by Wendy Wunder
“You know, a unicorn could heal you, Campbell,” Perry said, finally looking up from her texting. She stared at Cam as if she’d just come up with a brilliant idea.
“There are no such things as unicorns, genius,” Cam told her. “Those are just freakish one-horned goat mutants.”
“They’re just rare and extremely wild and can only be tamed by a virgin. So that’s perfect. You could tame it. Easily. Because. Of. Your. Virginitude,” said Perry, punctuating each word with a wag of her finger, before running away down the hall.
“Shut up, Perry,” said Cam as she made her way to her room. She shuffled down the hallway, dragging her feet through the browning shag carpet. She was too tired to agonize over the fact that her eleven-year-old sister knew the status of her sex life. And really too tired to feel grateful about how at least her antagonistic relationship with her sister was still in the range of normal. It was probably the only thing in her life that was in the range of normal. Everything else, like the extreme fatigue she felt at that moment, was way, way out of the range of normal. She was even too tired to call Lily. She could not wait to flop onto her bed and fall into a deep, deep sleep, but then she turned the corner and gasped.
Everything was gone.
FIVE
“WHERE IS MY STUFF?” YELLED CAM.
She slid open her drawers and found them empty. Naked hangers swung back and forth in her closet. Cam’s down comforter had been replaced with an old electric blanket. The Lite Brite Mondrian she had created with four screens taped together was unplugged. The solar system replica she’d made in second grade hung from the ceiling. Her Wonder Woman action figure, dressed in a grass skirt, stood traumatized on Cam’s desk next to the Magic 8-Ball. Constellations of blue putty spotted the walls where Cam’s posters used to be. “What did you do with the Ramones?” she asked. “And my Citizen Kane poster? Where is Tweety, goddammit?”
“We packed it,” said Perry, appearing in the doorway behind Alicia. She kept her mom’s body strategically between hers and Cam’s.
“You packed Tweety?” The one dorky thing about Cam was that she had a canary named Tweety. Everyone else in the family was allergic to cats and dogs, so she had to love a bird. He sat on her shoulder and ate from her hands. “Where’s Tweety?”
“Tweety’s in the kitchen, Campbell. We were just cleaning his cage. Getting him ready for the trip,” Alicia told her.
“Yeah, I guess that’s the missing piece of information here. What trip?” Cam demanded.
“To Maine.”
“Maine?”
“Maine.” Alicia picked up a pillow from the floor and tossed it on the bed. “You remember Tom. The guy I met at yoga?”
“Tom. Acid-trip Tom. Tom, who doesn’t even know what day it is and hasn’t showered in weeks, Tom? We’re placing all our bets on writing-a-rock-opera Tom, who owns five iguanas—Tom?” Cam leaned woozily on her desk.
“Tom knows about a mystical town in Maine that has been known to have healing powers. He said we should leave right away. Something about Saturn being in retrograde.” Alicia shrugged.
“This is what it’s come to?”
“Well, you won’t go to Tijuana,” Alicia told her.
This is what it had come to. “Shall we check the Magic 8-Ball then? Just to get a definitive answer?” Cam grabbed it and silently asked, Is Maine going to help us? The dice bobbled for a while inside the cloudy purple liquid before turning to “Ask Again Later.”
“What could possibly be in Maine, Mom? It’s not like there’s anything in the water. There are no magical springs. It’s the Atlantic Ocean. The same Atlantic Ocean we have in Florida. Only it’s cold. Freezing cold.”
“It will be good to just get away, Cam,” Perry said.
Cam paused. She couldn’t argue with that.
Before he died, her father made her promise that she would get out of Florida. It was his dream that she go to an Ivy League school. They dreamed that together. He would have been proud of her for getting into Harvard.
And it was because she’d promised him she’d get out that she was almost ready to agree with her mom and sister. It might not hurt to get out of Florida for a while. Especially in this heat.
“For how long?” Cam asked.
“At least for the summer,” Alicia said. “For as long as it takes.”
“Fine,” Cam conceded. “Let’s go.” She shook up the 8-Ball and put it back on her bookshelf.
“Great!” Alicia jumped up and down a little. She gave Cam a hug and said, “The U-Haul is all packed. We just have to hitch it to your car in the morning.”
“My car is not being hitched to a U-freaking-Haul.”
“You want to bring your car, don’t you?”
“Oh, God, fine! Did you guys pack my movies?” Cam asked.
“We’re not going there to watch movies,” said Alicia.
“I’m bringing them.” She rifled under her bed to find her DVD collection and the notes she and Lily were taking for their screenplay (or was it a comic book? They hadn’t decided) Chemosabe and Cueball Take Manhattan, about two superhero girls with neuroblastoma. She stacked the DVDs and pages on the floor beside her bed and went under for a final search.
“And we’re stopping in North Carolina to see Lily!” she said when she emerged. “And Nana’s in Hoboken. And at every tourist trap along the way.”
“Oh-em-gee,” said Perry. Izanagi had their mom pressed up against the car as he kissed her with way too much tongue. “We are your children,” she whined. “Just get your sayonaras over with already.”
Perry gamboled to the driveway, her road-trip essentials overflowing from her backpack: two packs Sour Patch Kids, one pack Cheetos, three Twixes, some Altoids, her pink-encased iPhone and a large-print word search book.
Cumulus looked proud of himself, hitched to the rig and ready to pull them and their belongings all the way up the East Coast. His front fender puffed out a little bit with pride.
Tweety’s cage was strapped to the backseat with a seat belt. Their dashboard hula doll winked from her perch on the passenger side. Cam walked around to the back of the U-Haul and duct-taped Darren to the right rear corner of the trailer. Perfect, she thought, and she felt something . . . excitement? Hope? Not hope exactly. But she thought maybe Alicia was right. Moving was better than waiting around.
“Mom, get in the car,” she said as she walked around the U-Haul. Cam was getting used to the U-Haul idea, too. It was nice to be able to travel with all of your stuff. It was comforting. Liberating. It was a traveling garage. A modern-day covered wagon.
U-Haul branded each trailer with a “fun fact” from a different state. They’d gotten Utah. And their fun fact was about the canyons of the Escalante, which was apropos of nothing except that the four-foot-square image of the canyon was strangely O’Keeffian and vaginal. They were branded with a four-foot vagina.
“Oh, God, Cam. Only you would think that,” their mother had said when Cam had objected to it yesterday.
“That makes me feel really good about myself, Mom, when you imply that my thoughts are crazy. Good parenting.”
“Okay, Cam, I’m sorry,” Alicia had said, exasperated. “Do you want me to ask for a different one? Without a vagina?”
“No. That’s fine,” she had acquiesced, and when she’d woken up this morning it didn’t bother her that much.
“Come on, Mom, it’s time to go,” Cam said insistently as she tapped her mom on the shoulder.
“Okay, okay,” Alicia said as she peeled herself off of Izanagi.
Izanagi took a deep breath and composed himself and then walked in his paint-splattered, turned-up jeans to his rusting Honda Accord. He reached into the open window and retrieved two rectangular gifts, impeccably wrapped in brown paper and tied with raffia bows. Izanagi was a stereotypically neat and meticulous minimalist when it came to his artistic pursuits. When he wasn’t working at the restaurant, he wrote spare poems and made paintings that were quiet and clean, l
ike whispers.
He handed the gifts to the girls, and Perry tore into hers hungrily. Inside was a simple brown notebook and a brown paper–wrapped pencil.
“To record your trip,” said Izanagi.
“To record the miracles!” said Perry, launching herself at Izanagi and hugging him around the waist.
“Thanks,” said Cam, keeping her distance. “I’ll open mine when we get there.” She was resistant these days to writing anything down. She didn’t want anyone reading her impermanent thoughts after she had permanently left the planet.
“God, I love that man,” Alicia said as she climbed into the car and blew him a final kiss. He slunk away with his hands in his pockets. He was staying in their house to keep an eye on things.
“You have a strange concept of love.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Nothing, obviously. Which way?” Cam was driving the first leg of the trip.
“Take a left.”
“South? From what I learned in geography—and granted, I missed a lot of school—Maine is to the north.”
“We need to stop by Tom’s.”
“Oh God. Really?” Cam just wanted to get on the road before she lost her resolve.
“He needs to give us specific directions. This place is almost impossible to find, even with a GPS. And you know that phrase, You can’t get there from here? People from Maine are really like that. No one will help us once we get up there.”
Tom lived in an overgrown jungle of mangroves, vines, and palm trees. You practically needed a machete to hack your way to the front door. The inside—and it was difficult to distinguish between the inside and outside—was crawling with mice and salamanders and the five famous iguanas, who roamed freely around the place. The TV was usually blaring something like Judge Judy or Divorce Court, and the only way to determine that this was a place of business at all was a tiny gold plaque next to the doorbell that read THOMAS LANE: HERBALIST, HEALER, SHAMAN, CHIEF.
“Ladies,” he said as he greeted them at the door wearing a green and blue tie-dyed shirt and smoking a joint. “Contact buzz?” he asked, about to exhale into Alicia’s face.
“No.” She shook her head. “I have to drive later.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. His shoulder-length gray hair was washed today, surprisingly, and his jeans were stain-free. His face was relaxed and his pale blue eyes were less bloodshot than usual. Maybe there was a new person in his life—or a new herb, thought Cam. “What can I do for you today?” he asked. “Campbell, you look great. Have you been taking the apricot seed like I told you?”
“Um, that would be a no,” she said as she stepped over the motionless iguana basking in a patch of sunlight.
“Cam, you need to open your heart to the possibilities of the universe. We can’t help you until you help yourself.”
“Whatever,” said Cam. “Can you just get us the directions?” A strange smell wafted her way from whatever potion was boiling in the dirty pot on the stove.
“To Promise?” Tom asked.
“Um, Promise?” This was the first Cam had heard of the town’s hokey name.
“Yes. To Promise,” said Alicia.
“Oh, Cam. I’m so proud of you for taking this step. Contact buzz?” he asked, leaning his face into hers.
“No. God. Blow it over there.”
Tom had weird sour breath because he ate mostly Gerber baby meat sticks. He claimed they were easier on the digestive system, so he ate jars and jars of them and used the empties, which were stacked neatly on shelves that ran floor to ceiling in perfect Gerber-meat-stick-jar increments, to house herbs. The jars were filled with powders, leaves, roots, teas, and other magical potions, and none of them were labeled. They were just laid out like a bizarre map of Tom’s mind. He knew where everything herbal was. Finding the directions would be another story.
“Let me see,” mused Tom, “Directions, directions. Where would those be?” He rifled through some of the books stacked all over the living room floor and on the dining room table and chairs.
“Promise is really a magical place, Campbell. It’s so beautiful.”
“Really. Have you been there, Tom?”
“Um, no. But legend has it that it’s just Shangri-La.”
“In Maine?”
“A-yuh. That’s how they say ‘yes’ in Maine. Okay. Here it is.” Tom unearthed an old, wrinkled-up Dunkin’ Donuts bag with writing scribbled all over it. “So here’s the map. The main road leading to Promise is behind the Dunkin’ Donuts off of Route 3, and you can only see it from the drive-through squawk box. People say it’s good luck to order a whoopie pie and some chocolate milk before driving into town. The number for the hotel is on the back.”
“What in God’s name is a ‘whoopie pie’?” asked Cam. “This is such a joke.”
“No, Campbell,” said Tom, getting really solemn all of a sudden. His normally turned-up mouth flatlined across his face, and his wild and wiry eyebrows sank. “This is no joke. If you can find the town—and most people can’t—magical things can happen. Amazing things, like tiny fish raining from the sky and miracle cures for diseases, which I think you are in the market for, young lady. So here,” he said, handing over the crumpled bag.
“Thank you,” said Cam.
Fish raining from the sky reminded her of that Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs book her dad used to read to her. It was a story about a magical town where the day’s food would rain down from the sky at every meal and people would catch it on their plates. Then things got out of hand and the townspeople had to sail to the real world on boats made of giant toast.
“Do they have sailboats made of giant toast?” asked Cam.
“What?” asked Tom.
“Never mind.”
“Now go, and don’t forget to send me a postcard,” said Tom.
Cam looked at the map drawn with the unsteady palsied hand of some recovering drug addict. She caught the tears in her throat before letting them pool in the corners of her eyes. It was so pathetic that they were trying this. Part of her wished she could just stay ensconced in her thin-walled bedroom, wrapped in her down comforter, and have her mother bring her chicken soup until this was all over. But when she looked at her mom and Perry staring at her from the doorway, already wide-eyed and ecstatic in their altered road-trip reality, she knew this wasn’t just about her.
“Let’s go, bitches,” she said in jest as she held up the crumpled bag. Alicia snatched it from her hand, and Cam said, “Maineward ho.”
“Who’s Maineward, and why is she a ho?” asked Perry as they made the treacherous walk through the mangroves back to the car.
SIX
“WE CAN READ THEM, PERRY. YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ THEM OUT loud,” said Cam.
Perry had been sucked into her first roadside attraction—that friendly euphemism for “tourist trap.” They had been on the road for six long hours, and they were getting a little loca. Alicia had become obsessed with redialing the number for the ghost hotel in Promise, Maine—no one ever picked up—and Perry could not stop reading road signs. The South of the Border billboards had started in Georgia at about ten miles apart, and now, halfway into South Carolina, they were practically every ten yards. Cam’s personal favorite—SOUTH OF THE BORDER: YOU NEVER SAUSAGE A PLACE!—had a three-dimensional, fifteen-foot-long hot dog hanging from the top of it in the shape of a smile.
Cam was actually grateful for the billboards. They gave her something to look at aside from the bleak landscape of America the beautiful. Beauty didn’t seem to be a priority for people anymore. If you had to judge from I-95, America had become cancerous clusters of cheap houses, replicating out of control. They were dropped into empty, treeless soybean fields and connected by strip mall after superstore after strip mall. People just needed places to collect their stuff. Each house had a swing set and a green lawn littered with plastic toys. No one even built a fence to hide the plastic toy habit. People were shameless about their consumption of p
lastic.
It was no wonder the polar bears were drowning.
They were getting close. Cam could see the lights of the sombrero tower blinking above the pine trees like a UFO. And when they rounded the next bend and Alicia drove Cumulus between the legs of an enormous neon Pedro—South of the Border’s offensive Mexican-guy mascot—all Cam could think was, Por qué?
South of the Border was empty. (Hadn’t people seen the signs?) It was dusty, dry, and desolate. Just a few warehouses filled with schlock dropped in the middle of nowhere. Scattered throughout the compound were plaster-of-paris statues of animals from Africa. An orange giraffe; a huge, T-shirt-wearing gorilla. What these had to do with Mexico, Cam could not imagine. It cost a dollar to take the elevator to the top of the sombrero tower, where you could look at nothing for miles around.
“Wow, this place has really gone downhill,” said Alicia. She finally stopped dialing the Promise Breakers Hotel, took the phone away from her ear, and looked around.
“Right. I’m sure it was very classy once.”
“It wasn’t this bad.”
Cam was glad she got to see it at night, though, where the neon gave the place its special cache. South of the Border at night was quite a wonder. Sleazy, cheap, gaudy, garish, and filthy, except for the absence of any visible prostitutes, it almost compared to the real Tijuana. She put Tweety back in his cage and covered it up so he didn’t have to witness the vulgarity.
“Okay, everyone gather round the stereotype,” said Cam. Her dad used to say that when Disney tourists asked to have their picture taken with him. Cam took out her camera and snapped a shot of Perry and her mom pinching the cheeks of a huge plaster-of-paris Pedro.
Then she headed toward Gift Shop West, the city block–size store filled with, in Cam’s estimation, much better stuff than Gift Shop East on the opposite side of the compound.
“The unicorn section is in Gift Shop East,” said Perry.