Instructions for the End of the World (12 page)

She looks me in the eye as she says this, and I can feel her gratitude. It makes me want to pull her close and bury my face in her hair, but instead I place a hand on her back and nudge her away from the house.

“How do you feel about tree houses at night?” I say.

“I don't know.”

Although the one in front of the main house is the most useful for spying on incoming traffic, it was my first build, and the most utilitarian. It lacks the charm and funkiness that I like to think characterize my later work, and these are the ones I want to show her, so I lead her away from the main house to the western edge of the property.

From the back, we can hear a drum circle starting up. Out of sync at first, they slowly slip into a rhythm, and soon, if this party goes like the usual ones here, there will be a large group of partiers dancing to the beat, elaborately hula hooping, and generally letting loose. This is where things usually start to go downhill fast. I think of Nicole's little sister but decide to bite my tongue for now, since she doesn't seem in the mood to play chaperone. We will still have time later to catch up with her before things get too out of hand.

We climb the ladder into my favorite of the Sadhana tree houses, a circular one that sort of resembles a yurt. It has windows in the roof for looking up through the tree branches at the sky.

“Wow,” she says. “You built this yourself?”

“I had a little help.”

There's a futon mattress for us to sit on, and we watch people in the back dancing and milling around.

“This is all for your mom?” she asks.

“Yeah, pretty much. I mean, mostly it's an excuse to have a party, but people around here love Annika, so I guess they're happy to have her back.”

“You don't sound like you are.” I feel her eyes on me, and I glance over at her, then away again, unsure what to say.

Is it wrong to wish my mother had stayed away for good? Is that the kind of thing I can admit to a girl I barely know?

“It's complicated,” I say.

“So what's your mother like?” Nicole asks me, and I try to think of the words.

Wrecked, broken, unfathomable
come to mind, but I know that's not the whole truth.

She's also charismatic and magnetic and a lot of people can't resist her.

“She's an addict,” I say. “Have you ever known an addict?”

I already know her answer to this question before she even shakes her head. Of course she hasn't. Her carefully planned and executed life thus far has only included the elements her father deemed appropriate, as far as I can tell.

I try to imagine a life growing up in the military, with an army officer for a father, but it's so far from my reality, I can think only of stereotypes. And yet, Nicole is no stereotype.

“Does she use drugs?” she asks.

“Sometimes. And she drinks. Right now she's sober, but it never lasts for long.”

“That sounds hard.”

There is a strand of hair hanging down over her left eye, and I resist the urge to push it back away from her face. Maybe she wants it there, I think. Maybe it gives her a sense of hiding away. I know the need for that feeling.

I don't want to talk about Annika, though. This night is supposed to be fun, so I smile and shrug. “Hey, parents, what are you gonna do, right?”

She smiles. “Right.”

“Have you ever been to a drum circle before?”

“No.”

“Do you know how to hula hoop?”

She frowns. “Um, sort of?”

“Then let's go do some hula hooping,” I say, and I start making my way down the ladder before she can protest. I know it's the one guaranteed way to get people to start relaxing at these village parties.

Near the bonfire we spot Nicole's sister laughing and dancing with the pack of kids I've grown up with, and I'm relieved at least to see she's not off in some dark corner pinned beneath some dude. I find two hula hoops, and there's already a group of people off to the side doing fancy hoop tricks, so we join the outer edges.

I look over at Nicole, and she's trying not to laugh. It's one of those nicely awkward moments that almost never happens—the kind of moment where you know that right then and there, at least, everything is okay.

Better than okay. Everything is great.

NICOLE

I try not to feel guilty about having attended my first real party, but it isn't until we make it home in the middle of the night and see that no one is there to catch us breaking the rules that I can totally relax. Izzy spent most of the night glued to a guy named Kiva, dancing too close to him, using moves I didn't even know she had. I never lost sight of her for more than a half hour, though, and she was in ridiculously good spirits when the party finally started winding down around two in the morning and I told her I wanted to go home.

She walked with me without complaint through the darkness, and this morning she woke up in a better mood than usual, even offering to help with chores.

I guess I'm in a better mood than usual too, though. I don't know what to think about Wolf and his strange life, but I know I can't resist liking him. I try to imagine what Dad would say if he saw Wolf come to take me out on a date, but it's too impossible to imagine. What if he just showed up as a friend, though? Dad would send him away, tell me I'm not allowed to associate with degenerates.

That's my best guess.

I get sick to my stomach when I think of those two worlds colliding, and it makes me hope Dad doesn't come back anytime soon. Except, well, how long can we live here with no water, no air-conditioning, almost no money, no car.…

Not a lot longer.

I walk down the driveway to check the mail that I haven't remembered to check in a few days, and part of me wants to keep going all the way to Wolf's tree house and see if he's home. But I don't.

I open the old, rusted mailbox expecting to find bills, junk mail addressed to my grandfather, and those sales flyers that seem to arrive every day. But what is sitting at the very top of the stack is an envelope with familiar, careful, teacher handwriting in blue ink across the front. I take it out and study it, knowing in an instant that it's Mom's handwriting.

There is no return address on the front, so I flip over the long white envelope and see there is none on that side either. There is only the letter addressed to me, and an American flag stamp, and the postal stamp of the date over the top, with “Barstow, CA,” above the date on the stamp.

Barstow?

Why would she go back there?

It's the nearest town to the army post where we used to live. It's not a place she ever wanted to see again, as far as I know. But it's also a crossroads to other places—Las Vegas, Arizona, L.A., and south to Mexico.

I try to imagine where my mother might have been headed, but I can't. I try to picture her holed up in some seedy motel in the desert, and it seems about as likely as her running off to become a Las Vegas showgirl.

I realize I'm holding my breath, so I inhale and exhale slowly. Then repeat until my hands stop shaking.

I consider waiting to open the letter until I'm back at the house, out of this heat, but I am already tearing open the envelope because what if it's not a letter at all? What if it's something stupid like a recipe for Izzy's favorite pineapple cake?

I don't know why I think this is a possibility, but there it is.

Inside the envelope is a single lined sheet of paper folded in thirds. I take it out and can see blue-ink handwriting faintly through the paper. I open the letter and see the words “Dear Nicole and Isabel” at the top of the page.

Nearby, there is a fallen tree at the edge of the woods, shaded from the sun, so I go sit on it to read.

I don't know if you will get this letter. Maybe your father will see it in the mail and keep it from you. I hope not. I want you both to know that I didn't mean to leave you behind. It's just that I know you'll be better off with your dad right now while I sort some things out. I guess what I need to make clear though, that maybe your dad hasn't told you yet, is I won't be coming back in any kind of permanent way. I would have rather told you in person, but I don't want to imagine you expecting one thing and then another thing happens. I will have to come get some of my things, perhaps, but I don't intend to live in that house.

It's not just the house though. Your father and I have problems bigger than that, and we are going to get a divorce. I hope this isn't the first time you've heard about it or thought of it as a possibility. It won't be so bad though. Your dad loves you and will take good care of you, and both of you will be out of the house in a few years anyway. When I'm settled somewhere, I'll figure out when and where we can visit.

Until then, remember that I love you, and that this has nothing to do with either of you. It's between your dad and me.

Love,

Mom

I stare at the letter, my eyes blurring. It's one short page, so matter-of-fact it's as if she's telling me about a trip to the grocery store. I mean, I guess I knew divorce was a possibility, but I never said it out loud in my head. I never really believed it would happen. I try to imagine just handing this letter over to Izzy, try to picture her reaction and how I will manage it.

She's going to flip. She might run away. And then I will have failed at the most important task Dad left me with. I can't even imagine Izzy taking care of herself on the street. She'd end up dead, or worse.

I carefully fold up the letter and put it back in the envelope. Stand up, dust myself off, and head back up the gravel road to the house, the weight in my stomach almost too heavy a load to carry.

If Izzy sees this letter, what will happen?
is the only thing I can think. The bigger questions, about Mom and Dad, about the future of our family, I can't even consider right now.

 

Ten

NICOLE

I have always kept a journal, ever since I got one from a friend for my ninth birthday, though back then I called it a diary. It was purple and had the words “My Diary” on the cover, and it had one of those little gold locks with a tiny gold key that fit perfectly inside. I loved that gift more than any other I'd ever gotten, mostly because of the lock and key. I kept the key hidden in different places, trying to foil would-be snoopers, and I wrote in it every night until it was full and I had to use money I'd saved to buy another one, and another, and another.

I loved that I didn't have to write what my dad told me to in it. I could write anything I wanted. I could think anything I wanted. It was a dizzying sense of freedom.

It's funny, but looking back I know now that I saw even the lock as a symbol of freedom. It was what gave me the confidence to think and write whatever I wanted, without anyone reading it.

Without my dad reading it.

My first entries felt awkward, not knowing what was worth writing down, or what wasn't, not feeling confident that my own thoughts and feelings deserved to be recorded, but somewhere around the middle of that first diary, I started to find my groove. Our fourth-grade class went on a field trip to see a play about Helen Keller's life, and I remember being so exhilarated learning about her that I came home, went straight to my room, and glued my ticket stub from the performance to the next empty page in my diary. Then I did something I'd never done before. I started writing a letter to Helen Keller.

I wrote about what I'd learned from her, and it wasn't the last letter I wrote. After that, the letters came to me regularly. Letters to teachers, letters to friends, letters to the president, my parents, my sister, my grandparents I'd never met.

I wrote regular diary entries too, but the letters gave me a feeling I'd never had before. They made me feel powerful. In them, I could say anything I wanted to anyone at all, and any feeling I had pent up inside seemed to disappear into the pages of my diary. I felt light as air afterward.

So while I'm alone in the too-quiet house after the arrival of my mother's letter, I find an empty journal with a plain black cover in Dad's office, and I start writing.

But what comes out this time—it feels different. I realize it's because I'm literally writing to my dad this time. I'm writing something I want him to read, if he ever returns here. After all, what can he do to me, really, if he doesn't like what I have to say? What can he do that's any worse than living in this broken-down house alone?

August 3, 2002

By the time you return, maybe the end will have come.

The End, as in the apocalypse, or the next ice age, or the Second Coming, or …

*   *   *

The longer our parents are gone, the more I start to wonder about them. Two weeks, and we haven't heard a word from Dad. I start to imagine the worst.

What I don't know about my parents could fill volumes of notebooks. I open the black journal and start with the questions I can think of:

Where did Mom go?

Why did she leave?

Why didn't she take us?

Why didn't she tell us she was leaving?

Why did she feel like she had to sneak away?

How did she meet Dad?

Did she love him?

Why did Dad retire from the army when he did?

Maybe these questions are connected, but I don't know how. I just know I want to find answers. I start by looking through my parents' stuff. Not just the obvious places, like the bottoms of drawers and backs of closets. I check those places, but I know I won't find anything there. I dig deeper, into boxes left unpacked in the garage, but my father isn't a saver of things that aren't useful. Mom, however, has a box somewhere, mementos. I remember coming across it once, years ago, but I haven't seen it recently. I wonder if she took it with her when she left. But Dad did all of her unpacking, so where would he have put it, or would he have thrown it away?