by Una LaMarche
There’s real terror, of course, lurking below the surface. I know we’re in uncharted waters now and that all of the things that were worst-case scenarios yesterday—running out of cash, begging for food—are now best-case scenarios, replaced by the new and infinitely more chilling worst-case scenario of being arrested and charged with grand theft auto and child endangerment and watching my siblings retreat into specks from the back of a police cruiser. They’ll try to split you up! Don’t let them split you up!
But the more miles we put between us and the hotel parking lot, and the more the general mood in the car improves, the more I’m able to push that fear down. In a fit of denial, I even make Tim stop at a Walmart in Tulsa so I can get a little $15 five-by-five dome tent and a couple of cheap polyester blankets for the kids to sleep on. I’m down to $101.87. There’s no amount of math that can make that stretch till Sunday.
“It’s better than the trunk,” I say as I pass my gifts around, and Leah actually squeals with glee.
We follow signs to a free campsite in Bristow, pulling up to the edge of Lake Massena just as the last of the purplish dusk gives way to night. It’s basically a beach, with a grassy area and a picnic table but otherwise just endless pebbly sand up to the lake, and so while Tim sets up the tent on the grass and Cass gives herself her shot, Denny, Leah, and I kick off our shoes and run down to the water’s edge to stick our toes in the cold black waves that are lapping at the shore under the light of a full, yellowy moon.
“This is better than the hotel,” Denny says, and I rustle his hair and let him splash algae onto my jeans with his overexcited stomps.
Since we have no way to get hot water, dinner tonight is an assortment of cheese and peanut butter crackers washed down with the last of a half gallon of grape Gatorade from Family Dollar. We eat sitting pretzel-legged on the beach, knee-to-knee in a tight circle to keep the wind from blowing sand onto our meager feast.
“We’ll get better food tomorrow,” I say, wiping my mouth with my wrist. “We’re not far from Oklahoma City, and they’ve got to have a mall.”
“Why do we have to go to the mall?” Leah asks, perking up.
“The food court,” I say. “You can get all kinds of stuff from the trays people leave behind.”
Leah wrinkles her nose. “So we’re, like, stealing people’s leftovers?”
“We have to eat,” Tim says.
“What about going to a Whole Foods and just eating the free samples?” Leah asks.
“We can do that, too,” I say. “Good thinking.” She smiles.
“They have free cookies at church!” Denny says. “But you have to sit through the boring part first.”
“Come Sunday, if we still need food, we’ll get some church cookies,” I promise.
“What day is it now?” Denny flops back onto his elbows and stares up at the moon, his eyelids starting to droop.
“Thursday,” Cass says.
“What do you think Mom and Jeff are doing now?” Leah asks softly, drawing her knees up to her chin, her question punctuated by a reedy chorus of literal crickets. With her hair tucked behind her sticking-out ears, she looks especially vulnerable. Just like Cass, she puts up such a tough front that it’s easy to forget she’s still a child.
Tim shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“We should call them,” she says. “I don’t want them to worry.”
“I think it’s too late for that.” Tim’s jaw tenses, and he swigs the dregs of the Gatorade and then tosses the bottle like a football back onto the grass.
I wonder if Mom’s worrying about us, for reasons other than the bail money. I wonder if Aunt Sam will even tell her we’re gone. If I could call my mom in jail to tell her we were okay, would I? Or would I let her sweat it out, give her a taste of what it feels like to think the one person you’re supposed to count on might not be coming back?
“You can call them,” I say, standing up and rubbing the gooseflesh on my arms. “Be vague, but let them know you’re alive. Try to stall.” I actually feel sort of bad for the Harpers, alone in their giant house, their fancy home alarm blinking away, oblivious that any sense of security they had has been shattered.
I kiss Denny goodnight, promising that Cass will tuck him in and sing him to sleep with our “safe” song, Mom’s favorite oldie, the one she still has on vinyl tacked up to the living room wall years after she sold her parents’ record player, by the band with the impossibly ironic name the Mamas and the Papas. I try to hug Cass, but she darts out from under me before I can touch her. Typical.
• • •
Even though I’ve been acting like it’s no big deal, I’m not looking forward to sleeping in the car. I’ve never done an overnight before, just occasional naps between classes or back when I was much younger and Mom and Buck would take us on long, circuitous drives that featured lots of random stops but no identifiable destination. The vinyl upholstery on the backseat is ripped in three places; two are patched with curling silver duct tape, plus the surface of the seats are ribbed in this weird way that makes your butt hurt if you sit on them for too long. I never sleep well anyway, but this is a new low. I pull a sweatshirt off the floor, give it a sniff test (old French fries and body odor, check), and roll it into a makeshift pillow, then lie back and try to let the sound of giggling from inside the tent help me feel right again—as right as I can feel, anyway. Does anyone ever feel really great, or is that just a lie we all agreed to keep telling as a species?
There’s a knock on the window, and I look up to see Tim standing with a toothbrush jutting out of his mouth. I bet Denny gave it to him. That kid never met a cootie he didn’t like.
The front door handle lurches up and down a few times before Goldie finally lets him in with a metallic squeak.
“Hey,” he says, dropping the toothbrush in the cup holder, and then just kind of stands there frozen, bent awkwardly at the waist, half-in and half-out of the car. After a few seconds I realize I’m watching him realize that we’re basically sleeping on top of one another. Unless he folds himself into the trunk, which would require the removal of a number of ribs, he’ll have to recline the front seat so that his head is separated from my waist by just a few inches. Gasoline smell aside, a twin bed might be less intimate.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I know it’s tight, but if it’s any consolation, the sleep will be terrible.”
Tim’s face reddens as he breaks into a bashful grin. “Great,” he says. “Whenever I travel cross-country to see an estranged invalid, I like to arrive as unrefreshed as possible.” He sits down and slowly cranks himself to a semi-horizontal angle. “Sorry,” he says, looking over his right shoulder so he has the most flattering possible view of my chin and nostrils. “I know I don’t have any right to talk about him like that.”
“‘Estranged invalid’ isn’t trash talk; it’s a fact,” I say.
“I guess.” He puts his hands behind his head, his elbows spreading out like tetrahedrons. “It just feels weird to rag on a guy I never met.”
“I could rag on your dad,” I say. “I hear he’s so old, he was a waiter at the Last Supper.”
Tim laughs. “He’s only forty-four, but I could see that.”
We shift in the darkness for a few minutes. I can see the moon upside down through the window, a waxing gibbous. I hate that every time I see it, I think of him. It’s really inconvenient. Couldn’t he have pointed out some star that would eventually explode, like everything else he touched?
“Hey, I’m sorry about this morning,” Tim says. “That was really embarrassing.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I was serious when I said I’ll pay you back.”
“I said don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t make me come back to Taco Bell and put it in the tip jar,” he says.
“There is no tip jar, and please don’
t ever come back,” I groan. I think of what Yvonne would have to say about Tim if she met him. I think of what she probably has to say about me right about now. “Plus, I probably don’t work there anymore.”
“You quit?” He says this kind of breezily, like hocking nachos was just a hobby of mine I did for fun.
“No,” I say. “But this isn’t exactly approved vacation time.”
“Wait—you didn’t tell them?”
“That I was going on a vision quest to find my sperm donor? No thanks.”
“Isn’t it more than that?” he asks.
“Maybe for her,” I say. “Not for me.”
“But didn’t he live with you when you were a kid?”
“I was six when he left.”
“So you must remember him.”
“Of course I remember him, but that doesn’t mean he deserves my sympathy.”
“Michelle,” Tim says, really serious all of a sudden. “He’s dying.”
“I know,” I say, mocking his tone. “Everybody dies.”
“Come on, you can’t be that cynical.”
“It’s a biological certainty,” I say. “You can’t argue with science.”
“But he’s your biological father.”
“You keep saying that like it means something,” I say. “Like that makes him important. But just because your dad shits rainbows in between monitoring his gold card statements doesn’t mean all dads are inherently awesome.”
“I guess I just don’t understand why you’re still so angry,” he says.
“You don’t understand why I’m angry? Do you need a bulleted list?”
“No, no,” he says. “That came out wrong. I meant . . . if you were really ambivalent, he couldn’t make you so angry. I know he deserves it, I’m just saying you don’t have to pretend you don’t care. Not with me, anyway.”
“You sound like a shrink,” I say.
“Sorry. I guess five years of therapy rubs off on you.”
I bite my tongue, literally and figuratively. I’m not sure what to say to that. The first thing I feel is more anger—it seems so bougie and frivolous to dump your problems in some doctor’s lap instead of handling them on your own. But maybe that’s just my jealously showing. Because I also can’t help but think about what might have happened if Mom had been able to afford real, extended care instead of the quickie court-ordered one-offs that judges threw at her almost as an afterthought: Here, this will look good on your record. Talk to someone for an hour. You’re fine now. What if we could pay someone to figure out what’s wrong with Cass or Denny? What if I had someone to talk to who would really be listening? I look at the silhouette of Tim’s profile, eyes open and glinting in the moonlight. I feel an anxious wave rising deep in my chest, but instead of letting it flatten me I decide, for once, to jump in.
“You know what I think about?” I say. “The fact that every single day for the last eleven years, he’s woken up in the morning with a choice. And that every single day for eleven years, he’s chosen to not be my dad. That seems even worse than how he left my mom with two little kids and a drug habit he gave her.” I blink back tears and keep going. “I mean, he could have picked up the phone anytime. Or written a letter, or even shown up out of nowhere just to say . . . I don’t know, something. He could have sent money so he’d know we’d be eating, and that Cass would have her medicine. But he never did. Not once.”
“What about now?” Tim asks. “He’s trying now. He could have just died without telling anyone.”
“Are you kidding? I wish that’s what he did!” I say, the tears finally spilling over my lower lashes, running messily down the sides of my face into my ears. “He doesn’t love us. This isn’t an epiphany about all the mistakes he’s made. This is the Hail Mary of a sick man afraid of going to hell.” I wipe my eyes with the heels of my hands. “I hope Leah understands that.”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Seeing him won’t do anything for us, except make the mental image we have of him even more depressing.”
“Then why did you decide to go?”
“Whatever Buck has for us, we need the money,” I say flatly. “I’m just hoping it’s actually worth something. This is my Hail Mary. I’ve got no other options. I just hope whatever it is, it’s enough to keep us afloat for a while.”
Tim swallows hard. “What about your mom? Doesn’t she have a job?”
“She used to. She was a housekeeper at the Embassy Suites out near the airport. But then a few months ago, some earrings went missing. They weren’t even expensive, not diamonds or anything. She told me they were little gold starfish owned by some tacky woman who didn’t tip.” I remember this detail specifically because my mom hates starfish—every time she sees one in the ocean she screams—and I remember being so relieved, because I wanted so badly to believe she wasn’t stealing again. But in the end it didn’t matter.
“That sucks,” Tim says.
“Yeah, well. It is what it is.” That’s something Mom says when she can’t fix a problem. That, or she tells me that if we all threw our worries in the air and saw everyone else’s, I’d want to grab mine back. But I don’t think so. I’m pretty confident I could find better ones.
We lie in silence for a few minutes. The talking in the tent is slowly dying down, making me think of all those nights Cass and I spent lying in our beds giggling and telling stories while we waited to fall asleep, how our voices would soften and the intervals between words would stretch and stretch until finally I would say, “Cass, are you still there?” and hear only breathing.
“My mom used to be a nurse,” Tim says. “She worked really long hours, and sometimes I wouldn’t see her for a day or two, and when she was off she was always sleeping or just kind of out of it. Dad said it was just exhaustion. But then the summer I was eight they caught her stealing prescription meds, really high-dose painkillers.”
“Oh.” I don’t know what else to say. I know from experience all the I’m sorrys in the world aren’t going to change anything.
“She went to rehab for a while, and things were okay, but then she started feeling sick all the time, going to a ton of doctors who couldn’t diagnose anything. Then she got beat up in a mugging.”
“Jesus,” I say.
“That’s not the worst part,” Tim says, closing his eyes. “It didn’t actually happen. There was a camera in the lot where she said she was, and Dad tracked down the tape, and it just showed her getting into the car and driving away. But she had all these bruises . . .” I watch his Adam’s apple bob as he tenses his jaw. “Anyway, by the time he caught on, it was too late—she already had the meds she wanted.”
“Did she get arrested?”
“No, you can’t get arrested for kicking the shit out of yourself, apparently, as long as you don’t file a false police report. But she got divorced.”
“Where is she now?”
“She lives in Annapolis. My dad has full custody, but I see her every couple of weeks. She makes a lot of excuses, though. She always has some reason she has to cancel. And I worry all the time. I don’t know if she’s taking care of herself or what she’s capable of. I guess I just don’t . . .”
“Trust her?” I finish.
“No.” He closes his eyes. “Not at all.”
“I know what that’s like,” I say, and without even thinking about it I grab on to his hand and squeeze three times. He squeezes back three times. And then we just let them stay, as Cass’s voice rises up over the crickets, thin and uncertain and sweet, singing Denny his lullaby.
ELEVEN
Friday
Bristow, OK Oklahoma City, OK Amarillo, TX
The next morning brings sunshine, chirping birds, and Leah and Tim knee-deep in water, holding Denny by the wrists and ankles as they swing him out over the lake. I change clothes in the backseat and watch as
my brother communes with nature, his soaking SpongeBob SquarePants briefs swinging a few inches below his actual butt.
“One . . . two . . . THREE!” they chant, and Denny lets out a Tarzan yell before he splashes down.
The tent flap is open, and I spot Cass sitting just inside, a cracker held between her teeth, giving herself a shot. I wait till she puts her shirt back down and then drop into the sand next to her.
“What’s your problem?” I joke. “Too early to cannonball?”
“Haha,” she says. “And it’s not early. You just slept forever.” I was uncharacteristically the last one up and probably would have slept even later if Denny hadn’t clambered into the car dripping wet and asked me if I wanted to join him for a “lake bath.”
