The Last Days of California: A Novel (4 page)

Our mother ejected the disc and placed it carefully back in its box. Elise and I watched our father stop to look around with his pleasant expression, his hands on his hips. He had biggish hips, almost womanly, that he was always calling attention to.

He got into the car making noises like he wanted someone to ask how his stomach was so he could tell us it wasn’t good. He tried to stick the rearview mirror back into place again, and this went on until Elise burst out laughing and then I started laughing. I was afraid he’d get mad, but he just sighed and opened his Coke. He called it Cocola, which made me think of him as a little kid. Once he was just a little kid hunting and fishing to put food on the table after his father moved to Florida with a red-haired woman.

He took another swig and another, throwing his head back jerkily as he made his way to the bottom of the can. Then he handed it to our mother and put the car into
DRIVE
.

As we were about to pull out of the station, a yellow convertible plowed directly into a white car, slamming it head-on. The man in the white car flew through the windshield and landed in the road as the cars spun off in opposite directions. It was very loud and then it was quiet.

“Oh my God,” Elise said.

My mother made the sign of the cross and my father backed up and parked in the spot we’d just pulled out of. We all got out. Both of the cars’ radios were playing, tuned to the same station. The people in the convertible were still in there, but the man in the white car must not have been wearing his seatbelt. He was faceup in the street and there was blood everywhere. I knew he was dead.

I looked over at a couple of teenage girls next to a gas pump, their hands covering their mouths. And then one of them removed her hands and screamed. After that, everybody started moving. Elise dialed 911. My father jogged over to the convertible and another man ran to join him. My mother sent me inside to tell the freakishly tall guy, but he already knew, so I went back out and stood next to my mother and Elise, the Las Vegas girl, and her dog. We had just seen a man die. A man who had been alive only moments before, thinking about nothing or nearly nothing—wondering whether it was too early to have a drink, or if he might go for a swim this evening—things that were so inconsequential they were an insult to his life. He hadn’t had a moment to prepare, would take all of his secrets with him.

I made up a hundred different scenarios. He was newly married to the woman of his dreams. He was a drug dealer, a felon, a preacher, a man with more children than he could afford to feed. He was depressed and thought about dying all the time. No matter who he’d been, though, he would be described in heroic terms, like everyone who died as a result of someone else’s negligence. Perhaps he’d been going to the store for nothing more important than ice cream, an unnecessary trip he’d taken to get out of the house. I was sorry I’d never know him. If I knew even a little something, I might piece together a story for his life.

My father dragged a girl out of the passenger seat of the convertible, cradled her in his arms. She was nine or ten years old, tall and thin. My mother took my hand and began to pray, but I pulled away and left her there with Elise, ignoring their calls to come back.

The girl was Asian—Japanese—with long shiny hair in perfect order. She looked like she was asleep. When I was little we’d had a dog that had been hit by a car; my mother placed him in his bed, curled up, like he was napping. He’d looked perfect, not a spot of blood on him, and I couldn’t believe he was dead. I’d sat with him for hours, waiting for him to open his eyes.

“Is she dead?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“She’s breathing.”

“Why doesn’t she open her eyes?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Do you think she’s in a coma?”

“I don’t know,” he said again.

I wanted him to know something. “It looks like she’s asleep,” I said. Wake up, I thought.
Wake up.

The other man had pulled a woman out of the driver’s side of the convertible. She was young and white and I wondered if she was the babysitter. The woman was alive, moaning softly, and then she sat up and screamed the most horrible scream I’d ever heard. And then she was shaking violently and screaming and the whole thing seemed like a bad television reenactment. No one was with the dead man. I walked over to him and crouched down, his face covered in blood and gashes. Elise and the Las Vegas girl joined me, watched as I touched his neck, which I wouldn’t have had the nerve to do without them there.

“Don’t do that,” Elise said. “What’re you doing?”

“Checking for a pulse,”

“Do you feel anything?” the Las Vegas girl asked.

I moved my fingers around, searching for the artery.

An ambulance arrived and a medic hustled us out of the way, and then there were police cars and fire trucks and we were moved farther and farther out of the way until we were no longer a part of it. We stood with the others, watching as they loaded them onto gurneys, as they covered the man in the white car with a sheet. My mother and Elise were crying. The Las Vegas girl touched my sister’s arm and they embraced. This seemed very strange and I tried to catch Elise’s eye, but she wouldn’t look at me.

I listened as those around us tried to work out what had happened, explaining it to the new people who’d arrived on the scene. They were already getting it wrong. We had seen it up close—we’d had the best view and I felt like they should be asking us. The convertible hadn’t been turning into the gas station. They’d both been driving straight past each other when the convertible swerved into the path of the man in the white car, who was now dead. Who, I had decided, had been on an unnecessary errand to buy an unnecessary item. Maybe he hadn’t even wanted the item, but had offered to get it for his girlfriend, a woman he hadn’t loved enough to marry.

We stood there for another ten minutes, waiting for someone to involve us again, to ask us questions, but no one did. We got back in our car. Elise was still crying. I cried so infrequently that other peoples’ tears surprised me, though they didn’t surprise me now; my lack of tears surprised me. Why didn’t I feel things the way others felt them? It wasn’t that I didn’t care about people. It was more like I couldn’t really believe they were real. I dug my fingernails into my palm, hard.

I’d read somewhere that not caring about people was a sign of mental illness, but I didn’t feel mentally ill.

“I have blood on me,” my father said, holding up his hands and turning them slowly. It reminded me of that scene in
Back to the Future
where Michael J. Fox was disappearing because his parents hadn’t kissed so he wasn’t going to be born. He got out of the car and went inside. I looked at my own hands—they looked clean even though I had touched a bloody dead man. I had a dead man on me.

My father drove
ten minutes in the wrong direction and no one said anything. I thought about the girl, whether she might be Chinese or Korean instead of Japanese. Why had I thought she was Japanese? I didn’t know anyone who was Japanese.

Finally, Elise pointed out a butcher shop we’d passed earlier.

“Where’s that map?” he asked.

My mother opened it, unfolding and unfolding until it filled the front seat. I looked at the back of her head, her thin hair fluffed up. I had her hair—fine and eager to fall out; we had to bend over and brush it upside down to make it look normal.

“We need to get on 90,” my mother said, while my father kept driving the way we’d come.

“Tell me where to turn,” he said.

“I think it’s this way.”

“Just tell me where to turn.”

“The GPS is in the console,” Elise said, but our father didn’t like being told what to do by a machine. He’d turn too early or too late and there was no one to blame it on.

“There,” our mother said, “now.”

He jerked the wheel and took the exit left.

“Are there any wet wipes up there?” I asked.

My mother tossed me a package that had been opened long ago. They were dry but I rubbed them on my hands, anyway.

“Let me see that map,” Elise said. Our mother passed it back and Elise spread it out, West Texas on my lap and East Texas on hers.

“I’m sad,” I said. I didn’t feel sad, but I thought saying it might help me feel it.

My mother turned and gave me a slight shake of her head.

“What?” I said. She didn’t say anything. “What?” I said again. I sighed and tracked the highway with my finger.

“ ‘Welcome to the great state of Texas,’ ” Elise read. “ ‘Whether you are a visitor or a resident, I hope you take advantage of the vast and varied travel opportunities Texas offers.’ Well, thank you. We certainly don’t plan on it.” She started Googling various towns along our route to see if there was anything worth seeing, though we knew we weren’t going to stop. We didn’t really want to stop. We only wanted to know what we were going to miss.

“We’ll come really close to Mexico,” I said. “Maybe we could cross the border.”

“There are drug wars going on,” our father said. He’d read a news story about a tourist town where the kids hadn’t been in school since February because the drug cartels were demanding half the teachers’ salaries so the teachers were refusing to teach. In response, the cartels were decapitating them and leaving their heads in the streets. I watched my mother to see if she’d put a hand on his arm or give him a look, but she didn’t.

Elise flipped the map over and we studied the picture of the governor and his wife. They were handsome in the usual way of politicians: stiff-haired with closed-mouth smiles. The wife was blond, with pale skin and glassy eyes; she looked like a doll. The governor looked a little more reasonable, but not by much. Elise folded the map the wrong way and unfolded and refolded until she got it right.

I took the egg out of my purse, still intact.

“Where’d you get that?” Elise asked.

“The gas station.”

“That’s really gross.”

“You think everything’s gross.”

“What is it? Did you get me one?” my father asked.

“It’s an egg. And no, I didn’t know you wanted one.” I offered it to him and he agreed without hesitation, so I passed it up and opened my Snickers. I tore off a hunk and held it out to Elise, who shook her head. I was never going to be skinny like her. She said all I had to do was starve for a month, six weeks tops, but I couldn’t do it. It might as well have been forever.

“Do you want some salt?” our mother asked, opening the glove box to search for a stray packet, but the egg was already gone. Elise was the only skinny one, and I was glad for it because I didn’t want our whole family to be overweight—it would seem like a fundamental flaw, like something we’d never overcome.

Our father zigzagged through a small town in order to stay on the right highway, but then it split, one marked business and the other marked truck. After taking the business highway into a bricked and empty downtown, we learned to follow the one for trucks.

The next town we came to was nicer. There were a lot of stores—not just tire stores and gas stations, but shops selling pottery and cupcakes and seafood. The Texas flag hung in front of each one. Our mother looked back and forth, reading the signs aloud:
HUCKLEBERRY’S SEAFOOD, LIGHTFOOT FLOORING, THE PLAY PEN, GOLDEN GIRLZ SALON, HOME BAKED
.

“Angel Funeral Home,” she continued. “The Jalapeno Tree. Save America Vote Republican. Lupe’s Cantina.”

“I bet Mexicans don’t eat at The Jalapeno Tree,” I said.

“I bet they don’t eat at Lupe’s Cantina, either,” Elise said.

“I bet Lupe doesn’t even
exist
,” I said.

“The Palace Donuts didn’t make it,” our mother said, making the sorry clucking sound I hated. The sorry clucking sound that said she was happy the Palace Donuts hadn’t made it. I couldn’t figure her out. She seemed like a nice person, doing all of the nice things nice people did—visiting the sick and volunteering at church, sending flowers and thank-you notes, but when one of her best friends died, she hadn’t even seemed sad about it. I kept asking about the woman, even though I hadn’t liked her, a busybody who was always trying to draw junior high gossip out of me.

“Oh man, look at that,” my father said, slowing to a crawl for an old man pushing a lawnmower across the highway. The man stopped in the middle of the road to give us a dirty look before continuing. Our father got a kick out of that and Elise took a picture of him with her phone. Then she started taking pictures of other things: the backs of our parents’ heads, VFW posts, signs that read
HISTORICAL MARKER I MILE
, without ever indicating what it was they were marking.

At a stoplight, we pulled up behind a big shiny truck and my mother pointed out the bumper sticker—the state of Texas with a pistol across it:
WE DON’T DIAL 911
.

“Texas is scary,” Elise said.

“It’s all trucks and guns and meat,” I said.

“And football,” our father said. “They love football.”

“We’ve seen
Friday Night Lights
,” I said.

“That sounds familiar,” Elise said, holding her phone in my face. I pushed her hand away and she took a picture of my legs. “I hate all those things.”

“You’re a cheerleader,” I said.

“It doesn’t mean I like football.”

“No, but you support football.”

“I support hot guys in tight pants banging into each other,” she said.

“Elise,” our mother said, “please.” She asked our father to do something about her, but he got distracted by a deer on the side of the road.

“Do you see it?” he asked. I knew he was talking to me, that I was the one he wanted to show it to.

“I don’t see it,” I said. I never saw anything on the side of the road unless it was dead.

“Right there, at the tree line. You can’t miss it.”

“I don’t see it.”

“It’s
right there,
” he said. And then, “You missed it.”

I hated the disappointment in his voice. “I never see anything,” I said, remembering that the animals weren’t going to be raptured. Our father had been trying to prepare us for a heaven without Cole, the dog we’d had for nine years. We’d dropped him off at the vet before leaving Montgomery. He hated being boarded so much and was shaking so bad I’d had to help my father get him inside.