notice her, la-dee-dah. I whispered, “Gina, roll up your window.”

“Why are you whispering?” But before she could turn the crank, the girl called out. “Hey, come on, be Good Samaritans, help a sister in need, will ya? Give me a ride.”

Gina shook her head, I stared straight ahead without acknowledging her, and as we passed, the girl’s hitching thumb morphed into the middle finger to our departing yellow Mustang. “Thank you!” she yelled. I stepped on it, catching her in the rearview mirror walking uphill in high-heeled wedge sandals and her spicy blue halter.

“Who wears sandals like that?” I asked.

“Who wears a skirt like that?”

We drove in silence.

“We couldn’t pick her up,” I said.

“Of course we couldn’t.” Gina glanced at me askance. “What are you even talking about? We made a deal.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Shelby, did you want to pick her up?”

“Slightly less than I want to be scalped,” I returned. The ridiculous part was I now had to stop and look at a map to see where we needed to turn to get on Penn Pike, but I couldn’t stop. I was afraid the girl might pursue me and force me to explain how I promised I wouldn’t pick up hitchhikers, not even a girl my age shoved roughly out of a black truck by angry hands.

I was going eighty on a local road, through fields with mountains up ahead, past abandoned gas stations.

“What’s wrong with you?” Gina asked.

“Nothing.”

“Why are you driving like a maniac?”

Silence again.

“We did the right thing, didn’t we?” I asked.

“About what? Can you stop for a sec and check the map? I don’t see the turnpike signs anywhere.”

We did see another billboard, this one from the American Board of Proctology: GIVING SOMEONE THE FINGER DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A BAD THING.

“I mean, that girl could’ve been trouble, right?” I said.

“Oh, her. Why are you still talking about her?”

We turned up the music. Diana Ross plaintively wanted to know if we knew where we were going to. Gina plaintively wanted to know when she was going to be fed. Having lost my sense of how far we’d come, whether we even were still in Maryland, I made a series of rights and lefts hoping the zigzag would eventually lead me to the toll road that transsected the entire state of Pennsylvania, as per Rand-McNally road atlas. Past a meandering town of antique stores and law firms we drove, past a deserted little town with not even a sandwich place for us to hang our hats, and, still hungry, we left the churches and the placards behind, the girl, too, and drove through the Appalachian Trail, sunlit and hazy, covered with a silken green and gold canopy. I pointed out a street sign that said Applachian Road. “You’d think that since they live here, they’d know how to spell it.” We chuckled at that, and then again at a sign that stated without punctuation: SHARP CURVES PEDESTRIANS 4 MILES.

For four miles we looked for these pedestrians with sharp curves. Liberty Street had long since become Appalachian Trail with the tall filtering trees looking almost yellow with their light green sparklings. After the trail was Hagerstown. The shops along the way seemed too dinky for us. Finally, our long-awaited toll road! With a shopping center and a Subway sandwich place.

At the table I stared blankly at the open map. Gina wanted to know if Toledo was in Pennsylvania. I glared at her over my tuna sandwich. “Toledo is not in Pennsylvania. It’s in Ohio. Everybody knows that. God, Gina.” Why was I so suddenly annoyed?

She shrugged, unperturbed, fixing her hair and applying lipgloss before eating.

“Did you say you were going to school to become a teacher?” I asked disapprovingly. “How are you going to teach little kids if you don’t know something like that?”

“The reason I don’t know it,” Gina said patiently, eating her Cheddar and Swiss on rye, “is because we weren’t taught it. And the reason my kids won’t know it, is because I won’t teach it.”

“But isn’t this something we need to know? Where things are?” I pointed to the state of Pennsylvania. “Look. I want to show you.” For some reason Gina had unreasonably irritated me with her torpid unhelpfulness. I flipped open my spiral, started to write down how far we’d come. I estimated it to be barely sixty miles. And it was nearing three in the afternoon. How in the world was I going to drive another 420 miles to Toledo? When I said this to Gina, I could tell by her glazed-over eyes she thought it was a rhetorical question she had no intention of answering. Her attitude seemed to be: I sit in the passenger seat, you drive, you get me to Eddie. For my part, I sing, pretend to stare at a map, look out the window and give you a little bit of money.

“Gina, you have to help me. I can’t do this on my own. I’m going to get lost.”

“Why would you get lost?” She sounded frankly puzzled. “You just looked at the map.”

“Yes, but so did you!”

“Yes, but I’m not driving.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Look, I’m hopeless at maps. It’s just how it is.”

“I’m not very good either,” I retorted, “but I still have to look, still have to figure things out.”

“So figure it out.”

I crumpled up the map like a soiled tissue. I didn’t finish my sandwich. “Ready?” I jumped up and left the table without even glancing back to see if she was coming.

Was it ridiculous for me to be this ticked off? We were not yet in Pennsylvania, the state next to New York! My original plan had been to cross the George Washington Bridge at ten a.m., drive on I-80 for two hours and be in Pennsylvania for lunch by noon. So how was it more than a week later and we still weren’t there?

I had lots of reasons to be simmering. It wasn’t the geographical ignorance that was irking me; after all, I was no Henry Stanley myself. What was getting to me was the supreme geographical indifference. Not just, I don’t know where I’m going, but I don’t care.

In the parking lot, the sunshine beating down, stomach half-full, the Interstate up ahead, things bubbled up and spilled over. Molly, Aunt Flo, too long in Glen Burnie, the prickly sadness about lost closeness.

“Look,” I said, whirling to Gina on the sidewalk. “This was a really bad idea. You clearly don’t want to be here, don’t want to do this. I don’t blame you. Why don’t I drop you off at the nearest Greyhound station and you can take the bus back home. You’ll be there by tonight. Or go to Bakersfield. Do whatever you want. Just …”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Sloane, come on …”

“Gina, I am not your chauffeur, while you sit in my car with your eyes closed and act like Molly.”

“I’m not that bad, am I?”

“Almost! You see me struggling and yet you refuse to help me out by looking at the map.”

“You wouldn’t stop the car! How is that fair?”

“You’ve got absolutely no shame for deceiving me. We’re going to see your stupid aunt in Toledo and you won’t even help me figure out where we’re going!”

“We’re going to see my stupid aunt, as you put it, because we stay with her for free. Your little spiral notebook likes that, don’t it?”

“I’m not your hired driver, Gina. You want to get to Eddie? Take a bus. Or fly. Call him from Bakersfield airport, ask him to come pick you up. But I can’t do this anymore.”

“Shelby, we’ve been on the road five minutes …”

“Yes, and doesn’t it feel like five centuries?”

“I’m sorry, okay?” She waved her hand dismissively, not remotely sorry. “I’ll look at the map, if you want. Jeez, I didn’t realize it meant that much to you.”

“You know what means that much to me? You pulling your weight. You helping me out. You sharing in this. I’m not your mother.”

“Okay,” she said, quietly now. “I thought you had things under control, you and your written-down plans.”

“Leave my plans out of it,” I snapped, looking around for a phone booth. “Yellow Pages will tell us where a bus station is.”

“Sloane, come on. I said I’d try to do better.”

“What is this try? Yeah, and I’ll try to put the gas into the tank, and I’ll try to put the car into first, and I’ll try not to turn the map upside down when I look for your aunt’s house. What’s with the try?”

We went on like this for a few more minutes. But the bubble had burst; deflated I knew I could not take her to the bus. I also knew three other things.

One, I did not have enough money to get to California without her.

Two, I was hoping a little bit she would talk me into driving her to Bakersfield.

And three—I couldn’t do this by myself. When I got out to pump gas, I made Gina get out with me, her mother’s imprecations notwithstanding. Not so much for company, but because I couldn’t get out of the car without some man, young, old, white, black, Hispanic, hassling me. Saying hello from his car. Smiling, coming over to see if I needed help. Now I’m no beauty. I’m either somebody’s type or I’m not. That’s not the point. And maybe they were coming over for Gina. Cute little Geeeeena, her shorts and blouses always tighter than mine, her breasts bigger. All these things, true. But that’s not why they sauntered over. I started bringing Gina out of the car only after I realized that every time I went to get a can of Coke, male strangers were giving me the eye. I knew, if I put Gina on that bus, my own trip would be over. For a number of good and not very good reasons, I wouldn’t be able to continue. Fear—but justified or unjustified? Real or imagined paranoia? My bravado was big, but some of my vexation was at myself, a thin thread of self-hatred for not being braver, the kind of girl who could pull into a gas station and get out of her car without worrying that some man was going to be casing her from ten yards away, hiding in the camouflage of Pepsi bottles and potato chips. But it was hardwired; I didn’t feel safe, and Gina made me feel only marginally safer. Still, even a few degrees of confidence was better than not being able to pump my own gas for 3000 miles. This is one of the reasons the bus felt unsafe to me, to Gina, to Gina’s mother, to Emma. This is one of the reasons a car was better. It allowed a measure of control, no matter how illusory, and I thrived on control. You could lock the car. You could hide in it. You could speed away. They’d have to catch me first on my canary Pegasus.

I sighed. She sighed. She apologized. I apologized. We hugged, awkwardly. Hugged for the first time in almost two years, and drove out to the Interstate. She asked if I wanted a piece of gum and even unwrapped it for me. “Are we going to put it behind us?” she asked, and I wanted to say with a falling heart, put what behind us, but instead said yes, hoping she was talking about the argument we just had. She opened the atlas, and asked where we were, and when we saw we were near Emmaville (Emmaville!) she found it in the atlas.

The scenery had changed dramatically from Maryland to Pennsylvania. Where Maryland was rustic and rolling, Pennsylvania was all about the green-covered Alleghenys. Every five minutes on the Interstate there was a warning sign for falling rock. WATCH OUT FOR FALLING ROCK. What were we supposed to do about that? Swerve out of the way down the rocky ravine? The highway curved and angled, and every once in a while ascended so high it seemed like I could see half of southwestern Pennsylvania and a little bit further. I kept saying the mountains were pretty, and, in response, Gina regaled me with Pennsylvania trivia.

“Did you know the Pennsylvania state insect is the firefly?”

“Gina, do you remember how you couldn’t pronounce firefly when you were a kid?”

“No.”

“You called it flierfly.”

“Did I? I don’t remember.”

“You did.” I trailed off. “It was so cute.”

“Well, fine,” she said. “The state insect is the flierfly. And did you know that George Washington’s only surrender was in Pennsylvania, in Fort Necessity?”

“George Washington surrendered? Aren’t the mountains pretty?”

“On July 4, 1754, to the French.”

“I don’t understand. How can you know so much about Pennsylvania, but not know where Pennsylvania is?”

“I’m going to be a teacher. And what does one have to do with the other?”

I was tired. It was my usual afternoon exhaustion. This Penn Turnpike wasn’t dull like Jersey, flat and straight, but it didn’t matter; even the high vistas through the Alleghenys couldn’t keep me from drifting off to sleep. The next rest area wasn’t for twenty-seven miles, and there is nothing more debilitating than trying to drive when your eyes are gluing shut. It’s worse than falling asleep in math class. Worse than falling asleep during final exams, or oral exams, or at the movies on a first date (more accurate to say one and only date) with someone you really like, worse even than falling asleep on the couch after having too much to drink with your friends. There is a different component that enters into falling asleep on a gently curving road through the mountains doing seventy. You’re going to die, my brain kept yelling at me. You’re going to die. Wake up. You will never get anywhere. You will not go to college, see your mother, get married, have a life. You will have nothing. You will be dead. Wake up!

It didn’t work. I opened the window, gulped the hot air, banged the wheel, turned up the music, tried talking except I couldn’t string two words together.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Gina.

I couldn’t explain. I tried chewing gum, one stick after the other; I had a wad of gum twenty sticks big in my mouth. That helped as long as I was chewing; trouble was, I wanted to be sleeping. An excruciating twenty-three more miles passed before I finally pulled into the rest area.

“What are we doing?”

“Sorry, I have to close my eyes for a sec.” I parked in the large lot away from other cars. I rolled down the window and tilted back my head.

“But it’s the middle of the day!”

“Yes. I can’t explain. It’s just—” I fell asleep nearly instantly, couldn’t even finish the sentence. Not even fear of death could snap me awake.

“Sloane!” Gina’s voice sounded alarmed.

I opened my eyes. Rolling up her window, Gina was shaking me awake, pointing to the black tar-truck in the parking lot, not twenty feet away. The driver, a fat man with tattoos on his neck and shoulders, was yelling something, gesturing to the backseat, and giving us, or something behind us, the finger. I almost wanted to turn around to make sure his girl wasn’t in the backseat.

“You got the witch in the back with you?” he yelled. At least I hope he yelled witch. “Tell her I’m not done with her! Not by a long shot!” He screeched away, rough-looking and sweaty, erratic on the exit; he nearly hit a sedan pulling into the lot as he was pulling out. After we’d watched him weaving through the service road onto the Interstate, Gina rolled down her window and yelled, “Screw you, mister! Go to hell where you belong!”

“Oh, very good, Gina. And brave.”

Gina turned to me. “Awake now?”

“You betcha,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Jeez, what was his problem?”

“Dunno. I guess he thought that girl was with us.”

I didn’t want to tell Gina I was glad I wasn’t alone. The man, big, angry, with a red bandana on his head, looked like the poster boy for public service announcements exhorting you never, but never to talk to strangers. I slowly got on the road, not wanting to catch up with him. But sure enough, in seven miles, doing eighty to his sixty, his “I DO ME, YOU DO YOU” coal contraption loomed ahead, and when he saw us smoking him on the left, he gave us the finger once more. Gina gave him two fingers of her own, and gesticulated wildly, pretending to be furious, silently mouthing things through the glass. She rolled down her window, and with the eighty mph wind whipping through her hair yelled for real: “Good luck trying to catch us, buddy!”

“You’re crazy; stop it! You’re going to get us into serious trouble.”

“What’s he gonna do? Race?” Gina rolled up her window. “I can’t believe that chick got into the truck with him.”

“She must be brave to hitchhike.” I said it wistfully, as in, I wish I were brave, not, I wish I could hitchhike.

“Brave? You mean stupid, dontcha?”

“Maybe.” I thought. “But she doesn’t have a car like us.” I patted my wheel as if she were a silky kitty.

“She could have taken a bus,” said Gina.

What, to be safe? I said nothing, but I was thinking that perhaps the girl who could get into a truck with a man who looked like that would probably not be the kind of girl who’d be afraid of taking a little bus.

Gina settled into her seat and closed her eyes. “I think that’s why you were upset before. At Subway.”

“Why?”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think you think we should’ve helped her out. Given her a ride.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I hope you know by that crazy guy, just how many kinds of wrong that would’ve been.”

I didn’t say anything.

After another 200 miles of turnpike speeding, I gave up any hope of getting to Toledo by nightfall. Scratch the last item on my list. It was ten at night and we were just nearing Cleveland. “Have you got anything to say about Cleveland?” I was exhausted.

“Yes!” said Gina, all sparkly. “Cleveland was the first city in the world to be lit by electricity. Back in 1879.”

“Hmm. Looks like they’re all out today.” It was dark in the distance and unlit. “How far to Toledo?” I asked the tollbooth operator.

“A hundred and twenty miles,” she replied.

Too many miles. We’d already traveled 454. Ten minutes later, we had ourselves a spare room in Motel 6, right off the Interstate. It was on the second floor, had two double beds, an old TV, and a broken air conditioner. It smelled only vaguely of other people. The sheets were white and starchy, not soft and pink like those Emma had bought me for my thirteenth birthday. It was our first motel room, well below budget at forty-five dollars, which pleased me. Gina was in the shower singing “By the Banks of the Ohio” and “Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal” as I was laying out my clothes for tomorrow and brushing my teeth. I had intended to turn on the TV, but I liked the sound of Gina’s happy soprano voice, I’ve got a mule and her name is Sal, and the din of the shower through the open door, fifteen miles on the Erie Canal … I lay down on the bed, the lights on, git up here, mule, here comes a lock. I was going to write a list for tomorrow and think about my mother … we’ll make Rome ’bout six o’clock … but all I could think about was that girl and why didn’t we stop. Oh, we couldn’t, no, we couldn’t, but if that were so, why did I have her young face, her short skirt and hitching hands in front of my eyes, her lilting voice in my head as the last things I saw and heard before I fell asleep? One more trip and back we’ll go, right back home to Buffalo …

Come on, help out a sister in need …

THREE

1
Ned

The next bright morning I drove like the tail winds were in my hair. At a hundred miles an hour I was the fastest horse on the road. I had trucks honking at me the entire way. There was no one faster on the road than me and my sweet yellow Mustang. We passed two cop cars, but I blew by so fast, they didn’t see me.

The music was loud, and Gina and I were singing. O Mary don’t you weep, don’t you mourn, O Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn … We opened the windows for a sec, but I was going too fast, we couldn’t catch our breath. We had slept well, eaten McDonald’s for breakfast, the sun was shining, not a cloud in the sky, and all was good, better than yesterday, and the days before that. My heart was light.

We punctuated the 120 miles by screaming every song on the radio at the top of our lungs. Our rendition of REO Speedwagon’s “Keep on Lovin’ You” would’ve brought down the house had there been a house to be brought down.

The Interstate through the northern part of Ohio is just a straight wide road amid a flat lot of nothing. Ohio didn’t impress. But going faster than a single engine plane did. Gina cheerfully compared and contrasted the Jersey Pike, the Penn Pike, and the Ohio Pike. We concluded that Penn Pike was best but only because of the unfair advantage of Pennsylvania’s mountains. Pennsylvania’s beauty was more dramatic than Maryland’s but it wasn’t more beautiful. For some reason I had really liked the sloping, cozy back roads of Maryland. Gina wasn’t crazy about either.

We got to Toledo around noon and hungry. I asked Gina for her aunt’s address. It took her a while to find it; she said we might have to stop for directions. I didn’t disagree. I’m not a guy, I have no problem asking, but stopping on an Interstate was a little problematic. It’s not like the information founts are working by the side of the road in little booths. When I asked to see the address, Gina demurred.

Turns out it was a good thing we didn’t push on straight till morning the night before, because Toledo’s being farther north and west than we had expected was the least of my concerns.

“Three Oaks, Michigan?” I gasped when I looked at the address Aunt Flo had written down. “Three Oaks, Michigan? Are you kidding me?”

“Well, that’s what it says.”

I ripped the piece of paper away from her and stared at the words again. “What does Michigan have to do with Toledo? Does Michigan even border Ohio? Isn’t Indiana the next state over?”

“I don’t know,” she said, wrinkling her little nose in a guilt squint. “I think so.” She blinked her blue eyes at me and grinned. “Want to check the map?”

“Someone is going to have to. Why would your Glen Burnie aunt tell you your Toledo aunt lived in Toledo if she doesn’t live in Toledo?”

“She didn’t say she lived in Toledo. She said she lived near Toledo.”

“Is Michigan, two states away, really near Toledo?” I flipped open my notebook.

Gina snatched it away. “Look, Miss Spiral, let’s get Burger King and get on with it. You know we’re going to have to go see Aunt Betty no matter what. She’s waiting for us. No use bitching and moaning. And it’ll save us at least fifty bucks in hotels.” She smiled. “Depending on how long we stay.”

When we had food in our hands, Gina called the number on the scrap of paper. “Aunt Betty is so happy we’re coming!” she said when she got off the phone.

“Oh, yeah? Did you tell her she lives in Michigan, not Ohio? That’ll wipe the smile off her face.”

Gina laughed. “Sloane, you’re so funny. So what? It’s nothing. Michigan, Ohio, what’s the difference? We take the road we’re on …”

“I-80?”

“I think so. We take it to Route 12, just a few miles west from here, and then take 12 a few miles north, and then we make a left, and it’s right there. Can’t miss it. She said from here it shouldn’t take us more than an hour.”

“Famous last words.” I unfolded my big map so I could find this Route 12. Oh, yes. So close. Just half a jump to the left, half a step to the right. Let’s do the time warp again … “Tell me, explain to me, how near Toledo means near Lake Michigan,” I grumbled, biting into my burger and fishing out a handful of fries. We were leaning over the hood of the ’Stang. “Tell me. Toledo is on Lake Erie. Tell me how Lake Michigan is near Lake Erie.”

“Aren’t they adjacent lakes?” Gina said helpfully.

“They’re Great Lakes! One lake is bigger than the Black Sea. The other is bigger than the Gulf of Mexico.”

“Come on, that’s not really true,” said Gina, helping me fold the map, her mouth full of fries and fish. “The Gulf of Mexico is the largest gulf in the world. And the Black Sea—”

“Gina, I don’t want to hear it.” I was getting tetchy again. “One giant lake, another giant lake, a rinky-dink town that doesn’t even rate atlas mention, that’s not next to Toledo, Ohio!”

“All right, all right. Can we go? She’s waiting.”

“Not next to it. You have to tell your Aunt Flo that, Gina, when you see her.”

“I will. It’ll be the first thing I tell her. Now come on.”

After we found Route 12 and got off, and drove twenty miles, we were told we were going the wrong way. “You’re going south,” the tollbooth guy said when we finally capitulated and asked. “You have to head north. Just head on up for ten or fifteen miles. Three Oaks is right before the bend. Watch for it. If the road turns, you’ve already missed it. You’ll be in New Buffalo.”

“So we won’t know until we’ve missed it?” I said accusingly, pulling away. “Gee, I wonder why it’s called Three Oaks?” I revved the car into second. “I’m sure it’s ironically named. It’s probably a booming town.”

Of course we missed it; missing it was built into the directions. When the road turned, a sign genially informed us that we were now leaving Three Oaks township (no less!) and counseling us to drive safely. We turned around. A little elementary school on the corner, a gas station, a bar. No sidewalks.

Michigan wasn’t what I expected. Perhaps my mind was poisoned by my perception of Detroit. I imagined all Michigan, like Flint—built up, industrial, a sort of bleaker Elizabeth, New Jersey, which is as bleak as apocalypse, all smokestacks and black electric-wire factories. It wasn’t anything like that where we were. This was all driving country, no towns, no strip malls. Silos, fields, curving country roads with little ramshackle delis built into the shoulder like bushes.

The aunt’s house wasn’t actually in Three Oaks, but on the outskirts, off a dirt road, marked not by a number but by a stone dog on the rusted mailbox. Next to it was a broken-down limp trailer with one end inside a small rotted-out barn where there was a cow and a goat.

Aunt Betty was waiting for us out on the dirt driveway. She was tall and thin, with watchful, perpetually moist brown platters for eyes. Her mouth was slightly ajar, as if she was about to say something, yet didn’t. She did quietly lament our tardy arrival as she and Ned had already eaten lunch and weren’t making another meal until sundown; was that all right with us?

“I don’t know,” said Gina. “What time does sun set around here, Aunt Betty?”

She showed us to our room, hurrying past the kitchen. The house was not as neatly kept as Aunt Flo’s—it was dusty, piled with years of layers of stuff. Ned was sitting at the kitchen table so immersed in a newspaper, he barely looked up.

“Hi, Ned,” said Gina.

He said nothing, just raised his hand in a wave.

“Come on,” said Aunt Betty. “I only have the one guest room. You don’t mind sharing a bed, do you? You used to all the time when you were small.”

Gina and I said nothing. Perhaps she did mind. If only we could put Molly between us, maybe that would be better.

Adolescent Molly may’ve been right about Ned. He gave me the willies, sitting there lumpen, his great blubber-belly hanging over his belt. Each time he turned a page of his newspaper, a frightening shower of dandruff snowed from his sparse, greasy comb-over onto his light blue T-shirt.

Later when he left the table and the paper open, I glanced over to see what had happened in the world that was so fascinating. A 500-pound woman had died and was two months in the deep freeze while waiting to be cremated. There was some issue about who was going to pay for the “highly involved” process of cremating a body 200 pounds over the allowable weight of 300. The son was indigent, and the coroner’s office, the hospital, and the morgue remained in bitter disagreement about who had to pay for it. I saw the date of the story: April, 1974. Ned couldn’t tear himself away from a news story seven years old.

After “Wheel of Fortune,” when I was faint with hunger, Betty gave us food, but not before she showed us the backyard with pens for her dogs. She cooed over them, fussed, fed them (fed them!). Then us, then Ned. He was last, after the dogs and the guests.

“Sloane,” Gina said to me quietly, “honestly, don’t let it slip how you feel about small furry pooches. Even Hitler liked dogs.”

“Yes,” I barked. “Preferred dogs to children. Quite the paragon of canine-loving virtue, that Adolf.”

Gina tutted and turned to Aunt Betty. “Aunt Betty, is there somewhere fun to go around here?”

“Fun like where?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”

“No, that’s why I’m asking. What kind of fun are you talking about?” She narrowed her eyes. “There’s a bowling alley in South Bend. It’s about forty miles away. But that’s a college town. It can get real rowdy there. Real rowdy. There’s an outlet mall in Michigan City. It’s closed by now. You can go there tomorrow.”

“We’ll need to be on our way tomorrow, Aunt Betty,” said Gina. “I’m just asking for tonight. Anywhere to go to in Three Oaks tonight?”

Betty’s eyes remained narrowed. “What kind of fun you talkin’ about?” She looked at Ned, dutifully drinking his beer, not looking up from his news page. He was re-reading the story about the obese woman. “Boy fun?”

Gina shook her head. “Not boy fun. I have a boyfriend. We’re getting married soon.”

“You are?” I whispered. “Shh.”

“What about your friend, here?”

“I can’t vouch for Shelby,” Gina said. “Can I, Sloane? Vouch for you?” She was turned to Aunt Betty when she addressed me. “We were looking for a bar or something. To get a quick drink.”

“No bar you’d want to go to. Girls don’t go to bars around here. Not good girls anyway.”

Some small measure of sense and her aunt’s Calvinist expression kept Gina from saying, “Who says we’re good girls, anyway?”

“You don’t want to be going into no bars around here.”

“Okay, gotcha.”

“You’re my sister’s kid,” said Aunt Betty. “I don’t care if you’re forty-seven, you ain’t givin’ up no pooty while you stayin’ in my house.”

Pooty? Gina stifled a groan. “Allrighty, then. Well, Aunt Betty, we’re feeling kind of tired. I think we’ll have a shower and head on to bed. Get up nice and early tomorrow, set out. Thanks for dinner. Goodnight.”

“We’re going to bed?” I whispered. It was nine in the evening!

She pulled me to our room. I told Gina I’d been there a thousand times, when a woman who was not my mother kept me from going out, from having fun.

“So what’d you do?”

“Nothing. I stayed in.”

“Fool. I just lied to my mother.” Gina was looking in her suitcase for clothes. “I told her I was sleeping over a girlfriend’s house. She never checked. She wanted to trust me, and as long as I didn’t get caught, I knew I’d be okay.” We giggled at the gullibility of mothers and Emmas trying to keep their girls from having fun. “Well, don’t just stand there. What are you doing, pulling out a book? Hurry, go have a shower, get dressed.”

“For bed?”

Gina grinned. “Whatever you want to call it, girlfriend. Just put on some ‘pooty’ clothes.”

“We’re going out?”

“Of course. What do you think? I didn’t let my mother tell me what to do, you think I’m going to let my mother’s enfeebled sister do it?”

“But she said no!”

“Oh, well, better tuck ourselves in, then.” She snorted. “Come on. We’re not going to walk out her front door.”

“How are we going to get to the car in the driveway?”

Gina pointed to the window.

“We’re going to sneak out the window like cats?”

“Cats on the prowl. What, you’ve never done it?”

“My window was on the second floor above a garage. So—no.”

“Chicken. I would’ve built a ladder in the trees.”

“Yes, I suppose you would’ve.” After showering, she put on her jeans, and a cute beige top that came with cleavage. I didn’t have a beige top that came with cleavage, but I had runner’s legs. So after showering I put on a mini-skirt and high heels. We spent extra time on our makeup. Gina was really taking time with hers. Three different eyeliners, two shadows, mucho blusho.

“Gina … um. What about Eddie?”

“What about him?”

I watched her apply another coat of black mascara. “Must be some fun you’re thinking of having with four coats of Great Lash. Didn’t you just say you’re going to California to marry your boyfriend?”

“Fiancé. He asked me to marry him before he left.” She waved the mascara wand, licked her lips. “I love Eddie. He’s the only one I want. But he’s been up to no good.”

“How do you know?” And is that how it worked?

“Oh, he confessed. He didn’t like having the burden of his wrongdoing on his conscience. To make himself feel better, he told me.”

My throat went kind of numb. I said, “Told you …”

“His little thing with Teresa. You know Teresa, the county slut? God. He justified it, as he justifies everything, by saying it was my fault. After all, he said, I had a boyfriend I refused to break up with when we first got together.”

“Huh,” I said carefully, throat less numb. She did actually have a boyfriend she refused to break up with when she and Eddie first got together. He was the tallest jock in school. Eddie was short.

“I know. But I was in love with Eddie, and he knew it. Still am. I just didn’t know how to break it off with John.”

“So how’d you break it off?”

“Don’t you know anything? Agnes isn’t doing her job. I didn’t. He broke up with me. So then Eddie and I were supposed to be exclusive, but now he’s gone back to Bakersfield and I know there’s a girl there he used to, like, date.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me. He doesn’t like to keep that stuff to himself.”

“Really?” I wasn’t looking at her, and she wasn’t looking at me.

“They’re sitting by streams, on rocks, picking flowers, reciting poetry or some shit. When we talk he tells me they’re hypothetically talking of what it might be like to be married. After all, that’s what they talked about when they were twelve.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Does he know you’re coming?”

She nodded. “I called him before I left, told him I’m on my way. He said, please come as soon as you can. Please. Save me from myself. I think I may accidentally end up marrying her.”

I blinked.

“I don’t want to talk about it any more with you,” Gina said. “All I’m saying is, he hasn’t been good. And he doesn’t have to know about tonight. Come on, let’s go. Let’s get us some real rowdy.” She smiled. “How do I look?”

“Great,” I said. “But the dogs are outside. They’ll start barking. They’ll hear my car.”

“The dogs are already barking.” Gina winked. She messed up the bed and put towels and pillows under the sheets to make it appear as if two sleeping forms were underneath. “I’m sure my aunt’s out by now. It’s eleven; way past her bedtime. Don’t worry. They’re both none too swift. Ready?”

Dolled up, done up, I hitched my mini-skirt, adjusted my tube top, made sure money and ID were in my pocket, and crawled out the window into the side yard littered with broken lumber. We tip-toed our way to the car; of course the tiny dogs, mistaking themselves for German Shepherds, snarled like we were about to rob the house.

I put the car into neutral and released the handbrake. In her heels, Gina helped me back it out the drive, I started it on the road, and we drove off, giggling like kids. “Why are you wearing underwear?” she said in the car on the way to South Bend. “I’m not.”

“I know.”

“Come on. Trust me, you feel completely different without underwear. Like anything’s possible.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” I said. “But my skirt’s too short. I’ll get arrested for indecent exposure.”

Gina said her mission was to make out with a cute college guy. She’d never had a college guy. She wanted to test if that thing they said about men and women was true.

“What thing is that?”

“That when a woman wakes up she can say to herself, today I will get laid. And have it be true. But when a man wakes up, he can say, I may never get laid again. And have that also be true.”

I laughed. I hoped it was true. We were wearing shiny lipstick, and had on lots of drugstore perfume, Coty and Jean Naté. Gina’s jeans were tighter than my skirt, but that was only because I was thinner. Too much running, though not since being on the road. Felt weird not running every day.

In South Bend, we cruised the noisy strip of bars, looking for a boisterous place where the patrons were neatly dressed and young. Gina didn’t want to go to Vickie’s (“Only girls there”) or McCormick’s or Corby’s (“The Irish get too drunk and pass out”). We debated between Linebacker Lounge and Library Irish Pub. She wanted the former, I the latter.

“Are you joking?” she said. “Library Pub? You want them to talk to you about Hardy and Yeats? Or do you want them to look like linebackers? That’s really the question here.”

“I want them to be able to speak.”

“That’s the only thing they’ll be able to do at Library Pub,” Gina returned.

“I would like,” I said, “a better class of boy.”

We had to play rock, paper, scissors to decide. We played best of three. I won. “If only all decisions were that easy,” said Gina, as we pulled into the Library parking lot.

“What do you mean? That’s how we used to decide everything.”

“Everything, Sloane?”

Two preppy, clean-cut guys walking inside saw us getting out of our car and whistled. “Nice ’Stang, girls!” And I, Shelby, smiled, because it was my Shelby. I may have kept my underwear on, but I had a nice ’Stang.

“That was so easy,” Gina whispered to me, as they were walking up to us. “Maybe you were right about this place.”

“Yeah, the car’s a stud magnet,” I whispered back. “Even with bookworms.”

The car, the mini-skirt, Gina’s moniker and panty-free manner combined with two or seven Sloe Gin fizzes was enough to hook us up with two sophomores from Indiana State, English majors and on the lacrosse team. The music was too loud, we couldn’t talk. We just sipped our drinks, smiled, and stood close. They kept leaning toward us to hear the words we weren’t saying, like, “You come here often?” and “Yes, I’ll have another drink. And another.” I laughed too much and too loud, which is what I do when I get a little tipsy, and thought everything they said and didn’t say was so funny. And every time my boy spoke, I touched his arm. Alive and Kicking were holding on a little bit tighter, baby, and Blondie was dancing very close cuz it was rapture time.

Gina and I didn’t get back to Three Oaks until her goal was more fully accomplished than even she had expected, and since I didn’t have a goal, I was quite surprised by the turn of events. So, at four in the morning when we climbed into our room, sneaking in like thieves into the den, we felt as if we’d run a marathon, or aced the SATs, or perhaps come in first and second in our class. Giggling, inebriated, and relaxed, Gina barely threw off her clothes before climbing into bed, and though I was also drunk, I folded my clothes, put them away, and got out my outfit for the morning, my notebook as well, but in bed I asked how in heaven’s name I was supposed to drive tomorrow, and Gina, nearly unconscious, muttered, let’s stay a few more days. I tried to remember my mother, whether the cover charge had been more or less than I’d budgeted for, and to count up how much money we’d spent so far. Had I paid for any of the drinks? I think I ordered bacon potato skins and buffalo wings, and tipped the waitress, maybe bought one drink. Thirty bucks, forty? But a song of freedom kept whirling in my head for the happy road day, won’t you help me sing … redemption songs. Redemption songs.

2
The Chihuahuas

We woke up at noon! Which was so not like me, and for some reason noon and sobriety didn’t make me feel as great about the previous night as last call, intoxication and songs of freedom had. I’d had a bad dream. And, who were those guys we’d been with?

“Who cares?” Gina said, stretching, rolling over. “We were like men last night. We came, we took what we wanted, we left. Wasn’t it awesome?”

My heavy skull cracking and my mouth parched, I said, “Yeah. Totally.” I wasn’t used to drinking, I was dehydrated. My dream had been so creepy and real, I didn’t know how I had continued sleeping. I sat up in bed and looked around. Everything in the room seemed to be in place. Our two suitcases, our makeup. Maybe we could ask Aunt Betty to let us do a wash today. “Did you get his name?”

“Todd.”

“Hmm.” I licked my lips, touched my face. Did I forget to take off my makeup? Yuk. “Mine said he was Todd, too.”

We stared at each other for the briefest of moments. “So?” Gina pulled open the curtain to glance outside. “So maybe they lied about their names. What, you think guys’d care if we lied about our names? If I said my name was Kathleen, you think they’d care? Look, a beautiful day again. And so hot, too. Want to go swimming? And tonight we can go back to South Bend.” She winked naughtily. “We’ll try the Linebacker Lounge this time.”

“Swimming?” I was still stuck on the boys and the dream. “Swimming where?”

“Uh—Lake Michigan?”

“Oh.” We were stretched out in bed. “But we didn’t lie, did we?” I said. “We could’ve, but we didn’t. We wanted them to know us.”

I didn’t tell Gina my bad vision of trouble: I had woken in the blue of night, and there, in our room, in the chair by the door, sat Ned, watching us, his scalp flaking, his belly overflowing, eyes slow-blinking.

We threw on clothes and went to the kitchen, where Aunt Betty eyeballed us like we were stale cheese. Ned sat at the corner table, reading the newspaper. He didn’t look up. Betty said the dogs had barked at four in the morning and woken her. “They never bark in the middle of the night.” Cleverly, we said nothing. She asked why we slept so late when we went to bed so early. Again, a simple shrug sufficed for reply. But at that moment Ned looked up from his early 70s newspaper, and gave me a slow blink.

I got scared, then. Perhaps, after all, nothing in the night had been a dream. When I quickly looked away from him, I saw Aunt Betty staring at me with those doe moist eyes, now wary, and considerably cooled.

As she was sliding me some unfriendly toast and burnt bitter coffee, she asked if we wouldn’t mind taking two of her homegrown Chihuahuas to a very good customer a few miles away. She said the pups had been born eight weeks earlier and the woman’s young sons were dying for them. They’d been inspected and paid for so all we had to do was deliver them, a quick in and out drop-off thing.

“See, Sloane,” said Gina, sipping her coffee as if it were champagne, “there are some people in this world who like dogs.”

I ignored her, pushing my cup away. “Aunt Betty, did you tell the woman,” I asked, “that whether or not her sons get the puppies at eight weeks or eight years, the Chihuahuas are going to look exactly the same?”

“Excuse me?” She remained humorless, and then turning to Gina said, “Please, niece? A favor to me?”

Gina looked at me with a friendly open shrug, as in, why not? I wasn’t reluctant, just silent. “Aunt Betty, we’ll be glad to, right, Sloane? But I haven’t seen you for so long, we wanted to stay a few more days, go to the mall, swim in the lake. Is that okay?”

Betty shook her head. It wasn’t okay?

“I’ll give you 200 dollars to deliver the dogs today.”

That’s when I perked up, that’s when my cement-head morphed upward into swamp-head. “Two hundred dollars?”

Gina generously offered to split it with me.

“Oh, you will, will you?” I returned. “Well, why not, after all, you’ll be doing half the driving.”

“Shut up. Aunt Betty, we’d love to, but please, can we go tomorrow?”

Vehemently, Aunt Betty shook her head. “You have to leave today.” Suddenly 200 dollars became a hefty chunk of change to drive two rodents a couple of miles down the road. I became suspicious. “Hang on a sec,” I said, my turn to narrow my eyes, furrow my eyebrows. “Where exactly are we going?”

“De Soto.”

“Ah, well, De Soto.” I got up to swill my coffee into the sink. It splashed and left a terrible mess. Not one to leave a mess behind, I cleaned it while saying, “And where might this De Soto be?”

“I have the address,” said Aunt Betty. “It’s just down 55-South. It won’t be any trouble. It’s on the way for you, girls.”

How many places were “on our way?” How could everything be on our way? Every single thing? What kind of coordinates did our way have? It zigged down and zagged up, it meandered on country roads, on Erie Canal, then curved around a bend—South Bend—and a lake, two Great Lakes even, and now was jutting on 55-South. South! Did anyone realize we were heading west? Everything between New York and California, point A and point B was on the way. Everything between the coasts was on the way. From Canada to New Orleans was on the way.

I went to get my map. Aunt Betty also disappeared, emerging a few moments later with cash in hand. “Are you girls packed, ready?”

“Ready? Aunt Betty, we just got up. We haven’t even showered!”

Betty frowned. “Why would you need to shower again? I heard you showering at nine last night.”

Without a blink, Gina said, “Always like to start my day with a shower, Aunt Betty. Sort of like brushing my teeth.”

“Well, no use wasting my water. I got a well around here, it runs dry on hot days like this. Why don’t you two get going. You can be done by evening.”

Well, at least De Soto was close enough to get to by evening, though by the hurried way Betty was shepherding us out, maybe this evening was optimistic. “I can’t find it on the map, Aunt Betty,” I said. “Show me.”

She declined. “I’m terrible at reading maps,” she said. “But I have the address.” Betty handed me a scrap of paper and a donut. Everything was on a scrap of paper. “You best get going. You wanna get there before dark. The Kirkebys live in the country, no lights anywhere; will be hard to read the street signs.” Before I could protest, she stuffed four fifties into my hand. “Here. You look like you need the money.”

“Do I?” What can I do never to look like that again? Is it my Levi’s shorts? Or my plain white blouse? Is it the Dr. Scholls on my feet? Or the two-dollar Great Lash mascara that was caking from last night? I didn’t carry a purse, but did my eight-cylinder, 350 horsepower stock car that cost someone a second mortgage give my financial status away? What was it about me that made me look impoverished to a pale woman with slow speech and a mute man that almost never looked up from his newspaper?

Money in hand, sugar from the donut sticking to my fingers, I opened up the piece of paper like it was a fortune cookie: “YOU WILL BE RICH.” “YOU HAVE MANY GIFTS.” “1809 Chariot Way, De Soto, MO.”

“MO?” I muttered. “Gina, what state is MO?”

“Dunno. Montana?”

“Not Montana!” That was Aunt Betty. “Where would I get a customer from Montana?”

“Is it here? Is it Michigan?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Betty, collecting the toast plates. “This isn’t Michigan. Flo always gets it wrong. It’s Indiana. We’re right on the border. Listen, don’t get yourself in a twist. You have the money. Go.” And then she added, “Need directions?”

Puzzled I stared at her; clear-eyed and judgmental she stared back. Where had I heard that before, seen that before? Need Directions? I saw it like a billboard in front of my eyes. “Yes,” I said. “Where’s De Soto?”

“St. Louis,” Aunt Betty exclaimed. “Just a few miles south on I-55. Why don’t you go and get ready. It’s getting late.”

Near St. Louis. A few miles south. On I-55. Carefully, folding my map, I said, “Is that on the way to California?”

“Of course!” replied Aunt Betty. “Don’t you know what St. Louis is called? ‘The Gateway to the West.’ What do you think the St. Louis Arch was built for?”

I straightened up and shook my head. “Aunt Betty, I don’t think St. Louis is that close. We were planning to stay on I-80.”

“What, two hundred isn’t enough?” she said. “Shaking me down for more money, Shel?”

“What?” I exclaimed. “No, of course not, like I would, no, but … now that you mention it …”

“Sloane!” That was Gina.

“No, no, niece, she’s right.” Aunt Betty smiled ruefully. “That’s fine. I’ll give you a hundred more. Will that cover it?” She stared at me meaningfully. “And here’s some water for the road.”

We’re leaving? But I hadn’t planned my route yet, hadn’t written things down in order—

Within thirty minutes we were flasked, packed, dogged-up, and shown the door. Betty did not allow us to shower.

“Goodbye!” She waved, disappearing into her broken-down trailer with the cow and the goat. “Was so good to see you, girls. Gina, I’ll tell your mother we had a nice visit. Be careful, you two!”

“Wow,” I said as we drove out onto the main road. “Wow.”

“Wow what?”

“Huh. Nothing. Strange is all.” I turned around to glance at the Chihuahuas in the crate taking up most of the backseat. What odd-looking dogs.

“What’s strange?” Gina opened the map.

“Don’t even pretend. Put that map away,” I said. “You didn’t get the feeling she was trying to get rid of us?”

Gina looked up. “No. She’s just efficient. Doesn’t like nonsense.”

“Yeah, that must be it.”

“Do you know where you’re going?” Gina put the map away.

“Haven’t you heard? St. Louis.”

We left that moment, not a few days later, like I planned, like Gina wanted. We were hurried out in the middle of an afternoon. I could’ve said no to the dogs, to the money, and didn’t. I could’ve said no to many things, and didn’t. Like I keep saying, sometimes, life alters by increments and sometimes by insurrection.

3
Two Todds

Route 12 was rural. Stretching through the strip of trees that flanked Lake Michigan, the countryside stopped being pretty, became utilitarian. But to me, where Aunt Betty lived looked like not a bad place for kids to grow up. There was nothing to do, but there were fields and forests. The kids could have adventures. In Larchmont you always had to be careful. Look both ways, don’t jaywalk. Not much adventure. Here, the kids just ran with the dogs. And the goats.

“Is Ned your aunt’s husband?”

“I don’t think so,” replied Gina. “I think they met up in a rest home Betty had been living in, recuperating.”

“Recuperating from what?”

“I don’t know. Life’s little stresses. She gets stressed out easily.” Gina chuckled. “You saw Ned.”

“You could say I saw Ned.”

“What?”

“Nothing. What was he recuperating from?”

“Well, I don’t know. He’s had some problems.”

“You don’t say. What kind of problems?”

Gina raised her eyebrows. “Mental problems.”

“Oh.”

“But I don’t really know.”

“Why don’t you ask Agnes? She’ll tell you.”

“How would Agnes know about Ned?”

“Agnes often speaks of things she knows absolutely nothing about.”

“You think?” said Gina, with a breath, then another. “But sometimes Agnes speaks of things she knows something about. No?”

After the briefest of pauses, I said, “No. Tell me about Ned.” See, this is when we needed Molly! No wonder Gina had brought her. If it wasn’t for crazy Ned, she’d still be with us.

“Once I overheard my mom say he was out on parole.”

“Parole?” My head jerked. “For what?”

Gina hesitated. “Look, he was falsely accused. He didn’t mean any harm. But some young girl, about fourteen, who’d run away, claimed Ned took her into his home where he was living with his mother and wouldn’t let her go. Kept her there like a slave or something. I mean, that’s preposterous, isn’t it?”

My heart was in my stomach. “Gina,” I said, because I couldn’t keep quiet, “why would you go visit your aunt when the man she’s with has accusations like that hanging over him?”

“He was innocent! They’re just accusations. He was living with his mother, for God’s sake. The girl should’ve just told his mother on him, if she didn’t want to stay. He probably thought he was being hospitable. It was all a big misunderstanding. He makes Betty happy.”

“Was he arrested?”

“Arrested, tried, convicted, but the charges were dismissed on appeal. Why the sudden interest in Ned, Sloane? You’ve seen him before at the house.”

I didn’t remember him. I barely remembered Betty, I’d seen her only a couple of times. She’d always been silent and watchful.

“You really think Aunt Betty shepherding us out with such exquisite haste was because of the dogs?” I asked skeptically.

“Why else?”

“Oh, Gina.”

“Oh, Gina what?”

Clearly she didn’t want to talk about it. In front of us rose an enormous concrete structure that looked like the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island. Instead of talking about why she would agree to stay in the secluded home of a convicted child assailant, we had a nice long discussion on whether Three Mile Island was in Pennsylvania or Michigan—like right in front of us. Gina kept saying, “Can’t you see this isn’t an island?”

“People who live on an island don’t know it’s an island!”

“Oh, Jesus. It’s in Pennsylvania!”

I retreated. “Tell me this doesn’t look exactly like Three Mile Island.” The near-nuclear-reactor-meltdown accident happened just a year or two ago. It was still fresh in my paranoid mind. We’d never seen a nuclear power plant before; we gawked, we rubbernecked at a stone tank. Adjacent to it was Lighthouse Place, an outlet mall. That made us laugh.

Ladies will shop even under the volcano, we said. Girls must shop. Were we two of those girls? Should we stop? Shop? I’d taken an aspirin for my head, was tired and didn’t feel like driving. I wished Gina could drive so I could close my eyes. “If we stop,” I said, “we’ll be forced to buy things. Do we need things?”

“We might. We won’t know till we stop.”

“But do we really need things?” I wanted to look into my notebook at the list of my expenses.

“I think we do.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said cheerily. “We’ll know when we shop.”

“I’m tired.”

“I’m hungry.”

“We just ate.”

“Toast doesn’t count. I’m hungry for something else.”

“Like a pair of jeans?”

Gina beamed.

“I didn’t budget for a nuclear shopping spree.” I allowed twenty dollars for a gift for Emma, that was all. Aside from some flat tire money. Was I really willing to spend it now on a bathing suit I didn’t need?

“We just made some extra,” said Gina, “but the question is, do we want to be girls who shop under a nuclear cloud?”

We giggled; we thought we would like to be those girls. Okay, I said, pulling into the mall parking lot, we’ll shop, but let’s look at a map first.

Gina groaned.

We spread the map out onto the steaming hood, too hot to touch. “Go ahead, tell me. How far is St. Louis?”

She looked, not too close. “About six inches.”

“How many miles is that?”

“I don’t—”

“Look at the legend!” I was too hot to stand in the parking lot.

“Hard to tell. Maybe seventy miles. Eighty?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t stop.”

“Of course we should. Besides, we’re already stopped.”

I started to protest; she raised her eyebrows and gave me a look that said I wasn’t being adventurous enough.

“Come on, we made some extra. Let’s go spend it.”

“What, all 300 dollars? Get out!”

She pulled on me. The reactor noisily emitted a plume of white smoke. She pulled me again, by the wrist, toward the walking mall. “We’ll be in St. Louis in about three hours. It’s fine. First we’ll swim, though.”

“You mean, first we’ll shop?”

“Yes, then cool off in the water. Let’s go.”

It was three in the afternoon, the worst time for me to drive, I was so low-energy. The alcohol had sucked the oxygen out of my veins. “Okay, let’s go,” I said, allowing myself to be pulled. To the left of us was a road with four churches in a row, like last night’s bars. Another religious experience, Gina said, wondering out loud if church was a good place to meet guys. “Nice choir-singing boys. Maybe we should stay till Sunday.”

“As a Buddhist are you even allowed to go to church?” I said, glancing at the white sign outside the Prince of Peace Lutheran church. “TWO GREAT TRUTHS: 1. THERE IS A GOD. 2. YOU ARE NOT HIM.”

“You’re a fool,” said Gina. “The Christians allow everyone in.”

“Even Buddhists?”

“You think they discriminate? They don’t care. We were Jehovah’s Witnesses for five minutes, and we still went to a Catholic church once on Christmas. It was the Jehovahs that got mad.”

“Huh.” I was dull like bouillon.

“That’s when my mom stopped being a Jehovah. She liked Christmas too much.”

“Are they mutually exclusive, those two things?”

“Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate Christmas. Don’t you know anything?”

“Nothing,” I said. “But the French Jewish family who lived in our house celebrated Christmas.”

“Are Jews and Christmas mutually exclusive?” asked Gina and we laughed. We turned to each other, and she took my hand for a moment. “Three Jewish families on our block have a tree and exchange presents,” she said. “They tell my mother, why should Christians have all the fun?”

Lazily we moseyed through the deserted outlet mall, bought a horrific hot dog, looked inside Ralph Lauren, BCBG, where we asked the shopkeeper how many miles it was to Indiana. She looked confused, said, you are in Indiana. I shook my head, said, no, no, you’re mistaken, we’re in Michigan City, and she said, “Yes. Michigan City, Indiana.”

“Oh.”

Then she told us our ready-to-emit radioactive fumes nuclear reactor was nothing more than a cooling tower for a regular Indiana power company generator. We lost interest in shopping after that. It was only fun when we thought we were being risk-takers, living life on the edge. “How long do you think to St. Louis from here?” I asked the BCBG cashier, as I was giving her money for my new white shorts. “A few hours, right?”

“St. Louis, Missouri? Try eight hours. It’s about 400 miles from here. Probably longer, what with the rush-hour traffic near Chicago.”

Eight hours! It couldn’t be! Mealy-mouthed, I said, “You said, St. Louis, Missouri. Is there perhaps another St. Louis? Somewhere in Michigan, maybe?”

Dejected we walked back to the car. “Some map reader you are,” Gina criticized.

“Yes, and your help was invaluable,” I snapped. “Now what are we going to do? We’re never going to find that house in the dark. Aunt Betty said.”

“Let’s try.”

“Try what? We couldn’t figure out the mileage on a map in broad daylight!” I wanted to get on the highway and drive until I hit the ocean on the other side. Just stay on one straight road. Gas? Right there. Food? Right there. Lodging? There, too. Everything, anything right at my fingertips. I wouldn’t even need a map.

We let the dogs out on a patch of grass. They were panting, rat-like, sniffing dandelions. Did rats pant? It was hot, it was four p.m. There was no way we could arrive at a stranger’s doorstep at midnight. Resigned to a night on the road, we decided to take the dogs and ourselves swimming. We would take the gateway to the west from St. Louis to get to California. Aunt Betty said. We each picked up a mutt and headed toward the car.

In the parking lot, with Chihuahuas in our hands, we passed a group of guys getting out of a pick-up truck. I instantly recognized one of them as the “Todd” I’d been with last night. “Todd!” I called, to get his attention. Hey! Look in my direction. Nudging Gina, I motioned toward them, about ten yards away. “Todd!” Gina said to her own “Todd”, but louder. No one looked up. They were laughing, talking among themselves. They glanced peripherally at us, as in, we’re five guys, none of us is named Todd, and there are two chicks with dogs in our path. I waved, and they waved back, said something to each other, laughed heartily, passed us and walked on. Gina and I stopped walking. I looked at her, stupefied.

“What?” she said. “They were with their friends.”

“They were.” And last night was dark, and we were dressed differently, and so were they. It was loud; there was Sloe gin. But still. The following day, in broad daylight, a young, well-groomed, smart young man, who not twelve hours earlier had Biblical parts of him inside Biblical parts of me, passed me in a parking lot and didn’t recognize me. He didn’t know who I was. We could’ve shaken hands last night. I could have served him a drink. I could’ve sold him gum at the local gas station, and he would’ve walked by me slower today, he would’ve paused for the briefest moment to say, gee, you look familiar. Don’t I know you from somewhere? Oh, yeah. Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit. Todd didn’t do any of that. No young man and young woman could have been more intimate, and yet, he passed me in an outlet mall and didn’t know me. I wasn’t even a stain on his memory like he was on mine.

“Unbelievable.”

“I know,” said Gina. “But look, we agreed to take the dogs. We took her money. Spent some of it. We can’t go back now.”

After a moment’s silence at the gasping realization of how far Gina’s thoughts had been from mine, I said, “No, of course. We have no choice. Let’s go.”

I cared less about the dogs now, about St. Louis. My heart began to hurt a little bit.

Slowly I started up the car, and we rolled on.

“I’ll give you my share of the $300,” Gina said, “if that’ll make you feel better.”

That wasn’t what was making me feel bad.

“Gina, doesn’t it bother you that they didn’t recognize us?”

“Couldn’t care less. Hey, turn here. We’ll go swimming.”

Reluctantly, I turned into a deserted National Dunes Park; in the car, like ferrets in a sack, we changed into our bathing suits and set off for the beach. The only thing that saved the dogs from immersion was the 126-foot, 80-degree incline sand dune that neither Gina nor I could climb while holding them. And what saved us from swimming after we struggled up Mount Baldy like Edmund Hillary and his Tonto was that the lake was another half a mile of sand away. We stood asthmatically at the crest of the dune. Lake Michigan didn’t look like any lake I’d ever seen—it was like an ocean with white sand.

“Did you know that Lake Michigan is our largest lake?” said Gina. “It’s the only Great Lake entirely within U.S. borders. It’s got 1100 cubic miles of water in it.”

“What I would give for a pint of that water right now.” I was so hot.

“You and the Chihuahuas. Imagine how thirsty they are.”

“Maybe it’s best we didn’t bring them. What if they couldn’t swim?”

“All animals can swim,” said Gina. “Even cows can swim.”

That made me laugh. She always somehow managed that, to say something supremely silly.

We slid down 130 feet on our butts back to the parking lot. Sandy, hot and exhausted, though we’d done nothing all day, we got back to the car, and while the crazy dogs were running around the pine needles chased by Gina, I examined the map, trying to get my bearings, control things. I had been looking just at the road to St. Louis, but when I traced the road from St. Louis to California, I quickly realized we had a bigger problem than driving a few extra hundred miles south. The Interstate out of St. Louis west to California was I-70, but when I-70 got to the middle of Utah, it just sort of dissipated. Broke into a dozen little pieces that became other roads that headed north and south, but not west to the Pacific coast, not west to Mendocino.

“I knew it,” I said to Gina when she returned, panting. “I may know nothing, but I knew we had to stay on I-80. From the beginning I said so. George Washington Bridge to San Francisco, that was my planned route. But no. We had to go all the way to Maryland, and come all the way back, and now we have to go all the way to St. Louis and come all the way back. We have to make an 800-mile detour. Eight hundred miles!” I shook my head. “This is crazy. Why, oh why, did I agree to something this stupid? Plus two days’ time driving to De Soto!” My voice was so high, I sounded like somebody’s exasperated parent, trying to explain why mumsie couldn’t just drop everything and buy her darling a pony. We can’t. We can’t. We can’t. “It’ll cost us more than 300 bucks and we’ll lose two days. That’s if we find this little De Soto. It’s in St. Louis, the way New Jersey is near New York.”

But it was impotent rage. I couldn’t go back to Aunt Betty’s, and I knew it.

Gina looked composed and unconcerned; she rubbed my arm, said shh, tried to use a soothing voice, as if she were now the mumsie, and I was the unreasonable tot demanding a pony. “It’s fine,” she said. “We’ll be okay. So we’ll go to St. Louis? What’s a couple of days in the scheme of things? I’ve never been to St. Louis. Don’t you want to see the Arch? We can go all the way to the top. Did you know it’s the world’s tallest man-made monument, at 630 feet?”

I was so tired. I wished Gina, all perky and bubbly, could drive so I could sleep. If horses were wishes.

FOUR

1
Candy

We got back on the road around five. It was time to start thinking about dinner, and we hadn’t gone but ten miles from Aunt Betty’s house, our sum total for the day. I couldn’t believe I told Emma I’d be back in two and a half weeks. I must’ve been delusional.

“Hey, you want a Blue Jay pumpkin? Look, they’re only a quarter.”

“No.”

“Look at the name of the town.” Gina laughed. “Valparaiso. Isn’t that funny?”

I didn’t know what was so funny.

“We’re in Indiana. You’ve got Joe’s Bar and Grill, and you’ve got Tony’s Car Repair next to Pump’s On Restaurant, next to Tasty Taco, in Valparaiso?”

“So?”

“You don’t think Tasty Taco is a little too hoi-polloi for Valparaiso?”

“No. I just think the people who named the town came from Chile.”

“I think, Miss Literal,” Gina said, “somebody’s lost her funny bone.”

“Completely,” I agreed. “I’m cranky like a child.”

I glanced over at Gina sitting there, whistling a tune, a smile on her face. And then he’ll settle down … Eddie was planning to marry someone else and she was whistling. In some quiet little town … If my boyfriend were planning to marry someone else, I sure wouldn’t be whistling. Perhaps she didn’t care. But then why was she riding shotgun across the continent and the Great Divide to stop him? Either you care or you don’t, but what’s with the whistling? I pulled her hair. “You’re not worried?” I asked.

“’Bout what?”

“Anything.”

“I’m not worried ’bout nothin’,” said Gina, wiping her head and humming. You know he’ll always keep moving …

We passed a little brown sign that said “Picnic Area at Great Marsh State Park.” That made me laugh.

“Oh, now she’s amused.” You know he’s never gonna stop moving …

“Because it’s funny. First of all, why in the world would anyone have a state park in a marsh? That’s first. And second, why would you want to have a picnic there?”

“Not as funny as Valparaiso.”

“Funnier.”

“Don’t think so.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Suddenly we fell mute as if the power had just gone out. Up ahead on Dunes Highway near Fremont, at the traffic light, on the right-hand side of the road across from the Great Marsh Picnic Grounds, with her thumb in the air was the girl from the black truck in Maryland. She must’ve recognized our car because she smiled at us and waved happily.

Gina and I blinked, not believing our eyes.

“Oh my God,” I said. “Is that the same—”

“Holy shit. Shh. Think so.”

“Why are you saying shh? It can’t be.”

“Well, look!”

“It can’t be!” I exclaimed.

“It most certainly is.”

“God, what do we do?”

“I don’t know. Holy shit. Can you turn somewhere?”

“Turn where!” We were on U.S. 12, with the lake on the right and the marsh picnic grounds on the left, and nowhere to turn. The railroad yards and the steel mills were up ahead. The headquarters of U.S. Steel were up ahead. And so was she. I don’t know what loomed larger. The light was turning red; I was forced to slow down and come to a stop. Right next to her. Her thumb still out, she came closer, staring expectantly into our passenger window.

“What do we do!” That was me, in a deathly whisper. I was flabbergasted, blinking furiously, as if hoping that she, like the haunting by Ned, would evaporate. I mean, it couldn’t be her. Not here, it just couldn’t be. We weren’t meant to be here; why was she? We had passed her in another life, days ago on a local road four states away; what wind blew her here? What wind blew us here? “What do we do, Gina …”

“Nothing.” Gina turned to me. “What are you talking about? Nothing. Look straight ahead, like when the homeless in the city come to wash our windshield. Look away. Ignore her. The light’s gonna change soon.”

“Gina …” I couldn’t look away. I was staring at the girl outside the window. Her smile was broad, like me she was chewing gum, smiling like Gina (who was no longer even faintly smiling). She looked so young, and she opened her hands at us, as if to say, “Well?” standing in her little blue skirt, skinny, her hair all weird. In her hands she held a shopping bag. What I was seeing was a cataclysmic coincidence, against all probabilities, impossible in a rational world, in a statistical world, in a world ruled by my plan.

“It’s fate, Gina Reed,” I said.

“Are you kidding me?”

“No.” I looked at the girl again. “It’s a supernatural event.”

“You know what we do when the gods show us what they have in store for us?” Gina said. “We snub our noses at them, and do something else, just to shake things up, to make it less boring.”

“You’re not curious?”

“No! I’m non-curious. I’m the anti-curious. I’m negatively curious.”

“Come on. We’re giving the stupid rats a ride. Why do the dogs rate a Shelby, but not the girl? Open your door.”

“No! Are you out of your mind?”

“You know she isn’t headed to St. Louis.”

“How do you know where she’s headed?” Gina exclaimed. “We’re not supposed to be headed to St. Louis.”

“True. Look, we’ll give her a ride to I-80, drop her off at the first rest stop, no harm, no foul. It’s just a few miles. I’m dying to find out how she got here. Look at her. She’s a kid. She could be your sister. That’s Molly out there.”

“No.”

I got some energy back. The light was still red, and she was outside our car with her hands open. “Gina, it’s a miracle.”

“No, it isn’t. A miracle is a good thing.”

“It’s like magic!”

“Yes, black magic.”

“We forgot all about her, and yet here she is, hitching on Route 12 on the Great Lake. At our red traffic light. She is the extraordinary. She is the unexpected. Let’s give her a ride.” The light finally turned green. The sedan behind honked to speed us on.

“Please, no,” said Gina. “Sloane, keep going. We’re doing well, we’re friends again, don’t ruin it, don’t spoil it.”

My heart squeezed. I almost sped up, if only the pull of the unknown weren’t so great, the pull of something I didn’t understand, but wanted to. This wasn’t in my spiral notebook. It could never be. This was no random event. And if this wasn’t, then the black truck wasn’t. And if the black truck wasn’t random, then nothing in the world was random. I had felt so bad back then for being such a chicken, for not letting her in. How often did you get a second chance? “I’m not going to spoil it. Come on. I traipsed around the country for your aunts and your dogs. What’s the big deal? You said so yourself. It’s just for a few miles. To the Interstate. Let’s help her out. Or some horrible guy in a black truck is going to pick her up. Is that what you want?”

“I don’t care!” Gina shook her head. “It’s a terrible mistake. We made a pact. We promised each other. No pick-ups.”

“Where’s the harm?”

“We made a pact,” she repeated doggedly. The cars kept honking.

“Well, I know, but I was talking about sweaty men with tattoos. This is to help a girl like us. What do you think she’s going to do? Come on.”

“I’m asking you, please no.”

But I wasn’t listening anymore. I crossed through the light and pulled onto the shoulder, rolling down my window, sticking my arm out, waving her on, honking twice. I saw her in the rearview mirror, running toward the car. Not quite running, but skipping, like skipping from happiness. A big smile split her face, her shopping bag, her hobo bag flapping.

“Open your door, Gina,” I said quietly.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this. I can’t believe you are picking up a hitchhiker. But then again, what’s a pact to you, right?” She huffed out and flipped forward her seat. The hot summer air swooshed in, and the girl fell in, hips first, then bags, then legs, all teeth, beaming, and said, “Thanks, you’re a Godsend.” Gina slammed the door shout.

I turned to the girl and didn’t know what to say.

She was one peculiar duck up close. She had short spiky hair bleached in punk strands of hot pink and jet black, some standing up, some falling to her neck. She wore thick, black eye-makeup and red glossy lipstick. The makeup was so heavy, I thought it was perhaps to disguise how young she was. Rings perforated her ears from the lobe to the top cartilage. Her body was weighted down with costume jewelry: red, white, and blue stars and stripes, copper bangles, silver hearts. Around her neck hung chains of all lengths, rings adorned fingers and wrists, three bracelets circled each bare ankle, and her tongue was spiked by a small silver ball. Under her short halter, even the bellybutton of her flat stomach was pierced. I’d never seen that before, except in pictures of African girls in National Geographic. She clanged as she sat and breathed; one part or another of her jangled like wind chimes. She had tattoos of flowers on her bare shoulders, and just the top of a red heart showed saucily at the edge of her pink top. Her skin was white as if her body had never been touched by the sun. Her voice was throaty. I rubbernecked her the way I had rubbernecked the nuclear power reactor. More. I couldn’t look away.

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