The Last Days of California: A Novel

by Miller, Mary

  “I liked you right away,” I said, while he kissed my neck. “Right when I saw you.”

  “I liked you, too,” he said.

  “You weren’t looking at my sister?”

  “No.”

  “But she’s so pretty.”

  “You’re pretty, too,” he said. “And you’re fun and nice and I like the way you look at me.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  His face came at me, slowly, and he pressed his lips to mine. I tried to figure out how his mouth worked, his tongue. I wanted him to want me more than he’d ever wanted anyone. But then he pulled away and lit two cigarettes, handed me one. I held it between my fingers.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, getting to his feet. “Don’t go anywhere.” He opened the door and hopped out.

  I climbed into the passenger seat and propped my feet on the dash, flicking ash before there was anything to flick. I imagined the van exploding, smoke and fire billowing into the sky. Gabe standing in front of room 212 screaming, and then running. I took another drag and dropped the cigarette out the window.

  He returned with four beers and a joint. “Do you mind if I smoke this?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Do you mind if I don’t?”

  “Of course not.”

  We sat on the bed again and he lit the joint and inhaled. As soon as the last of the smoke left his mouth, I leaned forward and kissed him.

  “How many people have you had sex with?” I asked.

  “Why do all girls want to know that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You could always lie.”

  “I’m not going to lie.”

  “How many?”

  “Seven,” he said. “Is that a lot?”

  I told him any number would seem like a lot to somebody who’d never done it. I wanted to know what the girls were like, if he’d loved any of them, but there wasn’t enough time and he probably wouldn’t tell me the truth, anyhow. I leaned forward to kiss him and he took my hand and brushed it against his shorts, the same swim trunks he’d had on earlier. I looked into his eyes as he pulled the string. He wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

  I touched him, letting him guide my hand up and down until I could do it myself. I watched his mouth, his closed eyelids, watched him pretend I could do something to him that no one else could.

  Gabe walked me to my room, kissed me one last time.

  “Will you think about me?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “And if the rapture comes and I’m not saved, you’ll come for me?”

  “Of course,” he said again.

  “Wait—how will you know?”

  “You’ll text me.”

  I told him I doubted cell phones would be working. He said we’d figure it out and kissed me again. When he pulled away, I grabbed his hand.

  “I have to go,” he said. “I have to be at work in a few hours.” He kissed my cheek and turned and I watched him walk away. He didn’t look back. I wondered if he thought about looking back.

  Elise didn’t stir when I opened the door. I brushed my teeth and got into bed as quietly as I could.

  “Did you have sex with him?” she asked, sounding wide awake.

  “No.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “No use in having sex with somebody you’ll never see again. It would only hurt your feelings.”

  “I told him I wasn’t going to,” I said, holding up my hand in the dark. It had his cell phone number on it. I hoped it wouldn’t smear or fade before I’d had a chance to transfer it to my phone.

  “That’s what all girls say before they do it,” she said.

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “I’ve said it and then gone ahead and done it,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just easier.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “It’s not that big a deal.”

  “It’s a big deal to me,” I said.

  “That’s because you haven’t done it—most of the time it’s like nothing. It’s hard to believe something that’s so much like nothing can mess you up so bad.”

  I thought about Gabe’s dick in my hand, how he’d gasped as he’d come and bit his lip. No one’s ever done that to me before, he’d said, using only their hand.

  “You’re stronger than I am,” Elise said. It was something she’d said before, something I hated, because she was so obviously stronger than I was. Even if there were ways in which I was stronger, they were small and nobody could see them. Elise asked for things and people gave them to her. She talked and they listened. I thought of all the people I’d met who hadn’t even remembered me, people I’d had to introduce myself to again and again because I occupied so little space in the world.

  “Good night,” I said.

  “Good night,” she said. “I love you.”

  I brought my shirt to my nose and inhaled, breathing him in and out, in and out, until I could no longer smell anything.

  FRIDAY

  I awoke to a knock on the adjoining door, interrupting a good dream. It was right there, right where I could remember it if I tried, but there was another, more persistent knock, and I got out of bed.

  My mother was standing there, eating a Fiber One bar. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes,” she said, “your father wants to make it to California today.”

  “There’s no way we can make it to California today,” I said, though I didn’t know if we could or not. She took another bite. I hated to watch her eat—she enjoyed herself too much and made a lot of noise. “I want one of those.”

  “It’s the last one,” she said. She pointed it at me and I took it and bit off a hunk. It was thick and chewy and seemed like too much trouble once I had it in my mouth.

  She closed her door and I closed mine. She turned her lock so I turned mine.

  I got back in bed and tried to remember my dream, but there was nothing, not an image or a feeling or anything. I listened to my parents’ voices through the wall. It made me realize how infrequently they said more than a few words to each other, how they spoke mostly to convey information. I wanted someone I could tell everything to, someone who would spend a lot of time talking with me about nothing.

  I went over to the window and looked out at the parking lot. Gabe’s van was gone. He was hammering nails into a roof somewhere, or drinking black coffee like a grown man. I transferred his number to my phone and got in the shower. Something was wrong with the plumbing, the pipes making a high-pitched whine—up an octave and back down and then up again. The hot water went out and I stepped to the side to wait for it to return.

  “I’m not wearing King Jesus today,” Elise said when I came out.

  “Who cares?”

  “They’ll care.”

  “I doubt they’ll say anything,” I said.

  “Of course they’ll say something, why wouldn’t they say something?”

  I sat on her bed and poked her through the spread. “They might have bigger fish to fry.”

  “What kind of fish?”

  “They’ve been talking for half an hour,” I said.

  “They never talk.”

  “I know, that’s what I’m saying.”

  We were quiet, listening, but one of them turned on the TV—probably our mother.

  Elise went to the bathroom and I watched a movie I’d seen before, Brad Pitt playing one of the white trash characters he liked so much—too thin with a dirty beard, dirty hair, and dirty clothes, but he still didn’t look trashy. I turned it off and knelt beside the bed. “Hello, God. It’s me.” I couldn’t think of anything to say after that and then I started wondering if everyone said it’s me. To be me for someone, you had to be close to them—not their number one, perhaps, number one could just start talking, but close enough. Was it an attempt to feel closer to Him, claiming to be me? I squeezed my eyes shut. “I haven’t been very good. I’ve had a lot of doubts.” I opened my eyes and s
tared at the ceiling, tried to look pained. He could see through all of it. “I’m not sure I believe in you anymore. I’m not sure if I’m talking to myself, if I’ve always just been talking to myself.” Birds chirping, I thought. Nothing. But then I was thinking about the rapture and being lifted into the clouds with all of the other chosen ones. I didn’t want to die on earth or up in the clouds. I wanted God, if He did exist, to stay where He was, just like He always had. And I wanted my life to be different and better, but I wanted to be the one responsible for changing it.

  I kept thinking, confusing myself, and then I stopped and listed all of the things I was sorry for—weakness of character, rebelliousness, being disrespectful to my parents, touching Gabe and letting him touch me. Wanting to be loved too much. But my desires weren’t that unreasonable, and why was my body made to want things it shouldn’t want? And then I had to start over, asking forgiveness and trying my best to want what I was seeking.

  Elise came out of the bathroom. “What are you doing down there?” she asked.

  “What’s it look like?”

  She shook her head.

  “I can pray if I want,” I said.

  “Of course you can—pray away. Say one for me, too.” She struggled to open a package of single-serve coffee. Once she got the little plastic container out, she had trouble sliding it into the slot, and it hit me—she would never amount to anything. But this wasn’t true. She was smart and beautiful and people loved her. She would be a star. I would always be watching her.

  I began to sweat the moment I stepped outside. I glanced over at Gabe’s room and imagined his friends asleep, sprawled out on the floor. His van was still gone. One day it would be back but I wouldn’t be around to see it.

  We put our bags and suitcases in the trunk and our father got back on I-10. We didn’t say anything about the real America—we preferred the interstate, where there were gas stations at more regular intervals and we didn’t expect to see anything of interest. As soon as he started driving, though, I was reminded that it didn’t matter whether we were on the interstate or the highway; the towns were small and far apart and there wasn’t anything between them.

  I checked to see how much gas we had: less than a quarter of a tank.

  “What are you doing?” my father asked. “Put your seatbelt on.”

  “Seeing how much gas we have.”

  “We have plenty.”

  Driving was boring. Everything was boring. It was hard to believe that so much money had been spent to build roads where so few people traveled.

  “What’s the caravan up to?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Elise said, opening a magazine.

  At the next town, our father stopped at one of the gas station/houses, a single car at the pump. He parked on the other side and I looked over at the man, banging on the inside hood of his car with a hammer. Our father only liked to stop at Shell stations and Texacos—big, overly lit places with too many cars in the lot—so this had to be stressing him out. He got out and the man stopped banging.

  “It’s like straight out of a horror movie,” Elise said.

  “We’re not having enough fun for this to be a horror movie,” I said.

  “You’re right—we’d need a Jeep and some loud music and a couple of douche-baggy guys. And you’d have to be hotter.”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “I’m kidding,” she said. “You’re plenty hot. We’d just need to put you in something trashy, and a pair of Spanx.”

  “Y’all need to be nice to each other,” our mother said.

  “We’re all we’ve got,” Elise said.

  Whenever we fought, our mother reminded us that one day they’d be dead and it would just be the two of us. It made me wish they’d had more children.

  Our father came back and handed me a key. We took turns using the bathroom, which was nicer than I’d expected. There was even a candle on the toilet.

  Inside the store, I selected a package of strawberry coconut cakes. I liked them because they were so pink and round. I took them up to the counter where Elise and my mother were waiting with an assortment of snacks and drinks.

  “You live out here all by yourself?” Elise asked the guy behind the counter. He was clean and neat, normal-seeming. Our mother took out her wallet and moved my sister aside.

  “Uh-huh,” the man said.

  “What do you do out here?” she asked.

  “Work, hunt, fish,” he said without looking at her.

  “Do you hunt turkey?” she asked. He nodded. “Quail?” He nodded. “Dove?” He nodded. “Pigeon?”

  “No pigeon,” he said, scrunching up his face. He handed our mother the bag and walked to the back of the store.

  “Where’s your shirt?” our father asked Elise when we were back in the car.

  “It smelled bad,” she said.

  “Your mother just washed them.”

  “That was the day before and it’s like a hundred and eight degrees,” she said, adding that cleanliness was next to Godliness.

  “Well, enjoy your day off,” he said, reminding her that he had paid twenty dollars for them.

  “Each,” I said, digging my cakes out of the bag. I opened the plastic, slid the tray out.

  “Let’s talk,” Elise said.

  “Oh, now you want to talk. I’m sorry. I’m busy.”

  “You’re not busy.”

  “I don’t like to talk about the stuff you like to talk about.”

  “What do I like to talk about?”

  “Politics and stuff.”

  “I wasn’t going to talk about politics,” she said. “Forget it.” She put her earbuds in. I looked at my cakes and thought of Gabe. Would he like me more if I was skinnier? I wanted him to touch me and feel bones beneath my skin. Boys liked it when you were starving, like you had starved yourself for them.

  Our father hit something and a tire blew—flopping and bumping as he directed the car onto the shoulder. We got out and walked around it, the front passenger’s side tire nearly gone. Our mother took the manual out of the glove box and handed it to our father. Then she went to the trunk and took bottles of water out of the cooler, passed them around. I had to pee but I twisted off a cap and took a drink.

  “Do we have Triple A?” Elise asked.

  “It expired two months ago,” our mother said, placing the back of her hand on her forehead like she was taking her temperature.

  “We don’t need Triple A,” our father said. He shielded his eyes and looked into the distance. Then he went to the trunk and started pulling things out, laying them on the pavement one by one like he had never seen any of it before. “Come on over here and help me,” he said.

  “I have to use the bathroom,” I said.

  “You have the worst bladder,” Elise said. “You have to pee every hour.”

  “I drink a lot of liquids.”

  “Go find a tree,” my mother said. In the sun, I could see just how thin her hair had gotten, how much of her scalp shone through.

  “Worst. Bladder. Ever,” Elise said.

  I looked around—there weren’t any trees—and then I realized that this was why the sky was so much bigger in Texas. In Alabama, pine trees lined the roads, skinny sickly pines pressed close together.

  The few scrub bushes were pretty far away. I started walking toward them. The grass grew taller and taller and I thought about snakes, coiled and hissing, ready to strike. I wondered whether I could make bad stuff happen by imagining it. I knew at any moment I’d see a snake and it would bite me and I’d yell really loud and everyone would come running. It would be poisonous, of course, and they’d tell me I was going to be fine, that help was on its way, and I’d make them promise a million times and I’d believe them and then I’d die before I knew what was happening.

  I stopped short of the bushes and squatted. Nothing lasts forever, I thought. But I’m here now. I am here right now and I am peeing in a field. I could have peed for longer but I jiggled and pull
ed up my shorts and began walking back, lifting my feet high and continuing the search for snakes.

  “I have to go, too,” Elise said, “but I’m gonna hold it.”

  I sat next to her on the side of the road and watched her tie her shirt into a knot so her stomach showed. My father didn’t ask me to help him. He was still arranging his tools on the pavement and had already managed to rip his pants even though he hadn’t done anything. I started thinking about his faults, which were many, and which he seemed totally unaware of. I wondered what my faults were, what people thought they were.

  “Aren’t you getting gravel in your hands?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “You just worry about yourself.”

  “Fine, be a bitch.”

  “They’re slowing down,” Elise said, as a white pickup truck pulled onto the shoulder. “And they’re stopping. Now they’re getting out.”

  I looked around—there were no other cars in sight.

  Three men got out of the truck, an older man and two younger ones. The older man smiled the kind of smile that’s meant to make you feel comfortable, so it doesn’t. He was tall and clean-shaven, wearing jeans and cowboy boots. I was afraid but reminded myself that I’d be afraid of any men that pulled over to help us, so my fear wasn’t an indicator of anything. My fear was all out of whack because I was always afraid. My mother said I’d been an easy child: a quick delivery, I’d practically fallen out. I’d slept well and held out my arms to strangers, had begun to potty train myself at eleven months. I didn’t remember this easy child. Surely this was my truest self, this person I had been in the beginning.

  “Y’all got some car trouble?” the older man asked. His belt buckle was a real, actual snake’s head. I elbowed Elise and she untied her shirt.

  “It’s a snake,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “His belt buckle.”

  “We had a blowout,” our father said, walking toward them with his hand outstretched.