Stranger Things Happen (16 page)

In the photograph Jenny Rose sits between her mother and father,
in a funny little white boat with a painted red eye. On the back of
the photograph is an enigmatic sentence. There is a smudge that
could be a question mark; the punctuation is
uncertain. 
Wish you were here.

Wish you were here?

1. Travel.

They had been traveling together for three days in Jasper's
rented car when they came to the dark mouth of the tunnel into
Milford Sound. Serena was telling Jasper something very important.
What did Jasper know about Serena after three days? That she didn't
wear underwear. That she was allergic to bees. That she liked to
talk. (She said the strangest things.) That she was from
Pittsburgh. Listening to her voice made him feel less homesick.

Jasper was driving on the wrong side of the road, in a place
where water spun down the wrong way in the drain, on a continent
that was on what he thought of as the upside-down part of the
globe, where they celebrated Christmas on the beach and it snowed
in the summer, which was the winter. A girl from Pittsburgh was a
good thing, like an anchor. Every homesick traveler should have
one.

"That thing you said to me in the bar was so cute," Serena said.
"You know, when we met?" Jasper said nothing. His tooth hurt. He
mimed, to show that it was hurting. "Poor guy," Serena said.

They drove down the Avenue of the Disappearing Mountain through
groves of swordlike cabbage trees. The road circled up between
cracked gray boulders and the little red car went up the road like
a toy pulled on a string.

"There was a guy in Auckland who had been to Milford Sound,"
Serena said. "He told me it was like standing at the edge of the
world. It's funny. I'd met him before, in Tokyo, I think. Once
you've been traveling for a while, you run into the same people
everywhere you go. But I never remember their names. You end up
saying things to each other like, 'Do I know you? Were you the guy
at that restaurant, that one with the huge fish tank, in
Amsterdam?' You end up writing down your addresses on little pieces
of paper for each other, and then you always lose the pieces of
paper, but it's okay, because you'll run into each other again.

"It's not a very big world," she said sadly.

They had been late leaving the youth hostel in Te Anau because
Serena slept past noon, and then she thought she might like a
shower. There was no hot water left, but she spent a long time in
the bathroom anyway, writing in her journal. Jasper hoped she
wasn't writing about him. He consulted his guidebook and then the
hostel manager and still managed to get lost on his way to the
corner dairy to buy aspirin for his tooth, and then lost again on
the way back. In the end, he had to ask a little girl wearing a red
parka and striped black-and-white stockings for directions. When he
came back, Serena was sitting on the bed, writing postcards. Her
clothes and her books and other things were scattered all around
her. She looked completely at home in the hostel room, as if she
had lived here for years, but everything went back into her
backpack, snip-snap, and then the room looked very empty, nothing
but a lonely bed and a heap of sheets.

Before they left Te Anau, they stopped at a pub for lunch.
Jasper couldn't eat, but he paid for Serena's meal. She flirted
with the barman, sticking strands of her hair into her wide red
mouth, and licking them into dark, glossy tips. She told the barman
that she was running away from home, that she was going to travel
all the way around the world and just keep on going, that she liked
New Zealand beer. She didn't say anything at all about Jasper who
was standing at the bar right there beside her, but her hand had
been curled in a comfortable way in his pocket, down under the
counter.

They hadn't seen a single car since they'd left the main road
and headed for the pass into Milford Sound. After enduring ominous
weather reports all the way from Queenstown to Te Anau, he guessed
it wasn't surprising. Alone, Jasper would have headed up the east
coast to Dunedin, rather than making the long drive into the West
and Fiordland, but Serena had a great desire to see Milford Sound
and he was quickly learning that Serena was seldom thwarted in her
great desires.

Two nights ago he had been sitting in bed, watching her sleep.
Dust floated in the cold moon-lighted air and he sneezed. A piece
of his tooth, a back molar, fell into his hand. In the morning when
Serena woke up, she had put it in an airmail envelope, sealed the
envelope, and written "Jasper's tooth" on it.

He had the envelope in his pocket now and every once in a while
his tongue went up to touch the changed, broken place in his mouth.
"I've never met anyone named Jasper before," Serena said, "It's
old-fashioned."

Jasper looked at her. She looked back, smirking, black hair
tucked into her mouth. She was doodling on the back of her own hand
with a fountain pen, making thin jagged lines. It was an expensive
pen. His name was engraved on it.

"So's Serena," he said carefully, around the tooth. "My
grandmother's youngest brother's name was Jasper. He died in a
war."

"I'm not named after anybody," Serena said. "In fact, I've
always hated my name. It makes me sound like a lake or something.
Lake Serena. Lake Placid. I don't even like to swim."

Jasper kept his eyes on the road. "I never learned how to swim,"
he said.

"Then hope that there will always be enough lifeboats," she
said, and closed one eye slowly. He watched her in the rear-view
mirror. It was not an altogether friendly wink. She put the pen
down on the dashboard.

"My grandmother gave me that pen," he said. He'd lent it to
Serena in the bar in Queenstown when they met. She hadn't given it
back yet, although he had bought her a ballpoint at a chemist's the
next day. He'd also bought her a bright red lipstick, which he had
thought was funny for some reason, a bar of chocolate, and a tiny
plastic dinosaur because she said she didn't like flowers. He
wasn't really sure what you were supposed to buy for a girl you met
in the bar, but she had liked the dinosaur.

"I never had a grandmother," Serena said, "Not a single one. Not
a mother, not a brother, not a sister, not a cousin. In fact, there
was a general drought of relatives where I was concerned. A long
dry spell. Although once I brought home a kitten, and my father let
me keep it for a while. That kitten was the only relative who ever
purely loved me. Does your grandmother love you?"

"I guess," Jasper said. "We have the same ears. That's what
everyone says. But I have my father's crummy teeth."

"My father's dead," Serena said, "and so is the kitten."

"I'm sorry," Jasper said, and Serena shrugged. She held her left
hand away from her, examining her drawing. It looked like a map to
Jasper—pointy stick-drawings of mountains, and lines for roads. She
stuck a finger in her mouth and began to smudge the lines away
carefully, one by one. "Your ears aren't so bad," she said.

The radio went on and off in a blur of
static. 
Unseasonable weather … party of trekkers on
the Milford Track … missing for nearly … between Dumpling
and Doughboy Huts … rescue teams … . 
Then
nothing but static. Jasper turned off the radio.

"They might as well give up," Serena said. "They're all dead by
now, buried under an avalanche somewhere. They'll find the bodies
in a couple of weeks when the snow melts." She sounded almost
cheerful.

There were tall drifts of snow on either side of the road. Every
500 meters they passed black-and-yellow signs reading: "Danger!
Avalanche Area: Do Not Stop Vehicle!" Every sign said exactly the
same thing, but Serena read them out loud anyway, in different
voices—Elmer Fudd, Humphrey Bogart, the barman's flirty New Zealand
sing-song.

"Danger, Will Robinson Crusoe!" she said, "Killer robots and
tsunamis from Mars ahead. Also German tourists. Do not stop your
vehicle. Do not roll down your window to feed the lions. Remain
inside your vehicle at all times. Do not pass go. Do not pick up
hitchhikers—oops, too late."

All day the sky had been the color of a blue china plate, flat
and suspended upon the narrow teeth of the mountains. The road
wound precariously between the mountains, and the car threaded the
road. The sun was going down. Just where the road seemed about to
lift over the broken mountain rim, where the sun was sliding down
to meet them, a black pinprick marked the tunnel into Milford
Sound. As Jasper drove, the pinprick became a door and the door
became a mouth that ate up first the road and then the car.

Serena was reading out of Jasper's guidebook. "Started in 1935,"
she said. "Did you know it took twenty years to complete? It's
almost a mile long. Four men died in rock falls during the
blasting. You should always call a
mountain 
Grandmother
, to show respect. Did you know
that? Turn on the headlights —"

They went from the pink-gray of the snowdrifts into sudden dark.
The road went up at a 45-degree angle, the car laboring against the
steep climb. The headlights were sullen and small reflecting off
the greasy black swell of the tunnel walls. The walls were not
smooth; they bulged and pressed against the tarmac road.

In the headlights, the walls ran with condensation. Over the
noise of the car Jasper could hear the plink-plink of fat droplets
falling down the black rock. He touched his tongue to his
tooth.

"Why, Grandmother, what a big dark tunnel you have," he said.
The terrible weight of the mountain above him, the white snow
shrouding the black mountain, the stale wet air in the tunnel, all
pressed down inexorably upon him in the dark. He felt strangely
sad, he felt lost, he felt dizzy. He sank like a slow stone in a
cold well.

"Hello sailor," Serena said. "Welcome to Grandmother's Tunnel of
Love." She put her long white hand on his leg and looked at him
sidelong. He sank down, was pressed down, heavy. His tooth whining
like a dog. He couldn't bear the weight of Serena's black eyes, her
thin shining face. "Are you all right?"

He shook his head. "Claustrophobic," he managed to say. He could
hardly keep his foot on the gas pedal. He saw them spinning through
the dark towards a black wall, a frozen door of ice.

And then he had to stop the car. "You drive," he said, and
fumbled the door open and went stumbling over to the passenger's
door. Serena shifted to the driver's side and he sat down in her
warm seat. It took all his strength to shut the door again.

"Please," he said. "Hurry."

She drove competently, talking at him the whole time. "You never
told me you were claustrophobic. Lucky for you I came along. We
should be out soon."

They came out into night. There was nothing to distinguish one
darkness from the other but dirty snow in the headlights. Yet
Jasper felt the great clinging weight fall away from him. His
tongue went up to touch his broody tooth. "Stop the car," he said.
He threw up kneeling beside the road. When he stood up, his knees
were wet with melted snow. "I think I'm all right again," he
said.

"You drive if you want to," she said. "Your call, pal. It's
about another forty-five minutes to the hotel, and you can't miss
it. There's only one road and one hotel."

Iced pinecones shattered like glass under the wheels of the car.
The road was steeper, circling down this time.

"What does the guidebook say about the hotel?" he asked.

Serena said, "Well, it's an interesting story. This is funny.
When I called to make the reservation, the man said they were
booked solid. It's a private party or something. But I talked
sweet, told him we had come a long way,
a 
really 
long way." She stuck her feet up on the
dashboard and leaned her head on his shoulder. He could see her in
the mirror, looking pleased with herself.

Jasper said, "The hotel is full?" He pulled over to the side of
the road and put his head against the steering wheel. Serena said,
"This is the third time you've stopped the car. I have to pee."

"Is the hotel full or isn't it?" Jasper said.

"Have some chewing gum," Serena said. "Your breath smells like
vomit. Don't worry so much."

He couldn't chew the gum, but he sucked on it. He started the
car again.

"Is your tooth killing you?" she said.

"Yeah," he said. "Revenge of the sugar cereal."

They went another five hundred yards when something ran across
the road. It looked like a small person, scrambling across the road
on all fours. It had a long bony tail. Jasper slammed on the brakes
and swerved. Serena's arm flailed out and walloped him, catching
his jaw precisely upon the broken tooth. He howled. Serena fell
forward, knocking her skull loudly against the dashboard. The car
came to a stop, and after a moment, during which neither of them
was capable of speech, he said, "Are you okay? Did we hit it?"

"What was it?" she said. "A possum? My head hurts. And my
hand."

"It wasn't a possum," he said. "Too big. Maybe a deer."

"There are no deer in New Zealand," she said. "The only native
mammal is the bat. It's just us poor unsuspecting marsupials around
here. Marsupials."

Then she snorted. He was amazed to see that tears were streaming
down her face. She was laughing so hard she couldn't speak. "What's
a marsupial?" he said. "Are you laughing at me? What's so
funny?"

She punched his shoulder. "A possum is a marsupial. It carries
its young in a pouch. It's just the word marsupial. It always
cracks me up. It's like pantyhose or crumhorn."

It didn't seem that funny to him, but he laughed experimentally.
"Marsupial," he said. "Ha."

"Your mouth is bleeding," she said, and snorted again. "Here."
She took a dirty Kleenex out of her bag and licked it. Then she
applied it to his lower lip. "Let me drive."

"Maybe it was a dog," he said. There was nothing on the road
now.

2. Arrival

Milford Sound curls twenty-two kilometers inland, like a dropped
boot. Its heel points north, kicking at the belly of South Island.
The Tasman Sea fills the boot, slippery and cold and dark. Abel
Tasman, the first European to set foot on shore, sailed away in a
hurry again after several of his crew were cooked and eaten. He
left behind him Breaksea, Doubtful and George Sounds, and Milford
Sound, which is now accessible by sea, by air, by foot across the
Milford Track, or along the Milford Road by car, through Homer
Tunnel.