The Last Days of California: A Novel (6 page)

My father pulled onto the shoulder and put the car in park.

“We could get rear-ended here,” my mother said, as the vehicles whooshing by rattled our doors.

“This shoulder’s big,” he said. It
was
a big shoulder, much bigger than the ones in Alabama. Cars passed on them, used them as extended turn lanes. There was a whole protocol to this big shoulder we hadn’t figured out yet.

My mother shoved my head into the backseat like she did with Cole. “Put your seatbelt back on,” she said.

I put it on and looked out the window. I liked to track the drops, but there was just a smear.

Elise stuck her feet in my lap and told me to rub.

“Why? Are they swollen?” I asked, fingering one of her smooth, red toenails. She punched me in the arm so hard I’d probably have a bruise in the morning. I closed my eyes. When I saw the lightning flash through my eyelids, I counted the seconds until thunder.

After a while, the rain slacked and our father pulled back onto the road, but it was the same as before: nothing but brake lights and glimpses of white line.

“It’s hard to believe Noah was the only man worth saving,” Elise said.

“If He thought Noah was the only man worth saving, he was,” our father said.

“I mean, how many people were alive back then? And they were
all
bad? That’s just really hard to believe.”

I pressed my forehead to the glass and banged it softly while Elise argued the scientific evidence against the Flood, which seemed like very solid evidence despite my unwillingness to listen, and then our father argued what was meant by “the world.” He spoke of ancient wood and seven types of mussels and his evidence seemed solid as well. But then Elise got angry—she always got angry first—and he said, “Why don’t we save it for this evening, when we aren’t in the middle of a dee-luge?”

I’d never heard him use this word before and didn’t think he had pronounced it correctly. “I don’t want to save it for this evening,” I said. “I want to watch
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
and order pizza. Can we order pizza?”

Nobody said anything.

“Hello?” I said. It came out sounding horrible.

“If we can find someplace to deliver it,” my mother said.

The road narrowed into one lane for roadwork and my father bumped an orange cone; it wobbled but didn’t go down. My mother put a hand on the back of his neck and told him he was doing a good job, which she did when he was doing a bad job, and I got the spacy out-of-body feeling I got sometimes, like I wasn’t real, like nothing was real so nothing mattered. We could drive off a cliff and I wouldn’t care. And then the feeling was gone and I was back inside my body. I turned my hands palm-up and slowly moved my fingers, thinking,
These are your hands.
You are moving your hands.
Sometimes I found this incredible, but now it just seemed dumb. Of course they were my hands. Of course I could move them.

By the time
the rain stopped, our father’s nerves were shot.

At the next town, he pulled into a motel in the kind of place he was trying to save us from—two motels, two fast-food restaurants, a gas station, and a bar—but all the small towns were like this. The factories had closed and people were left with a few places to regroup on their way to someplace better, except they didn’t go anyplace better. How did they survive? I bet most of them were on disability or welfare.

We stayed in the car while he went into the office, the radio playing Taylor Swift and Garth Brooks. Halfway through Martina McBride, he gave the thumbs-up and we got out. The pavement wasn’t wet. It looked like it hadn’t rained here at all.

“Did we get our own room?” Elise asked.

“Not tonight,” he said.

“I thought you were putting everything on your credit card.” The way Elise figured it, the credit card was free money since my father didn’t believe he’d be around to pay it back. She didn’t understand why we weren’t staying at four-star hotels, sleeping in plush, king-sized beds.

While we gathered our stuff, our mother pointed out that the motel was being renovated: TVs had been wheeled outside; bed frames and mattresses leaned against the walls; carpets rolled and stacked. Our room, however, didn’t look like it had been renovated since the place had been built, a very long time ago.

We set our luggage down and our father went to get ice, first thing, like he always did. I went to the bathroom, which was handicapped—bars everywhere and a sticky mat in the tub so you wouldn’t slip and bust your head, which made me not want to take a shower after all. I propped an elbow on a bar and listened to Elise complain. Only drug addicts wore black t-shirts, she said, and boys who ate foot-long sandwiches and read manga in the lunchroom. Girls like Elise didn’t even sit in the lunchroom—they sat in the little waterless ditch in the courtyard, their legs stretched out so they could get a suntan. They passed around bags of grapes and baby carrots because they found eating in public humiliating, and if they had to do it, they would eat only foods that were clean and neat.

I opened the door and scooted past them, peeled the spread off the bed closest to the bathroom. It was smooth and silky on top but pilled underneath. I peeled back the top sheet and looked for the short black hairs that were often woven into the thread. I didn’t see any so I got in and pulled the sheet up to my chin. It smelled clean, like bleach, and I thought of a show I’d seen about pests people couldn’t get rid of. The family with bedbugs had closed them up in a suitcase and carried them home from a motel just like this one. The bugs were hardy and adapted to survive, moving up and down the stairs on the children’s stuffed animals.

I listened to the sounds of renovation—things falling and being ripped out—while Elise and my mother droned on in the background. My mother spoke in the slow, controlled voice she’d been using a lot lately, a voice that begged us not to give her a hard time.

I got out of bed, opened the door, and stepped outside. The motel was two-story and horseshoe-shaped, the lot nearly full. I didn’t see my father. A worker stepped out of the room next to ours; he was small and covered in a fine white dust.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Putting in carpet,” he said.

I nodded and we shared a moment.

“Do you want new carpet in your room?” he asked.

I tried to think of something to say. Did he think we lived here? “Not today,” I said, and he went back into the room he’d come out of. I closed the door and got back in bed. I wasn’t gathering enough information. I tried to think of what else I could have asked him but couldn’t come up with anything. I’d have had to start at the beginning. What was his name? Where was he born? Did he have a wife? Kids? But all of these things seemed meaningless.

“Fine,” Elise said. “I’ll wear King Jesus tomorrow if you wash it. I’ll wear it for the rest of my life if you want.”

“Jess, get me the detergent out of my carry-on,” my mother said. “Come on, take ’em off.”

We took off our shirts and threw them at her. Then we put on the Old Navy tank tops we liked to sleep in, fast, before our father returned. They were Christmas-themed—mine was red with white snowflakes and hers was white with red candy canes. For some reason, we only thought to buy them at Christmas.

“I wish you’d just let me stay home,” Elise said. “We’re working on a new routine and I’m going to be behind.” She sat at my feet and fell between my legs. I kicked and scooted over and she came clambering up the bed and stuck her face in mine.

“We’re not going back,” I said, as dramatically as possible.

She put her finger up my nostril.

“Stop molesting me,” I said, throwing the covers over my head.

I didn’t want to go to heaven if Elise wasn’t going to be there. I’d have to take my chances on earth. We’d make our way home and find Cole, or he’d find us, and then we’d locate the key to the gun case and catalogue the contents of the pantry before planting a garden in the wide, flat backyard, the place where we had always imagined a pool. She’d give birth to a healthy baby girl, or maybe a boy—our own boy. And I’d work hard all day and at night I’d be so tired it wouldn’t occur to me to sleep badly. But then I thought about every postapocalyptic movie I’d ever seen and how we wouldn’t be able to stay there because men would want our guns and our food. They’d want us to have their babies in order to repopulate the world, all of the pretense of love gone.

“Forget it,” Elise
said, sitting up abruptly. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m not wearing it again until Saturday, you can tell Dad that.”

“Tell Dad what?” our father asked, opening the door. “You’re wearing those shirts, they cost me twenty dollars.”

“Each?” I said.

“That’s right, each. There’s only one ice maker working in this entire motel. This wouldn’t happen at a Days Inn.” He set the bucket on the table. He was partial to Days Inns. He had brand loyalty: Colgate, Maxwell House, Ivory soap.

“You’re the one who stopped here,” Elise said.

“I don’t like Days Inns. I always find little nests of hair in the bathroom,” I said. “It’s like they don’t even pretend to clean it.”

“But the ice makers work,” he said. He took off his glasses and held the bridge of his nose. Then he opened his eyes and looked blindly around the room. I hardly ever saw him without his glasses—he looked like someone who had been asleep for a long time and had just woken up.

Our mother squeezed the water out of our shirts while he chased a fly around the room with a newspaper. Then she went to the bathroom and did her business, silence punctuated by long airy farts, as our father continued to pursue the fly. Elise and I watched him with the blankest faces we could muster. When our mother came out, she washed her hands and made their drinks—a Sprite for herself and a whiskey for our father. She tried to hand the cup to him, but he was busy taking everything out of his suitcase: stacks of no-iron shirts, bundles of socks, a pile of tighty-whities.

In the doorway, they turned to us.

“We’ll be at the pool,” our mother said. Our father took a sip of his drink and made a face like it was too strong before closing the door.

“Finally,” Elise said. “Good Lord.” She rocked back and forth so the headboard knocked against the wall.

I searched for something to listen to on my iPod, scrolled through each of my playlists. Before leaving Montgomery, I’d made a
Heaven
mix and Elise had made an
End of the World
mix, but I was already tired of the songs I’d chosen. I decided on a mix labeled
Jogging
, though I never jogged. It hurt my knees.

Elise got out of bed and turned the air conditioner on high, checked the closet for extra pillows. She found one and launched it at my head.

“I can’t believe they left the liquor. Is this some kind of test?”

“What?” I asked, taking out an earbud.

“Maker’s Mark,” she said, “whiskey.” She took the bottle out of our mother’s carry-on and held it up to the light like she might find something floating.

“Put it back.”

“What?”

“You shouldn’t drink,” I said.

“I’ll put some water in it and they’ll never know.”

“That’s not why,” I said. I’d found the First Response box in a trash can in Biloxi, faceup, like she’d wanted me to find it. That day, our father had stopped driving after a couple of hours and we’d spent the afternoon feeding the seagulls on the beach; they’d taken the chips right out of our hands. When I confronted her, she set the plastic stick on the table—the lines so brightly pink they glowed. Then she called Pizza Hut and paid for a half-veggie-half-sausage with her own money. I hadn’t asked any questions, how far along she was or if she might want to keep it. We ate the entire pizza while watching
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
, the old one with Gene Wilder.

“Life occurs at conception,” I said.

“Do you just repeat everything people tell you?”

“I’ve thought about it plenty. And it doesn’t matter when the baby becomes a baby. If you let it grow long enough, it’s a baby. This debate about when,
exactly,
it becomes a baby is stupid.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

“And you just repeat everything people tell you, too. Only it’s the opposite thing I repeat.” I thought I’d made a good point, which she confirmed by not saying anything. But maybe she wouldn’t have to go through with it—she wouldn’t have to have the baby or kill it—because we’d be saved. And after we were saved, the great storms and fires would descend upon the earth and then the earth would explode, and after it had exploded, it would be sucked up by a black hole followed by a quiet that was so quiet it would blow your eardrums out.

I wanted to believe we were special. I wanted to believe all of it—heaven and happiness and joy unlike anything I’d ever known.

“Okay,” she said. “Life occurs at conception and we’re going to heaven and it’s going to be fucking awesome.”

“You have to believe it.”

“I wish you’d stop telling me what I have to believe. I’ve never been to church once—not once—and felt the presence of God, or anything else. So what exactly do you want me to believe in?” She handed me a cup and sat on our parents’ bed.

“I don’t want this,” I said.

“So don’t drink it. Answer me, what should I believe in?”

“It’s about faith. You have to have faith,” I said, realizing it was my own faith that was the issue. Elise had already decided God didn’t exist and she was okay with it. I wanted to go back to the time when I hadn’t thought about whether or not I believed, when I’d gone to church and Sunday school and passed out tracts and it never occurred to me to question any of it. Now everything was in question, all at once, and it mattered.

“What about you?” she said. “Do you feel the presence of God when you’re in church, or do you just stare at peoples’ asses and try not to yell curse words at the top of your lungs? Because that’s what I do. Or I play hangman with you. I like those little sushi pencils.”

I stuck my tongue in the cup—whiskey on ice, undrinkable. I didn’t say anything, but she kept looking at me, waiting. “I count colors,” I said. “How many people are wearing purple or yellow or green?”