“Hi.” The woman is soaping her hands with the blueberry soap.
I kind of half-laugh; it sounds so fakey. “Smells like blueberries.”
“Blueberries?” She looks at me, confused.
“The soap.” I point at the dispenser and start rinsing my hands.
She sniffs her hands and laughs. “It does, a little bit.”
I nibble on the inside of my lip as I move to the hand dryer looking at her, then my wet hands, then at her again. She’s some kind of Native American, but I’m not good with tribes. “Could I ask you a huge favor?”
She looks at me, her hands under the water.
“I did something really dumb,” I say in my “everyone likes me and trusts me because I’m Caitlin” voice. “I locked my keys in my car and my cell phone is there. I was wondering . . . Could I use your phone to text my dad?”
“Sure, sweetie.” She moves toward me. “You don’t want to call him?”
I smile again and shake my head. I don’t want to call Todd because I’m not sure what I would say to get him to understand that my mom has kidnapped me and that I need him to come after me because I can’t just say that. This lady might tell Mom. A text to Todd is a better bet. “I better not.” A half smile, half grimace. “He’s in a meeting. A lawyer.” I have no idea where that came from. “If I text him, he can just come for me when his meeting is over. I don’t want to interrupt and ask him to come get me.”
“Of course you can use my phone.” She fishes it out of an outer pocket of her yellow handbag with two wet fingers. “But can I give you a ride somewhere?”
I shake my head, texting as fast as I can. I remember Todd’s number, which is kind of weird because in the world of cell phones, who knows numbers anymore? You just start to type the recipient’s name and the number comes up. But, like my mom, I have a good memory for numbers.
It’s me, I text. DO NOT call this number.
Whose this he texts back.
I shake my head. He’s such an idiot. It’s Haley. I don’t have my phone, so I borrowed someone else’s. I can’t talk. I need you to come get me. My mom made me get in the car with her. She’s making me go to Maine.
I glance up. The woman is done drying her hands and now she’s just standing there waiting.
“Sorry,” I say. Another quick smile as I hit send and start texting again. I need you to come get me. Not sure where, yet. Start driving toward Utah. Take I15.
Drube 2 utah?
I close my eyes. Maybe this is a bad idea. Todd may not be smart enough to find Alaska. Or Utah.
Gotta go. Text you as soon as I can. Don’t text to this phone again.
I send and look up and smile as I go into “edit” and delete the texts. “Thanks. I’m sure he’ll be here soon. His meeting’s almost over.” Another smile.
“You sure you want to wait here? You don’t want to sit in my car with me?”
I hand her back her phone. I hook my thumbs in my jeans’ pockets. “No thanks. I’m just going to get an Icee and then, you know”—I lift my chin in the direction of the store—“wait for him.” Then I open the door for her. “Thanks again. Have a good day.”
“You too.” She gives a little wave and walks out into the store.
I follow her, but take my time. The minute I step out of the little hall where the bathrooms are, I spot Mom and Izzy at the frozen drink machine. Mom’s been waiting for me. Watching for me. I walk to the closest rack of food and reach for a bag. I check them out like I’m seriously considering getting reduced calorie Chex Mix. If Mom comes over and starts talking to me before the lady who loaned me the phone leaves, I’m not sure what I should do. What if Mom asks her if I was bothering her or something? Mom’s acting so . . . not like herself that I can’t honestly guess what she will or won’t do. An hour ago I would have said Mom would never have gone back for Izzy. But there’s Izzy standing there with her big-ass Icee.
Luckily, the woman with the phone picks up a bottle of water from a cooler near the register and pays for it and a pack of gum. She does turn and wave to me as she goes out the door. I wave back and follow up with the smile.
A second later, Mom is beside me. She has an enormous frozen Coke in her hand and a bag of pretzels. Izzy’s hovering behind her.
“Who was that?” Mom asks.
I shake my head, putting the snack bag back on the rack. “Just somebody I was talking to in the bathroom.” I move around the end of the aisle to get away from Mom and look at a rack of nuts.
Mom stands there for a minute and I worry that she might be suspicious. Caitlin always said Mom had a nose for when we were up to something. “You want something to eat? Something to drink?”
I almost say no, but then I realize that if Todd is going to come for me, the smartest thing for me to do right now is to play along with Mom’s insane road-trip thing. I didn’t tell Todd, but I’m pretty sure he’s going to have to drive all the way to wherever we’re staying tonight to get me. I don’t want Mom getting suspicious. Maybe if I play along, she’ll let me go out for ice or something and I can get away. “These.” I hold up a bag of pistachios.
“I like pistachios.” Izzy sucks on her straw. Her Icee is blue, which is a little gross since she just washed her hands with blue soap.
Mom reaches around me and gets another bag of the nuts. “Drink?” she asks me.
“I’ll get a Coke.”
She holds my gaze for just a second longer than I’m comfortable with and for some reason, a part of me, the tiniest part of me, feels guilty for telling Todd to come get me. Mom really is trying. Even if she’s completely wrong about this road trip, and she is, she gets points for trying.
She nods. “Meet me at the register.”
She walks away and Izzy just stands there, looking at me, sucking loudly on her straw. She’s still wearing her school uniform and it’s all wrinkly and she didn’t brush her hair this morning. Caitlin used to brush it for her sometimes.
I walk away, kind of wishing I had a brush.
Chapter 25
Julia
51 days
We’re all quiet for half an hour, after we get back in the car. I take Interstate 15 north. We’ll soon cross the northwest tip of Arizona and go into Utah. There’s less traffic now that we’re past the Vegas Strip and I relax a little bit.
My Icee is delicious. It’s been so long since I’ve had one. Years. In my battle against the bulge, I gave up dessert, butter on my bread, and frozen drinks, both alcoholic and nonalcoholic. Too many calories. Too much sugar. Which is why this tastes so good, I’m sure. I open my bag of pretzels and have one. “Pretzel?” I offer the bag to Izzy.
She’s got Doritos and cheese puffs and red licorice. And sour gummi worms. I should have told her to put it all back. Too much saturated fat and sugar for anyone, but she was so excited back at the mini-mart to be allowed to get what she wanted that I decided what the hell? A few days of junk food won’t hurt any of us. Haley and I could both stand to put on a couple of pounds. And if we stay with Laney, there won’t be a string of sugar or triangle of trans fats to be found in her cupboards.
Izzy’s holding her blue Icee with both hands. The bags of snacks are on her lap. “Sure.” She wedges her drink between her legs and the cheese puffs take a nosedive to the floor. She takes the bag of pretzels, removes a handful, and offers it back to me.
“Pass them to your sister.”
Izzy looks at me like I just told her to stick her head in a gas oven. Her lips are blue from the drink.
I should probably choose my words carefully; we’re all so fragile. But I react to Izzy with semi-annoyance. I’ve had just about enough of this. “You wanted to come with us, so you’re with us. But I’m warning you, this silent treatment you’re giving your sister? You’re going to have to let it go, Isobel. I’m not driving three thousand miles with the two of you not speaking to each other.”
Haley reaches between the seats and grabs the pretzel bag from Izzy. “I never stopp
ed talking to her. She stopped talking to me when I killed Caitlin.” The pretzel bag rattles and I hear her bite a pretzel.
It takes me a beat to respond. I’ve been going over in my head different ways to open a conversation with Haley about Caitlin, about the accident. I’ve been trying to think about things we need to talk about that will help us get out of this hole we’ve dug for ourselves. All three of us are down here in this black pit; I see that now. Izzy may seem okay, but she’s not. How can she be? I cannot imagine the willpower it’s taken for her to go fifty-one days without speaking to the only sister she has left.
I put my drink into the cup holder on the console. I’m getting a brain freeze. “You can’t say that, Haley.”
“What?”
“You can’t say that you—” My voice catches in my throat and I swallow and fight the wave of pain that threatens to wash over me. I push through. “You can’t say you killed Caitlin.” My words come out staccato and loud.
Izzy freezes, pretzels in one hand, the big cup in the other. Her blue lips are wrapped around the straw.
“But I did.” Haley sounds like a little girl.
“No,” I manage. “You got into an automobile accident and your sister died in that accident.” I nod as I say each word, to make my point.
“But I caused the accident. I killed her.”
I make myself look into the rearview mirror at her. “It was an accident, Haley. You didn’t do it on purpose.”
As I speak the words, they reverberate in my head. I know she didn’t mean to run the stop sign. I know she didn’t mean to hurt her sister. But I also know, as I say the words, that I still blame her, somewhere deep inside, where logic doesn’t reign.
What kind of mother does that make me? An unfit one?
I stare straight ahead as the dry, barren, brown scenery whizzes by us at sixty-plus miles an hour. I hate Nevada. I hate the sun that beats down, baking the earth until it’s cracked and lifeless. I hate the dull, monochromic landscape. I long for green forests and sparkling lakes and ponds. I ache for the scent of pine trees and grass.
I hear Haley crunching her pretzels. I glance at Izzy. She’s just sitting there, drink in one hand, pretzels in the other.
“I don’t know if I can do it,” Izzy says softly to me. “I don’t know if I can ever speak to her again. I know it’s bad of me. I know I should, but I just . . .” She looks like she’s going to cry. “I can’t, Mom.”
I reach between us and pat her knee. I can’t force Izzy to speak to Haley. I know that. But this is the first time I’ve said a thing about it. I’m their mother. It’s my place to tell Izzy it’s not right to do this to her sister. It’s my place to tell Haley she can’t hold herself responsible for killing Caitlin. “Drink your Icee before it melts,” I say kindly.
We cover thirty miles before I speak again. We’re all quiet, lost in our thoughts. But it’s time to dive in. I know I can’t waste the precious time I have in this car with my girls. I think about some of the stuff I read yesterday about the grieving process. Lots of Web sites talk about the importance of talking about the deceased.
“You know what I miss?” I say. The question is rhetorical. I don’t wait for either of them to respond. “I miss the little notes Caitlin used to leave me. The pink and purple sticky notes. Remember? She had that big cube of them. She’d leave them on the refrigerator: Buy almond milk. On the counter: Home after cheer.”
We go another five miles. Ten. No one says a word and I’m frustrated. Do I say something else? Do I ask each girl to tell me a memory she has of Caitlin? Because this isn’t going to work if Izzy won’t speak to Haley and Haley won’t speak to me.
We cover another ten miles before Izzy speaks up. “When I had that turtle. The one that died. Caitlin used to leave me notes on the turtle bowl that said, Feed me.” She laughs.
I smile at Izzy’s sweet memory. I’m fairly certain the turtle died of starvation, or at the very least general neglect, but I keep that to myself.
A few miles later, Haley speaks from the back. “She always signed her name with hearts over the I’s. Like she was a fourth grader, or something.”
It sounds like a dig, but the tone of Haley’s voice is nostalgic.
Tears well in my eyes, but I don’t let myself cry. I have a note in my jewelry box that Caitlin left me on my bathroom mirror one morning, sometime around Christmas. She was in there borrowing my good tweezers, which always made me crazy because she never put them back. The note said, I love my mom, with a drawing of a pair of tweezers. She signed her name with hearts over the I’s.
Izzy sucks loudly on her straw, getting air with the frozen drink. “Caitlin made the best grilled cheese sandwiches. With lots of butter and cheese. I miss those sandwiches.”
“Rye bread from the deli and three kinds of cheese. There must have been a thousand delicious calories in one of her grilled cheese sandwiches.” I sigh and reach for my drink.
I hear Haley rattling a package and look in the rearview to see her opening a pack of pistachios. “She snored,” she says. “I used to lie in bed and listen to her. I could hear her all the way in my room.”
“We kept talking about having her tonsils and adenoids out, but she never wanted to take the downtime,” I tell them.
Haley cracks open a pistachio nut. “This is going to sound dumb, and I know I complained all the time, but I kind of liked hearing her snore. It was like . . . everything was normal in the house. Like everything was okay.”
I feel a lump rise in my throat. “Remember that time she used her phone to record you snoring because you kept complaining that she was keeping you awake?”
Haley laughs. Not a full-blown laugh, but more than a chuckle. “I do not snore. I think she faked the whole thing.”
“I don’t think so.” Izzy shakes her head as she puts her drink in a holder. “I think it was real.”
She doesn’t speak directly to Haley, exactly, but I feel like it’s a step in the right direction.
“I miss the way she laughed. She had the best laugh, ever. Anyone want any pistachios?” Haley holds the bag between the two front seats.
Izzy makes an event of opening her bag of Doritos and crams several chips into her mouth, crunching loudly.
I feel bad for Haley. “I’ll take a couple.” I hold out my hand and she drops some into it. I crack one between my teeth and the meat of the nut falls into my mouth. It’s good. Salty. I didn’t really want any, but it feels right to share something together, while we share our memories of Caitlin. Something about breaking bread together. I can’t believe two months have passed and we’ve never said we missed her. “Want one?” I hold my hand out to Izzy.
“Got these.”
“They’re really good,” I cajole.
She crunches another corn chip in response. It’s kind of obnoxious, but she is only ten. I forget that because she acts older most of the time.
“Caitlin liked Doritos,” Izzy says. “Cool Ranch. She liked the classic nacho cheese kind, but her favorite was Cool Ranch.”
I notice that’s the flavor she’s eating.
“And she liked cheese puffs,” Haley says. “And licorice and gummi worms.”
The snack foods Izzy picked when she was allowed to choose for herself. I wonder if those will always be her favorites now.
I hear Haley’s window go down. I look into the rearview, but I can’t see what she’s doing and I’m immediately apprehensive. I hear something rattle down the window and against the car and I realize she was probably just throwing out shells. I don’t know why I’m concerned. The doors are locked. It’s not like she’s going to go out the window of the moving car. And she seems like she’s resigned herself to the trip. I need to let my anxiety go and trust her until she gives me a reason not to.
“Which way are we going?” Izzy asks.
She pulls an iPad out of her backpack on the floor, only she doesn’t have an iPad. Hers, a hand-me-down from Ben’s office, broke just before Caitlin
died. We had intended to get her a new tablet and just never thought about it again. And she never asked.
“That’s not yours,” Haley accuses.
It has a pink neoprene cover.
It hits me hard. It was Caitlin’s.
“Is it okay, Mom?” Izzy looks up at me; she can tell I’m upset. “I took it off her desk. I wanted to look stuff up for our trip. It’s still got a data plan. I checked.” She hugs it against her and the bag of Doritos. “I thought it would be okay.”
“It’s fine.” I glance in the rearview mirror. “You have your own, Haley. There’s no reason why Izzy shouldn’t have Caitlin’s.” I wait. “Is there a reason why you think she shouldn’t have it?”
I hear carbonation hiss as Haley opens her Coke. “It’s just weird. To see it.” She points. “I got her that sticker. It came out of one of those old-school gumball machines at the bowling alley. I had to keep putting quarters in to get the one she wanted. I think that one sticker cost me like four dollars in quarters.”
“Which one?” I ask. The pink iPad cover has stickers all over it. There are flowers and peace signs, the word war with a red circle around it and a line through it. One of the stickers says Eat Natural.
Caitlin was my budding hippie. I have no idea where it came from. Neither Ben nor I have ever been particularly environmentally conscious. We recycle and we have solar panels on our roof and at the office, but that’s mostly a reflection of where we live. We try to eat healthy, but it was Caitlin who introduced us to organic grains and grass-fed beef. I know that children are genetically a mixture of their parents, and they’re certainly affected by their environment, but I think Caitlin was a prime example of how our children grow up to be individuals.
“The sparkly pink peace sign.” Haley leans forward to point at it.
Izzy flips the cover back to conceal the stickers, almost snapping Haley’s finger with it. “Can we go through Bryce Canyon, Mom? It takes a little longer than just staying on this road, but there’s a natural bridge there I want to see.”
Haley makes a derisive sound and slides back on her seat. “We’ve seen that.”
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