The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (36 page)

"Where are you, In?"

"I don't even know. Santa Barbara? I'm sitting
at this boat dock. I'm looking at cars in the parking lot. Jaguar, Jaguar,
Porsche, Lexus, Lexus, BMW. I'm sorry. I've been so stupid."

"Honey. What's going on?"

"I was on this yacht." I sniff. I take a
breath. I feel like I'm in pieces and parts. I feel like a Picasso. "At a party.
I hated it. Like everything that was supposed to be beautiful was ugly. So I
just got off. I just got off because I couldn't stand it anymore. And now, here
I am. I'm sorry I woke you guys. But I don't have a car, and I'm not sure where
I am and it's late. I broke my promise. It was
so easy
to break,
Dad."

"I know, In."

"I just got sucked right up."

"I'm just going to call you a taxi,
okay?"

"I haven't even been gone a week," I
say.

"Long enough to find out what you needed to
know," Dad says.

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"Tell Jennifer I'm sorry to wake her. She'll
probably be pissed."

"In, don't worry about it. She's not even here.
Let's just worry about you."

"What do you mean, she isn't there?"

"This isn't the time to talk about it, okay?
Let's try to figure out where you are."

"Oh my God. She left. She left, didn't she? Are
you all right?" My heart is still. It holds its breath.

"Absolutely. It's necessary. But now what's
really necessary is calling you a taxi."

"It's kind of a long way for a taxi," I
say.

"It doesn't matter. What do you see where you
are?"

"This big-ass camper. It's got this license
plate that says 'Captain Ed.' A bumper sticker--'Home of the Big Redwoods.'
Hey--it's a Washington State plate."

"Honey, okay. Do you see a sign of any
kind?"

"Bel Harbor Marina," I say.

"Perfect. In? I'm going to find out who to call
and have them come, okay?"

"Okay. And then I want to come home," I say.
"I'll call you right back."

I close my cell phone. I really do love this
little phone. It is so helpful, like a tiny silver friend.

It is late when I get back to Allen's house,
but Melanie and Allen aren't home yet. I know I should stay the night and go to
the airport the next morning but I don't want to wait. I don't want to lay my
head there one more night. Dad and I make a plan. I write a note to
Mel.

275

Thanks for everything, but this is not my
place.

I look in the fridge for some snacks to bring,
but there is nothing but bottled water. A huge beefsteak tomato sits on a shelf,
though, and at the last moment, I go back for it, place the tomato on my note to
hold it down. Michelangelo would have approved.

The Porsche vrooms to life. I let my hair whip
around my face. I let the giddiness of relief, of speaking my own truth, fill
me. It's the orange soda happy feeling you get when things are going right, or
when you're finally going to make them right again.

All I have to do is get on I-5 and go north.
Straight north, until I get there. If Captain Ed could do it, so could I. I take
Dad's advice and when fatigue strikes, I get off at the first city I find. I
turn in to the Holiday Inn off the interstate, in Redding, California. Nothing
goes wrong at Holiday Inns. This is no creepy motel of sandy-feeling sheets and
clingy, molesting shower curtains; this is a Holiday Inn where kids could swim
in a pool and where there is always a place right next door that serves
breakfast twenty-four hours.

It is very late, but I can't sleep. I think
about Dad and Jennifer. About Mom and Severin and Bex and Jane and the
Irregulars and Trevor. All my people. I don't want to call home this late, and
so I put the TV on for company. Once I eliminate home shopping channels and
crime shows, I'm stuck watching bird migration. Someone has stolen the phone
book and Bible (so much for nothing going wrong at Holiday Inns), and the hotel
service pamphlet takes me only two seconds to flip through. Finally, I hunt
around in my bag for Dad's Emerson book that I brought along. I open to the page
he folded down, the essay "Self-Reliance." It seems at

276

first a sure cure for my insomnia. A long-dead
guy talking long-dead-guy talk, fleur-de-lis language, words as curved and
ancient and small as old-lady embroidery.

But then I start to listen to him. This once
alive, real man talking. His rhythms are soothing and draw me in; he is almost
religious without all the God part. And if I cut out all the curlicue words,
ignore the thou's and thee's, I see that the man had stuff to say. About how we
should trust ourselves. About how nature and the good and right stuff inside is
our real fortune. We are swayed too much, he said, by the wrong things, by what
each other has, not what each other is. We must be nonconformists, he wrote. We
must think for ourselves, because the only sacred thing is the integrity of our
own minds.
Insist on yourself,
he said.

"Insist on yourself," I say. "You read it," Dad
says. "Yeah."

"I can't believe you read it."

"Honestly? Me either. I actually liked
it."

"I knew you could never be a conformist for
long, In. You promised you'd call if you needed anything last night, so I'm
assuming all went well," Dad says.

"I just went north, like you said. Are
you
all right?"

"I'm fine. I don't want you to worry. It's what
I need. The truth isn't the problem, In, just what you have to do to face it.
Where are you?"

"I'm here in a Josie's Pancake House, pouring
blueberry syrup over the biggest stack of pancakes you've ever seen in your
life." I hold the phone in the crick of my shoulder, cut a triangle of
pancakes.

277

"Yum," Dad says.

"Bacon, too," I say.

"What next?" Dad says.

"I-5 north. Stay straight until I get
home."

"Grandpa Sam?" Dad says. That was Dad's own
father. He died before I was born. "He told me to see the world. 'Home is not
the center of the world,' he said. It wasn't bad advice, not entirely. I mean,
how do you get a sense of something without its comparison? But we
forget--anyplace can be the center, depending on how you turn the globe. Who's
there, who's not there, that's what makes a place worth staying in. That's what
makes it ours."

I chew away. Swallow. "So, there's no place
like home, click my heels three times?" I say.

"Not necessarily. But sometimes, yes.
Often."

I think about this. I swirl the tines of my
fork in the thickness of the syrup. "I've got some making up to do to the people
there," I say. "To all the people I love."

"Indigo?"

"Yeah?"

"So do I," Dad says.

I drive, and drive and drive. I have a lot of
time to think. About what I really want, about the things that mean something to
me. That sounds so simple, and yet it isn't simple. Sometimes, stopping to think
is hard work. The sun is out the whole way. It is the kind of day where dogs'
heads stick out from car windows. All types of heads--Doberman heads and cocker
spaniel heads and mixed-up-dog-family heads. But they are all out, ears
flapping, noses up, filled with the joy of the journey.

278

I have two milk shakes and one cheeseburger on
the way, eating with one hand and driving with the other, because I'm in too
much of a hurry to stop. I speed through southern Oregon, its farmland middle,
then arrive in Portland. My heart lifts when I make it over the state line into
Washington.
Stay straight on
I-5
into Seattle,
my Dad said, and
that's what I do, ignoring my numb ass and legs that feel permanently crunched
into their new I shape.

I am starving again when I arrive in Seattle; I
want to go straight home, but my stomach aches with hunger and so I stop for
something before I cross the floating bridge to go back home to Nine Mile Falls.
I stop at the Frankfurter right on Pier 54 on the waterfront, and have a huge
hot dog with sauerkraut, just the way I like it. Then I get back into the
Porsche and head through Pioneer Square.

It stuns me to think how easily I could have
missed it. My eyes are humming with fatigue, and the city traffic and one-way
streets are distracting, as is the effort required in trying to find the signs
for the freeway entrance. But I don't miss it. I don't miss
him.
I am
sitting at a red light and look over and there he is. I swear to God, this is
what I see--a homeless man, sitting on one of the benches under the glass
pergola of Pioneer Square. His head is down, his hair a dirty tangle. This is
not an uncommon sight, not at all, because a lot of homeless people hang out
here on these benches, under this awning of glass squares. But what is unusual,
what shocks me, what stops me so thoroughly that the car behind me honks when
the light turns green, is what he is wearing. A T-shirt, but over that, a vest.
A vest with Mr. Moore's face on it, a vest from the party, happy 55, chief !
written underneath his image.

279

I think I am perhaps hallucinating. I think the
sun and wind and endless miles are messing with my head. I drive around the
block again, to be sure. My heart is beating very fast, with the urgency of
importance. They had said, hadn't they, that they give the vests to the needy? I
drive past slowly, and if I am hallucinating, I am hallucinating still, because
yes, there it is. There is Mr. Moore's face, smiling from the right breast
pocket of the homeless man's new vest.

I want to laugh, or I want to cry, I don't know
which. But this is some sort of sign, isn't it? Okay, I don't have a fucking
clue what the sign means, but I have no doubt that it is one. I don't know what
to do. My hands are shaking. I feel a bit crazy. I know I have to pull over, get
my thoughts together. I might be dangerous, driving like this. I make a few
turns, too many random turns. I stop on a street in the shadow of the Greek
church, with its golden soft-serve-ice-cream top. The Qwik Stop grocery
store-gas station is on the corner. I find my cell phone.

"Dad?"

"Is everything all right?" He's beginning to
sound like Mom in the way he answers the phone lately.

"I want to spend it," I say. "All of
it."

"Indigo, you know, I don't think that's the
best idea ..."

"No. I don't mean just go spend it.... I mean,
I want to put it places. I was thinking, you know, that maybe what's ugly, maybe
it's the imbalances. Like money,
power,
is about imbalances, but all the
good things are about balance."

"The good things ..."

"Love is about balance, and even doing the
right thing is about balance, right? And nature ..."

"Yes."

280

"And we fuck things up when we let them get out
of balance."

"I think that's very true," Dad
says.

I sit by the mini-mart and I make a plan. I
make a plan with Dad, until my phone battery starts to run out. I write the plan
on a pink slip of paper that was in the glove compartment, with a pen from my
bag.

"And what about you?" I ask. "What can I give
you?"

He doesn't even stop to think about this. "More
time with you guys. Another chance," he says.

"Done," I say.

That Emerson--he was pretty funny, too.
What
is a weed?
he said. A
plant whose virtues have not yet been
discovered.
I think about this as I approach our house. There is our lawn,
turning yellow from summer, splotched with the thick scratchy leaves of
dandelions, bursts of bright yellow. Sometimes, what is beautiful is ugly, and
what is supposed to be ugly is beautiful.

Mom's car is in the driveway, still looking odd
and off kilter with its three large tires and one small, round spare. Ron the
Buddha smiles serenely at me as I come up the walk. "Peace, Ron," I say.
Needlessly--he is always peaceful. I open the front door, causing Freud to leap
off the sofa and jet outside. Right away I notice that the television is
missing. There are two gaping holes where the bolts had been.

"Severin?" Mom calls from the kitchen. "Are you
home? Can you help me? I'm stuck! I got my watch stuck ..."

"It's me," I call.

"Indigo! Indigo? Is that you? Oh my
God."

"It's me."

"Oh my God, come here! You're home!"

281

I go into the kitchen. Mom is leaning over the
kitchen sink, her hand thrust down the garbage disposal. "It
is
you! I'm
going to cry. Oh, In. You're home!" Mom's face scrunches up, and her eyes fill.
"You have no idea ..."

"I missed you, Mom."

"Oh, In. I was so worried."

"Let me help you," I say. "What happened to
you?"

She wipes the tears with her free hand. "I have
never been so glad to see someone in my entire life. Oh, my girl. The house key
... It slid down the garbage disposal, and then when I went to get it, my
watchband got stuck around one of these blades, and ... Who cares!" she cries.
"You're home!"