The Last Days of California: A Novel

by Miller, Mary

  “Don’t bring me into it,” I said. “I’m not trash.”

  Our mother got her feelings hurt, said we were always assuming things, putting words into her mouth.

  Elise and I bought Cokes at the vending machines and sat beside the fountain, tapping our flip-flops on the water. First she’d tap, making ripples, and then I’d tap. When we grew tired of that, we made wishes. We tossed in our pennies first, one at a time, and then our nickels, dimes, and quarters.

  “Van Horn’s coming up,” our father said, walking up behind us. “We’ll stop there.”

  “That sounds like a good place,” I said for something to say. So much of what he said required no response, but if no one said anything, his words just hung there. He gave us the coins from his pockets and we threw those in, too, but after a while I realized I’d stopped wishing and was just throwing.

  Van Horn, Texas, was a tiny dot on the map.

  Our father pulled into the crappiest motel we’d stayed in yet, sprawling and one-story, painted in hospital blues and greens.

  “Things are steadily going downhill for this family,” Elise said. This struck us as funny and we laughed.

  “We’re on a budget,” our father said. “How about I get you your own room? How about that?”

  “That would be nice,” Elise said.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” our mother said.

  “It’ll be fine,” Elise said. “I won’t let Jess out of my sight.”

  Our father got out of the car looking beaten, and I started to get that crushing feeling again, like my whole body was welling up, but then it went away and I was just irritated and hot.

  While we got our luggage, a man on a bicycle cruised around us in wide circles. His pants were so short his skinny brown calves showed. One of his irises was whitish, terrifying. He rang his bell, nearly losing his balance, and my father pulled a tract out of the trunk. We must have had a thousand of them, stashed all over.

  “Hey,” he called, flapping it back and forth at him. The man looked alarmed and circled wider before pedaling off.

  “I bet this place is full of hookers,” Elise said.

  “I don’t see any hookers,” our mother said.

  “That’s because they’re all busy.”

  My father handed me some tracts. Then he took the cooler out and opened the plug to let the water drain.

  “I feel like I haven’t handed out tracts in forever,” I said.

  “Speak for yourself,” he said. “I handed out dozens yesterday.”

  “I can’t remember yesterday,” I said. “I’m losing track of my days—what day is it?”

  “Thursday,” Elise said.

  Our father gave us each a key and said he loved us and we said we loved him, too. Then we kissed our mother and told her we loved her.

  I slipped tracts under windshield wipers as we went.

  “People are going to hate you,” Elise said.

  “Maybe somebody’ll read it,” I said.

  “No one’s going to read it, it’s just going to piss them off.”

  I inserted my key and pulled it out; the light blinked red. I tried again and got the same thing.

  “You never do it right—there’s a technique. You have to put it in real slow and hold it there a second before pulling it out.” She winked at me and opened the door. We set our keys and purses on the table.

  “This is the kind of place people kill themselves in,” she said, and I thought about our wholesome-looking cousin—she hadn’t killed herself, she’d been murdered. It seemed impossible. In all of the pictures and videos I’d seen of her, she’d looked normal, just a regular girl, like me but prettier.

  “Maybe we’re out of money,” I said.

  “Well, yeah, but we have credit cards and that’s what they’re for, so we don’t have to stay in motels with bike thieves and hookers,” she said. “I think he’s trying to teach us a lesson, but I’m not sure what it is.”

  “Maybe they’re maxed out,” I said, unwrapping the thin bar of soap.

  “He’s been using them,” she said.

  “Maybe they’re almost maxed out.” I brought the bar to my nose—it smelled spicy. I washed my face again, trying to get the yellow tint off. Then I sat in bed while she plucked her eyebrows. She told me I ought to start plucking mine, that they were getting out of control.

  “Are you gonna wash that thing off your face?” I asked, digging around in my ear. I scraped out something that felt like a bug but was just the crust of a tiny scab I hadn’t known was there.

  “I like it.”

  “It makes you look insane.”

  “Take a picture first,” she said, tossing her phone onto my bed. I took a picture of her posed against the wall, making some sort of gang sign.

  While she washed her face, I turned on the weak light and went through the contents of my bag. I refolded a couple of tank tops, counted the number of clean panties I had left. I was going to have to start washing them in the sink.

  Elise stripped down to her bra and panties.

  “Put your clothes back on,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to see you.” She seemed hurt, so I said, “You’re too pretty—it makes me feel bad.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like when people compliment my looks.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. And then, “Because it reminds me that I’m going to die. If someone says I have nice teeth, I think, One day they’ll rot. If they say I have nice hair, I think about it falling out by the fistful.”

  “I’d love it if people told me I was pretty. I’d trade it for smart or talented or anything else.”

  “That’s stupid,” she said.

  “You would, too.”

  “No I wouldn’t.”

  “You don’t know,” I said. “You have no idea.”

  “Let’s go to the pool.” She unhooked her bra and I turned my head. There was a baby in her flat, tan stomach. I pictured it fully formed, a perfect little girl that looked exactly like her except for one thing—the eyes or nose of someone else. “You see this triangle here?” she asked, sticking a finger in the empty space below her vagina. Her pubic hair was shaved nearly to nothing. “Factory air. It’s Dan’s favorite part of me.”

  “Who calls it that?”

  “I don’t know, boys.”

  “Where’d it come from?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  “Look it up on Urban Dictionary.”

  She picked up her phone and typed while I waited. “ ‘The space created between a woman’s thighs when she’s standing with her legs parallel to each other, and perpendicular to the floor. As in, Dude, that chick had some nice factory air. I bet she doesn’t ever get any duck butter.’ ”

  “What’s duck butter?”

  “It just occurred to me—his favorite part of me is a part that doesn’t exist.”

  My phone signaled the arrival of a text message and I dug it out of my purse. Nobody had called or texted me in days. One time my cell phone rang and Elise said, ‘That’s what your ringtone sounds like?’ as if I hadn’t had the same one for a year. The text was from an unknown number in our area code. Bitch, it said. It made my heart drop and I looked around the room as if the person could see me. I thought about who might have a reason to call me a bitch and came up with no one. It was the wrong number but I couldn’t help taking it personally. Bitch, I thought. I’m a bitch. I deleted it without telling Elise, who was down on the floor doing pushups, asking me how her form was.

  We put on our swimsuits and the too-short dresses we only wore to the pool, and walked around to the fenced-in area. We claimed a couple of chairs, draped the tiny motel towels over the backs of them. I stepped out of my flip-flops, nearly losing my balance. Elise looked natural out of her clothes but I didn’t; it was my attempt to look natural more than anything that mad
e me so awkward. I felt like my limbs had been taken off and reattached in different positions.

  Once we were settled, we turned our attention to the three boys drinking beer at a table. They were listening to the radio. The station played Nirvana and The Doors and Elise started naming all of the rock stars she could think of who had killed themselves or OD’d at twenty-seven.

  “That guy from Sublime,” she said. “What was his name?”

  “I’ve never heard of Sublime,” I said.

  “But maybe he wasn’t twenty-seven, I’m not sure. Do you know Blind Melon? You know Blind Melon, right?”

  “No.”

  “That song about the rain, with the bee? How’s it go?”

  “I don’t know it,” I said, watching a father and son in the pool—the boy was learning how to swim. “Let’s just do it one more time,” the father kept saying, and the boy was trying everything—he was tired, he had a stomachache—and then he was bawling. I looked over at the table of guys and the blond caught my eye. It forged some kind of bond between us. And then the blond and his friend were out of their chairs, walking over to us.

  Elise lifted her sunglasses and said, “Hi, y’all,” in a ridiculous accent.

  “You guys aren’t from here,” said the blond.

  “That’s right,” she said.

  “We’re from Montgomery,” I said. “Alabama. We don’t really talk like that.” I smiled and he smiled back. It was crooked and made his eyes disappear. Unlike nearly everyone, he was more attractive when he wasn’t smiling. They introduced themselves as Erik and Gabe, and said they had a cooler full of beer if we wanted to join them.

  “Maybe in a minute,” Elise said, her voice normal again.

  They went back to their table and their other friend laughed and tossed a can at them. It went into the pool and the father threw it back.

  “We don’t have to go over there,” she said. “They’re clearly assholes.”

  “I kind of liked the blond.”

  “Just listen to them,” she said. They were laughing, probably at nothing. No matter how smart boys were, they always seemed so dumb.

  “We don’t have anything better to do, and the blond’s cute.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But you don’t have to drink.”

  “I know.”

  “Drinking doesn’t make you cool.”

  “Am I in a public service announcement right now?”

  “That’s funny, a public service announcement.”

  I stood and slipped on my dress. “Weren’t you the one feeding me straight whiskey last night?” I asked.

  “There was ice in it.” She kept lying there, her ribs and pelvic bones on display, the baby hidden neatly inside. I couldn’t stop thinking about it—how no one knew, no one could see. If I hadn’t found the box, if she hadn’t wanted me to find it, I wouldn’t know.

  She waited a minute before following me over to their table.

  “Hey, girl,” the blond said to me—Gabe. His hair was so pale it was nearly white, his chest smooth and muscular. The popular boys in my class were scrawny; it wasn’t cool to go to the gym. It wasn’t cool to appear to be trying to be anything.

  The boy we hadn’t met introduced himself as Charlie and got up to grab another chair while Erik passed around beers. They were so cold and everybody was so good-looking I felt like I was in a commercial. I pretended to take an interest in the father and son. The father was swimming laps while his kid sat on a step. I wondered if his mother was waiting in one of the rooms, but more than likely his parents were divorced and the man only had his son a few weeks every summer. To make things exactly even, they drove the same number of miles and exchanged him in the middle, which happened to be this shitty little West Texas town. It would explain why they were so disappointed in each other.

  Elise took a Marlboro out of somebody’s pack and lit it with her bedazzled lighter before any of the boys could reach for their Zippos. I pressed my finger into a tiny flower on the table. It stuck and I thought about making a wish, but I’d been making a lot of wishes lately and they were the same generic wishes I always made. I was going to have to start being more specific. Gabe, I thought, blowing it off. I want Gabe.

  “What are you guys doing here?” Charlie asked.

  “We’re going to California where we’re going to witness the Second Coming of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. In Pacific Time,” Elise said. She told them we were the chosen ones, that they were going to suffer through terrible fires and earthquakes before the earth exploded into nothingness.

  “Stop,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You’re making a joke out of us.”

  “I’m not making us a joke,” she said. “I’m making them a joke.”

  “But we’re here, too.”

  “We’re kids,” she said. “All we can do is act like jerks.”

  “You do a good job of that,” I said.

  She blew smoke past my face, rolled her eyes.

  “She believes in it,” Elise said, and the boys looked at me with half-smiles.

  “I don’t know if I do or not,” I said. “I might be agnostic.” I liked the way it sounded. I took a sip of beer, which tasted a little less awful than it usually did because it was so cold. Like Elise, I sat in church and felt nothing. I memorized Bible verses same as I did Robert Frost poems in school. But I wanted to believe. I really wanted to. If the rapture was coming, I hoped our parents’ belief would be enough to get us into heaven, like Noah, whose family had been saved because he was a good man.

  Charlie opened another beer, placing his empty on the stack. “Every group has its own eschatology,” he said.

  “Its own what?” I asked.

  He took off his sunglasses so we could see his eyes. “It’s how we deal with death,” he said. “It’s human nature to want the world to end when we end.”

  “Hey, girl,” Gabe said, “you want another?”

  “Keep ’em coming,” I said, though my beer was still half-full. I liked how he called me girl, as if there were too many girls to remember, as if the names of girls would take up too much space in his head. If he liked me, maybe I could become pretty girl or even my girl. But for this to happen, we’d have to fast-forward past all of this getting-to-know-you business. We’d have to pretend we already knew each other. People were so similar once you got to know them.

  I watched him out of the corner of my eye, his body in constant motion—an ankle bouncing on a knee, his hand lifting a can to his mouth. I wanted to feel his body move over mine. Before leaving home, Elise and I had watched a religious documentary that was streaming on Netflix. In it, all of the girls said that they very much wanted the rapture to come, but would prefer if it waited until they had husbands. They didn’t say sex. They said marriage, husband. They said their parents had gotten to marry and have children and they only wanted the same opportunity.

  “He should take that kid home,” Gabe said, gesturing to the man, who was holding onto the side of the pool and kicking, telling the boy how easy it was.

  “I know, right?”

  “I didn’t learn how to swim until I was fourteen,” he said.

  “Really?” I took a larger swallow than I’d intended, and it sat there, pooled at the back of my throat, before I could make myself choke it down.

  “My dad died in a boating accident when I was two and my mom was afraid of water after that. She thought I’d drown if I went anywhere near it.” This story made me think he could love me. He wasn’t just a cute boy—he had problems.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He shrugged and said it was okay. “Do you know how to swim?”

  “I was on the swim team at the country club for years,” I said. It was actually only two years because my grandfather stopped paying our dues and we couldn’t afford it after that.

  “The country club,” he said, “how fancy.”

  “Not really. It was the old people country club. My grandparents golfe
d there and made us eat Sunday dinner with them every week.”

  “You any good?”

  “No,” I said, laughing. “I only got pink and purple ribbons.”

  “I didn’t even know they had those.”

  “I was a little better at relay. I swam so hard because I didn’t want to let anybody down.”

  Elise opened another beer, lit one cigarette off another. She was unhappier than I’d seen her since the trip began, which was saying something. I wondered if she didn’t like seeing me have fun, if she didn’t want to see me happy.

  “Come on,” Gabe said.

  I took off my dress and we walked over to the deep end. There was a NO DIVING sign, a shadow man hitting his head with an X over it, but Gabe dove in anyway and came up, flinging the hair off his forehead with a flick of his neck. Boys made everything look easy; it made me love them and hate them at the same time. I jumped in straight so I wouldn’t make too much of a splash, touched the bottom, and pushed up hard. The father switched to breaststroke and swam around us.

  I wanted Gabe to know I could take him or leave him, so I swam to the shallow end and floated on my back, watching a big gray military plane fly low overhead; low-flying planes always made me think a bomb was about to be dropped, though I’d seen hundreds if not thousands of planes and a bomb had never been dropped. It was awful being a girl. All I could think about was whether he thought I was pretty, and if he thought I was pretty, how pretty. I’d only kissed one boy, a guy I’d met at church camp who hadn’t known that boys at school didn’t like me. That more than a mouthful’s a waste. He’d written me emails for months after, but they hadn’t said anything: the places he’d gone; the things he’d eaten; what song he was learning to play on the guitar. I’d wanted to like him but couldn’t, even though he was the only boy who’d ever taken an interest in me.

  “Hi,” I said to the kid. He picked up his head and blinked. He was only seven or eight and already had dark circles under his eyes like an insomniac. He was so sad and ugly, I didn’t feel sorry for him any more.

  “It looks like your kickboard got attacked by a shark,” Gabe said.

  The kid’s father stopped swimming and looked at us like we might try something crazy. Then he took the boy’s hand and hauled him out of the pool. I felt sorry for the kid again. He couldn’t help being ugly—no one wanted to be ugly. Sometimes I had to remind myself.