The United States of Us

by Kate Sundara

  Gazing up to the heavens she’s reclined on the back seat of the Chevy, watching the perfect blue sky through drowsy eyes on the long drive home. Sunlight and wind stream through Brent’s hair in front of her, birds making looping patterns, dipping in and out of silver cloud.

  Sitting back up she sees the beauty that is all around them; plains covered with flowers, horses and deer, sun glistening on a distant mountain edge like a chunk of gold. Way ahead, above the open land, light catches in a cascade of rain, turning it into angel hair streaked every colour of the rainbow. On the other side of the road are lakes so crystal clear they look like glass, doubling the glory of everything. The purity of morning shines through all that is broken, transcending any earthly mess. Mia feels as if they’ve entered some kind of silent heaven and today she’s been given wings. She reaches again to feel the feather talisman around her neck, tries to recall everything Rosa said the evening she fastened it onto her.

  She doesn’t want to think about River Valley, not yet. That’s a churned-up, raw place in her stomach that she wants to ignore for as long as she can. Mia lays back down as they coast along, drinking in the clarity of sky. After her stint behind the wheel, she’s happy to take her eyes off the road and relax, Iggy Pop’s The Passenger playing in her mind and the fresh air against her dangling feet.

  It’s been an action-packed couple of days: exploring a national park, riding horses on Tess’s ranch, helping out with the livestock at that family home. They’re tired and hungover from last night’s antics too. Half of the group were dancing on top of the bar in a joint where the music was live and loud, the walls sported moose-heads and rifles, a superfluous log-fire burned by the door, bringing out smells of whisky from the wood, the floor sticky with spilt beer. Heather signalled the women in that place to get up and join them and the whole thing became a blur of drinking and laughter, leathers and tassels, men in Stetsons and cowboy boots slipping dollar bills into their jeans pockets. Back down on the dance-floor, Mia and the other girls were swirled about by long-bearded revellers old enough to be their daddies’ daddies, swinging from partner to partner, learning how to sidestep, twist and click their heels. Georgia made it onto stage with a bluegrass band, playing violin; Brent was busy chatting up a doe-eyed girl in a country dress; Mia just smiled over at them, glad that his attention was finally venturing elsewhere.

  Wil was the only one to shy away from the dancefloor. He said it was because of his arm, but Mia didn’t buy it: Wil wasn’t precious about his wounds. On the contrary, he’d let his bandages getso grubby from groupactivity that Tess’s dad had insisted on giving his stitches an extra swab of Betadine to ward off infection, and had re-gauzed his arm. Rainfall at Tess’s family ranch had lent itself to a mass mud-wrestle and no way was Wil missing out on that. It’d been ridiculous fun, they’d all gotten involved, even Megan, who could be too sensible for tomfoolery, even Wil with his gauzed arm – he’d kept it elevated and his friends were careful not to get his stitches wet or worsen his injury, even though Wil took on everyone else single-handedly. Everyone except for Mia, as if he were purposely avoiding contact with her, making her doubt if he even likes her, or if he, like Brent, thinks she’s ‘weird’. Caked in mud, it’d bothered her then and it’s been bothering her ever since. Moreso when Wil refused to dance with her last night, instead standing on the side-lines, watching on with a smile as Mia danced anyway, pretending not to care, though she did.

  Now in the car, Brent at the wheel, the two guys make little conversation. Every so often, Wil checks Mia in his wing-mirror and she smiles at him sleepily, faith restored by nature. Surrounded by beauty, life doesn’t seem bad to her now. No, life seems tickety-boo when she doesn’t allow herself to dwell on certain things. Hope grows inside of her like spring unfurling after winter. Even the Rockies look wonderful to her again. Mia’s started to think positively: how blessed she is for the friendships she’s found in Wil, all of the Dale bunch, Ruth and Rosa; she could even talk with people back home now and tell them how great this adventure is and mean it. She’s stopped seeing everything that doesn’t involve Zak as a consolation prize and regrets that she ever thought of things that way. She’s wearing wildflowers in her hair – Heather linked their stems together and popped the chain around Mia’s head. Ten wildflowers to represent each member of the Dale crowd, including Mia, who was touched by the sweet gesture. Finding the chain too small, Mia added one for Tess, who they’d left behind with her family, plus two more – one for Ruth, one for Rosa. She told Heather they were for absent friends.

  She’s almost amused now by the fact that nowhere in this region is flat, all sky-high snowy mountains and way down winding valleys. It’s a million miles from Utopia with its smooth seascape, its calm cobalt bay.

  After a couple of hours’ drive, they pull over at a station to refill the gas, use the wash-rooms, stretch their legs and get some air. Brent goes inside to buy beef jerky and peanut butter Hershey’s. Mia watches grains of sand blowing in from the desert go bouncing across the forecourt. Wil squints into sunset as he fills up his Chevy. The endless road is empty; they’ve lost the rest of their party along the way. Gazing through heat-waves, Mia wishes her head wasn’t just as hazy.

  ‘You’re very quiet today, Miss Mia,’ remarks Wil, giving her one of his smiles across the car roof. He tilts his chin back, almost so he’s looking down his nose at her. It confuses Mia all the more, him being all pally at the same time as pulling back. She loves the little names he makes up for her, regardless, always with that friendly formality about them. He looks out across the desert then back at her with a different smile, a sumptuous, almost conspiratorial smile, sunlight catching the amber of his eyes, making them glow bright, like there’s fire dancing in them.

  ‘What ya writing?’

  ‘My travel journal,’ she replies. Mia writes about all sorts in that journal, with everything chronicled – places, people, everything except for how the journey begun – with me. I’m too hard to talk about – to write about – even in private.

  ‘You don’t get car-sick?’ asks Wil. ‘I’m used to it.’

  Wil stretches his injured arm behind his neck, accentuating the breadth of his toned chest as he arches his back. Mia’s stomach somersaults and she knows it’s nothing to do with her return to the valley – that’s still far away. Overcome with a sudden hot-flush, she turns to face the desert, closes her eyes and lets the breeze cool the burn in her cheeks.

  * * *

  Flying by the blazing gold lake in the last winking rays of sun, filaments of pink and purple streak the windscreen like spun sugar. After stopping to eat at a diner en route Georgia came to join them in the Chevy. The four of them have been playing games on the long vacant roads, but now nearing River Valley – the town they’ve escaped for the past week – Mia withdraws from the fun.

  Seeing the signs for the valley her palms begin to sweat, her gut back-flipping as she recalls her return to Zak’s house, those polaroids around his bed, those black and white worries which won’t fade no matter how far she runs with them into the sun. Suddenly all of the laughs from the road-trip: Brent getting thrown off that crazy horse, Amber sliding into the river trying to fly-fish, the evening of music-making with Tess’s eccentric parents using kitchen utensils, mucking-out stables, riding bikes around the national park – it all falls away as she casts eyes on that road-sign, replaced by a sense of foreboding as they near the valley – that place, to Mia, now inseparable from the sensation of being drowned.

  Wil lets out a quiet groan as they pull off the highway into a familiar street and a traffic-jam. Vehicles are at a standstill and already stacking up behind. Wil looks at Mia in the mirror with a sort of c’est-la-vie smile; she just about manages to return it over the lurch in her stomach.

  ‘Looks like we’re gonna be here a while,’ says Brent. Eric’s Combi stops behind them.

  ‘An accident?’ Just ahead, to the side, Mia sees lights flashing red and blue against the falling dusk
. She catches sight of a mashed up bicycle on the pavement – a bike she knows by the splashy design Zak spray-painted on it–

  Zak’s bike!

  Heart in mouth, she catapults from the Chevy and up the road. All the cars, horns and voices of friends rushing up behind her blur into one, deafeningly loud, sissing filling her ears like the thrashing of the sea. Tidal-wave bowling her over, she whirls back to That Day – back beyond that day – back before we loved and lost. Recollections collate from every angle, mine and hers colliding in a collective state – flying – a mirror shattering in reverse. Pieces of past-life slot together to form a future she can’t face again.

  She’s praying, pleading: please not again, no!

  Pivotal, pivotal – this is how it all begun:

  Doom, dolly-boom, contra-zoom – pan-in, pan-out.

  ‘MIA!’

  Her mouth is dry, throat tightening as her feet pound the pavement, her muscle-memory unlocking her trauma, my life flashing before her eyes and even I can’t separate her image strands from my own. Together in a flashback: as she runs up the road, she’s a kid running through the woods, chasing me. We’re laughing, racing by foxgloves, forget-me-nots, sea in the distance, we’re united in a memory.

  ‘You can’t catch me!’ my inner child cries.

  Can’t reach

  Can’t reach

  Can’t reach

  We run into our teenage selves, speeding towards the tree-house. I pull her up the ladder, she dangles where the top rungs are missing; I heave-ho her up, we fall in, looking at the sky through a gap in the roof.

  I’m taking off my clothes, it’s a hot summer’s day.

  Both hearts beat together – mine still has a beat.

  She looks into my eyes, ‘Green,’ she says, ‘Glass-cider-bottle green.’

  Warm wood smell, golden delicious, syrup light.

  I kiss her mouth-to-mouth – all the colours change without warning.

  To dark stormy waters. To blue lips, frozen body. To red blue red blue red blue flashing lights…

  Mia finds herself in Main Street, beside a smashed-up car and Zak’s mangled bike, staring down at a stretcher and a face she doesn’t recognise. As they slam the rear doors and the ambulance pulls away, she sees me in the back window’s reflection.

  * * *

  Mia looks as if she’s seen a ghost. She hasn’t slept a wink all night.

  Drifting to the tap for a glass of water, she stands gazing out of Ruth’s kitchen window watching brighter colours suffuse the silvery dawn.

  Maybe she did see me in that ambulance reflection last night. Maybe she didn’t imagine it. She’s starting to see things she couldn’t see before, like in the forest when the bear attacked and she rushed above the trees. Her perception’s getting stronger, like time in nature is heightening her senses.

  The book Wil gave her notes the Native American belief that creation is all One, separated only by a thin veil. Rosa confirmed that when Mia brought it up one day at the shack. Now, for a moment, Mia takes comfort in the notion of Oneness. If Oneness were real then she’d feel okay about being back in the valley; she wouldn’t be eaten-up with jealousy about Zak and Freya because she’d share in that sense of intimacy. She wouldn’t feel so sore about his deceit or betrayed by April because those things would all be part of her too. But we aren’t all One, she thinks, how could we be? She’d never experienced Zak the way Freya had, could never be as duplicitous as him, nor as insincere as April.

  This isn’t unity, she cries out inside. It’s all separation – where’s the Oneness in any of this?

  ‘Early riser,’ croaks Ruth, shuffling through to the kitchen in her dressing gown.

  ‘Hey, Ruthie…’

  ‘You okay? Still bugged out by the accident last night? All that angst and it wasn’t even Zak.’

  ‘How was I to know someone had stolen his bike?’

  Ruth pops a teabag in a mug, pours herself a bowl of cornflakes, nudges Mia to eat something.

  ‘Thanks. Not hungry.’ That’s a lie. Mia is hungry, really hungry. She just doesn’t want to eat. Eating connects her to her body and from that she’s trying to escape. The thought of piling food on top of the heaviness in her gut… Aside from water, alcohol and ice-cream – things that cool and numb – she can’t force anything down.

  ‘What ya looking at?’

  ‘Rosa. From the shelter. I see her out walking really early in the mornings. I’m too tired to be sociable, but I should go and see her now I’m back in the valley. She gave me this.’ Mia shows Ruth the feather talisman. ‘She’s like some kind of dawn treader or something.’

  ‘The Dawn Treader. Isn’t that a Narnia story?’ Ruth peers out the window at Rosa walking slowly, heavily, holding her face up to the morning light as she passes below the house.

  ‘What do you want on your toast?’ asks Mia.

  ‘Making my breakfast? You can stay here indefinitely. Butter and apricot jelly, thanks.’

  ‘You’re doing me a massive favour having me here; it’s the least I can do.’

  Ruth sits at the table. ‘What’s up? You seem agitated. Your scratches itching?’

  ‘No, it’s not that…’

  Ruth received a recap of road-trip highlights from the others when they dropped Mia off last night. Mia hadn’t said much, her emotions all over the place after witnessing that bike accident. She told Ruth she was bushed and put herself to bed on the couch. Now Mia searches around for the apricot jam – jelly – jell-o – whatever it is, in the fridge. She can’t think straight, thoughts and distractions between every item on the shelves…

  ‘What could have caused the bear to act that way?’ asks Ruth.

  ‘You’re the one who studied animal psychology, you tell me! I don’t know. I guess you get crazy wildlife just like you get crazy people. Speaking of which, did they catch that bushwhacker prowler round here yet?’

  ‘Not yet. The thought he’s still out there really creeps me out.’

  ‘Me too… So what did I miss?’

  ‘Well… I might have a date next Saturday.’ Excitement creeps into Ruth’s voice.

  ‘A date?’ Mia finally finds the apricot, closes the fridge door.

  ‘I met someone. While you were away. At a conservation talk on campus. His name’s Corey and he’s… sorta cute. He came by the library while I was working, asked what I’m doing next weekend.’

  ‘And?’

  Ruth shrugs. ‘And maybe I should go. Maybe I should start dating. Maybe it’ll help me get over… I could try. I could at least try, right?’

  ‘Damn right!’

  Ruth looks down at the table, less enthused.

  ‘C’mon, Ruthie!’

  ‘I know, I know, it’s just…’

  ‘Just nothing! Give him a chance! He might be a great match for you.’

  ‘You mean someone who might actually want to be with me? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound self-pitying. Romance hasn’t exactly treated you or me too well. I guess you could use a boost too.’

  ‘Oh the road-trip boosted me. Y’know, aside from the bear attack, it was so good to get away, to not think about Zak or any of the mess, just to–’

  ‘So don’t think about him now you’re back. Put it all behind you.’

  ‘Easier said than done, it seems.’

  ‘I’m so sorry it wound up this way.’

  ‘What, coming halfway across the world to couch-surf – hosted by the kindness of strangers?’

  Ruth smiles. ‘You deserve so much better.’

  ‘Do I?’

  Ruth looks at her surprised.

  Mia elaborates. ‘Why do women expect so much of a man anyway: dreaming of being rescued by some knight in shining armour? It’s because as impressionable little girls we hear those stories over and over, so we grow up with false hopes and high ideals. Is it any wonder we’re constantly disappointed? How many guys do we know were read fairytales?’

  ‘Good point,’ says Ruth. She gives Mia a cl
ose-mouthed smile, then ‘C’mon!’ she insists, ‘let’s get dressed.’

  ‘Why, where are we going?’

  ‘Local activities. Without men. I missed you while you were gone. We’re due some quality catch-up time, and we need to cheer each other up, pronto.’

  ‘Yes!’ agrees Mia, momentarily lifted by Ruth with her powers of persuasion.

  ‘What’ll it be first? Yoga, the farmers market or a movie-marathon at the art-house?’

  ‘Is it the women-only yoga class?’ asks Mia.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Let’s go there.’

  When Saturday finally rolls around, Mia helps Ruth get ready for her date, assisting with make-up. Ruth says she never wears it, that she has no clue and could use Mia’s artistic touch. Mia is glad for Ruth trying to move on, even if a new courtship might exacerbate her own loneliness. If Ruth had found herself a guy then their girl-time would be over. Still, she knows she can’t be selfish about it; she wants Ruth to be happy. She can’t recall the last time she had so close a female friend.

  Corey’s car pulls into the driveway and Ruth leaps up in nervous excitement, giving Mia a quick peck before leaving her home alone. Mia watches her go.

  * * *

  In the early hours of morning, Mia dreams of a bear. A good bear, not the one who’d mauled them. The dream-bear is protective. A healer, teacher, leader, emblematic of grounding forces, courage and strength. As Mia’s reverie guides her through a honey-coloured home she wakes in warmth, knowing that her honey-eyed bear is Wil.

  In the afternoon she cycles to the baker’s on Ruth’s bike, the one with the basket and bell. Butterflies and dandelion fairies float through the air, wispy clouds drift overhead. That’s when she sees him: Zak Ryder. Walking in the sunshine without a care in the world.

  Mia’s feet cease on the pedals, he looks at her and smiles. The space between them shortens. She clenches her stomach, wraps her knuckles over the brakes, ready to squeeze. As they pull closer, her lips part but no words come. And then, like two perfect strangers, they let each other sail on by.