Our eyes meet briefly but then she looks away.
I want to ask her if she’s okay but I don’t want to give her the opportunity to tell me that she doesn’t want to do this again.
“My husband,” she finally says. “He’s really sick. Cancer.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Stage three. Liver. There are some options for treatment but they aren't great. And they’re really expensive.”
Traffic speeds up a bit and we enjoy a steady pace of about ten miles an hour but only for a few minutes.
“There are some experimental treatments available at private clinics. There are no guarantees but I want him to fight. He has been fighting but things don’t look good.”
“So, why are you doing this?” I ask.
“Money, why does anyone do anything? These treatments are promising but they cost money. Insurance won’t cover them. We already got a second mortgage to cover the chemotherapy but it’s nowhere near enough to try this. And I’m not going to lose him over something as stupid as money.”
I nod. Why does it always come to that? Why does everything seem to revolve around a few pieces of paper that someone infused with value?
I hear the anger in her voice and I feel her pain.
I don’t understand it because I’m not going through it but I sympathize and I wish there was something I could do to make things right.
“That’s why this has to work,” she says, her fingers trembling. “We have to make it work.”
We drive in silence all the way to the booth. My heart is pounding out of my chest when we get there. An alert agent dressed with a stern look on his face comes up to my driver’s side.
“Passports please,” he says.
24
Nicholas
When we cross the border…
I hand the officer my passport and then turn to Dorothy and say, “C’mon, hurry up. It’s not like you didn’t have three fucking hours to get it out.”
She cringes and searches for hers in the glove compartment.
“What was your business in Mexico?” he asks.
“We’re full-time RVers,” Dorothy pipes in. “We sold our house last year and got this rig here, and we love it.”
“She got a name?” he asks, looking at my passport. For a second, I hesitate. She? What is he talking about?
“Of course, she does!” Dorothy says, handing him her passport. “Sorry about that, we had an issue and we had to get the manual out. Well, you know what that’s like, right? Everything in that thing gets all jumbled up.”
“Uh-huh,” he says, looking at her passport.
“Freedom!” Dorothy yells over me.
“Ma’am?” he asks.
“Freedom. That’s the name of our RV. Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Yes, it is,” he says rather disinterested.
“Okay, well, everything seems to be in order here. Wait for a moment while we get the dog to sniff around.”
He walks away before either of us can say a word.
We exchange knowing looks and hold our breath.
When the dog finishes with the car up front, his handler brings him over to us.
I relax my hands around the steering wheel and fiddle around with the radio.
Dorothy suddenly seems to clam up. To snap her out of it, I pick an argument. We’ve been together for years so it should be no big deal for us to argue in public.
“When I get back, I’m going to go to the gym first,” I announce. “I’ll drop you off at your mother's and meet up with you later.”
It takes her a second to respond but then she does.
“You’re not going to see my mother?” she gasps. “We’ve driven all this way and you’re not even going to stop in?”
“I will, in an hour or so. I need to unwind. Besides, we didn’t drive all this way. I drove all this way,” I correct her. “And you just don’t want to go see her on your own. And you know that. I’m your buffer.”
“You are not a buffer!” she yells.
“You’re all set. Have a safe trip,” the border agent says, tapping the side of the RV. I drive away and pull my window up, but we don’t stop arguing until we are a few miles away for safe measure.
“Did that just happen?” I turn to Dorothy with a wide smile on my face. She nods, letting out a high-pitched squeal and claps her hands. She pulls out a Twix from her purse and offers to split it with me.
“No, thanks,” I say.
“It’s our celebratory candy bar!” Dorothy says. “Milk chocolate. Caramel. It’s delicious. C’mon, you know you want it.”
“It’s all yours,” I say, shaking my head.
She bites into it feverishly, picking off the little crumbs that fall on her shirt.
“Where are we going now?” I ask when her phone beeps. The drop-off location is about twenty miles north.
“What are you going to do now?” I ask after a long period of silence. “Go home to San Diego?”
“How long will the money last with the cancer treatments?” I ask.
She bites her lower lip. “A little bit but not long.”
“What are you going to do then?”
“Probably this, again,” she says, looking out in the distance. “What else is there?”
We look at the desert stretching wide before us. The sky is bright blue and the land is a dusty beige, and it’s the most beautiful place in the world.
“Will you go with me?” she asks. We’ve been lucky once.
“I can’t. This is it for me.”
“Too bad.”
“Dorothy, you’ve got to be smart about this. If you do this again, and that should be a big if, you need to go to Arizona or Texas or somewhere far away from this border.”
“Why?”
“You can’t risk getting the same agent. He won’t believe your story the second time, if you’re coming in with a different boyfriend.”
“I’ll think about it,” she says under her breath.
I want to shake her. I want to tell her not to press her luck.
What happened back there was short of a miracle and miracles don’t tend to happen in sequence.
We arrive at the drop spot a few minutes later. It’s the parking lot of a Walmart. Big, spacious, and not very full. I park in the back. We are to leave the keys in the RV, go inside, shop, and then come out.
I’m nervous about leaving it unlocked but spot two guys sitting in their old beat-up truck, watching me. They are waiting for it.
“How are we going to get the money?” Dorothy keeps asking me as we walk around the aisle aimlessly.
“They’re going to drop it off,” I say.
“What if they don’t?”
I would be lying if that thought hadn’t crossed my mind.
But there isn’t much I can do. I don’t really want to hold on to all of that meth for any longer than necessary.
“We should just be patient,” I say.
Her eyes meet mine in the grocery section. She’s worried, much more than I am.
My goal was to get into the US. If it all goes to shit, I can go to Vegas and find Big Dipper and try to set things right.
But Dorothy? She doesn’t really know him as anyone but a voice on the phone.
And she needs the money to save her husband’s life.
25
Nicholas
When we wait…
We come out of the store, holding our shopping bags full of snacks, food, and water. Most of them are mine.
I lead Dorothy to the bus stop all the way across the parking lot. This would be the least conspicuous place to do this.
“The RV is gone,” Dorothy says, turning to me.
“They are going through it.”
“They took it and they aren’t going to pay us,” she says, shaking her head.
It’s a very real possibility, I admit, but keep my mouth shut. I don’t want to make her worry anymore than she already is.
We wait for close to t
en minutes, which feels like a decade.
Then the same car, but this time with just one guy pulls up to us. He doesn’t get out.
He just stops, opens the door, and gives us each a duffel bag, then drives away.
I open the zipper and peer inside. Seeing bundles of cash makes my heart sing. This is going to be enough to get a new identity, a clean one, and to start a new life.
“It’s all here,” Dorothy says, overjoyed, after doing a rudimentary count of the money. “What are you going to do now?”
“Get a cab and a ride to a used car dealership. You can’t get around California well without one. You?”
“Same thing, I guess. Minus the car dealership.”
“You’re going to take the cab all the way to San Diego?” I ask. She shrugs. “With all of that money?”
She shrugs again.
“No, come with me and I’ll give you a ride.”
I buy a 2006 Honda Accord for an even three grand, splurging a bit on one that has a sound transmission so that it doesn’t break down at some inconvenient time on the freeway.
After dropping off Dorothy at her house, I call Big Dipper.
“When are all of my papers going to be ready?” I ask as soon as he answers.
“Good job. It’s nice to hear from you, too,” he says.
“Sorry about that, it has been a long day.”
“I need a few more days,” Big Dipper says.
“A few more days? I thought I could fly out tomorrow.”
“No can do. The guy’s wife is having a baby.”
“What?” I ask, half laughing. I was expecting any sort of excuse but not that one.
“Yep, it’s the world we live in. She’s having a baby and he’s there for her, doesn’t matter what shit is going down.”
I chuckle, shaking my head.
“Besides, maybe it’s a good thing. Airport security is tight. You’re going to have to be invisible if you want to get out by air.”
“Even with the new ID?” I ask.
“Go online and Google yourself, you’ll see. You better just go somewhere quiet and lay low. And by low, I mean real low. No friends. No acquaintances. No girls. Oh, man, your life is going to suuuuuuuck!”
After I hang up, I drive to a cell phone store and buy myself a proper smartphone.
I pay cash and register it using the passport that I used to cross the border.
Back in the parking lot, I look myself up online.
Big Dipper wasn’t lying.
The number of programs and articles that feature my name have more than doubled since I was in Belize.
It would be a death wish to try to fly out of LAX or any other airport with all of their facial recognition software.
The only reason I even got back into the US is that no government agency thought I’d be so stupid as to come back here.
“Fuck me,” I say. “What the fuck am I going to do now?”
I start the engine and drive. Turning onto the Pacific Coast Highway, I drive along with the wide ocean to one side. The moon is huge and bright yellow today, casting shadows over the quiet waves out by the horizon.
It has been a very long day and I should probably get a hotel room somewhere but I can’t stop driving.
I put on some classic rock and lose myself in Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones.
My grip on the steering wheel is relaxed and I sit back comfortably in the weathered leather seat.
There are about a hundred and twenty-thousand miles on this car. I wonder where has it been in its whole life? Did it travel across the country and if so, how many times? Or did it only drive over the same twenty miles from home to work over and over again?
In my heart, I hope it has seen some adventure. Cars, after all, are meant to go places.
Speaking of going places, where should I go now? Two directions are out of the question. I’m not going back south and I can’t physically go west unless I take a plane. So, it’s either north or east for me.
It doesn’t take long for my thoughts to drift back to Olive.
Whenever I relax or don’t have anything pressing to think about, they always come back to her.
When I see a sign to go east, I take that road and it takes me away from the ocean. I know where she is and now that there are less than two hours separating us, I feel her gravitational pull.
I can’t get there fast enough.
I don’t want to speed but at seventy miles an hour, I feel like I’m driving through molasses.
Finally, an hour later, I start seeing signs for desert cities. A little bit later, I pass Cabazon Outlets and I finally see the windmills that separate Palm Springs from the rest of Southern California.
The windmills are tall and numerous. At night, they are practically invisible except for the bright red blinking lights at the top. They are positioned in a valley between two desert mountain ranges, an optimal place for the great winds to gather and sweep through.
It’s a particularly windy day and my car starts to shake from the pressure.
I grab on to the steering wheel a little harder to keep it in its place.
I’ve been to LA a number of times but I have never been to Palm Springs. How can anyone live here with all of this wind? I wonder to myself.
But everything changes when I get onto Palm Canyon Drive. Here, the palm trees barely sway in the breeze and people are happily enjoying their food outside.
Behind the restaurants and the parking lots, there’s a huge mountain towering over the canyon. The same mountain that funnels the wind up north is now the one that’s blocking all of it.
I put in the address that I remember belonged to Olive’s mother.
It’s the only address I have.
I can’t very well reach out to my own investigator.
He’s a little bit too good at finding people and that’s the last person I want on my trail right now.
I pull up a long driveway and drive past her gate without stopping. At the top of the hill, there’s a little turn out.
I park right up front, a little bit on the road, if I were telling the truth. But from this vantage point I can see people coming in and out of her house.
Then I wait.
An hour later, I feel like a total fool.
What are the chances that she even looked her mother up yet? And even if she did, that doesn’t mean that she would be at her house at this time. Still, I want to stay longer but my eyelids start to feel heavier.
The one thing I can’t do is fall asleep here. Still, I wait.
A few hours later, I drive away.
26
Olive
When I meet them…
I change my outfit about five times before I settle on the right one. For some reason I am more nervous to meet them than I was to meet her.
Well, no, that’s not true. I was dying inside the first time I went to see Josephine. Still, meeting her husband and kids is a big deal. I wasn’t expecting us to get to that level so fast.
I finally show up at their house in a collared dress with a belt around the front. It’s dressy but not very fancy. After going back and forth between flip-flops and heels, I finally settle on wedge sandals.
Josephine meets me at the door and gives me a warm hug. Two little kids are playing in the living room. One is four and the other is two. I kneel down next to them.
Ellen, the older one, shows me her cars and Byron, the younger boy, shows me his sticker collection.
I love how informal their presence is making this whole interaction. We don’t shake hands, we just dive right in. Josephine stands a little bit away from me, watching us lovingly.
“Where’s your daddy?” I ask Byron. He just points to the kitchen and grunts. Ellen laughs, so does Josephine.
“He’ll be out in a minute,” Josephine says.
“Of course, no rush,” I say, sitting back in the bean bag chair and admiring my siblings.
I don’t know if Josephine would want me thinking
of them as that yet but I already do and I’m falling in love with them.
“Olive! I’m so sorry, I was on a call.” A man about Josephine’s age comes out to greet me.
He has kind eyes, a strong fit body, and a smile that lights up the whole room. He gives me a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek.
“Come on, let’s sit. Can I get you a drink?” he asks.
“Wallace makes the best Old-fashioneds.”
“I’ll have to try that.”
“Jo caught me up on everything that has happened but I’d love to hear more about you,” Wallace says when we take our seats in the living room. “And by the way, I am so, so sorry that this happened. Ever since I’ve known Jo, she has been looking for you. And I’m sorry that you two didn’t have each other all of these years.”
His words bring tears to my eyes and I can’t hold them back. They are so unexpected and loving that I’m physically overwhelmed.
I spend most of the dinner talking about myself after they ask question after question about my experiences growing up.
I’m torn between telling them the whole truth and covering up some of it with lies. I know that the whole truth will hurt Josephine even more than she already is and I want to protect her from some of the pain. But she always deserves to know what really happened to her daughter.
Luckily, over dessert, the kids start to dominate the conversation and I find myself slipping off the hook.
I play with them.
I talk to them.
I ask them about their lives and Ellen fills me on both of theirs.
“I think it’s getting late,” I say a few hours later.
I don’t really want to go but I also don’t want to overstay my welcome.
“We’re actually going to put Byron to bed and have Ellen do some quiet time, but can you stay just for a little bit longer?” Josephine asks. “We can have some more drinks out on the patio.”
“Sure,” I say, walking over to the sliding glass door.
Tell me to Fight Page 10