by Claire Cook
I was just about to run back in to check my calendar, when Tess’s front door opened. She stood there for a moment under her outside light, talking to someone behind her. Finally she walked out the door with her carry-on. Her husband followed, rolling a suitcase behind him.
I felt a little bolt of jealousy. Must be nice to have a semicute, loyal husband who got up at this insane hour to say good-bye to his wife, even though he’d be exhausted at work all day. I tried to picture someone loving me enough to wake up at 3:30 A.M., but I couldn’t quite get there.
I dragged my suitcase across the grass to Tess’s driveway.
“I don’t think I can go,” Tess said.
“What?” I said.
“Of course you can,” her husband said. “I’ll handle it.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Hannah hasn’t come home yet,” Tess said. “If she’s okay, she is so completely grounded for her next nine lives.”
A white van pulled into Tess’s driveway. Her husband put his arms around her and kissed her on the lips. “Love you,” he said.
“Love you, too,” she said. “Call me the minute she gets home. No, make her call me. No, don’t. I don’t want to ruin my trip. Never mind. You figure it out.”
The driver got out and put our suitcases in the back of the van, and Tess and I climbed in. Rosie was waiting on High Street, at the end of her long dirt driveway.
“Woo-hoo,” she said as she jumped into the seat behind us. “I’m out of the house!”
Nobody said anything.
“What happened?” Rosie said.
I turned around. “Hannah’s not home yet,” I said.
“She’ll be fine,” Rosie said. “God, I so don’t want to let Connor and Nick be teenagers.”
Nobody said a word until we got to the Marshbury common. “Well, will you look at that,” the driver said. “I don’t know how I missed it on the way into town. Must have still been half asleep.”
Tess’s and my posters were softly lit by the stars, the moon, and the streetlights. They flapped gently in the predawn breeze. We’d done a great job on the lettering. All of the posters were legible as we drove by, even wake up and smell the sheets, which had slipped out from under one of its clothespins. You just had to turn your head sideways to read it.
But it was the bubbles that really got your attention. Overnight they’d multiplied and taken on a life of their own. They’d overflowed the fountain and surged across the manicured grass of the common. They looked like a cross between a seriously late snowstorm and an effervescent tidal wave.
Rosie poked me between the shoulder blades. Hard.
In front of us, the driver shook his head. “Stupid kids,” he said. “Wait till the cops get their hands on them.”
TESS GAVE HER husband one last call before the flight attendant made us turn off our cell phones. “Nothing?” she said. “Okay, call Kayley’s house and see if she came home last night. If Kayley’s home, have them wake her up, and make her call everyone she could possibly be with. And then try you-know-who’s house, just in case they’re back together again. There’s still time for me to get off the plane. Okay, okay. I’ll call you from Atlanta.”
I had an aisle seat. Tess was across from me on the other aisle, and Rosie had the window seat beside me. I glanced over at Rosie. She was ghostly pale and white-knuckling both armrests.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Rosie shook her head. “I hate to fly,” she whispered.
Tess leaned over the aisle to get a look at Rosie. “Don’t worry, sweetie pie,” she said. “I have Valium.” Tess reached under the seat, unzipped her carry-on, and pulled out a Baggie filled with pills.
“Here, switch seats with me,” Tess said. I switched.
“How’s she doing over there?” I whispered once we’d reached cruising altitude.
“Sleeping like a baby,” Tess whispered back. “Get ready, though, she’s got an aggravating little snore.”
“Good thing you packed your Valium,” I said.
Tess pulled a magazine out of the seat pocket in front of her. “Like I believe in pharmaceutical drugs. It was one of my vitamins. Magnesium. I have to take it with my calcium pills so I don’t get constipated.”
“Seriously?” I said.
“What, calcium doesn’t do that to you?”
I shook my head. “No, I mean you didn’t really give her Valium?”
Tess leaned across the aisle. “Once I gave my husband one of the kids’ old vitamins and told him it was Viagra. Smurf blue and probably ten years old.”
The woman behind me leaned into the aisle. “It worked?” she whispered.
“Like a charm,” Tess said.
As soon as we landed, Tess called her husband. “Thank God,” she said. “Oh, puh-lease, a likely story. Yeah, yeah, okay. Right, don’t let her out of the house for a second. Okay, work, but call and double-check she’s really on the schedule. No, I don’t want to talk to her. I’m trying to have a vacation, not that she hasn’t ruined it already. Okay, okay. I will. I won’t. Okay, call you later. Love you, too.”
“She’s all right?” Rosie and I both said as soon as Tess hung up.
“Fine,” Tess said. “At least until I get my hands on her.”
Eventually they let us deplane, and we rolled our carry-ons along the ramp and into the terminal.
“I still don’t get how you can fly from Boston to Seattle and have to go through Atlanta,” Tess said. “It’s a total waste of fossil fuel.”
“Look on the bright side,” I said. “We got here early, plus we have an eighty-three-minute layover. This airport is huge. I bet we can get four thousand steps in before we have to board.”
Rosie yawned. “No way. You two walk. I’ll sit and watch our carry-ons.”
“Slacker,” I said.
“Sorry,” Rosie said. “It’s just that I’ve always been really sensitive to drugs….”
Tess grabbed one of her elbows. “I think we’d better keep you walking then. We don’t want any drug overdoses on this trip.”
We bypassed the tram and the moving sidewalk and kept walking, even on the escalators. We checked out some great stone sculptures from Zimbabwe while infectious Zimbabwean music played overhead, a tribute to the African roots of a large percentage of Atlanta’s population. I thought it was great that more and more airports were supporting artists and giving travelers something to look at while their flights were inevitably canceled or delayed.
Fortunately ours was almost on time. Better yet, by the time we’d grabbed something to eat at the Atlanta Bread Factory and found our seats on the plane that would actually take us to Seattle, we’d dragged Rosie around for 4,133 steps. I flipped my pedometer closed. “Wow,” I said, “not bad.”
Tess turned to check on Rosie. “How’re you doing, kiddo? Need another dose?”
“I don’t know if I dare,” Rosie said. “Okay, but just a half this time.”
A LITTLE MORE than nine hours after our first plane took off, our second plane finally landed in Seattle.
The seat had flattened my hair into the back of my head, maybe permanently. I tried to fluff it up with one hand while I pulled my carry-on with the other. “Boy, am I tired,” I said. “I can’t believe we still have to pick up our rental car and drive to Sequim. Maybe we should have planned to spend tonight in Seattle.”
Tess finished resetting her watch. “That wouldn’t have made any sense at all. It’s only noon here, plus we’re heading in the opposite direction.”
“I’ll drive,” Rosie said. She was rolling her suitcase ahead of us like a racehorse. “I feel great. I haven’t slept like that in years. I am so getting my own Valium prescription when we get back.”
“Nice art here, too,” I said. We looked up at a row of suitcases and one guitar case suspended high above us. They had holes drilled through their centers and a metal bar threaded through, and they were twisted at random angles.
“That’s suc
h a great piece,” Rosie said, “although I feel a little bit sorry for that poor guitar case. I’m trying to decide if I like this or the sea creatures embedded in the walkways at Logan better.”
“Apples and oranges,” Tess said. “This one is much edgier, and the sea creatures are more, I don’t know, aquatic.” She stretched her arms overhead. “You know, except for my stiff back, it almost feels like we’ve spent the day museum hopping. Come on, let’s go get our rental car.”
“Why is everybody in our line?” Rosie asked a few minutes later. There were five rental car counters lined up side by side across from the baggage claim carousels. Each of the other lines had about three people in them, while the line in front of Nationwide stretched back endlessly.
“I picked it because it was the cheapest one online,” I said.
“By how much?” Tess said.
I shrugged. “Maybe a dollar or two. Per day.”
“People think it’s all about sexual predators, but this is how you really get in trouble on the Internet,” Tess said. “From now on, always go with the second cheapest offer.”
“Welcome to Sea-Tac,” the woman at the rental car counter said an eternity later. “This your first time?”
Rosie yawned and handed the woman her license. “Yes,” she said. “We’re heading to Sequim for the lavender festival.”
“Oh, you’re going to love it,” she said. “Here, let me find it on the map for you. Where did you say you were going again?”
Tess started to giggle. Then I did. “Bathroom,” Tess said.
We were still laughing when Rosie found us outside the bathroom. “It wasn’t that funny,” she said.
“Ohmigod,” Tess said. “It was the funniest thing I’ve heard in my whole life.”
“Then you need a better life,” Rosie said.
“No shit,” Tess said.
Tess and I started laughing all over again.
“When did you two become new best friends?” Rosie asked.
The airport was south of Seattle, so it turned out to be a pretty easy two hours to Sequim. We drove south until we got to Tacoma, then headed northwest toward the Olympic Peninsula. On the map, the Olympic Peninsula looked like an arm reaching out across the Strait of Juan de Fuca and waving to Victoria, British Columbia.
Right around Gig Harbor, Rosie read a sign out loud: “CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS.” She fumbled with her left hand until we heard the click of all four doors locking.
I flipped through my travel guide. “That’s the Washington State Corrections Center for Women.”
“If they make it this far, I say we pick them up,” Tess said. “They probably just need somebody to believe in them.”
“You sure you don’t want to stop and do some quick volunteering?” I asked. “It says here they have a great Prisoner Pet Partnership Program.”
“Don’t encourage her,” Rosie said.
We were quiet until we came to the Hood Canal Bridge.
“Wow,” Tess said.
“Will you look at those views,” Rosie said. “Just incredible.”
“It’s the third largest floating bridge in the world,” I read. “It connects the Kitsap Peninsula to the Olympic Peninsula.”
“I can’t believe these huge trees,” I said a while later.
“Doug firs,” Rosie said.
“Doug Fir,” Tess said. “I think I dated him in college. Tall guy, right?”
Sequim was a surprise. I’d expected just a quaint little village, but it was a lot more spread out than I’d pictured, hugging the highway the way towns in Vermont did. Then it stretched through farmland out to the ocean. It felt both familiar and completely foreign to be near the ocean, but in full view of whitecapped mountains.
“Wow,” Tess said. “It’s like New England in an alternate universe.”
“And how about that lavender,” Rosie said. “Look, even the gas stations have perfect displays of lavender.”
“Ooh,” I said, “what’s that kind of lavender called with the dark pink bunny ears?”
“Spanish lavender,” Rosie said. “It’s not a true lavender, but isn’t it great?”
She pulled our cramped white rental into the Sequim Suites parking lot.
“And what’s the one over there that looks like a punk rocker?” I pointed to a big clump of purple lavender with one pale pink section running through it like a streak.
Rosie laughed. “It’s probably a hybrid trying to revert back to its original self.”
“Wherever you go, there you are,” Tess said. “I hate that.”
I leaned out my window for a closer look. “How do you know it’s not just becoming the color it’s always wanted to be?”
Rosie put the car in park. “Geez, we definitely should have gone for the standard instead of the midsize.”
“Well,” I said, “they don’t make it easy. I thought the midsize sounded bigger.”
“Well,” Tess said, “obviously if it was cheaper, it was smaller.”
“Okay,” I said, “next time you get the car.”
“Come on,” Tess said, “let’s check in and go drink our dinner.”
“It’s only three-thirteen,” I said.
“Not for me,” Rosie said. “I haven’t changed my watch yet. Hey, do you think I dare have a glass of wine? I mean, do I still have Valium in my system?”
Tess was already yanking our suitcases out of the car. “Come on,” she said. “I want to check my e-mail. Maybe there’s something from Annalisa.”
The woman behind the reception desk, who had great cheekbones and a slightly gap-toothed smile, was about our age. Her name was Nancy, and she couldn’t believe I’d remembered her sneakers. “Are you sure?” she kept saying. “You know, I would have given you the room anyway.”
The lobby was bursting at the seams with people. “Is it always like this?” Rosie asked.
The woman tucked the sneakers behind the counter. “Just for the festival,” she said. “Wait till you see it tomorrow.”
I zipped up my suitcase again, and we headed for our suite. Tess sat down on the couch and pulled her laptop from her carry-on. Rosie turned on the television, and I started unpacking.
“Nothing,” Tess said.
“Wow,” Rosie said. “High sixties, low seventies for the whole weekend. Hey, can you check Marshburytownonline.org for the weather at home? I just want to make sure it’s hot and muggy, so I can gloat.”
“Holy shit,” Tess said a minute later.
“That bad, huh?” Rosie said.
“Holy shit,” Tess said again.
Rosie sat down on the couch beside Tess, and I dug in my suitcase for my toiletry case. Once I got myself relatively organized, I’d kick into vacation mode for the rest of the weekend.
“Noreen?” Rosie said. “You might want to come over here for a minute.”
I sat down on Tess’s other side. “What?” I said.
Rosie pointed.
On Tess’s computer screen, right below the local weather forecast and above the recap of the last Marshbury selectmen’s meeting, was a blurry close-up of me taking off my black ski mask. There was an arrow on my nose. Tess clicked on the arrow, and the video started. A hazy but identifiable me followed a ski-masked and unidentifiable Tess and her laundry detergent over to the fountain.
The video panned the length of clothesline long enough to read our signs, cut to the duct-taped mouth of the Revolutionary statue, to a sea of bubbles, and then back to the beginning again. “In a stunning reversal of roles, on the Marshbury town common, under the cover of darkness,” the voice-over said, “two as yet unidentified older adult female vandals were caught on cell phone camera by a couple of quick-thinking teens, who happened to be in the area.”
“Ohmigod,” I said. “Tess, you can tell it’s me.”
“Did you see how wide my hips look?” Tess said. “But, come on, older?”
Day 26
6425 steps
THE NEXT
MORNING AT BREAKFAST, THE THREE OF US CHECKED out the people sitting at the other tables.
“I don’t know,” Tess said. “Seems like an awful lot of whiteheads here.”
“Stop,” I said. “There but for a bottle of dye go I—and you, too.” I looked around. “I don’t think most of them are that much older than we are.”
“Ohmigod,” Rosie whispered. “Don’t look now, but over there.”
Tess and I turned to look. A couple was unloading the contents of a canvas bag onto their table: his and her seven-day vitamin dispensers, soy milk, ground flaxseed, and finally, a bag of prunes.
“Are three enough?” Tess whispered. “Are six too many?”
“They call them dried plums now,” I said. “It’s all in the spin.”
“Shoot me,” Tess said. “If I ever walk into a restaurant with a bag of prunes, please just shoot me. And in the meantime, I hope we can at least manage to stay up a little bit later tonight. I can’t believe we were all asleep by six-thirty.”
Rosie took a bite of her lavender pear pancakes. “Cut us some slack,” she said. “It was really nine-thirty. But you’re right, we should have at least gone for that second glass of wine. Mmm, these are delicious.”
“I had the best dream last night,” I said. “It must have been my new dream pillow. I waded into the middle of the Marshbury common fountain and climbed up on a big soapbox….”
“Great symbol,” Rosie said.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m a good dreamer. Anyway, I gave this incredible clothesline speech. It was like I was channeling Sally Field in Norma Rae.”
Rosie took another bite of pancake. “Love that movie.”
I tried my lavender coffee cake. Amazing. “Yeah, me, too. But, back to my dream speech. I opened with that line about well-behaved women never making history.”
Tess stirred some lavender honey into her tea. “What was I doing?”
I took another nibble of lavender coffee cake. Beyond amazing. “You weren’t in it.”
Tess put her mug down on the table. “What do you mean, I wasn’t in it? The whole clothesline thing was my idea.”