The Lauras

by Sara Taylor

  Still no answer.

  “You don’t have to do it this way—maybe you should try writing her a letter first. Or try a phone call. Something a little less difficult.” And weird, I wanted to add, but didn’t. She was reminding me of the girls I’d gone to school with, who obsessed over certain boys, kept their pictures up in their lockers, followed them in the hallways and watched them across classrooms but never introduced themselves. To see her like this made me deeply uncomfortable, and had I been less reticent, less self-conscious, I might have charged the girl when next she emerged, tackled her into the grass, forced the interaction.

  The theater door opened to disgorge a mass of students, and Ma was alert once again, if she had relaxed her vigilance in the first place. We followed her through the dusk—she was leaving campus, going home probably.

  “If we follow her home again she’s going to call the cops,” I pointed out. I didn’t think Ma had heard me, was going to elaborate on my point when she put on the speed, and I had to trot after her.

  “Excuse me, excuse me! Miss!” The girl turned, and Ma stopped dead.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  No answer, not a sound.

  “Can I help you? Are you lost or something?”

  Ma didn’t respond. She was frozen on the spot, mouth half-open. Seeing the two of them feet apart, gazing at each other, made me want to smack them both, to ask my mother if she was crazy and my sister if she was blind, if she didn’t see herself in our mother’s face, if she didn’t have the eerie feeling of doubleness.

  “Did you drop this?” Ma held out her own wallet, and the girl looked at it for a second before shaking her head.

  “No, it isn’t mine. Security can find the owner, though, if you found it on campus.”

  “Sorry to bother you.”

  I wanted to kick her.

  The girl turned away. Ma was still standing, offering up the wallet, and I wanted to kick her even more. Only when the girl had disappeared into the distance did Ma move: she put her billfold back in her pocket. Her shoulders dropped. She turned to go, and I followed just a bit behind, not wanting to break into her personal space, wanting to give her some privacy with thoughts and feelings I couldn’t understand, but as we went she reached behind her back and took my hand, pulled me up under her arm like we might have walked in a life where I was that kind of kid and she was that kind of mother. That didn’t work—I was too tall for her to get her arm around my shoulders anymore—so she let it settle on my waist, and I was the one who draped my arm across her shoulders, held her close to me as we walked back to the car.

  She didn’t say anything as she got in the driver’s seat, buckled her belt, and reached for her cigarettes. She dropped the pack, balled her fist and punched the dashboard, once, with a swallow that was more a sob. Maybe it would have been healthier if she’d talked about it—if we’d been the kind of people that talked. But she shook her hand, picked up the cigarettes and shook out one, then looked at me as if she couldn’t remember whether I was at an age to be smoking or not.

  “I’m not that old yet,” I said.

  She waited until we were on the road to light up, blowing out the first plume of white as we turned towards the highway. Heading north again.

  “We’re almost there, aren’t we?” I asked.

  “In the grand scheme of things, yes. We don’t have very much farther to travel. End of the line is just ahead. I think.”

  “I saw your map,” I said. She didn’t seem surprised. “There isn’t anywhere planned out after what comes next. We’re staying when we get there, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do you not know?”

  “Some people, when you show up on their doorstep for the first time in ten years, they’re happy to see you—some people call the cops. Most people would only expect you to hang around for a day or three.”

  “So she isn’t expecting us?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “What do you mean, not really?”

  “Well, I made promises a long time ago, and I don’t think that she believed me.”

  “What kind of promises?”

  “First one was, if we got to forty and were both still single we’d move in together. Second was, if her husband ever left I’d take his place. Half joking but not really, you know how I mean.”

  “What if she doesn’t let us stay?”

  “Then we figure something out on our own.”

  “I’m getting pretty damn tired of sleeping in the car.”

  “And I’m pretty damn tired of living in motels, but we’ll figure something out.”

  “Which Laura is it?”

  “Say what?”

  “Which Laura are we going to see?”

  “I’ve told you all those stories and you can’t guess?”

  “Not really, no.”

  She gave me a look, wiggled her eyebrows at me, but didn’t answer.

  I waited a few minutes before asking, “And no plans after that?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “Does . . . my dad still know where we are?”

  “He knows that we’re safe.”

  I hadn’t known what to call him, didn’t know if mentioning him would upset her.

  “Can I talk to him sometime, or something?”

  She looked at me for a moment, then said, “Haven’t you noticed yet that there’s pretty much zilch I can keep you from doing once you’ve decided that you want to do it?”

  “Does that mean I can quit school?” I asked.

  “You’re getting pretty close to the age where you could, if you want to. I think when you turn sixteen you’re allowed to try for your GED rather than serving the rest of your time.”

  I waited a few minutes before asking, “Does that mean I can go back east?”

  She waited a few minutes before answering.

  “Just be careful. And maybe let me know ahead of time, OK?”

  For once the sun did not chase us into darkness, but sank off to the left, beyond the cities and people, as we went north now on the last leg—or what I hoped was the last leg—of our journey.

  CHAPTER XXI

  I woke up to the thought that we were on our way home. Virginia home: the mountains were low and small, the scrub sandy, and the ocean nowhere in sight.

  “Are we . . .” I began, then glanced at the clock and the sun and figured that we were traveling pretty much dead north. “Are we there yet?”

  “It’s about a thousand miles altogether, kid, give it a day or two.”

  “Are we stopping for breakfast soon?” According to the clock I’d only slept a few hours. What looked like an evening sun was in fact a barely risen sun.

  “Soon. I’m going to get a few hours’ sleep when we do, no sense wrecking when we’ve come this far already.”

  The strange sleep cycle, or rather the lack of one, had put me in an odd mood, and I didn’t try to winkle any more stories out of her as we rolled north, but sat and stewed in my own thoughts. I’d spent a decent amount of the previous few years of my life holding absolutely still while at the same time moving relentlessly, unstoppably forward. Time was a hard thing to get a handle on. Every day had the capability of being the carbon copy of the days that preceded it, so it was hard to remember that the days added up, that I wasn’t living the same day, day after day, into forever, but that each day was a measured segment of something set and finite. That I too would die. Could die, in an instant and in any instant, and that would be it. That no law of the universe guaranteed that I would make it back to see my dad, that he would be there to see if I did make it back. It terrified me, that we all live relentlessly, that we all die eventually, that we have no real knowledge of what happens after, that we can’t say, “Stop the ride, I want to get off.”

  Humans—most of us, at least—have the incapability of pondering the really terrifying things for any serious length of time. It’s probably what keeps us from throwing ourselves off cliffs in m
ass fits of existential crisis. I watched the mountains and the tractor trailers bearing down on us and wondered about death, until my stomach started to growl. Then I began wondering about food, and was saved from myself. We think we’re evolved, but we aren’t, at least not as far as we like to think that we are. The feral part requires appeasement before it will allow sapiens sapiens to pursue its intangibles.

  We stopped at a rest stop that modeled itself on the sort of place that wagon trains would have paused to water the oxen and stock up on ammo in the days when both oxen and ammo were given possessions for someone on the road. Now it offered hot food and free refills of coffee, coin-operated showers with towels for rent and a three-washer laundromat; there were some family cars and little trucks but big rigs, circling the diesel pumps or clustered together like a herd of mammoths, dominated the asphalt. Ma parked somewhere that wasn’t really a space, leaned back in the driver’s seat and sighed before switching off the car.

  “Shower?” she asked.

  “I dunno. They got curtains or something, or is it open-plan like we’re animals?”

  “Going to have to see, aren’t we? If it’s too uncouth you can always do without until we find someplace to your liking, but I can’t promise that that will be on this side of the border. It isn’t too busy this time of day, at least.”

  The showers turned out to be unisex, little lockable closets with one showerhead apiece and a door that went floor to ceiling, and the water was hot and came out strong. We had our own soap and towels, and when I locked myself in and breathed out, in private once again, I almost curled up on the floor and fell asleep, it felt so good to be alone. I whacked on the water and let the thoughts roll through my head without having to worry about what my face was giving away, leaned on the wall and let the stream roll hot down my back, feeling the aches and the tight places, and I knew that on the other side of the wall Ma was doing the same thing. She used to take me in the shower with her when I was a toddler, because she couldn’t trust me on my own with the run of the house. I’d play with bath toys sitting on the bottom of the far end of the tub and she’d lean against the tiled wall, letting the water wash over her like she was under a waterfall, enjoying holding still, being warm, not having to think or do anything.

  I got out first and waited for her, damp with my cleanest clothes sticking to me, drying my head under a hand dryer because I hated having wet hair dripping on my shirt. She staggered out when I was nearly done, the wet clumps of my hair hanging down and the dry sproinging in my face so I looked like Shirley Temple on a six-day bender and couldn’t see anything to the front or sides, only down.

  We ate burgers in the diner but didn’t have coffee for once, and as she began to fall asleep over her plate I asked, “Want me to take a spell, driving?”

  She snapped awake. “I had a friend in high school that read palms. She told me that I’d die in a violent manner, but at an advanced age. I’m not letting you turn her into a liar—I’ll sleep in the car for a few hours, and then we’ll carry on. We’re almost there.”

  I followed her to the car, took the back seat as she took the front, stretched out and listened to her breathing, listened for it to change. She usually shifted around as she fell asleep: one, two, three; lower back, shoulders, then neck, getting the stiffer places comfortable. This time she just went out, like her falling asleep was an actual fall, sudden and into unimaginable depths. I tried to follow her, but the seat was hard underneath me, my neck at the wrong angle, and even though my body was tired my mind was wide awake. Eventually I gave up, wormed my way out the door making as little noise as possible, stepped into my half-laced boots and crunched towards the truck stop.

  I’d thought I’d just have a little walk, knock the keen edge off my wakefulness, but when I got halfway around the truck stop I realized that there was another side to the place, literally—the buildings were pushed back to back, one side with the showers and diesel and chewing tobacco, the other side oriented to families, with a tacky souvenir barn, picnic tables . . . and a dark blue U.S. Post box.

  As I poked through the junk on the shelves I realized that, were the air of a different quality, I could have been back on the east coast. People went on and on about how unique their little part of the country was, and while the landscape had changed as we went it had still been Wal-Marts and McDonald’s from sea to shining sea. It was one size fit all, the family places bought out by companies that shipped and sold in value size. Maybe if we’d strayed farther from the highways as we’d gone along we could have found the little places that remembered the differences between GA and CA. But who has time for that? And who wants to stray too far from what they know? One day—maybe even yesterday—we’ll find that we no longer have the option of leaving the familiar behind.

  Between the novelty outhouse magnets and the off-color bumper stickers I found the cards and stationary, stopped and read a few off the bottom rack—the kind you need to stick a finger through for the joke to work, that I was too embarrassed to pick up and read if someone else was standing with me—then shuffled through the postcards and Post-it notes, looking for something cheap. Behind the pack of “to do” pads and unicorns and flowers was a pack of notepaper, marked down because half the envelopes were missing from the set. I considered walking out with it, reconsidered and picked out a gel pen, paid with bills from Reno that had been washed in the zipper pocket of my cargo pants and were softer than their fabric, opened it all on one of the picnic tables and immediately had to chase down half the paper because there was more of a breeze than I’d realized. At least the table wasn’t wet.

  Dad—Still don’t know Mom’s plan, but we’re almost out of country. Should make our last stop in a day or two, then I guess I’ll be coming back. You can tell from the postmark that we’re on the west coast—we’ve come farther than I thought we would. Also, it’s taken longer than I thought it would. No surprise there. I thought I’d be back long before now, else I would have written more. But you were the one who told me that life never follows the plan. Ma keeps her cards close to her vest, so I guess I can’t really know that we’re almost done. But I can promise that I’ll be headed towards home by the end of the year.

  Me

  I had no way to know if I would be headed home, by the end of the year or otherwise; I had no idea what the date was, whether we were really stopping soon or if we’d continue through the Arctic Circle and on into Russia. But I felt like I had to give him something. If I made a promise, I’d have to keep it.

  Ma woke before I did, started the car and reversed out while I was still sprawled across the back seat.

  “Hang on, I get sick sitting back here.”

  “Still? Your pediatrician told me that you’d grow out of that.”

  “Doctors are idiots.”

  “You can be so negative sometimes, Alex.”

  “Did the doctor tell you that I’d grow out of that, too?”

  “We’re in rare form today.”

  “I didn’t sleep long enough. Or I slept too long, take your pick.”

  “A little bit cranky?”

  “Just feeling weird.” And I did. She snapped on the radio and I leaned back in the passenger seat and put my feet on the dash, wanting to grouse and snipe but unable to interrupt the music.

  I thought we’d have longer. That I could be grumpy and she could cheer me up and we could have the miles going on and on, just us. Then came the signs: BORDER CONTROL—HAVE YOUR TRAVEL DOCUMENTS READY FOR INSPECTION PLEASE, and I realized that things had greened up, cooled off, that the road had run out while I was still taking it for granted. FERRY AHEAD—ALL FORMS OF PAYMENT ACCEPTED.

  “We’re—uh—they’re not going to arrest us for having the gun, are they?”

  “Hm? Oh, that. I sold it while we were in Reno.”

  “. . . Anything else they could, you know, arrest us for?”

  “We should be golden, kid. Quit worrying.”

  We sat in a cloud of exhaust, inching towar
ds the ferry, waiting for everyone in front of us to have their little books stamped. At our turn, Ma handed over the passports nonchalantly.

  “More than ten thousand USD in cash or goods? Plants? Animals? Soil? Food? How long is your stay and what is your destination?”

  “Just prepared food. We’re visiting a college buddy on Vancouver Island, should be a couple-week stay at the longest.” She dug through her billfold and handed him an envelope with our address in Reno on the front and one from British Columbia as the return. He looked us over, looked in the back of the car—we’d packed it neatly, all the edges square, but it still looked like we’d been road tripping—flicked through our passports, then bang-bang, bang-bang, stamped them both. Ma shouted, “Thank you!” as she rolled up her window and we rolled slowly down into the belly of the ferry and into the parking space an orange-jacketed young man waved us towards. She cut the ignition, grabbed her backpack from the back seat and rolled out of the car, and as she opened the door I was hit in the brain with the smell of exhaust and fuel oil and decay. We hadn’t started moving yet, and already I felt sick.

  Once I got out of the auto-fume fog and into the fresh air on the deck I felt not sick, which isn’t quite the same thing as not feeling sick, but damn it if the ferry itself didn’t make me supremely nervous. I’d never been on a ferry before, and as we pulled out into the water I wished immediately that I had been allowed to continue in my ignorance. We were trapped in a sardine tin with miles of water beneath us, rocking slowly along with no way of getting off.

  Ma had a book with her, some oranges, a blanket—she could have stretched out on the bench where we’d huddled against a bulkhead to get away from the kids screaming in excitement as they watched the land recede, but instead she sat next to me, hunched forward with her forearms braced on her thighs, her shoulders tight and her eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare. Every now and again she would open the backpack, shuffle through the contents, take a gulp from the water bottle, then settle back, alert but watching nothing. If I didn’t know better I would have thought that she was nervous. Doctor’s-office nervous. First-date nervous. A nervous that I should be nervous about.