My Diary from the Edge of the World (15 page)

Deeper and deeper we've gone into the center of nowhere, and we've all grown more silent, as if the world's swallowed us. Everything is old here. Mom says it looks like “the dry heart of the earth.” These are sun lands we've crossed into—there are no clouds except the one that pursues us, though occasionally we can see tiny storms form and disappear far off in the distance, across vast expanses of dry grass. At midday the sun's so bright I can feel it leaking into the camper, and the air has gotten warmer. Mom's flipped the map over and over in her hands for hours to try to find our way back to the main road, but at this point it's useless.

We've been seeing the fires of settlements in the far-off trees. Dad says they belong to people who've been all over the country since long before my great-great-great-grandma emigrated from Poland, and who prefer living a traditional life out here to being near the cities.

“We're only passing through because they let us,” Dad says. I can understand how a junky old Winnebago might break the quiet and beauty of this place, so I think it's pretty nice of them.

Here's one funny thing: Mom is following Oliver around the Trinidad with her comb right now. If he isn't careful, she'll be trying to dress him next.

Something unforgettable has happened to us!

It was getting dark, almost night. Millie and I were sitting side by side after I wrote that last entry, being civil for once. (She's been unusually gentle lately, and kind of thoughtful—looking out the windows a lot. She must be as mesmerized by the views as I am.) Sam had poked his head out from the back, wrapped in his blanket, which I knitted for him in arts and crafts last year (and which is full of holes), and we were all listening to Oliver. He was telling us about this time his mom was
in charge of the Go Fish booth at their local carnival. Apparently, she thought fishing was a cruel sport, so she changed Go Fish to Catch the Clover.

“She spent all night,” Oliver said, fighting back his laughter, “making paper four-leaf clovers with little paper clips attached at the end. Everyone was so confused when they had to catch four-leaf clovers with fishing poles.”

I was laughing so hard (even Mom, squeezed in beside me at the table, was chuckling) and Oliver seemed so happy (talking about the mom he said he wants to forget), when the Winnebago suddenly screeched to a halt and we all went thumping forward, falling out of our seats.

“Kids!” my Dad hissed, and looked back at us with a hand to his lips to silence us.

My first thought was the Cloud. I looked up through the windows into the falling dusk, immediately sickened, my heart pounding. But the sky—a darkening purple—was empty for the moment. Then a movement drew my eye downward. The space surrounding our RV was moving like a wave, full of thousands of enormous shadows. They were all around us, moving in unison, engulfing us so that nothing—the road, the
desert beyond—was visible but them. I couldn't speak. I couldn't even breathe.

“Buffalo,” my dad whispered.

There had to be thousands of them, parting like a river as they moved slowly around the Trinidad. They walked smoothly and rapidly, but they moved like one creature. Their breath puffed out in the cold air.

We could hear the thud of their hoofbeats, muffled by the glass windows. “Just be still,” my mom whispered. “Don't startle them.” She didn't have to say it; we were frozen in place. Even Daisy was completely silent behind us.

At school I've heard about the great buffalo herds of the west. But I never imagined I'd see them for myself. I wondered how many hooves it would take to flatten a Winnebago and the people inside it. Hundreds?

“They're beautiful,” Millie breathed.

It took almost an hour for them all to pass by us, all of us sitting silently, left breathless by the sight.

When the last few had straggled past, and we could see the back of the herd trailing off—shaggy tails and enormous rumps getting smaller and smaller in the distance, and dust rising behind them above the grass—Dad started the ignition. But none of us has spoken since.

What day of the week
is it? My mind is in a haze.

I want to tell you where I'm sitting, but I've decided that first I'll need to tell you how I got here. I'll start with when we first knew for sure we'd veered too far off course to recover.

“We're still on the right track,” Dad said over his shoulder that morning. “We're just a little sideways.” My mom glanced back at us from the driver's seat, her amber hoop earrings jangling, and I could tell just by her eyes that things were worse than she wanted us to know. Plus we can always tell when Dad's lying; he sounds extra cheerful.

I was sitting in my bunk, facing front with the curtain drawn open and looking out the opposite window. Tiny,
scraggly trees occasionally lined our path, their limbs struggling up out of the red dirt, and a low, thin fog was drifting in patches across the ground.

“This feels very wrong,” Mom said as we veered around a rocky outcropping, and the road rose upward, getting bumpier. “Where's that fog coming from? Teddy, we need to turn back, retrace our steps. It's foolish to keep pushing on in this direction.”

“We'll never make it back to a gas station,” Dad said, still trying to sound cheerful, but less so.

Everyone grew silent and tense as we drove on. The road was dust. It was not a road at all.

“I think . . . ,” Dad began, turning to his left to address my mom, when three things happened at once. The camper shuddered like a train jumping its track, the brakes screeched as Mom jarred forward and slammed down on the pedal, and we all went flying out of our seats.

We were very still for a moment. And then Mom said quietly, “Everyone stand very slowly.” She swallowed deeply and looked out through the windshield at something we couldn't see. There was something strange about the feeling of the RV, and then I realized what it was. We were
tilting
.

“We're going to move out the back, one at a time,” she said. “We need to do it very gently but very quickly.”

Dad, who'd been completely silent and still beside her, looked over at her. “After you,” he said.

As Mom turned toward us, I could see the blood had drained from her cheeks, and her eyes were terrified. She put one foot in front of the other carefully until she reached Millie, and then gestured for her to go on in front. Sam followed, Mom grabbing his hand. I tucked this diary under my arm before I went slowly, gingerly behind them, so frightened my legs felt tingly and numb—though I didn't know exactly what I was frightened
of
. I knew that if we didn't move carefully, something terrible was going to happen—something that had to do with the tilting, tilting into
somewhere.
 . . .

Oliver, who'd been sitting at the table, reached a hand out to make sure I was steady, biting his lip, and then fell in behind me. I looked over my shoulder to make sure Dad was behind him. Mom led us, not through the side door, but through her and Dad's room. She gingerly unlatched the big back window and raised it, and then one by one, Sam first with Mom lowering him down, we squeezed through the opening into the narrow gap between the back bumper and the trailer. Mom
grabbed her knapsack from the overhead bin as she slid out behind us and turned to help the rest of us out. As I emerged, Millie and Sam were standing to the left, gawking, and I moved to join them, Oliver right behind me. As I followed their gaze, my heart flip-flopped in shock.

The front end of the Trinidad was hanging into . . . empty space. It was halfway over the edge of a gaping chasm . . .
more
than a gaping chasm, which was spilling fog at our feet. And it looked like there was nothing holding it back from falling straight in.

Now I turned to look in the other direction. And if the sight of our camper dangling into an abyss had been unbelievable to behold, what I saw next nearly knocked me to the ground.

There was Daisy's trailer, two of the four wheels tilted up in the air. A long, thick, hairy arm stretched through the tiny window at the back, taut, having ripped through the one remaining screen. A huge furry paw gripped a small scrubby tree growing out of the desert dust. From inside the trailer came a low, desperate howl. Daisy's claws slipped a little farther up the tree—it was the only thing, apparently, keeping our Winnebago, and her, from dropping over the edge.

Oliver was leaping forward before my dad's reaching arms could pull him back. He threw himself at the trailer and worked desperately at the pin that attached it to the Trinidad, and then, suddenly Millie (of all people!) was beside him, working feverishly to yank the pin out of its hole. Daisy's paw slipped again, the tree bent so far I could hear it crackle as it began to break, and she let out a high squeal of terror.

And then there was a clank and a thud, and both Oliver and Millie fell backward as the pin came out in their hands. Mom let out a sound like a yip as the Trinidad slid. The sound of metal as it scraped rock was deafening as the back end tilted up into the air while gravity pulled the front end down, and then there was a metallic screech as the whole thing tumbled out of sight, dust flying in a cloud around us.

For a moment, there was silence. Then came the
CRASH CRASH CRASH
somewhere beyond the chasm lip and down.

The trailer stood alone, Daisy's claws still digging into the tiny tree and holding on for dear life, though the danger was over.

Dad put his hands on top of his head and walked gingerly in the direction of the chasm, not getting too close
to the edge, but peering downward. We all walked up behind him and gathered in a cluster to follow his gaze, but the fog that pooled inside the chasm, while thin, was enough to obscure our view.

“What is it?” I asked, gazing at the emptiness that had almost swallowed us. I had the sense of the hole being enormous, but with the fog it was hard to know for sure.

My father sighed, then nodded, then took a deep breath.

“It's the Grand Canyon,” he said.

That's when Mom let out an inhuman sound, part growl, part string of swear words. She let out a scream and started kicking the dirt, like she was trying to kick the earth right down into the canyon. Then she ran to the trailer and started kicking that, so hard Daisy yelped. She crouched (her long red skirt flapping around her ankles—I don't think I'll ever forget the sight of her like that, like a woman gone crazy), grabbed a handful of dirt, and threw it up into the air toward the Cloud—which was about a hundred yards behind us, hovering low. “Let us go!” she yelled. “Leave us alone! He doesn't deserve you! He's just a little boy! He's a
good
boy! Go find somebody who deserves you!” And then she sat down on the desert floor and lowered her head, as if she'd given up.

She looked over at Sam, who was clearly scared and bewildered, and then pulled him in close to her and murmured to him that it was all right.

“Don't be mad at the smiling man,” Sam said.

Swiveling with him in her arms, Mom turned her back on the sky.

*  *  *

So here we sit. It's nighttime, dark as ink except for the firelight. In Mom's knapsack we've found a spare set of keys to the Winnebago, some used tissues, some gum, the sock full of Grandma's life savings, and the artifacts Grandma gave us: the Delta snack pack, the encyclopedia page, and the postcard. At least the snack pack has some peanuts in it. It's slowly dawning on us all the things we've just lost. (Sam's most depressed about Jim the bear.) We are foodless, Winnebagoless, shelterless, on the edge of the Grand Canyon, at the end of a road that's not really a road. We owe our lives to a sasquatch. And almost everything we had is gone.

This morning I woke up
just before the sun. My eyes popped open and it felt like the world was about to come awake. I've never felt the moments before dawn
vibrate
.

My mom was the only other person up. I could see her, sitting cross-legged at the edge of what I knew even in the dark was the canyon, bundled in her coat, her breath puffing into the air.

She heard me tiptoeing up beside her, and I crouched and sat next to her carefully as she held her hand out to keep me back from the edge.

I snuggled into the crook of her arm, stretching my feet out over the emptiness. We waited.

I've seen sunrises in Cliffden, pink and blue above the
clouds. But here, the first ray of light cut the darkness like a sword.

Pure gold climbed up the sky, sliding along the low scattered clouds, and bit by bit the scene below us crept into the light. The fog had gone. My eyes were blinded by the brightness of the canyon bottom below and how far away it was. It took my breath away.

I'm trying to think of the words for it, but I don't think they exist. I think the planet is more dangerous and beautiful and wild and vast than I ever could have imagined.

I think there is more magic in the world than we know. If not, how could there be the Grand Canyon? If not, how could there be the thousands of buffalo?

After a lot of blaming
each other for getting lost in the first place and arguing about what our plan should be, we've done the thing we most needed to do: We've set Daisy free.

Yesterday afternoon Oliver insisted he be the one to unlock her trailer door. We all watched, with a little fear for our safety, but less than I ever could have imagined a few weeks ago.

I held my breath as I watched Daisy emerge—her trunklike hairy legs stepping down slowly out of the trailer, her claws clasping the sides of the doorway before she moved her paws to shield her eyes from the sun. None of us had ever seen her stand at her full height, but now she did, stretching her back and neck, breathing the
air in deeply. She was at least seven feet tall, towering above Oliver, who backed up slowly, gaping. She blinked down at him, slightly dazed, and suddenly I knew we'd made a big mistake and that she was going to kill us after all. I felt ill with sudden fright. But she only looked around at us, and then at her surroundings, and let out a low, meek whimper.