Just before dawn he was wrenched awake, and he quietly lugged his duffel bag into the hotel bathroom to change. By the time the sun came up nothing seemed important anymore. He’d only slept three hours but didn’t feel groggy or even tired. She was still in her pajamas, and as she smoked a cigarette on the balcony he lay on his bed with his hands over his chest. This is what people do when they’re happy, he thought as he looked at the ceiling. They sit around and think about how happy they are. She’d left the door open and he could feel the morning’s chill on his toes. It was one of those things you hold on to, the feeling, and before long his eyes were closed and every shift in the room’s temperature brought a smile. When he was younger, she would touch his face before bed, running her finger along his eyebrows, the bridge of his nose, and the soft spots under his eyes, just light enough where she felt so much more than human. He remembered this and began to giggle, and to cry. Some people were so bound up and twisted into terrible shapes that you could never hammer them back the way the were. Unhappiness, Colin decided, was just part of his world. By the time they packed the car, he was already thinking of how easy it was to die in the Grand Canyon.
They ate a late breakfast at the lodge, right on the rim. “So this is the wilderness,” she said with a mouthful of eggs Florentine, pointing with her fork at the line snaking toward the buffet. “I was in New York once. Came up out of Penn Station, on that giant escalator to the street. That’s the only place I’ve ever seen more crowded.”
“I read you’re not supposed to come here in June,” he said. “Too many people.”
“But we are here, and we weren’t here in April. I hope the Grand Canyon isn’t offended that we’ve arranged the trip around our schedule.” She winked and took a sip of coffee. “Besides. All I want is to see the damn thing. Get a picture of you on the rim. I used to take pictures of you all the time. All three of you. You’d lose a tooth and I’d take a picture. Heather’s first report card—I have ten pictures of it, plus the stupid thing itself, somewhere in a box. All your art projects. Everything that says ‘Mom’ in your crooked handwriting. Which hasn’t gotten any better.”
“Shut up. Here—” He grabbed a napkin and dipped his finger into his orange juice. He tried to drip MOM but it came out like a big blob. “That’s special too,” he said, and flung it across the table. But she didn’t push it away or laugh. Instead she smiled at something nobody else could see, and he felt more cruel than he had in months. “Sorry,” he told her.
“Sorry for what?” She folded the napkin into fourths and set it on the table. “Being a jerk? I’m used to it.” She finished her coffee and clunked the mug on the table. “You can’t raise kids without breaking your own heart,” she said as they pushed themselves away from the table. It sounded familiar and he knew where he had read it. He was so distracted that he forgot all about leaping to his death, and even felt a tinge of vertigo when, as they stood right on the edge, a single, tiny rock rolled out from under the toe of his shoe.
“And that’s only halfway down,” some man said, putting his hand on Colin’s shoulder. “Not what you bargained for, hey buddy?”
The man was smiling but Colin felt as though he’d been attacked. He was old enough to be his grandfather, only fat and dressed like someone from Gilligan’s Island. “It’s a mile deep,” Colin said, and he shrank back toward his mother, who was already searching her purse for a cigarette.
“It really is an amazing place,” she said as they sat in traffic, waiting to leave the park. They were on a spruce-lined road that would’ve been pretty on another day. The signs about mountain lions and coyotes would’ve been exciting. “The car in front of us stinks,” she said. “If I get a migraine you have to drive.” He buried himself in the atlas, plotting their next route to LA. They should have arrived yesterday, he calculated.
The best thing to do was go south, back toward the freeway. Instead she went north and took them into Utah, where everything—as if someone had draped a swatch of silk over the sun—was orange. Toward evening they were moving west again. “You have to find the 15,” he kept telling her, and he put up his hands when she turned where she wasn’t supposed to go. “You’re gonna get us lost!” he shouted, just outside a place called Hurricane. A half hour later she pulled onto I-15, heading toward Las Vegas.
“This is a vacation, remember? We’re supposed to have fun.”
“It would be fun if you weren’t trying to kill us.” He was trembling, he realized, and sweating so badly he could feel it drip down onto his ribs.
“Kill us? Really? Who’s out there trying to kill us?” She laughed at him and cracked her window, only an inch. The freeway’s thunder silenced anything he could’ve said. He turned and glared out the window, at the desert, which he now understood grew in all directions at this time of day and looked surrounded by flames so hot you couldn’t even see their licks and curlicues. The whole thing looked like an oven, as if they could drive in any direction and roast themselves alive. By the time they crossed into Nevada he no longer knew why he was so angry, and after they left a gas station he tried to make a joke about the slot machine above the urinal in the men’s room, but she wasn’t listening. As she drove she looked up at the sky, the sun now sunk beneath the mountains. “I believe that’s Venus,” she told him, pointing to the sky’s only star. Of course it was, he said, as though she’d pointed to the road and said pavement. And it was like this, their moods out of alignment, until they came around the bend and saw Las Vegas nestled in the rocks like a handful of diamonds. “Wow,” they said at the same time, smiling at each other. It was too expensive to stay, and they moved on.
“Tell me about a small town,” she said, after night had fallen in earnest. “What’s nearby? Something tiny. Way smaller than Williams. I want some hole-in-the-wall place.”
“Uh…” He held the atlas close to his face, leaning into the clock’s turquoise glow. “I think you, uh…” She flipped on the light and he blinked until the map made sense. “Go east on 164. It might be called Nipton Road. It’ll take you to Nipton.” He reached up and killed the light. In the vanishing glare they saw a pair of eyes glide onto the road. “Fuck!” he shouted as she swerved. He looked back and saw something step into the night. “What the fuck?” His muscles felt full of ice. “We almost died,” he said, over and over as she sat gripping the wheel. “You don’t even care!”
For the first time in years, she slapped him across the face. “That’s enough.”
It was after eleven when they reached the California border. A roadblock forced them through a checkpoint. Colin gripped the atlas like a shield. His mother rolled down the window as a man stepped up to the car. “Good evening,” he said. His accent made Colin feel like they’d traveled much farther. Through the filmy window of the booth he saw another man waiting, a rack with two shotguns behind him. His ears began to ring.
His mother seemed oblivious. “Hi there. What is this? Some kind of immigration thing?”
“Not at all. Just wanting to know if you carry any fruits or vegetables with you today?”
She laughed and glanced at Colin. The way she smiled made him think they were going to die. “We have apples in the cooler, sir,” he said over her shoulder. “And maybe an orange somewhere. I can look if you want.” He gestured with his thumb toward the trunk. They wanted money, he was thinking, and they had nothing to give.
“You’re seriously looking for fruits and veggies?” she asked. “Like they’re, what—full of drugs?”
“Not at all, ma’am. Just fruits and vegetables themselves. Many carry bacteria, parasites, insects, pests. California requires tight control on incoming produce, you understand? To ensure no contamination?”
“Can you believe this?” she asked Colin, who begged her to unlock the trunk and give the man what he wanted. “This is ridiculous,” she said as she got out of the car.
Colin watched them in the rearview mirror. She was bent over the trunk and the border officer stood behind
her. He passed a flashlight over her hip and Colin saw a band of flesh as her T-shirt rose up above her waistline. The beam was resting more on his mother than on whatever was in the trunk. She’d left the door open and the car’s urgent reminder to take out the keys was all he could hear. The man dumped an armful of apples into a drum with a biohazard symbol. He was smiling as he walked back up to the car. “You are free to go,” he told her, and winked as she shifted the car into gear. “Have a lovely night.”
“Thanks,” she said, and began to roll up the window. You’re pretty, Colin thought he heard. The man was standing in the road, watching them go, ignoring the next car in line. Not even a mile down the road she had to pull over so Colin could vomit out the window.
“Don’t get any on the car,” she was saying. She rubbed his back as he coughed up the last bit of their dinner, and even offered her sleeve as a napkin. The way he shook his head reminded her of the child he’d been, and as they drove the last few miles to Nipton her heart felt like a rock hurtled through the sky, disintegrating as it plummeted back down to earth. “You know I love you,” she said, and she was glad to discover, as she glanced over at him, that he’d fallen asleep.
At the hotel in Nipton she rented two separate rooms, right across the hall from each other. There was only one other guest who never left her room. They stayed for three nights and she couldn’t explain why, even when Colin paced up and down the dirt road, complaining that they’d just have to turn around and go back home, that there was no point in going to LA, that they’d wasted all their time. But by morning on the second full day he was lounging in the lobby in a pair of gym shorts, his feet on the edge of the couch as he flipped through an old National Geographic. She sat alone at the card table under the window, watching pillars of dust skate across the expanse of the Mojave below. In time she thought of them as ghosts made visible by the air’s particulates, and in the evening, when the wind died down and the heat had abated, she walked alone in the empty field behind the hotel. The desert was full of garbage, she’d noticed a few days ago, but garbage so old it seemed like treasure. Rusted cans that must have fed cowboys a century before. Machinery she imagined was long obsolete. And shell after shell of something exploded—land mines, grenades, bullets. For the first time since Kansas she asked herself if this was why she had come. Her hand found its way into her purse, where the gun’s grip felt like something she knew, something that gave comfort. But she knew the tangled mess of her life had been picked up, once more, and bent into some other shape. It would take time, as always, to study it like you’d study a gliding cloud, to find something in its abstraction that looked, to you, like a thing you could name.
She’d thought it would be picturesque—they’d roll into LA and see it all, right there: the buildings downtown nestled right up against the great white letters of Hollywood, and from there you’d only have to squint to see the beach. Instead, Los Angeles was like a tide that overtook you, a little at a time. “This is the LA area,” Colin said as they passed a ranch here, a sewage plant there. They hit traffic on the other side of a small canyon. The hills were quilted in gardens whose caretakers could afford varying levels of water bills, their squares of growth overrun with profanely pink flowers, palms, and pines that grew next to cacti. After that, the freeway trickled through a colony of stockyards where the smell of ammoniac shit made her realize that nothing could be more beautiful than the Mojave Valley at dawn, like a bowl filling with light. As they inched through exurban traffic she felt the wealthiest homes before she saw them, the change in moisture pin-prickling her skin. Colin was looking left and right, as if the city they knew from movies were hiding just behind that curtain of smog.
They had a late lunch in Pasadena, and the sky was purpling when they arrived in what they later learned was the LA Basin. Diane paid far more than she should have for a motel a few blocks south of Hollywood Boulevard. “We’re close to the action,” she said as they lugged their suitcases upstairs. “You know, Action!” Colin wasn’t listening. He kept looking over the railing, down to the parking lot.
“Everything’s outside,” he said. He pointed to the vending and the ice machines, tucked in a cubby beneath the stairs on the other side of the building.
“Well, yeah. It gets…what, sixty here? At worst?” She unlocked the room. “Tell me where we are,” she said as she hurled her bags onto the bed. “Show me on the map. Show me me.” Colin was halfway through the bathroom door and gave her a pained look, like he couldn’t decide which was more urgent. “In a minute,” she said, and waved him away. “Perfect time for a smoke anyway.”
It was hard, standing on the balcony, not to imagine she was on camera. She knew the city did this to people. You couldn’t avoid it, especially in the evening when the lights overtook the sky. The traffic inched along between the stoplights and made her think of blood, pulled a little at a time through the heart’s valves and chambers. She held her cigarette more elegantly here. She rested her weight on the railing as though deep in thought. This was how things started, she told herself. This was the moment at which something was supposed to happen. A couple on the first floor was arguing in Spanish and the only word she recognized was comer. Someone’s TV’s light show at the far end of the balcony made the night seem as if it had already ended and she asked herself who was inside. A man here alone on business, or maybe exiled by his wife—or a pair of high schoolers pretending to be adults. She took a long drag and closed her eyes as it filled her. Sometimes she pictured the little pockets in her lungs the doctor had called sacs. She tried to feel them individually, exhaling inside of her. When she opened her eyes the TV was off and a maid exited the room with a bundle of sheets. The downstairs argument had fallen to a mutter, and Diane was no longer sure if comer meant to eat or to take, and if “to take,” in Mexico, meant something like fuck. “Christ, you’re pathetic,” she whispered. She stubbed her cigarette on the railing and flicked it into a pot of magnolias.
For those first two days they behaved like tourists. They took a bus tour of Hollywood and Beverly Hills and snapped pictures with the disposable cameras they bought at the gift shop outside the Chinese theater. Colin wanted to see the La Brea Tar Pits and she wanted to walk along the Santa Monica Pier. Both were expensive and crowded, and they loved it. They ate dinner at a sidewalk café and ignored the smell of exhaust from passing cars. Early the next morning they walked up and down Hollywood Boulevard, photographing the names of movie stars they recognized and complaining about the ones they couldn’t find. A man walked by who could’ve been George Clooney but nobody seemed to care, so she decided he wasn’t. “I’m sure he’s taller anyway,” she said.
In the shower, late that afternoon, she began to hate the city again. It had won her over with a simple glance at the evening sky, but she wasn’t that kind of person. She wasn’t someone who peeked through celebrities’ gates. Instead, in the morning, she would pretend she lived there. She wanted to wake up and act as though this was her neighborhood, and that her motel was a tucked-away townhouse with a dense little garden in the middle of a courtyard. Just as she’d lain awake at the Hotel Nipton—her window cracked so she could hear the coyotes and decide whether or not she’d ever find them comforting—she would find someplace with good coffee, a sunny booth, and terrible doughnuts. She would pretend the barista was someone who knew her name, who asked questions about her week or the weather. As she toweled off she muttered to herself the things she might say, one day far off, when this was her real life.
When she opened the bathroom door she heard the bed creak and the sheets rustle together. Something fell from the nightstand onto the carpet. She waited a few seconds so she wouldn’t embarrass him. At home this was easier to ignore: he had his own room, they each had a schedule. Traveling had made her uncomfortably aware of how much he’d grown up, not to mention his gross little habits. More than once, walking barefoot through the room, she’d stepped on a shard of toenail, torn from his foot with his teeth. He left str
eaks in the toilet bowl. Whenever he tossed a tissue or a candy wrapper at the trash can he missed. The faucet in the bathroom was sticky with soap residue. And if you leave him alone for more than five minutes, she thought, and shook her head. Don’t think about it. When the other room was quiet she walked in and found him there, the remote in his lap and a look of fake boredom on his face. “All clean,” he said, his skin flushing red. It was hard not to tease him or shudder in horror, but she smiled nonetheless, like he was still her little boy. His hands were shaking as he gathered up his clothes and she thanked God she would never have to face being fourteen again.
As he stepped into the shower, Colin tried to believe his mother was still her usual kind of crazy, simply overwhelmed by all these new places. But whenever they sat down for lunch or stopped to rest on a bench she talked about leaving home for good. First it was Santa Fe—how the “crisp mountain air” was good for her. Now, in LA, she promised that their lives would change, that there was so much more opportunity in a place like this.
“Think of how different it would be for you,” she’d said that afternoon. “How much easier.”
Easier how? he wanted to know, and she changed the subject.
He resolved to act more like a boy, after that. He refused to point at things that astonished him, like the store that sold nothing but wigs, or the white-as-a-sheet woman whose fur coat, on that ninety-degree day, could have been cut from the dragon in NeverEnding Story. Instead he sulked like she’d ruined the trip. When they saw a gay couple in purple shorts and flip-flops he nudged her and pointed out those two fags. “Colin!” she said, as though it was a swear word. For the first time since they’d left home he felt ashamed enough to want to die.
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