by Deb Caletti
We check into a place called the Flamingo. Dad says it’s a splurge. The bedspread is actually nice. You don’t think of bodily fluids when you look at it. There’s a pool with a slide. We explore the city. There are lights and crowds and the constant bing-jing sound of casinos. I feel like I’m inside a pinball machine. There is a fake rainstorm in one hotel and fake canals of Venice in another, and there are guys on every corner handing out flyers to strip shows. There are slabs of prime rib bigger than your head, though I have to admit, I sort of like those. I like the ceiling of blown-glass flowers in that one hotel too, although I don’t tell Dad that.
“I can’t eat another bite,” I said, eating another bite. Banana cream pie. The meringue on top is tall enough to go on the rides at Disneyland. Everything here is oversized, and I do mean everything.
My mood is just starting to improve when, through a bite of pie, my father says, “Portland.”
“What do you mean, ‘Portland’?” I’m afraid to ask. I’m done, more than done, with this trip. I am ready to go home. It hasn’t quite been the life-changing shake-up I was hoping for. Nothing has become more solid or connected; nothing has become more understood. I’ve had to erase several new follow-up messages from Meg and Dillon, who both now sound pissed off, and my father is becoming more of an alien the more time we spend together. Basically, he’s driving me crazy. If you think a road trip is a good idea, just remember that strained family relationships plus long car rides equals homicidal impulses.
“I mean, let’s go to Portland.”
“Oregon?”
“Of course Oregon.”
“Why Oregon? What’s in Oregon?”
“I went to school in Oregon. I’ve got friends there.”
“Since when?” You get to thinking you know everything about your parents. You have to think that. It’s too unsettling otherwise.
“Since forever.”
“I don’t want to go to Portland.” Summer is about to start, and my mind neatly erases all the loneliness and distance I’ve felt for the last three months and starts playing the shiny, green-grass and blue-sky film version—Dillon and me holding hands while leaping in the ocean, Meg and me playing volleyball on a beach. And wait, there’s Jessa Winters, too, spiking the ball in her tiny bikini, though I hate sports, and volleyball makes my palms sting, and Jessa Winters isn’t even our friend. This is some bad teen movie where a shark’s about to appear and turn the water bloody.
“You never want to go anywhere. You always do this.”
“Always-never statements,” I say. “One of the Ten Communication Killers.” I read that in one of Mom’s magazines.
“What do you want from me, Tess? I’m doing everything I can here!” Dad’s voice is getting loud. Two women diners in shiny tank tops look over at us.
“When you talk to me in a raised voice, I feel frustrated.” Always use I statements.
“Are you implying I can’t communicate? Is that what you’re saying? I’m an excellent communicator!” he yells.
Now we’re that couple fighting in the restaurant. My father runs his hand through his hair. I sigh and study the saltshaker. People are looking away. The waitress glances over nervously. Pretty soon one of us is going to get up and stomp off, leaving the other with the check. I want a divorce.
I wonder how often my mother felt this way. This is why you’re supposed to have a mother and a father. Parental failings are more easily swallowed when diluted.
We are sitting in the Paradise Garden Café of the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, geographical coordinates: 36.1161° N, 115.1706° W. I know just where we are. But it’s quite clear that my father and I are lost.
chapter four
Proboscidea: devil’s claw. The seeds of the devil’s claw were adapted to hook onto the legs of large mammals, thereby spreading seeds over miles as the animal walked. Eleven to fifteen inches long, with a grip as firm as a fishing lure, the devil’s claw is the largest and most obstinate hitchhiking seed ever.
I tie the last pixiebell back into my mother’s shoe as we leave for Portland. I hope it’ll be okay after all this moving and driving in the heat and sliding around on the floor of my father’s truck. If it isn’t, I don’t know what I’m going to do, because keeping it alive is the one important job I have right now. It’s my simplest and clearest mission, and that’s the one thing I’m sure of.
I do more sullen staring out the window. Dad turns on the radio so that he doesn’t have to hear everything I’m not saying. I am oh so close to Henry Lark, but I don’t know that yet. It’s one of the great and terrible things about big changes, the way they sit unseen just around the next corner, pleased and calculating, while you innocently get a new stick of gum out of your purse and fold your arms and watch the scenery pass.
The atlas says it’s 755.29 miles from Las Vegas to Portland. I’d look on my phone, but there’s no service in the desert. The trip will take sixteen hours and seventeen minutes, not counting food and bathroom breaks. We keep heading north until we finally stop in the dead of night in some town called Klamath Falls. If there really are falls there, it’s too dark and we’re too tired to see them.
The next morning, when we leave Klamath Falls, I am a cranky hostage. If my mother knew (knows) about any of this, she’d be furious. I’m having fantasies of leaving my father behind at the next gas station. But as we come to our first stop sign, right next to a Texaco and a David’s Restaurant (“Home of the Brawny Burger”), there’s this little old lady carrying her dog across the street. I swear to God, it’s taking her fifteen minutes and she’s barely halfway. All this waiting is using up my precious minutes before I’ll need a bathroom break again.
“I’m gonna honk,” Dad says.
“You’ll give her a heart attack.”
“She’d probably beat me up with her purse.”
“She probably knows kung fu,” I say.
“Or at least fu,” he says, which cracks us up.
And just like that, the mad spell between us is broken. We are friends again. We are friends all the way until Eugene, Oregon, when large billows of smoke start pouring out of my father’s truck.
“Fuck,” my father says.
For once, it’s an understatement.
* * *
It’s green here, way more green than at home, and there are lots of Victorian houses too, small ones and big ones. I might like this place, if Dad weren’t whacking the steering wheel over and over again with his palm and swearing. This is bad. This is really, really bad. We’re never going to get home now. Well, he’s had that truck for a billion years. We should’ve taken Mom’s (my) car, which is way more reliable.
My father runs his hand over his stubble; he hasn’t shaved since we left home. He opens the car door, and I roll down my window and stick my head out to watch. The hood creaks as if in pain when he raises it. The stupidest things make you think of other things. The word “pain,” for example. In your worst fears, you think of cancer and excruciating agony and moaning even. There wasn’t time for that, maybe. Maybe we just didn’t get to that part. I don’t really know. She had lost her taste buds, and her throat had radiation burns, and she couldn’t eat. There were other burns too, all over her chest and even on her back. Mouth sores and scary weight loss. Still, the first surgeon told us she would likely completely recover. The oncologist said this too, and so did the other surgeon who put in that stomach tube. They were all pretty self-congratulatory about it, actually, until there was a series of unfortunate events. That’s what they also said afterward. Doctors say a lot of things, and you want them to say more, but it’s never enough.
My father knows nothing about cars. It’s warm out, and the sun is on my face as I watch him. He is staring down at that engine, stunned and nervous, as if someone’s just handed him the scalpel and asked him to save the patient.
“What’s going on?” I ask. I have to lean way out to see him.
“The radiator.”
I sno
rt. He doesn’t know his radiator from a hole in the ground.
“What’s that supposed to mean,” he asks but doesn’t really ask. He pokes his finger around in there, touches something hot, I guess, because he pulls his hand back and shakes it.
“Radiator,” I say. I chuckle.
“I worked at a garage in high school, smart-ass.”
Okay, fine. Another thing I didn’t know. Parents should not be capable of surprises. Tessa Sedgewick’s Handbook of Good Parenting, Chapter One.
“What do we do?”
“We wait awhile.”
He slams the hood closed. He rummages around in the backseat. I know what he’s looking for. A little tin with an American eagle on it. He doesn’t know I ditched that stuff back in the desert at a rest stop. Tessa Sedgewick’s Handbook of Good Parenting, Chapter Two: No mind-altering substances allowed.
He looks at me hard. “You’re kidding,” he says.
I don’t say a single word.
“You didn’t.”
I shrug.
“Jesus. This is some road trip.”
We wait. It’s the kind of waiting where you look at the clock again and again and find that only thirty-five seconds have passed. It’s getting hot, so I get out too. We’re both leaning against the truck. We’re both looking across the street. There’s a cycle shop and a used bookstore and Diablo’s Downtown Lounge, which has a few motorcycles in front and lit-up beer signs in the window. We stand there way too long.
“License plate game,” my father suggests.
“Don’t even.” I’m in no mood.
“Twenty Ques—”
“No.”
His profile looks sad. I start to feel bad. “Karaoke on Fridays,” I say, and nod toward Diablo’s Downtown Lounge.
“ ‘Some say loooove, it is a river . . . ,’ ” he sings.
“ ‘That drowns the tender need . . . ,’ ” I sing. Mom had the album.
“Reed,” Dad says. “The tender reed.”
“Whatever.”
I look for more gum in my purse. He busts out a few more lines, about love and flowers and seeds.
“People are staring.” No one is really staring. There’s a dog tied to a lamppost by the bookstore. He lies down, as if settling in for the rest of the show. “Is it time yet?”
“No.”
We keep waiting. A man walks in a drunken zigzag out of Diablo’s Downtown Lounge. What is it, barely eleven o’clock? Sheesh.
“Dave’s Drinking Took a Turn for the Worse,” Dad says.
It’s a game we have, and when another guy comes out of the cycle shop in shiny green bike pants, it’s my turn. “Mark Had an Unfortunate Run-In with Lycra.”
A woman passes with an enormous, bulging purse. “Sheila Believed You Could Never Be Too Prepared,” he says.
Finally, Dad tries to start the car, but the little arrow that indicates engine temperature flies all the way to the wrong side. The truck’s making a bad noise, too, sort of like that time Dad ran the lawn mower over a garden trowel.
“Darn it!” My father doesn’t really say this, but I’m saving you from more of his bad mouth. He paces around a bit, runs his hand through his hair again.
“We can hitchhike,” he says.
“We’re not going to hitchhike! What kind of a father suggests something like that?”
He sighs as if I’ve given him no choice. He takes out his phone. He turns his back to me (why is he turning his back to me?) and makes a call. I don’t like what I’m seeing, not one bit. His shoulders are hunched as if he’s protecting a secret, and I hear him laugh loudly. It’s a jovial fake laugh that puts me instantly on high alert. The WRONGWRONGWRONG sirens are going off in my head, because he’s over there smiling.
He’s smiling! What exactly is there to smile about in this situation? He hangs up. He pockets his phone like it’s a crisp hundred-dollar bill. He’s awfully pleased with himself.
“Who was that?”
“A friend.”
“What friend?”
“An old high school friend, Mary. She knows a guy around here who has a tow truck company. Isn’t that great?” He says this very fast, so that it comes out “Anoldhighschoolfriend-MarySheknowsaguy.”
“Mary.”
“Don’t say it like that. She’s just an old friend.”
I want to remind my father exactly how long my mother has been gone: six months and three days. Mostly, you hope for heaven, but at times like these, I sincerely hope she isn’t watching.
“I am all for you moving forward and finding happiness, tra la la, but looking up the old high school flame six months after the funeral is just tacky.”
“You got this wrong, Tess.”
“Mary”—let her name have sarcastic quotation marks—has sent over her buddy Simon, who drives us the rest of the way to Portland with my father’s truck on his flatbed. Several hours later, we’re at Mary’s. Mary’s house is small, and all of the jobs a husband might do are undone—the grass is long, the porch slants, and lightbulbs that you have to climb a ladder to change are burnt out. It smells like cat inside, even though there is no cat.
Mary has long black hair and talks in an overly sincere way that includes grabbing my arm at various intervals. She is trying hard, helping the girl with the dead mother, but she really needs to stop touching me. I keep my hands behind my back, which makes me look like a prisoner walking to the exercise yard. I feel like a prisoner. I make a desperate move and place a hostage call to Meg, but it’s tough to communicate over her screeching. “Where ARE you! Where have you BEEN? How can you just TAKE OFF before school is even out!” In the state she’s in, if I tell her what’s really going on here, state troopers will get involved. I’ll end up on the news. Instead, I reassure her how fine I am and get off the phone as fast as I can. I try Dillon. “Wherever you are, babe, I’ll come get you.” I hate being called babe. I always think of that pig movie. If Mom is watching, this is a good time for her to do something.
We spend the night, and then another as we wait for Dad’s truck to get fixed. If I have to sleep on that couch with that musty-smelling quilt one more night, I’m going to make a run for it. I swear I will. Dad and I need to have a talk.
“You’re not having fun?”
Honestly? He thinks that the cookie making and Clue playing is a barrel of laughs? Maybe Mary is nice; fine, she’s a little nice, barely, but she’s under the impression that I’m a nine-year-old orphan. She almost tried to tuck me in. I have only one more book left, which makes this an emergency situation. But worse, my father stays up late, talking and laughing with “Mary.” “Mary” made us red sauce and Dad made his meatball special, and it was all too, too cozy. Old Roosevelt High. Remember Principal Berry who had that affair? Did you know that Evan Gray became a mayor? He flunked civics, ha-ha-ha. I’m surprised they didn’t sing the fight song.
“I’m not staying here.” My bag is packed, and I have the last pixiebell under my arm. I mean business.
“The truck is fixed. I got a call this morning.”
“Good,” I say.
* * *
But what isn’t good is what happens next. My father, he keeps driving north. He doesn’t ask me for my opinion this time. I really am a hostage. When he doesn’t answer my questions, I consider opening the car door and rolling down an embankment like they do in the movies. That always looks so painful. Every time I see that, I wonder if I’d have the guts to do it if Mexican drug lords were kidnapping me.
“Where are we going?” I ask for the millionth time.
“Trust me,” he answers for the millionth time.
Trust him?
It gets greener and greener. I see signs to Seattle. I’ve never been to Seattle. I wonder if my mother has ever been here. When I think about that album in my bag and the fact that the album and the last pixiebell are nearly all that’s left of her, my heart rockets through my body, ripping and tearing as it goes. That feeling almost folds me right in half.
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“Canada,” I say.
“No.”
We arrive at a ferry landing. SAN JUAN ISLANDS, the signs say. My father hands over some cash at the ticket booth. I took a ferry once, with Mom and Dad, to the island of Coronado. My mother’s brown hair blew in the wind, and we ate burgers on the other side, but there were palm trees and there was sand, and here the trees are dark, pointed evergreens, and the shore is rocky.
I am not going to jump out of the car now, because “Mary” and her cat-smelling house are long gone, and things are looking up. It’s possible that my father has a surprise. He probably wants to pay me back for the miserable time in Portland. “Islands” equal “vacation.” This is what I tell myself. Sometimes you forget that surprises can go either way.
The ferry isn’t here yet. Dad turns off the engine and rolls down his window and gets comfy. I do the same. I take a big, deep breath of that briny air. People are walking their dogs on the beach or waiting in their cars with the seats reclined or their feet up on the dashboards.
I check on the pixiebell. The dirt is too wet, much wetter than Mom or I ever keep it, and I wonder if Mary watered it when it was on her coffee table. I have a flash of worry. I hope it’s going to be okay. All this moving around after so many years in one place—poor Pix, it must be in shock.
The car engines start and I whack Dad’s leg, because he’s fallen asleep. He wakes and looks at me as if he doesn’t know where he is, which makes two of us. This is not reassuring. On a road trip, someone should know where you are, especially if that someone is supposedly the parent.
The cars all pile on to the ferry, and then Dad says, “Come on!” and we get out. You have to yell to be heard, so Dad just swings his arm in an arc over his head to gesture which way to go. We walk sideways between the cars and then find the narrow stairwell. Up inside the ferry, there are wide windows and padded seats, and I feel almost excited.
