Lost on the Road to Nowhere

by Scott Fowler

  Cover photo by Elise Fowler

  Copyright © 2012 Scott Fowler

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1467923001

  ISBN 13: 9781467923002

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61916-743-8

  Dedication:

  To the real Chapel, Salem, London and Georgia Fowler,

  who provided the inspiration for this book.

  I am proud to be your Dad.

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: The Deer

  Chapter 2: The Family

  Chapter 3: The Wreck

  Chapter 4: The Plan

  Chapter 5: The Road to Nowhere

  Chapter 6: The Sled

  Chapter 7: The Bears

  Chapter 8: The Dark

  Chapter 9: The House

  Chapter 10: The Morning

  Chapter 11: The Kitchen Counter

  Chapter 12: The Old Lady

  Chapter 13: The Truck

  Chapter 14: The Return

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER 1

  I saw the deer before anybody else did, standing in the middle of the road like she was just waiting for our car to run over her. Behind her stood a fawn on wobbly legs. I remember seeing the white spots on the fawn’s back and thinking for a second they were snowflakes.

  I saw them both first, because I was the only one paying much attention to the road. Salem and London were fighting in the third row of our minivan. The baby, Georgia, was crying in the middle row right beside me. Mom was telling Dad he should have stayed on the main road instead of taking this sort-of-illegal shortcut that he kept bragging was a road no one even knew about anymore since the new highway had gone in. “It doesn’t feel like a shortcut,” Mom said. “It feels like a road to nowhere.”

  It didn’t seem like it was late afternoon on Christmas Eve right then. There was no peace on earth in our van, and not much goodwill toward men, either. But that’s what it was. That’s why we were on this road trip in the first place. We were going toward my grandparents’ house for a Christmas holiday in the North Carolina mountains. We had been thinking about how cool it would be to have a white Christmas if it snowed – none of us had seen snow for a couple of years.

  Dad started yelling at Salem and London, trying to make them be quiet. He also kept trying to reach back with his right hand to find Georgia’s doll on the floor so he could hand it back up to her and calm her down. It was what Mom likes to call “Everyday Chaos.” She says that’s what she’s going to call her blog if she ever has time to write one.

  We have a family of six – two parents, four kids. When we go into a restaurant, people look at us funny and sometimes ask if they can sit a little further away. My name is Chapel. I’m 11 years old and I am the oldest, so I try not to get into all the arguing that my two younger brothers do. But sometimes I can’t help it because they are so totally wrong about so many things. Arguing is one of our family traditions, like reading bedtime stories or fighting over who gets the biggest piece of pumpkin pie.

  No one argues with me now about who saw the deer first, though. I don’t know why. Maybe they just know that I did, because I was the one who yelled “Look!” Or maybe it’s just because it doesn’t seem as important to us now, because so much happened after the deer – so many things that will change our family forever.

  Now when I think about those 18 hours right after the deer walked onto that road, I can’t believe it all happened. Not to us. We were just an ordinary family -- a little bigger than most, but otherwise not that unusual. We live in a small town called Denver, N.C. No, not Denver, Colorado. Our Denver doesn’t ever get snow, and it doesn’t have any mountains, and it’s so small that every time we go into a restaurant, my mom or dad always know someone and have an extremely long and boring talk with them. My dad works 30 miles away at the newspaper in Charlotte, writing about city council meetings and school boards and a lot of other stuff I don’t understand and don’t want to.

  My mom met my dad at the newspaper on the escalator. “Between the second and third floors, going down,” they always say. Then he proposed to her on the same escalator a few months later, late one night when they sneaked back into the building. Then they got married a few months after that.

  Then they started having a baby every three years, like they set a clock for it or something. After there were two of us kids, Mom quit working and started taking care of us all the time. She says she likes taking care of us better than any job she could have. But sometimes when she says it, her face is kind of pinched, like she just bit into a lemon.

  But nothing much exciting had happened to our family since I was born. Having a new baby brother or sister every three years was about as good as it got. I was always reading these adventure stories in the library about kids who find out they are wizards, or kids who solve mysteries, or kids who suddenly develop superpowers. We weren’t like that. We were just kids. And we were pretty much minding our own business until that deer and her baby walked onto the road.

  My dad looked when I yelled, “Watch out!” Then he swung the wheel way too far to one side. Dad had never let me drive a car, not even for one second in the big field behind our house, but even I knew that what Dad did to that steering wheel wasn’t quite right. I have watched him drive a lot, and I had never seen him yank it like that, like he was trying to tear it off completely. Then my Mom screamed. And I had never heard her scream like that before, like she knew how badly she and Dad were going to get hurt before it even happened. And a few seconds after that, there was a lot of blood.

  I don’t really like to think about the next part. I don’t like to think about a bunch of those 18 hours, really, even though not everything that happened was bad. But it’s like I have to think about it. My mind won’t let me forget. And some parts I like to think about. Some parts, I’m proud of.

  Do you know that deer and her baby walk through my dreams sometimes? I’ll be having a perfectly normal dream about a test in social studies class, where we had to memorize all the states and their capitals. Mrs. Zappone will have called on me to recite them all, and I know I know them, so I’m not nervous. But I’ll be in my rhythm, just getting past all those “M” states – Jackson, Mississippi; Jefferson City, Missouri; Helena, Montana -- when the deer and her fawn walk through the door to the classroom and right up to the front of Mrs. Zappone’s class and just stare at me. The deer and her fawn never say anything – they gaze at me with those huge deer eyes, and sometimes somebody behind me yells “Look!” and then I usually wake up.

  Since it doesn’t look like I’m going to forget those 18 hours anytime soon, I decided I’m going to write them down instead. I think getting it on paper or in a computer will get it out of my mind, and maybe get those deer out of my dreams. It’s a little spooky when the deer walk in to Mrs. Zappone’s class, to tell you the truth. I wish they would talk or something. I’d like to know what they want.

  We didn’t kill the deer, you know. Neither one of them. They’re probably out in those same woods right now, doing whatever it is deer do. Looking for berries or something. But before I get to the wreck and what happened after that, I need to tell you a little more about our family, so maybe you’ll understand a little more why we did everything the way we did it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Let me back up a little. My full name is Chapel Scott Fowler. I’m eleven years old and in the 5th grade, even though I’ve been going to school six years. They don’t count kindergarten as a grade – it’s just like it’s for practice or something. That’s a total rip-off. I like school OK, although I’d never admit that to my parents. But I hated one part of kindergarten – the fact they made you
lie down for 20 minutes of quiet time every day. Another total rip-off. I’m taller than everybody but one girl in my fifth-grade class, and I like to wear my hair as long as my Mom and the school dress code will allow. I hate when people ask me what I want to be when I grow up, although I’ll tell them “comic book illustrator” sometimes just so they won’t ask anymore. I love to build Lego sets, too – I can follow the directions for those a lot quicker than either of my parents can. If the set has fewer than 300 pieces, I don’t consider it much of a challenge.

  I don’t really know what I’m good at yet except for drawing and spelling. I love to spell. I have finished in the top three of my classroom spelling bee each of the past three years, and two years straight I won it. Usually, if I see a new word and look at it a couple of times, it just sticks in my mind and flashes inside there in red letters, like a sign for a restaurant at night.

  In fifth grade, we switch classes and teachers every hour, which is a lot better than the other grades, where you had to stay in one place. There, if you get a teacher you don’t like – too bad. You’re stuck with her for seven hours a day. My younger brother Salem has it that way now – he’s in second grade. One teacher only, all day long. He likes his teacher, though. She likes him, too, Mom said. The teacher told Mom that Salem is a true gentleman. It’s obvious his teacher has no idea how he acts at home.

  Salem is eight years old. He’s got long brown hair like me, but he’s a lot shorter than I am. And more athletic, too. He can beat me in “H-O-R-S-E” on our backyard basketball goal most of the time. He learned how to swim before I did. He tries things I would never attempt. The first time he tried to do a front flip off my parents’ bed, I saw it. He had never done one before. So he just thought about how he might do it for a few seconds inside his head, he said. Then he bounced a couple of times, did a real somersault in the air (the word “somersault” put Collin Jones out in the spelling bee last year, by the way) and landed on his feet on the carpet.

  Mom walked in right as he jumped. She had a laundry basket of clean clothes under her arm, and she dropped it on the ground and yelled “Salem!” She said later she just about had a heart attack. She told him never to do it again, but he still does it sometimes when he knows Mom and Dad aren’t around.

  The youngest brother in our family is London, who just turned five and has red hair. He doesn’t go to school yet because he’s too young and I think he is very spoiled. His red hair is really thick and every grown-up woman wants to put their hand on his head or squeeze his cheeks. He has been told so often that he’s “cuter than the average boy” that when he was three he asked Mom and Dad who the Abrage boy was anyway and where he lived.

  London likes to scream a lot when we only annoy him a little bit, which we only do for his own good. He needs to be tough if he’s going to make it through kindergarten starting next school year. He likes to say, whenever we do something just a tiny bit bad, “Get Chapel and Salem immediately in trouble!” Mom and Dad always take his side, even though he won’t do any clean-up when we’re supposed to work together to be able to watch TV that night. And he still gets to watch TV, too, although he used to always be afraid of this one monster on a Chef Boyardee commercial, so for a long time he wouldn’t watch any TV show because he never could be sure that monster wouldn’t show up on a commercial.

  That was OK with me – then we didn’t have to fight over the two good chairs in the bonus room. London and I don’t fight much – we are six years apart – but Salem and London fight all the time. Once Salem scratched London on the arm hard enough to bleed and got in trouble for it. His argument to Mom and Dad that his punishment shouldn’t be severe was this: “It’s not my fault! He has weak skin!”

  London can be very brave when he really wants to be – he slept with all the lights off before any of us did. But he has to be motivated. One time, in this story I’m going to tell you, he was braver than anyone I’ve ever seen in my life. But I still think he’s a little spoiled.

  None of us three brothers like girls much. We make only two exceptions to that rule. The first is our cousin, Paige. She’s cool. She’s 11 and she’s great at soccer and she and I write scary stories together sometimes. But we don’t see her much – she lives a long way away.

  As for girls that live nearby, we don’t like any of them. We have this small clubhouse at my grandparents’ house that they let us build with old boards and other stuff we found in the woods. On the biggest board, we painted a sign that said, “No Girls Allowed.” I wanted to spell “girls” with a “z” because it looks cooler that way, but Dad said no.

  Well, there actually is one girl nearby we all like. She’s the second exception. She is our baby sister. Her name is Georgia, and she’s 19 months old. She is extremely cute and likes to pick out her own clothes already, which Dad says is funny now but will be a problem later. She will get in the closet she shares with Mom and Dad and say “No no” to everything until they get to something she likes, and then she goes, “Dat dat dat.” She loves stripes, so if you just skip straight to the clothes with stripes on them, you can avoid a lot of wasted time.

  Georgia can say about 20 words, including “Mama,” “Dada,” “bye bye,” “bubbles,” “hock (which means sock),” “bubba (which means brother),” “car,” “kay (which means OK),” “candy,” backpack” and “no no.” “No no” is her second-favorite word. She says it to all of us brothers all the time, because she’s a terrible sharer. If she grabs something we are playing with, we are not allowed to get it back. Her very favorite word, though, is “helmet.” She has a blue bike helmet that is toddler-sized, and she likes to wear it all the time. She will wake up in the morning and say “helmet, helmet” and pat her head, and until you get it for her, she will drive you crazy wanting it. So a lot of times we just let her wear the helmet when she’s wandering around the house. Mom says it won’t hurt her.

  Georgia had on her helmet when I saw the deer. She had been wearing it practically the whole car trip – it was the only way Dad could get her to calm down and get back in her car seat. She had worn it inside the gas station when we had gotten a ton of snacks after Dad pumped the gas. That’s one good thing about our family on road trips – we buy all sorts of junk food that we don’t usually get at home. Dad did make us all go to the gross gas-station bathroom, though, even when we all said we didn’t need to – another total rip-off. And then it hadn’t even snowed yet, even though the sky was gray and it was plenty cold – yet another total rip-off.

  Georgia had worn the helmet back to the car after going into the gas station. She ate her tiny cheese crackers, and since she ate them very slowly, that kept her occupied for awhile. But then she decided she had had enough of the car ride, which was a problem because it was still two more hours to my grandparents’ house in the North Carolina mountains. That’s even with the shortcut my Dad took, which he really wasn’t supposed to do. He circled around a metal gate and a big “Road Closed” sign, with black letters painted on an orange background, to get on the road we were on. He said it was safe and that he knew where it went because he had used to drive on it all the time and had heard from “somebody,” although he forgot who exactly, that it was still a good road that no one used. He also said it would save us at least 30 minutes, and given the way Georgia was behaving that we would need every minute of that.

  So that brings us up to when Dad was trying to reach down on the floor of the minivan – to get Georgia her doll. My parents freak out sometimes when the baby starts crying, like it’s the first time they’ve heard one do it or something. They’ve had four kids by now, so you’d think they would be used to it. I sure am. I was sitting in the middle row of the van, beside Georgia, because it gets too cramped when you put the three of us boys all in the third row in the back.

  Meanwhile, London and Salem were screaming at each other. They were just bored, that’s all. London said that Salem had touched his hair when there was supposed to be no touching at all, and Salem said
touching hair didn’t count because if you touched it real lightly, the other person couldn’t even feel it.

  Then London had whacked Salem on his own head and said, “Do you feel that?” And Salem had hit London on the shoulder and London had cried and yelled: “Get Salem immediately in trouble.” And Dad had said in his sternest voice from the front: “What did you do to him, Salem?” while he was reaching for Georgia’s doll, Miss Peggy. Mom had given Miss Peggy the doll her name, because Georgia wanted to call the doll “No No” and she already has three other dolls named “No No.” I could have reached the doll easier than he could have, but he didn’t ask me.

  That’s when the deer walked out on the road, and I said “Look!” and Dad swung the wheel way too far. And that’s when all of our little problems turned into one big problem.

  CHAPTER 3

  I could tell we were going to miss hitting the deer as soon as Dad yanked the wheel. And we did. I saw the deer one more time as we went by, but this time from a different window, because the car was spinning. The fawn’s white spots were a blur. Mom was screaming and Georgia was crying but all of us brothers were quiet. Salem and London stopped fighting immediately – they were not bored anymore. Dad was trying to do something with the steering wheel. My heart felt weird, like it was trying to jump out of my chest.

  I don’t know how many times the van spun around. But then it felt like it was going straight down, like the first drop on the old “Thunder Road” rollercoaster at Carowinds, the one my Dad likes so much because he says it is “old school.” I love rollercoasters, too, but this time I was just scared. I knew it wasn’t right. We bumped over something so hard that my head nearly hit the ceiling. And then I heard a huge BAM!! At the same time, the car stopped with such a jolt that my head hit Mom’s seat right in front of me.