The Last Days of California: A Novel

by Miller, Mary

  Outside, the girl stood smoking a cigarette, a dog at her feet. In the sunlight, she wasn’t pretty at all. She had a puffy scar beneath one eye, blackheads on the sides of her nose.

  “Is that your dog?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I said it’s not mine.”

  “What kind is it?”

  “Are you deaf?” she asked. And then, “Blue heeler.”

  “Does he bite?”

  “I dunno, I just found him here.” I crouched down to pet him, and she said, “I’ve known heelers to bite, not the best people dogs. This one’s okay, though, you can look at his eyes and tell.” She started to say something else and stopped, as if remembering she had no reason to talk to me. I petted the dog’s head, which was too small for its body, and thought about giving the girl some money to feed him, but I didn’t want her to buy condoms or cigarettes with it.

  I tried to think of other questions for my information-gathering mission, but everything I could think to ask could be answered in one or two words: yes, no, fuck off.

  The dog looked at me and I looked at him and I had the feeling I got sometimes with dogs and babies, like they could see that I was bad, like they were waiting for me to lift my hand into the air and bring it down hard.

  Elise came out eating a red, white, and blue popsicle—a rocket pop—the kind we used to buy from the ice-cream man in our neighborhood. “What’s his name?” she asked.

  The girl repeated what she’d told me, that she’d just found the dog, or the dog had found her. “I’m traveling,” she added. “I can’t have a dog with me all the time.”

  My sister held the popsicle out so it wouldn’t drip on her shirt, leaned over to take another bite. “Where you headed?”

  “Las Vegas,” the girl said.

  “Why Las Vegas?”

  “Have you ever been to Las Vegas?”

  “No.”

  “Then I can’t explain it to you,” she said.

  The popsicle streamed down Elise’s fist, trails of red and blue staining her hand.

  “I’m going to stay at Paris,” the girl said. “At night, the stars are all over the place like a real night sky. There’s two bathrooms and a minibar with chocolate and cute little bottles of wine and you can look out and see the whole city.”

  She’d probably seen the hotel on the Travel Channel, that boring show with that boring Samantha Brown woman. I had no idea why anyone would have ever put that woman on television, let alone given her her own show.

  In the car, my mother was listening to Joyce Meyer. “Repeat after me,” Joyce said. “I don’t have to bleed any more. I don’t have to bleed.” I liked the sound of it—not only the way she phrased it, but the idea that suffering was something I inflicted upon myself and I didn’t have to do it any longer. All of my suffering could stop this very minute.

  My mother and I liked Joyce Meyer, but my father would make her turn it off when he got in the car. He said she didn’t consult the Bible, but I thought he disliked her because she was loud and opinionated, and worst of all, unattractive. I especially liked to watch her on TV, her matching pantsuits and careful makeup and the way she said amen over and over like it was a question. Amen? Amen? She couldn’t stand it when the audience was quiet. She’d talk about her husband then, tell us something Dave said, and the men would be reminded she was just a wife and the women would be reminded that we were always only wives. But still, she was the one on stage while Dave sat in the audience waiting to be talked about.

  I bet she had a lot of money and hardly ever gave any of it away. I bet she ate steak every night and slept in hotel rooms with thick, white carpet.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked, taking a slug off my Yoo-hoo.

  “The Waffle House didn’t sit well with his stomach,” she said.

  “I guess we can add that to the list of places we can’t eat anymore.”

  Elise got in the car and asked where Dad was.

  “The bathroom,” my mother said, checking her watch even though there was a clock in the middle of the dash.

  “You’re running a minute behind on every conversation,” I said. “It’s super annoying.”

  She leaned over and opened her hand: a pink lighter with the words “True Love” in red rhinestones. “Texans love to bedazzle some shit,” she said. “I couldn’t decide between this and one with Elvis’s head on it—young Elvis. Have you ever seen pictures of young Elvis?”

  “Of course.”

  “He was amazing,” she said. “I see we’re picking up Joyce Meyer. How wonderful.”

  “Joyce is preaching on obeying God and being blessed,” I said.

  “Isn’t she always?”

  “Unless she’s trying to explain why bad things happen to good people.”

  “That’s a tougher sell. What town are we in?”

  “Beaumont,” our mother said.

  “Beaumont! I think that’s where Footloose was set,” Elise said. We loved Kevin Bacon, too. Kevin Bacon was his most beautiful in Footloose, primarily for the angry dance scene in the abandoned warehouse, even though you could tell it wasn’t always actually Kevin Bacon. When the camera panned out, something was off—the torso too wide or the legs too long, something hard to put your finger on.

  Our mother ejected the disc and placed it carefully back in its box. Elise and I watched our father stop to look around with his pleasant expression, his hands on his hips. He had biggish hips, almost womanly, that he was always calling attention to.

  He got into the car making noises like he wanted someone to ask how his stomach was so he could tell us it wasn’t good. He tried to stick the rearview mirror back into place again, and this went on until Elise burst out laughing and then I started laughing. I was afraid he’d get mad, but he just sighed and opened his Coke. He called it Cocola, which made me think of him as a little kid. Once he was just a little kid hunting and fishing to put food on the table after his father moved to Florida with a red-haired woman.

  He took another swig and another, throwing his head back jerkily as he made his way to the bottom of the can. Then he handed it to our mother and put the car into DRIVE.

  As we were about to pull out of the station, a yellow convertible plowed directly into a white car, slamming it head-on. The man in the white car flew through the windshield and landed in the road as the cars spun off in opposite directions. It was very loud and then it was quiet.

  “Oh my God,” Elise said.

  My mother made the sign of the cross and my father backed up and parked in the spot we’d just pulled out of. We all got out. Both of the cars’ radios were playing, tuned to the same station. The people in the convertible were still in there, but the man in the white car must not have been wearing his seatbelt. He was faceup in the street and there was blood everywhere. I knew he was dead.

  I looked over at a couple of teenage girls next to a gas pump, their hands covering their mouths. And then one of them removed her hands and screamed. After that, everybody started moving. Elise dialed 911. My father jogged over to the convertible and another man ran to join him. My mother sent me inside to tell the freakishly tall guy, but he already knew, so I went back out and stood next to my mother and Elise, the Las Vegas girl, and her dog. We had just seen a man die. A man who had been alive only moments before, thinking about nothing or nearly nothing—wondering whether it was too early to have a drink, or if he might go for a swim this evening—things that were so inconsequential they were an insult to his life. He hadn’t had a moment to prepare, would take all of his secrets with him.

  I made up a hundred different scenarios. He was newly married to the woman of his dreams. He was a drug dealer, a felon, a preacher, a man with more children than he could afford to feed. He was depressed and thought about dying all the time. No matter who he’d been, though, he would be described in heroic terms, like everyone who died as a result of someone else’s negligence. Perhaps he’d been going to the st
ore for nothing more important than ice cream, an unnecessary trip he’d taken to get out of the house. I was sorry I’d never know him. If I knew even a little something, I might piece together a story for his life.

  My father dragged a girl out of the passenger seat of the convertible, cradled her in his arms. She was nine or ten years old, tall and thin. My mother took my hand and began to pray, but I pulled away and left her there with Elise, ignoring their calls to come back.

  The girl was Asian—Japanese—with long shiny hair in perfect order. She looked like she was asleep. When I was little we’d had a dog that had been hit by a car; my mother placed him in his bed, curled up, like he was napping. He’d looked perfect, not a spot of blood on him, and I couldn’t believe he was dead. I’d sat with him for hours, waiting for him to open his eyes.

  “Is she dead?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s breathing.”

  “Why doesn’t she open her eyes?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Do you think she’s in a coma?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again.

  I wanted him to know something. “It looks like she’s asleep,” I said. Wake up, I thought. Wake up.

  The other man had pulled a woman out of the driver’s side of the convertible. She was young and white and I wondered if she was the babysitter. The woman was alive, moaning softly, and then she sat up and screamed the most horrible scream I’d ever heard. And then she was shaking violently and screaming and the whole thing seemed like a bad television reenactment. No one was with the dead man. I walked over to him and crouched down, his face covered in blood and gashes. Elise and the Las Vegas girl joined me, watched as I touched his neck, which I wouldn’t have had the nerve to do without them there.

  “Don’t do that,” Elise said. “What’re you doing?”

  “Checking for a pulse,”

  “Do you feel anything?” the Las Vegas girl asked.

  I moved my fingers around, searching for the artery.

  An ambulance arrived and a medic hustled us out of the way, and then there were police cars and fire trucks and we were moved farther and farther out of the way until we were no longer a part of it. We stood with the others, watching as they loaded them onto gurneys, as they covered the man in the white car with a sheet. My mother and Elise were crying. The Las Vegas girl touched my sister’s arm and they embraced. This seemed very strange and I tried to catch Elise’s eye, but she wouldn’t look at me.

  I listened as those around us tried to work out what had happened, explaining it to the new people who’d arrived on the scene. They were already getting it wrong. We had seen it up close—we’d had the best view and I felt like they should be asking us. The convertible hadn’t been turning into the gas station. They’d both been driving straight past each other when the convertible swerved into the path of the man in the white car, who was now dead. Who, I had decided, had been on an unnecessary errand to buy an unnecessary item. Maybe he hadn’t even wanted the item, but had offered to get it for his girlfriend, a woman he hadn’t loved enough to marry.

  We stood there for another ten minutes, waiting for someone to involve us again, to ask us questions, but no one did. We got back in our car. Elise was still crying. I cried so infrequently that other peoples’ tears surprised me, though they didn’t surprise me now; my lack of tears surprised me. Why didn’t I feel things the way others felt them? It wasn’t that I didn’t care about people. It was more like I couldn’t really believe they were real. I dug my fingernails into my palm, hard.

  I’d read somewhere that not caring about people was a sign of mental illness, but I didn’t feel mentally ill.

  “I have blood on me,” my father said, holding up his hands and turning them slowly. It reminded me of that scene in Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox was disappearing because his parents hadn’t kissed so he wasn’t going to be born. He got out of the car and went inside. I looked at my own hands—they looked clean even though I had touched a bloody dead man. I had a dead man on me.

  My father drove ten minutes in the wrong direction and no one said anything. I thought about the girl, whether she might be Chinese or Korean instead of Japanese. Why had I thought she was Japanese? I didn’t know anyone who was Japanese.

  Finally, Elise pointed out a butcher shop we’d passed earlier.

  “Where’s that map?” he asked.

  My mother opened it, unfolding and unfolding until it filled the front seat. I looked at the back of her head, her thin hair fluffed up. I had her hair—fine and eager to fall out; we had to bend over and brush it upside down to make it look normal.

  “We need to get on 90,” my mother said, while my father kept driving the way we’d come.

  “Tell me where to turn,” he said.

  “I think it’s this way.”

  “Just tell me where to turn.”

  “The GPS is in the console,” Elise said, but our father didn’t like being told what to do by a machine. He’d turn too early or too late and there was no one to blame it on.

  “There,” our mother said, “now.”

  He jerked the wheel and took the exit left.

  “Are there any wet wipes up there?” I asked.

  My mother tossed me a package that had been opened long ago. They were dry but I rubbed them on my hands, anyway.

  “Let me see that map,” Elise said. Our mother passed it back and Elise spread it out, West Texas on my lap and East Texas on hers.

  “I’m sad,” I said. I didn’t feel sad, but I thought saying it might help me feel it.

  My mother turned and gave me a slight shake of her head.

  “What?” I said. She didn’t say anything. “What?” I said again. I sighed and tracked the highway with my finger.

  “ ‘Welcome to the great state of Texas,’ ” Elise read. “ ‘Whether you are a visitor or a resident, I hope you take advantage of the vast and varied travel opportunities Texas offers.’ Well, thank you. We certainly don’t plan on it.” She started Googling various towns along our route to see if there was anything worth seeing, though we knew we weren’t going to stop. We didn’t really want to stop. We only wanted to know what we were going to miss.

  “We’ll come really close to Mexico,” I said. “Maybe we could cross the border.”

  “There are drug wars going on,” our father said. He’d read a news story about a tourist town where the kids hadn’t been in school since February because the drug cartels were demanding half the teachers’ salaries so the teachers were refusing to teach. In response, the cartels were decapitating them and leaving their heads in the streets. I watched my mother to see if she’d put a hand on his arm or give him a look, but she didn’t.

  Elise flipped the map over and we studied the picture of the governor and his wife. They were handsome in the usual way of politicians: stiff-haired with closed-mouth smiles. The wife was blond, with pale skin and glassy eyes; she looked like a doll. The governor looked a little more reasonable, but not by much. Elise folded the map the wrong way and unfolded and refolded until she got it right.

  I took the egg out of my purse, still intact.

  “Where’d you get that?” Elise asked.

  “The gas station.”

  “That’s really gross.”

  “You think everything’s gross.”

  “What is it? Did you get me one?” my father asked.

  “It’s an egg. And no, I didn’t know you wanted one.” I offered it to him and he agreed without hesitation, so I passed it up and opened my Snickers. I tore off a hunk and held it out to Elise, who shook her head. I was never going to be skinny like her. She said all I had to do was starve for a month, six weeks tops, but I couldn’t do it. It might as well have been forever.

  “Do you want some salt?” our mother asked, opening the glove box to search for a stray packet, but the egg was already gone. Elise was the only skinny one, and I was
glad for it because I didn’t want our whole family to be overweight—it would seem like a fundamental flaw, like something we’d never overcome.

  Our father zigzagged through a small town in order to stay on the right highway, but then it split, one marked business and the other marked truck. After taking the business highway into a bricked and empty downtown, we learned to follow the one for trucks.

  The next town we came to was nicer. There were a lot of stores—not just tire stores and gas stations, but shops selling pottery and cupcakes and seafood. The Texas flag hung in front of each one. Our mother looked back and forth, reading the signs aloud: HUCKLEBERRY’S SEAFOOD, LIGHTFOOT FLOORING, THE PLAY PEN, GOLDEN GIRLZ SALON, HOME BAKED.

  “Angel Funeral Home,” she continued. “The Jalapeno Tree. Save America Vote Republican. Lupe’s Cantina.”

  “I bet Mexicans don’t eat at The Jalapeno Tree,” I said.

  “I bet they don’t eat at Lupe’s Cantina, either,” Elise said.

  “I bet Lupe doesn’t even exist,” I said.

  “The Palace Donuts didn’t make it,” our mother said, making the sorry clucking sound I hated. The sorry clucking sound that said she was happy the Palace Donuts hadn’t made it. I couldn’t figure her out. She seemed like a nice person, doing all of the nice things nice people did—visiting the sick and volunteering at church, sending flowers and thank-you notes, but when one of her best friends died, she hadn’t even seemed sad about it. I kept asking about the woman, even though I hadn’t liked her, a busybody who was always trying to draw junior high gossip out of me.

  “Oh man, look at that,” my father said, slowing to a crawl for an old man pushing a lawnmower across the highway. The man stopped in the middle of the road to give us a dirty look before continuing. Our father got a kick out of that and Elise took a picture of him with her phone. Then she started taking pictures of other things: the backs of our parents’ heads, VFW posts, signs that read HISTORICAL MARKER I MILE, without ever indicating what it was they were marking.