My Diary from the Edge of the World (12 page)

Sam's not feeling well and wants to be on Mom's lap all the time. He's decided in the meanwhile to be our navigator. He'll take a look at the map on Mom's lap and say to Dad, “Turn left at the mountain,” or “Turn south at the red dot.” He'll then look out the window for the red dot that he sees on the map, knitting his eyebrows in confusion because its not there. He looks so small and frail and cute that sometimes I could devour him more easily than any black hole ever could.

It's not easy to sleep knowing the Cloud's behind us, but now it's especially hard with a sasquatch attached to our camper. I think the first few nights we had Daisy, we all lay awake most of the night, ears pricked, envisioning her escaping and tearing off the doors and bursting in on us in our beds. But Mom and Dad assure us she's safely contained. And ever since the first couple of days, when she howled and thrashed and screamed every time we stopped and started the RV, she's quieted down. I wonder if maybe she's given up hope.

For some reason Oliver's insisted on being the one who gives her food and water. He's been buying her
bags of beef jerky and taquitos and bottles of water at 7-Eleven (he must have had some money saved up), stuffing them through the slatted window of the trailer gingerly and then jerking away quickly. Every time I think I know him a little better, he becomes a mystery to me again—like how he's the most afraid of Daisy but also the bravest about taking care of her.

There are other things to worry about now too, the farther west we get. We've been driving through old rail tunnels that Dad says are haunted by the ghosts of miners: “Men who died blowing through rock to make room for the trains that never came,” he says. The tunnels are poorly lit by a few flickering electric lights (the farther west we go, the spottier electrical service is), and I hold my breath through each one, because I've decided it's a lucky thing to do. So far we've only seen one lonely soul holding up a lamp and waving to us sadly as we passed.

*  *  *

Mom says challenges bring families together, but so far it's been exactly the opposite. Millie has been mostly in her bunk with her blanket-curtain drawn. (Sam is her “assistant,” and whenever he sees a boy her age in another car, he gives her the signal—a triple knock on her bunk frame—at which point she refreshes her
makeup and emerges to flirt out the window.) Dad is as far away as ever, barely talking during the day. (He's been in a medium-level swamp ever since we left West Virginia.) Even Sam, since he's not feeling well, has been in a bad mood, and sometimes takes it out on Jim the bear by stuffing him in the cupboard and telling him he's grounded. I can't say I'm in the best mood myself, and I've already made several trips up to the front today to complain to Mom about various things that annoy me, such as the new freckle on my right hand and my hair getting in my eyes.

Oliver and Mom are the real peacekeepers, and neither of them ever seems to be cranky. Mom goes out of her way to check on all of us, especially Oliver (she's always asking him if he needs anything) and Oliver tries to get me out of my moods by making decorations for my bunk: paper chains made from newspaper, spinning mobiles made of paper clips he found in the glove box. He never makes anything for Millie, and that makes me happy.

*  *  *

Yesterday morning Sam found a daisy in a patch of grass while we were stopped at a gas station. He asked Oliver if he could climb on his back, and then asked him to piggyback him close to the trailer. He waved it in front of the
window, though Oliver kept him at a safe distance. “This is a daisy and so are you,” Sam said loudly into the trailer, then sniffled and coughed. Inside, Daisy was silent. I was sure at any moment she'd lunge at the window and scare Sam out of his wits.

“She can't understand you, buddy,” Oliver said.

“Yes she can,” Sam insisted. He waved the daisy back and forth, then nodded and smiled at the trailer, raising his eyebrows for extra effect. “Gracie says you look like Chewbacca, but that's not so bad.” He turned to me. “We should get her a mirror so she knows what she looks like.” (Oliver gave me a crooked smile—I think he adores Sam almost as much as the rest of us do.)

If Daisy was angered by Sam's loud, insistent presence, she didn't do anything about it; she was silent and still, which was frightening in its own way. Looking through a bunch of travel guides he bought at 7-Eleven, Dad has located a circus up ahead in eastern Arizona, right on our zigzaggy route to LA. We're all relieved to know she'll be out of our hands then.

*  *  *

I've been sneaking Mouse some Pixy Stix that Dad let me buy at our last stop. (With Dad, you wait until he's distracted to ask for things, which is pretty easy.) So right
now Sam's not on Mom's lap as usual . . . he's actually jumping up and down on the couch. A few minutes ago he shouted, “There are fireworks behind my eyeballs!” If it were me acting so hyper, I'd get in trouble, but everyone is so happy when Sam is happy that no one wants to rain on his parade.

The rest of us have been talking about our soon-to-be guardian angel.

“I hope he's cute,” Millie said.

“I bet he's, like, a commando type,” I said.

“Angels aren't into war, dummy,” Millie said dismissively.

“Yes they are,” I argued. “They got into that war with heaven that made them all leave and come to earth.” Everyone knows, from school, that the angels are naturally rebellious. They even rebelled against the gods—that was how they ended up in LA instead of heaven in the first place.

“I bet he loves raisins,” said Sam, jumping down from the couch for a moment to weigh in and wipe his sniffly nose with his sleeve before resuming his sugar-fueled rampage.

Personally, I picture our angel as glowing like the sun, magnificently strong, bright, and wise. I also picture
him (or her) paying special attention to me—recognizing how different I am from everyone else in my family, how generally misunderstood I am, and how much patience I must have to put up with them as much as I do.

“No one knows geography better than angels,” Dad piped up from the front. We hadn't even known he was listening. Looking up at us in the rearview mirror, noticing his suddenly rapt audience, he touched the side of his glasses and went on.

“Though they won't share the secrets of the edges of the earth—it's against their code. Of course, coming from another dimension, they may know something about superstrings, too.”

“What are superstrings?” Oliver asked. Millie groaned, then mouthed,
Please, no,
at him. But it was too late.

“Superstrings are the things that tell us that it's possible there are other dimensions out there. Basically, we've discovered that tiny invisible superstrings exist everywhere, woven throughout the fabric of space and the universe, but that they wiggle and disappear, and we don't know where they go. They have to go somewhere, so scientists think they go to other dimensions. They've worked out the math and they think there are eleven dimensions total. It's called quantum physics.”

“Don't get him started talking about count 'em physics.” Sam sighed sadly, crashing from his sugar high and laying himself down on the couch, staring up at the ceiling.

“Quantum physics means that in this world,” Dad went on, “this is a Winnebago, but in another it could be an elephant. It means the universe is full of endless possibilities.”

“In another dimension, maybe there's another Mouse,” I said to Mouse to cheer him up, “and that version of Mouse doesn't like Pixy Stix.”

“Maybe in that world there's a you who never gets grounded,” Millie said to me.

“Maybe there's a world where you're not stuck up,” I replied.

Oliver was leaning toward my dad with interest, but Dad just started muttering to himself about “M theory” and something called “angelic torque,” looking up at the sky. La La Land Lockwood in action.

*  *  *

Other than the haunted railroad tunnels, Arkansas is a green, friendly-looking place. We've been passing scattered small towns, gentle creeks, pretty white houses with porches, small farms, and small fields of corn. Of
course, the towns have become fewer and farther between as the miles have stretched on, and it's clear that we're headed into more rugged territory. Mom says we can only hope the roads stay drivable. (They've started to get bumpy and potholed.) The people here, exposed as they are to the open sky, have erected tall metal deflectors, like second roofs over their houses, to deflect dragonfire, though you can see that dragon crossings have burned some of the cornfields badly.

We've seen something else: other families, in old Volkswagen buses and Winnebagos like ours, heading west just like us.

Yesterday I went into a Circle K to buy a postcard for Arin Roland. My mom gathered some bananas and jars of peanut butter and jelly while I picked out a card bearing a photo of a wampus cat, which is apparently the state animal. I was just leaning on the counter, composing a short note that would make it sound like I was having the time of my life and that I felt sorry for Arin having to stay in Cliffden, when I noticed a family in a station wagon out in the parking lot giving odd looks to our trailer. (Daisy has been whining softly all day today, and I'm sure they're wondering what wild beast we've got in there.) I turned to my mom.

“Do you think their families are being chased by Clouds too?” I asked.

Mom shook her head. “Lots of families are just moving farther inland, even farther west, despite the dangers. Too many mermaids along the shores of the coastal towns, too many dragons burning down houses. They're adjusting to the wilder world.”

“Do you think any of them are looking for the Extraordinary World?”

Mom laid her items on the counter. “Probably not. Not everyone's as brave as your dad.”

“Dad's scared of spiders,” I said. But then I wished I could take it back. Ever since Grandma's, I've been trying to be nicer in my mind when I think about him. Maybe he really is as brave and smart as Mom has always said.

*  *  *

Millie has just made a rare appearance in my bunk to borrow one of my pens. I told her I've been thinking about how we should be nicer to Dad, but she rolled her eyes.

“He barely even talks to us. Especially when he's in one of his moods. It's like he can always find a way to make everything feel worse.” Her beautiful brown eyes (I can't deny, Millie's about ten times more beautiful than I'll ever be) were all big and solemn.

She has a point. Sometimes I'll be in a perfectly good and hopeful mood, and then I'll look at my dad bent over the steering wheel, wearing what Millie calls his classic Theodore Lockwood Look of Doom: jaw set tight, fingers scratching at his stubble, mouth in a distracted frown—and it's like letting the air out of a balloon inside me. Millie says I'm a moody person just like him, but I think that's different because I'm not a dad and dads should be better than that.

Since we were having this heart to heart, I decided to ask Millie something I'd been wondering ever since Oliver and I talked about his family and how he wants to forget them.

“Millie, what do you want most in the world? I mean, besides Sam being okay?”

Millie thought for a moment. She actually seemed happy I'd asked.

“I really want to meet my first love,” she said, “and have a first kiss.”

I was sorry I'd asked.

“Bubble head,” I muttered.

Millie shoved me out of my bunk, and the peace was broken.

In the back Daisy roared from her trailer.

I'm sitting on a railroad
track beside the Great Western Road, or what's left of it, in my purple plaid jacket that Mom got me last year at Macy's. (It's a bit tight on me, but I guess a new coat isn't on the horizon any time soon.) The wind is blowing the chilly fall air through my hair, and Mom is changing a tire. The Cloud is sitting serenely in the clear, darkening sky about a mile back. Millie's gone for a walk and Oliver is standing at Daisy's trailer with an armful of doughnuts. Dad is working out some equations in the dirt with a stick. The road is torn up for miles from here forward.

Our route—at least the paved part of it—has come to an end.

It's just dusk, and lights are coming on across the
plains . . . but not many. We've been driving on a disintegrating road for days—the potholes getting so numerous that for the past several miles the pavement has been more holes than road, and now it's finally turned into a dirt track. This is our second flat tire in three days, though Dad says it's not just the potholes to blame but the poltergeists that haunt the Goodyear factories and put tiny holes in the rubber.

We're still not the only people trying to get across the Western Road, and at least it's been drivable. There are even a few renegade gas stations along the way, usually just people setting up shop under tarps and selling big drums of fuel, though every once in a while we still come across a proper building. Sometimes we even see a car headed in the other direction—and we'll stop to make conversation with each other—but so far we haven't talked to anyone who's come all the way from California.

“Dad?” I asked a few minutes ago, surveying the warped, curled track on which I'm perched, and making him look up from his math. “Why are there so many railroad tracks when there are no trains?”

Dad laid his stick on his lap and looked across the plains.

“Back in the late 1800s,” he said, “there was a big push to
‘conquer' the west by spreading the railroad from New York to California.”

I tried to picture it—a “tamed” west, a railroad that stretches from New York all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Of course, they'd talked about it in school, but I'd barely paid attention.

“Several big barons—men like Cornelius Vanderbilt, men who wore top hats and had lots of money—invested in the project. Laborers worked day and night to build the tracks.” He paused as my mom dropped her wrench; he went over and picked it up for her, then walked back and sat down.