The Last Days of California: A Novel (5 page)

Cole had had a stroke on New Year’s Day and I’d taught him to walk again, fashioning a harness out of an old dress. I’d slept with him on the kitchen floor at night when he’d been unable to control his bladder, while the rest of them slept comfortably in their beds. It was the best thing I’d ever done and I reminded them of it constantly. Cole was fine now, though he ran crooked and couldn’t catch squirrels anymore. I couldn’t imagine anyplace without him, without the small animals he loved to chase. That was my problem—I had no imagination—I couldn’t imagine anything other than what I knew. The way time functioned, for example. Minutes. Waiting. How long a day could be. My biggest fear was that things would go on forever and there would never be any end. The idea of forever terrified me, even if we were in heaven and everything was great there. Surely, it would have to come to an end at some point. There would have to be something else. When I wanted to scare myself, I’d lay in bed and think
forever and ever and ever and ever and ever
until I thought I might go crazy.

Our father said heaven was going to be perfect in a way we couldn’t even begin to comprehend because we’d never known anything like it. We’d be young and healthy and surrounded by our loved ones. There would be no fear and no hate and no war, happiness and pleasure like we’d never known. I was already young and healthy and surrounded by my loved ones and it didn’t seem so great. And I wondered how good happiness and pleasure could be without their opposites to compare them to. If everyone was beautiful, what would beauty even mean? What would I have to strive for?

“What’s the caravan up to?” I asked.

“Eating at every food court in every mall in central Florida,” Elise said, looking at her phone. “Greta’s a big Sbarro fan.”

“After they eat at Sbarro, I bet they cruise up and down the main drag and stop at Sonic for cherry limeades.”

“Swap the limeades for Oreo Blasts and you’d be right,” she said. Then she started laughing.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“What’s so funny?”

“I just remembered something,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said, angrily. I hated when she wouldn’t tell me what she was laughing about; it was like she did it to remind me that my life wasn’t as amusing as hers.

We passed fields of cows, tails swinging, standing in the sun. They had their heads down, eating grass. Just eating grass all day long. I fingered my gold-plated ring on my gold-plated chain. The ring said
PURITY
on the outside; on the inside it had my initials:
JEM
. It was cheap and ugly and Elise had the same one hanging from her own chain. We’d gone to a purity ball, made pledges. We’d worn white dresses, and our father had gotten down on one knee in a school gymnasium to slip the rings on our fingers: first Elise, then me. This had been four years ago, before I’d even gotten my period. Before we’d known better, Elise said, but we’d worn them so long they were a part of us. I felt naked when I took it off.

My memories of that night were good ones. There had been wedding cake and steak and a hot dip made with crabmeat. I befriended a young black girl, a pretty girl with gray eyes. I had never known a black girl before. The school we went to was all-white. The neighborhood we lived in was all-white. I only saw black people at the mall, or driving around in their cars.

Our father scanned
radio stations and stopped at a program called
Revive Our Hearts
, the woman talking about Noah and the end times. The end times seemed to be all that was left to talk about. The woman said if you read the Old Testament, you would see that it had been necessary for God to wipe out the world in a catastrophic flood and it was necessary for Him to wipe it out again.

“The Flood couldn’t have been worldwide—there isn’t enough water in the oceans,” Elise said. “It would have taken five times the water in the oceans.”

Our father wasn’t taking the bait. He turned the radio off and pumped the gas, the car lurching and coasting, lurching and coasting. He did this when he was agitated or wanted to annoy us. If we said something, it would go on longer, but I usually said something anyway to point out what an asshole he was. This time I kept my mouth shut. It was probably making Elise nauseous.

I counted down the miles to the next town—22, 15, 9, 6, 4, 2—and then we were cruising into a little nothing town.

In front of a boarded-up convenience store, a fat woman manned a table full of colorful junk. We passed a man selling puppies out of a cardboard box, a young girl holding one up to get a look at its eyes. We passed a Subway, a tiny post office, and a tinier library. I thought about all these people living in all these towns and how I’d never know them, and something about it seemed sad and strange—maybe it was just that I’d never thought of them before, that they had never occurred to me at all.

“I feel sick,” Elise said. “Can I sit up front?”

“Can we change at the next stop?” our father said.

“No, I need to sit up front
now
.”

He pulled into a McDonald’s and Elise and our mother swapped. Then we decided we might as well get ice cream.

We were all in a better mood after that.

“Hi,” I said, looking over at my mother, a chocolate shake wedged between my thighs. She looked at me and smiled, her eyes blinking behind the blue lenses. She took my hand and I let her hold it a minute before pulling away.

I picked up my milkshake and turned to the window. At some point, my feelings for my parents had changed. I mostly felt nothing and couldn’t think of anything to say to them, but it was periodically broken by a brief, crushing feeling, a love so intense that there was nothing to do but reject it altogether.

We stopped for
an early supper at a barbeque restaurant/gas station. Most of the gas stations were attached to something now. In Louisiana, we’d stopped at one attached to a tanning salon and Elise had tanned, cooking the baby while the rest of us ate shrimp po boys.

A handsome soldier held the door, called Elise and me “ma’am.”

“Thank you, sir,” Elise said, nodding at him.

“Thanks,” I said, so he would look at me and see that I was separate. He touched my shoulder for the briefest of seconds.
I love you
, I thought, and it felt like the truth.

The place was full of army men in their army hats and pants, stiff long-sleeved shirts. The material looked thick and uncomfortable, but they somehow managed to look fresh. We ordered at the front, but there wasn’t a four-top available, so my parents sat at one two-top and we sat at another, far enough away that we could pretend we were alone. I watched Elise pull the ponytail holder from her hair and comb it out with her fingers. She moved her head from side to side to gather all the stray pieces before putting it up again. The process took a long time, a minute at least. I wanted to talk about the Japanese girl and the dead man, but Elise would accuse me of dwelling on the negative. Debbie Downer, she liked to call me.

Her phone dinged. She read the message and smiled as she typed her response. As soon as she set it down, it dinged again. I searched the room and located the handsome soldier. He was by far the best-looking soldier in the room, tall and tan and broad-shouldered. He could pick me up, no problem.

“Dan’s so cute,” she said, showing me the picture he’d sent her. He was giving the camera an exaggerated sad face—bottom lip turned out, head tilted—so he must have done something wrong. “Don’t you think he’s cute?”

“I guess. His eyes are kind of bloodshot.” I thought of the two of them watching TV together on the couch, how they created a space in which no one was welcome. I didn’t like Dan. He was always turning words around, calling Facebook “the book of faces” and stuff like that. Elise looked out the window and I stared at the delicate veins on her temple, blue and winding like rivers on a map. They were the only thing about her that wasn’t pretty.

Our father brought our food on plastic plates with little dividers. “Which is which?”

“Mine’s the one without pork,” Elise said.

He set them down, giving her the pork plate, and bowed his head.

“We can pray by ourselves, Dad,” she said. She glanced up at him and went back to her phone. He probably hated having daughters—we didn’t fish or hunt and we were having sex with boys, or would eventually have sex with them. I kicked her under the table and my father put his hand on my back. It went up and down a few times and he walked back to his table.

“You’re a jerk,” I said. I swapped our plates and picked up a greasy bottle of barbeque sauce, squeezed some onto a clean spot. “I’m going to throw your phone across the room.”

“Just leave me alone for a minute,” she said. “I haven’t talked to Dan in days.”

“More like twelve hours.” I bowed my head and then looked to see if she was following my lead; she wasn’t. I took a bite of potato salad. The tallest, most handsome army man would not be swayed by Elise’s beauty. He would brush my hair and be careful untangling the knots. He’d hoist me onto his shoulders at parades so I could catch all the beads.

I got out my phone and looked at it—no one ever texted me. I thought about texting Shannon, but there was nothing to say, so I turned the sound off so I wouldn’t have to hear it not ringing and beeping. Shannon was my best friend, though she complained constantly and blamed others for everything. She’d tell me about all of the things she did for people and how they took advantage, insisting I wasn’t one of these takers, that I was one of the few exceptions, but this conversation typically occurred after I’d borrowed her clothes or spent the night at her house two weekends in a row. I took another bite of potato salad and shook some salt onto the pile. I took another bite and another until it was gone and moved onto the baked beans. When the beans were done, I started in on my sandwich. I was starving and knew it wasn’t food I wanted, but it had somehow become my focus.

“I wonder if these beans were cooked with bacon,” Elise said, and her phone dinged again.

“The other day I was eating egg-drop soup and there were all these tiny little bits of ham in it,” I said. “You’re probably eating meat all the time and don’t even know it. Seaweed salad, too—there’s fish in it. ‘Contains fish,’ it says on the package, when you buy it at the grocery store.”

She ignored me and continued typing.

“Your texting and Googling are distracting me from the purpose of this trip,” I said. “I don’t even know how you live in the world.” I had heard someone say this once—
I don’t even know how you live in the world
. I liked the way it sounded. I took another bite of my sandwich. A piece of pork fell in my lap, barely missing the napkin.

She set her phone down. “You know why we’re really here, don’t you?”

“No—why are we
really
here?”

“Because Dad lost his job again,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

“No, really, I don’t, or I’d tell you,” she said.

“I thought it was going fine.”

“We always think that,” she said. “He always makes us think that.”

We were quiet for a minute. “At least mom has a job,” I said. “She’ll never get fired.”

“Sure, mom has a job.”

Our mother taught third grade, had taught third grade when I was in third grade, the year my life had taken a bad turn. All of a sudden, you were either popular or unpopular, and boys liked you or they didn’t, a decision they made as a group. Before this, there had just been the kids we’d all stayed away from: the masturbators and scissor thieves and glue eaters, anyone who brought a separate container of mayonnaise in their lunch bag.

She sighed and balled up her napkin on her plate. She was like girls on TV—all they did was spin the spaghetti round and round their forks. I looked at my legs pressed against the yellow plastic, pale and wide. I placed a hand on one thigh and imagined slicing the fat away, how thin I would want them if I could just cut it off. They wouldn’t have to be as skinny as Elise’s.

“We shouldn’t judge him,” I said.

“Why not?”

My army man stood to leave—smiling and shaking hands. He grabbed a stocky guy by the elbow as he shook, the other hand clapping the guy’s back.

“He had a hard life,” I said. “We didn’t have to live his life.”

“So what?” she said.

“So we should have some compassion.”

“Stop,” she said.

“
You
stop.” I took my plate to the trashcan and then went to the bathroom, which was cowboy-themed, the toilet paper unspooling from a piece of twine. When I came out, a man was standing there. He asked me if the bathroom was clean and in proper working order and I said that it was, and this pleased him. After that I wandered around the store, weaving in and out of aisles considering things I didn’t want—motor oil and coffee filters and saltines, packages of Imodium A-D and Motrin. My army man was gone forever. I’d never sit on his shoulders at a parade, high up, safe from everyone and everything.

Soon after we
got back on the road, the sky turned green and the lightning began, splitting the sky in half. I hadn’t seen lightning like that in a long time, maybe ever, though I’d once seen a tornado spinning off in the distance when my father and I went to pick up Elise from cheerleading practice. As soon as the funnel was gone, it was like something out of a dream.

The wind blew the car from side to side. It blew trash out of the beds of pickups, bags and boxes my father weaved around in case there was anything inside them. A few fat drops hit the windshield, and then there was the quiet moment while we waited for the downpour to begin.

The rain came all at once, battering the car. Our father slowed to a crawl and put on his hazards as eighteen-wheelers hurtled past. The windows fogged and he yelled at our mother to fix them so she fiddled with the temperature control: blasts of hot air followed by blasts of cold. I took off my seatbelt and scooted forward, my head between their shoulders—I couldn’t make out anything except the brake lights of the car in front of us and the occasional glimpse of white line.