It Looked Different on the Model (18 page)

Roy smiled. “Well, there might be a plant fairy that lives up the hill somewhere and always has a spade in her back pocket, ready to do good deeds. But I’m not saying if I know for sure or not.”

“Has anybody who lives at your house been to Home Depot lately?” I asked Roy, trying to see him around my funnel cake.

He just grinned.

“Maybe, maybe not,” he said cryptically, but I knew in that smile that somewhere up the hill, in the form of a spade and a tarp, the good had outdone the bad.

“N
icholas, run!
Run
!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, trying to shout over the deafening crash of the surf hitting the beach as I watched him about to get swallowed by a huge wave.

As evidenced by my screaming on the beach like a demon, our vacation with my nephew had not turned out quite as planned. My husband and I were terrible, terrible substitute parents. When I originally had the idea of bringing Nick up to visit us for a couple of days before my sister and the rest of her family flew up, I had nothing but charming and delightful reveries in my head, and now it was looking like the reality couldn’t be laughably further from those trite little dreams.

It’s true: Many years ago I assessed the impact of propagating my family’s genome even further and quickly withdrew my nomination for motherhood in the general best interest of the world, because I knew I could never guarantee that the hand reaching out and grabbing your leg from the middle of a department store clothing rack wouldn’t belong to my child and I get very angry if someone else has helped themselves to my snack food. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t have a wonderful time with my nephew as we took him to the redwoods to have
the vacation of a lifetime. He was almost twelve, and the window of him still wanting to be in the same room with us was about to quickly close; soon, I knew, he would communicate solely through grunts as he discovered, layer by layer, how uncool we were. He had a bag of Chex Mix with his name labeled on it and I had mine, and as long as our hands stayed in the respective bags, everything was fine for the time being. We packed the car up and headed south to the California border, but not before Nick asked if we could stop at the bookstore so he could read a book during the car ride, since he had already finished the one he brought. I beamed with pride.

We stocked up on reading material for all of us, and five hours later the trees got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until we reached a sign that informed us that we had, indeed, reached our destination.

If you’ve never been to the redwoods, all I can say is that it really has to be one of the most spectacular places on earth; it’s majestic, amazing—every superlative fits. Tree trunks as big as houses, sunlight streaming through branches, and the subtle quiet and absolute stillness blend as wisps of fog rise and roll together to form a place unlike any I’ve ever been to before.

“Isn’t this great, Nick?” I said as we walked on a path deeper into the forest, where everything became bigger and quieter. I expected that at any moment my nephew would begin jumping up and down from excitement as he cried out in joy, “This is the best place I’ve ever been! Thank you, Aunt Laurie! I love these trees! They are huge! I now have changed my mind and no longer want to be a football player; I want to be a dendrologist, which is a scientist who studies trees, and devote my life to preserving and studying these magnificent, beautiful works of nature! You have changed my life, Aunt Laurie, you have changed my life!”

“This is pretty cool,” my husband said as he gently shook Nick by the shoulders from behind.

“Yeah, it’s okay,” he said.

“It’s
okay
?” I said, laughing at Nick’s coolness toward it all. “These are the biggest trees in the world. Some of them are thousands of years old.”

“The knight in my book is a thousand years old, and he just cast a spell so he can escape a ship he’s being held captive on by a king who used to be good but is now a warlord, so I’d like to see what happens with that, you know,” he replied as he shrugged, hands in his pockets.

“Oh” was the only thing I could think of to say.

“You know, they filmed part of
Return of the Jedi
here,” my husband added.

“That was before I was born,” Nick said simply. “And my book is sort of more interesting.”

We have three days here, we’ve been in the car all day, and he’s tired, I told myself. Give the kid a break. Let him read his book. Who cares if you just drove eight hours to get here and it’s one of the most amazing things you’ve ever seen? Who cares if he’s not into it right now? We have a ton of other things planned: We’re taking a gondola ride up the side of a mountain, we’re going to the beach, we’re going to drive through the Avenue of the Giants, we’re going to the Sea Lion Caves, and we are going to have fun.

We are going to have fun.

We are going to have fun.

We are going to have fun.

And we did. Nick had fun reading in the backseat of the car as we drove the rest of the way to the cabin we were staying at, I had fun while I ate the rest of my Chex Mix, and my husband had fun thinking to himself.

When we got to the cabin, Nick decided to change into his pajamas and rifled through the backpack my sister had gotten ready for him.

“Aunt Laurie?” he asked after a couple of minutes. “Do you have an extra pair of pajamas? Mom forgot mine.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Well, how about you just sleep in the T-shirt you’re wearing? Would you be okay sleeping in that?”

“Not really,” he said honestly. “Grandma says only hoboes sleep in dirty clothes. Mom forgot my shirts, too. I only have this shirt and three pairs of shorts.”

I was shocked. While I wouldn’t be surprised if she forgot to pack a toothbrush or comb, it was rather unlike my sister to forget to pack something like clothes. Any of them. While Nick was well stocked on socks and underwear, everything else was missing.

“Are you sure?” I asked my nephew. “You checked everywhere?”

“Yep,” he said, nodding.

“Where did she think we were going that you wouldn’t need shirts?” I asked aloud. “Alabama?”

I finally talked him into sleeping in the shirt he was wearing—but not before much, much arm-twisting and the agreement that we would get him some new clothes the next day, although I had no idea where. We were almost in the middle of nowhere, and the only thing separating us from actual nowhere was a small grocery store across the street that, while offering live bait and bags of microwave pork rinds, thankfully did not offer apparel of any sort.

Being that the cabin had one bedroom and a small futon in the living room, I gave Nick the choice of whether he wanted to sleep on the futon by himself or bunk with me in the bedroom, and he chose the latter. Even though he was eleven, sleeping in
a strange place without either of his parents might be a little bit unnerving, I realized, so I decided not to make a big deal out of it. I was, however, touched that I got to hang on to the last moments of Nick’s kiddom, of his not wanting to be quite so independent, and I was happy that those moments weren’t all gone, not just yet. We got ready for bed, Nick brushed his teeth, I got my sleep mask and earplugs out, and we all called out good night to one another.

Nicholas got under the covers, snuggled up to the pillow, and I was going to turn the TV off, but I couldn’t find the remote control.

“Where’s the remote?” I asked him.

“I have it,” he said, looking at me. “I need the TV on to fall asleep.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, not finding any joy in that news. “Don’t you want to just give it a shot?”

He shrugged. “Not really,” he replied. “That’s why I picked this room with the TV. Because, you know, I thought the futon looked fun.”

“Does it have to be ESPN?” I asked. “Could we at least put it on Bravo?”

“I don’t watch any shows on Bravo. It’s a lady channel,” he said decidedly, and without much of a response, I caved.

Remarkably, though, I fell asleep pretty quickly, because the next thing I remember was that someone with Chex Mix breath was shaking me.

“Aunt Laurie,” I heard. “Aunt Laurie.”

I jolted awake and my eyes flew open immediately.

“What’s the matter?” I said, ripping my face mask off and plucking out my earplugs as a shot of adrenaline surged through my system. “What happened?”

Nicholas slowly and cautiously pointed to the ceiling. “I saw a spider,” he whispered.

“Are you sure?” I whispered back wearily, my heart still pounding in my throat. “I bet it was just a shadow, honey. Or a fly. I bet it was a fly.”

He shook his head. “I saw lots of legs,” he confirmed. “Eight. I counted them.”

“This is what happens when you keep the TV on,” I whispered back as I got out of bed and turned the light on. “When it’s dark you don’t know that spiders are crawling above you.”

But I looked at the ceiling and didn’t see a thing, and certainly not a big enough spider whose legs could be counted by a little boy through the flickering light of basketball highlights.

“Right there,” Nick said, pointing to a teeny spot on the ceiling on the far, far side of the room.

“That?” I said as I got closer to it, realizing I’d had pimples bigger than the fearful creature. “Now I know why your clothes are missing: Your mother packed your night-vision binoculars instead. You counted the legs on
that
?”

Nicholas nodded. “Eight. That’s what qualifies them as arachnids.”

“Nick, it looks like a Skittle from here,” I argued, grabbing a shoe and climbing onto a chair to reach the terrifying offender.

“A Skittle wouldn’t crawl in my ear or into my mouth and lay eggs,” he countered, as I whacked the tiny spider and grabbed the carcass in a tissue.

“Is it all right if I flush this, or did you need to incinerate it?” I asked.

“I think you’re overreacting,” he informed me.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Well, let’s see who overreacts when they
have to wear the same hobo shirt until their mother gets here with her credit card.”

The next morning we headed out to the Trees of Mystery, a roadside attraction featuring a mile-long trail through the redwoods called the Kingdom of Trees that is “devoted to the myth and mythology of Paul Bunyan.” There is also a restaurant, a gift shop, the sky gondola, and a forty-nine-foot-tall figure of Paul Bunyan and a giant Babe the Blue Ox, complete with Babe the Blue Ox giant “adornments hanging from the lower torso,” shall we say.

“Nick,” I said excitedly. “Go stand underneath Babe and let me get a picture.”

He went over obediently, stood under Babe, and smiled.

“That’s great!” I yelled. “Now just reach one hand up and touch the balloons.”

“Those aren’t balloons, Aunt Laurie,” Nicholas told me.

“Yes they are,” I insisted. “They just don’t have strings, because people would trip on them. But they are balloons.”

“I don’t want to touch the blue balls, Aunt Laurie,” Nicholas yelled back.

“It’s concrete,” I shouted in return. “They’re not real!”

“Please don’t make me touch the blue balls, Aunt Laurie,” he said. “I don’t want to touch the blue balls!”

“Every other kid in this parking lot has touched the blue balls and let his parents take a picture of it,” I pleaded. “I promise, when you get into college this will be hilarious.”

“My mom wouldn’t make me touch the blue balls,” he said forcefully.

“Your mother would be over there holding your hands to them,” I told him. “When you were three, she took a video of Goofy flipping off the Mad Hatter while you were eating pancakes
at Disneyland. I bet she makes this the wallpaper on her computer. Smile like you’re having fun!”

Nicholas reluctantly raised one hand above his head and barely grazed the adornments with his fingertips, his mouth curled into a frown.

“
Smile like you’re having fun
!” I yelled. “There’s a bunch of other kids behind you waiting to touch Babe’s balls!”

I clicked anyway. It
will
be hilarious when he goes to college.

In the gift shop, we picked out several new T-shirts for Nicholas, and I will say I was disappointed when he chose the Paul Bunyan over the Babe shirt, although I did talk him into one with a profile of Bigfoot on it. We then took the sky gondola up the mountain, through the canopy of the redwoods, all the way to the top, so high we could see the ocean.

“Are we going to go to the beach?” Nick asked.

“Sure,” my husband replied. “We could go there right after we get back to the car if you like.”

“Really?” my nephew said, looking very excited.

“Of course,” I said as I shrugged. “Provided that, before we get to the car, you touch the balls again, but with a smile this time.”

Heading west in the car, I figured it was the optimum time to impart some words of warning.

“Now, a couple of weeks ago when we went to the coast, the beach had pieces of jellyfish scattered all over it,” I told Nick, because the last thing I wanted was for him to poke around at some beach blob and get it all angry. “Don’t touch it. I don’t want you poking it with a stick, I don’t want you covering it with sand, I just want you to ignore it like it was your younger brother.”