Hit the Ground Running

by Alison Hughes

  Dee glanced at him in the rearview mirror, anxious to steer away from the topic of their parents.

  “No, you never know. Could’ve been…something like Cindee and Freddee,” she said.

  He sat up, excited, his brain working furiously.

  “Or Sandee and Georgee,” he shouted, “only that’s a gee…”

  “Andee, Randee…”

  “Meddee, Geddee, Headee…” Eddie randomly leaped through the alphabet until the conversation trickled off into silence. He looked out the window, his eyes narrowed against the wind, his hair tangling crazily.

  “I guess we could have been anyone, hey? Any dee. Or really anything,” he said.

  This was true. Her parents had been capable of anything.

  “Well, at least we’re not Deadee,” he yelled, grinning at her in the mirror.

  Dee laughed helplessly. It was so stupid.

  Nope, they weren’t dead.

  Let’s just keep it that way.

  Eddie had got her thinking about her name. Dee. What kind of a name was Dee? Just a letter, really, not a proper name. She was always having to spell it out, although, when you thought about it, how else could you spell it?

  She’d asked her parents once, before Eddie was born, why they’d named her Dee. What it was short for. Loretta Lubbuk, a pushy girl in her second-grade class, had confronted her that day.

  “It has to be short for something,” Loretta said with authority. “It can’t just be Dee. Nobody’s just named Dee.”

  “Loretta Lubbuk” wasn’t exactly a jackpot name either, but Loretta had been loud and popular. Nobody had questioned Loretta. Today, Dee would advise Eddie to tell someone like that to shut up, to walk away from them. They don’t matter, she’d say.

  But at the time it had mattered.

  She’d asked her parents about her name, where it came from. They looked up from their books absently, unaware of the intensity of her interest.

  “Oh no, it’s not short for anything. You’re just Dee,” her dad had said.

  “I think there was an old lady at Grandma’s nursing home named Dee,” her mother reflected. “Remember, she shared the room with Dorothy?” she said to Dee’s father. “We called them Dot and Dee.”

  “We just thought it was a pretty name. Kind of different.” They smiled at each other, looking over at her as if to say, Is that what you wanted? Have we been helpful?

  Dee remembered hating them both at that moment. For giving her a stupid, old-lady name, for being so clueless, for not understanding the Loretta Lubbuks of the world, for sending her out there to fend for herself. For not even giving her a middle name she could hide behind.

  Now, driving down an endless, scorching highway, possibly with a children’s-services van on their tail, it seemed silly, all that wasted intensity, all that agonizing and embarrassment over a name. But, she thought, everything has a time and place. It had been the end of the world. The end of her seven-year-old world.

  Eddie was reading out loud, shouting against the wind that was screaming in through the open windows.

  “The thorny devil is a ferocious-looking creature no bigger than a man’s hand. But despite its fearsome appearance, its main interest is in eating ants and termites, up to 1,000 in a single meal!” He stared down at the flapping book in his lap, one arm resting along the top, bracing the pages against the wind.

  “The size of your hand!” he repeated in a loud voice, his face alight, holding the book up and backwards so Dee could see the illustration in the rearview mirror. “Your HAND!”

  “Wow. Cool lizard. Reptile. Whatever.” Dee hadn’t really been listening. She wondered where Eddie got the energy to keep reading when it was such an effort—the yelling, the clamping of the flapping pages…everything. Her left arm was sunburned and starting to ache. Her back was sore from driving so long, her right leg numb. She didn’t want to think about the dry, barren place they were leaving, or the scaly creatures that scrabbled out an existence there.

  “Hey, Eddie?” she called over her shoulder. “You got any stories back there? You know, with characters? A plot? Anything like that?”

  “Stories?” He reached out with his left hand and scuffled halfheartedly through a pile of books.

  “Nnnnnnope,” he said. “But listen to this! The thorns and spikes on the thorny devil provide protection from predators and help the creature get water. Dewdrops settle on the thorns and trickle into the lizard’s mouth! Imagine that!”

  Dee glanced at him in the rearview mirror, ready to say, Enough with the reptiles. But then her face softened. Eddie’s eyes were closed, and he was smiling to himself, his mouth open slightly.

  She knew him well enough to guess that he was imagining how it felt to be a thorny devil tasting the dew.

  They finally stopped to get gas just outside of Phoenix after three hours of driving. Normal people take two hours to get to Phoenix. Everyone in Santacino always says Phoenix is just two hours away. How could it take us so long? Traffic. Navigating multiple-lane freeways without a map while Eddie called out helpful reptile facts. At one point they had been pelting along the highway to California. It took a Los Angeles 365 sign to turn them north.

  Eddie looked up from his book as they pulled over.

  “Are we having lunch here?” he asked.

  “Nope. Quick stop. We’ve got lots of food, so I think we’ll eat on the way, okay? Car picnic.”

  It felt good to get out of the car, even if it was only to top up the gas and use the putrid washroom. Eddie ran up and down the hot asphalt beside the station like a puppy while she paid for the gas (forty dollars gone) and bought a map to study that night: The Western States. The attendant gave her directions to the interstate highway that would lead north to Flagstaff. The I-17, the first interstate she would ever drive, not counting that mistake out to California. A serious highway, a fast one.

  A few minutes after a scary merge, she decided that she hated the I-17. Within half an hour she loathed it. She concentrated on trying to unclench her back muscles. She straightened up, arching slightly, but within a few minutes was hunched again, aching hands in a death grip on the wheel. She carefully lifted each hand from the wheel, one at a time, doing a few quick flexes.

  Eddie was, unbelievably, asleep, lulled by the wind and the sun’s pulsing heat. He looks so young, Dee thought, glancing at his flushed face framed by damp hair, his slightly open mouth.

  The heat in the car was almost unbearable. Trickles of sweat ran down the sides of Dee’s face. She felt sweat slip down the side of her leg into her sandals. My legs are sweating. Right now, at this very moment, my shins are sweating. I am utterly, completely disgusting.

  She reached carefully for her water bottle and froze as she saw flashing lights in the rearview mirror. Oh, shit. Her heart started to hammer. Shit, shit, shit!

  The police car was behind her, closing in rapidly. She checked her speed. Still zero. She had a wild moment of hope that maybe this wasn’t about her—lots of cars had been whipping past her. She hovered uncertainly, watching the cruiser in the mirror, until it signaled her to pull over with a sharp, impatient blurp on the siren.

  Dee pulled onto the shoulder of the highway, sliding the car to a stop. Without the wind the quiet was broken only by random bursts of noise as other cars sped past. Without the slight breeze it was baking hot.

  Dee took a swig from her water bottle, eyes on the car in the mirror. A scary car, she noted, with flashing lights and a grate separating the driver from possible criminals in the back. She had never been pulled over by police, but she remembered her father being stopped once. He’d rummaged in the glove compartment for some papers, looked out with a rueful smile and said, “What seems to be the trouble, officer?” He had the officer laughing within about ten seconds. But that was Dad.

  She swallowed, ran a hand over her hair and glanced uneasily back at the cruiser in her side-view mirror. Calm. Gotta be calm. Matter-of-fact. Hyper-polite. Cops like polite. Let him tal
k first. She glanced over her shoulder into the backseat. Eddie, please stay asleep, please don’t wake up. A massive state trooper took his time finishing up on his radio, then struggled out of his cruiser, which bounced up a couple of inches as he left it. In her side mirror Dee saw him walk toward her, hitching up his belt. A bulky man in a sweat-stained uniform, with a round, flushed face under his hat.

  As soon as she saw him looming at the window, she blurted out, “Hi, officer, what seems to be the problem?”

  His calm gaze swept over Eddie and the car mess.

  “Well,” he said, “y’all were going forty, forty-five tops.”

  “Ah,” Dee said. What the hell? Other cars had been flying past her. Her face must have mirrored her confusion, because he continued.

  “The speed limit on the interstate is seventy miles per hour,” he said. “Just as dangerous to go too slow as to speed. Makes people swerve around you. Makes people angry.” He pronounced it “angruh,” which sounded worse.

  “Oh. Sorry,” she said, apologizing to the hypothetical angry people.

  “It’s mostly old ladies we pull over for this kind of thing,” he said, smiling.

  Not a bad enormous old cop after all. She smiled back, hoping it looked kind of natural.

  “Well, we’re heading to visit relatives,” she said with a slight grimace, hoping Eddie wasn’t awake. “Not in any hurry to get there.” Sorry, Auntie Pat.

  “Gotcha.” He chuckled. “Well, better have a look-see at your license and registration.”

  “Of course, of course.” Dee opened the glove compartment, grabbing the little plastic folder and handing it to him. “Here’s the registration. I just have to find my wallet.” She grabbed her backpack. For my nonexistent license. Oh, God. She put her head down, pawing through the backpack. Time for makink the beeg show, Dee, findink the license…

  “Now where…” She pulled out a sweatshirt, a pair of shorts, a book. She fished around inside the bag with her arm. “Sorry, sorry,” she said. She opened a side zipper, hunted, zipped it back.

  Incredibly, her dad had kept the car’s registration current, and the insurance was paid until August. That in itself was a miracle. How long can I pretend to look for my wallet? Two minutes? Then what? Please don’t call us in, please don’t call us in…

  “You sure got a lot of stuff in that backp—” He stopped, interrupted by an urgent beeping from his cruiser radio.

  “Whoops, ’scuse me. That one can’t wait. Hold on, hold on,” he muttered as he shambled back to the cruiser. There was a curt exchange, and then he was striding back to her window, sweat streaming down his face.

  “I got to get somewhere ASAP, preferably yesterday,” he said, “so anyway, remember, keep up with the traffic. Even sixty, sixty-five miles an hour’d be good. Just get in there,” he said, making a swooping underarm motion with his arm, like he was throwing an imaginary softball. He looked more like a Little League coach than an enforcer of the law.

  Dee nodded.

  “Okay, sir, thanks a lot,” she said, but he was already heading back to his car.

  “You have yourself a nice day,” he called over his shoulder, giving the trunk of the car a friendly thump.

  Dee watched him lever his bulk into his car, flick on the lights and sirens and accelerate past her. She was trembling with reaction, relief. Saved by some horrible accident or violent crime, she thought. Eddie was still asleep, his head lolling forward over the seat belt. He’ll be so disappointed to have missed the action. The lights, the sirens. He’ll be devastated.

  She pulled back onto the highway, brought the car up to what she estimated was the speed limit judging by the other cars, and glared at the useless speedometer that still had them going zero. The wind roared deafeningly in the windows. The engine juddered, rattling the car. Dee gripped the wheel tightly, feeling unsafe and out of control.

  But legal, she reminded herself grimly. The speed limit. Completely legal.

  “Hey! Dee!” Eddie shouted, his eager face making eye contact in the mirror. “I just saw a sign for the Grand Canyon!” He twisted in his seat, gesturing at the back of the sign they had flown by. “Are we going there? We’re stopping there, aren’t we?” He made it sound as if she was trying to keep this a wonderful secret from him.

  Lost in a robotic driver trance, Dee hadn’t seen the sign. Unbelievable. I am so incredibly stupid. I forgot all about that ancient, 1,000-mile-long canyon right in our way. Laughter bubbled up in her throat. Not fun laughter. Panic laughter, hysterical stress laughter. The kind of laughter people in movies got slapped for.

  How could this canyon happen? She had imagined them driving in a straight line up from the bottom of Arizona into Utah. Looked as if they had a slight detour in front of them.

  She had to have a serious look at a map. She glanced at Eddie’s thrilled, expectant face.

  She swallowed.

  “Yep, we’re stopping there, Eddie. You got it,” she said. “Surprise! Grand Canyon, here we come!”

  How much does it cost to look at the Grand Canyon? And how long will it take?

  “I always wanted to go to the Grand Canyon!” Eddie said, resting his head on the back of his seat. “Remember, we almost went there once, but then Dad had to help Mr. Blair move? I think we almost went another time, but we never did.”

  No, they never did, Dee remembered. Something always came up. But when Dad was feeling restless or freaked or whatever the hell his problem was, we’d take off at a moment’s notice. Never to the Grand Canyon or Disneyland though. Always to some other dusty little town baking in the desert. In her mind she saw the two of them, paid off in candy, trailing their dad through some estate sale, antique auction or barn full of trash.

  Screw the cost, she thought angrily, we’re going to the Grand Canyon. Who lives in the Grand Canyon State and never sees the Grand Canyon?

  “Well, we’re going there now,” she said firmly, like it had been part of her plan all along. That intricate, well-crafted master plan of hers. “We finally made it.” She reached back for Eddie’s stinging high five.

  “We’ll tell Dad all about it,” he said happily, sitting on his hands.

  They sat on a bench right near the rim of the Grand Canyon. It fell away before them in folds of red and bronze and blue-gray, sweeping into the distance, the tiny Colorado River winding away far below like a worm at the bottom of a pail. Dee didn’t know what she had expected. Nothing. She had expected nothing. She hadn’t thought of the canyon at all, other than as a stop they needed to make before they could move on. She was startled by this calm and infinite majesty. This sense of peace. It was like watching the ocean or the stars. It seemed limitless.

  The air was fresher here, much cooler than the desert they had escaped from. The twenty-five-dollars-per-vehicle entrance fee to the park, which had seemed exorbitant when she paid it, now seemed like the bargain of a lifetime.

  Whatever happens, wherever we end up, we’ll both have this memory.

  Eddie was hopping in excitement, trotting back and forth to read the informative signs, storing away the facts.

  “It is 277 miles long and 18 miles wide! It took three to six million years to form! Wow.”

  “Cool. Look, don’t go so close to that rope thing, Eddie. Just stay back from the edge.”

  “The rock at the bottom is two billion years old!” He sat down with her on the bench, digesting the information. “We finally made it, Dee! The GRAND CANYON!” He said it in a booming, exaggerated monster-truck voice, spreading out his arms like a circus ringmaster.

  She smiled. They’d finally hit a landmark, something acknowledged by normal people to be a destination for a family holiday. Something people came from all over the world to see. And they’d done it without their dad.

  “Someday I’m going to walk all around it and then down through it, and take a boat and float down that river,” said Eddie, making it sound simple, inevitable, a piece of cake. “Want to come? Just someday,” he said.<
br />
  “Someday, sure. It’d take a long time. Weeks and weeks.”

  Eddie considered this silently. She knew that in his head he was already paddling down that river.

  A family settled on a bench nearby. Mother, father, a boy, a girl. A nice family, thought Dee, watching them covertly. They all had different ice-cream flavors and were offering each other sample licks. The boy was about fourteen, uncertain voice, looking as if he was self-conscious of his height and hair. The girl was maybe twelve. She had a perfect swath of straight, golden hair and a braces-flashing smile. She swung her pristine white flip-flops as she sat, and Dee stared, mesmerized, at the girl’s toenails. They were all painted sky blue with a tiny pink flower dotting the center of each one. Theresa would totally approve, thought Dee.

  Dee crossed her ankles, shoving her grubby feet in her old sandals under the bench. She looked down at her red left arm, her sweat-stained T-shirt, her crumpled shorts. Eddie was a mess too—Dorito smears on his T-shirt, dirty fingernails, hair a knotted mass from the wind.

  Staring over the canyon, hearing the chatter of the happy family, Dee felt loneliness sweep over her. She felt cut off from the crowds, from the ice-cream family beside them, even from Eddie. Because she couldn’t really talk to Eddie—she couldn’t confide in him. He was too young; it wouldn’t be fair. She was alone.

  She was very, very tired. Dog tired. She felt old.

  “Do you want an ice cream, Eddie?” Dee asked suddenly, her voice louder than she had intended.

  “Yesss!” he cried, as though he’d noticed the ice cream but didn’t want to ask. The friendly mother caught Dee’s eye and smiled.

  “Beautiful view,” she said.

  “Gorgeous,” agreed Dee. Unused to making small talk, she hesitated, not knowing whether the woman was going to say anything else.

  “Is there any chance you could get a picture of us with the canyon in the background?” the woman asked. “We never get a picture where we’re all together, you know?”

  Dee knew. She took the camera, and the mom cajoled the kids to stand between her and her husband, with their backs to the canyon. Dee focused the camera on the family, waited until they were all looking at her, and clicked. Then once more, just to make sure. A mother, a sister, a brother, a father, smiling and happy, silhouetted by trees and canyon, frozen in time.