There’s a long line of cars waiting to pay the fee and enter the park. Once we get past that, there’s another long line of cars stopped to look at a single bison on the naked, scabby hillside. This is somebody’s first bison, I guess, and they don’t know that there will be milling herds of them a little further down the road. In a few hours, that person will be sick of bison. Bison will seem less interesting than a brown couch in a dentist’s office. Bison will be so close to the car it will be possible to hear the poop plopping on the pavement.

“Look, if we’re fishing in the park, we need to stop at the store at Mammoth and buy permits. OK?”

“It’s your money, Polly. If it makes you feel better, buy permits.”

“And you have to use some of my flies. You understand. This is catch and release only. Those are the rules. Not my rules . . . the rules. OK?”

“Alrighty then, trout torturing for sadistic pleasure only. Check.”

The cars finally start moving.

“Feel like boiling? The turnout’s in a minute.”

I think about it. I used to love visiting Boiling River. Finding the perfect spot between the cold river and the hot springs, complaining about the rotten smell of the clouds of sulfur steam, taking sly looks at shy, almost naked strangers—what’s not to love? But now I imagine seeing Odd’s robot leg on top of his stack of clothes, like it’s normal to remove body parts to go swimming.

“No, it’s bound to be too crowded, don’t you think?” I say. It’s a reasonable answer.

 

Yellowstone is pretty much living up to my expectations. It’s a people zoo. The parking lots at the store are full. We have to drive past to park at the base of the terraces, which isn’t that far, except now I worry about Odd walking. I mean, he made it to the bottom of the falls and back up afterward, but he has to be hurting after that effort. I know I am. At least this little walk is fairly short and level, but Odd doesn’t head the right direction. He starts up the boardwalk to the thermal features like that was the plan. It was not the plan. I made the plan, and climbing up hundreds of steps in the company of hundreds of people was not part of it.

Water sparkles in the sunlight while it trickles down stone steps. Pretty, pretty, pretty.

A bride in a frothy white dress is having her picture taken with the Opal Terrace in the background. She is a little toy bride standing by sugared shiny tiers of cake. Delicious. Good enough to eat. The breeze shifts and a cloud of sulfur steam surrounds her like a veil. She laughs and buries her nose in the bright bouquet in her hand. Then she grins and sticks out her tongue. She is beyond beautiful. She is adorable. People clap and take pictures. They share her happiness. The world has come to her wedding. They are all her honored guests.

 

I have three hope chests at home, waiting for when I get married. It’s bizarre. It was even bizarre before I was a monster. Nobody does hope chests anymore. People just register for what they want. But I have three hope chests because they are part of my mom’s plan for my happy future. One hope chest belonged to my grandmother. It is full of family albums and baby clothes I wore and things that belonged to my grandmother—even her wedding band. She took it off before she died and said it wasn’t right to bury a promise. That’s the legend: “It isn’t right to bury a promise.”

The second box holds a kitchen-full of five-ingredientcook-from-fresh cookbooks and heart-shaped muffin pans. I have a whisk and a ricer and pepper mill. I have an entire set of everyday dishes. I have a stand mixer and an espresso maker. I have lots of things my mother never uses when she cooks, but I have them because my happy future might require that sort of thing.

The third box is the oldest one. My mom looked for the right chest for years before she settled on an antique with hand-sawed dovetail joints and cheerful painted hearts and joined hands and flowers in an emblem on the front. This one is mine, although it probably used to belong to some other pioneer bride who is deader than dust and doesn’t need it anymore. It holds bedding mostly. Star quilts made on the reservation, a down comforter from France, pillowcases with hand-tatted lace. Only the best. Because that’s what my happy future is all about: only the best.

My mom keeps the keys to the hope chests in her jewelry box. I can get them anytime I want, but she wants to make sure they don’t get lost, and I might lose them. What would happen to my happy future then? What?

 

I see Odd high above me, climbing the stairs to the top of the terrace. He’s waving his arms around. It’s some sort of performance for a knot of Asian tourists. I doubt they asked for it. I doubt that matters to Odd. I jam my hat on my head and put on the disgusting glasses. My plan is to buy a fishing permit. My plan is good. It’s the right thing to do. I turn toward the store and go to do the right thing.

The line to get into the store is so long that Odd catches up with me before I get to the counter to buy our fishing licenses. I ought to feel good that he’s going to have a permit, but I just feel irritated that he will spend no time waiting. I did all the waiting. I’m scowling, but it is pretty ineffective. Even if I took off the hat and glasses, the change in expression would be pretty subtle. And then there is the fact that Odd, who ought to get the message, is as sensitive to the rights of others as a rockslide. He’s just going where he’s going, doing what he’s doing, and a scowl isn’t going to put the brakes on that.

When we get out of the store, there’s a circle of people with cameras hovering like a respectful bubble around a badger waddling across the grass. The badger seems unconcerned. He is used to life in the people zoo.

 

“You sing, Polly?”

“No.”

“Never? Not even in church?”

“Never. Unless you count ‘Itsy-Bitsy Spider’ or ‘Clean-Up Time’ or ‘Washing Hands Is Fun To Do’ at the Kid-O-Korral. Did you know small children respond better to singing than raising your voice? It’s a nice thing to know.”

“Great. So you’re used to an audience. Check. So, now, let’s hear you sing.”

“Sing what?”

“Whatever you want. But not ‘Itsy-Bitsy Spider’— something a little more interesting.”

“Couldn’t you just turn the radio back on?”

“Do you want to do it karaoke sing-along? OK. That could work.”

“No. I meant, why not just listen to the radio? The people singing on the radio are fine, right?” I’m more than happy to lie about my opinion of Odd’s musical taste, if it means I don’t have to talk—or sing.

“No. I want you to audition for the band,” says Odd.

“What band?”

“The band that will be our new job.”

He is certifiable. I am also trapped in a motionless car while we wait for some yahoo to get tired of seeing real live bison. OK. He asked for it.

 

“Come away, human child

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in . . .”

 

“OK,” says Odd, “not so much of that. Do you think you could cover some Chainsaw Percussion? ‘Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer!’” Odd’s growling scream just might spook the bison and get traffic moving again. Despite that upside, it’s not what a person might call singing. He sounds like the soundtrack for a movie about a pissed-off mutant alcoholic bear.

“That’s a song?” It’s a legitimate question. I’m not just being a bitch.

“Well, Polly, the genre’s gotta fit the look, and the look ain’t changing.” The words drive Odd’s point right through the numb scar tissue to the me underneath. It hurts.

“So maybe no vocals for you,” he goes on, “You play an instrument?”

“Clarinet in middle school,” I say.

“Clarinet. You, me, and everybody else. There will be no band,” Odd crumples up that idea like an empty beer can. Conversation over, he clicks on the radio. It’s a relief—a horrible, twangfest relief—to listen to some bighat from Alabama crow about how cool it is to be him. Country music is all about how great it is to be country. It’s like a nonstop party—which might be true, I guess, for people who get paid to sing about how great it is to get paid to sing. According to Odd, I’m unlikely to find out how cool that is for myself.

 

People think being nice is easy, and maybe it is for some people. But for me it took effort. It was work. It meant doing a lot of things I didn’t want to do. Smiling and asking Mrs. Morehead if she wanted more cookies during the Ladies Day Tea when she was a mean old biddy who pretended being rude was encouragement—that was hard work. And when my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Carver, said my letter a’s looked like little, shriveled-up peas, I worked on my penmanship until the pencil put a groove in my finger. People still ask me to address their wedding invitations so they don’t have to expose their own sloppy true selves. But I think this whole being nice thing started with Mom.

Now that I’ve got an actual brain in my head, I know Mom was probably going to love me no matter what. She went to a lot of trouble to get me in the first place, what with the in vitro and the fertility treatments and all the money I cost. And she actually gave birth to me. But there’s more. When she was shopping for donor eggs, she went out of her way to match my dad’s genotype. It’s like she was shopping for one of those just-like-me dolls, only, for whatever reason—because she loves him? because she hates the way she looks?—the “me” she matched was my dad. I am the result: pale eyelashes like a bald-face cow, red hair, pale eyes, pale skin that sunburns during a TV commercial for a Hawaii vacation. My mom went out of her way, as far as medically possible, to design me so she would find me adorable.

None of that matters to a little kid—at least it didn’t to the little kid that was me.

All that mattered was that I wanted my mom to love me, and being nice made her happy. It’s very hard to tell the difference between a happy parent and a loving parent. So I had good manners and smiled at the people in the grocery store. I said thank you. I said excuse me. I was always happy to help—even if I really wasn’t. I was nice.

And then there was Bridger. Bridger loved me because I was nice. I’m not talking about purity-ring, madeup-swear-words–nice. Bridger was fine with sex, for one thing. But he was a nice guy himself. He volunteered, he got good grades, he had plans for the future. And that’s the kind of nice I was, too, when I believed it was worth it, because it was all part of The Plan. I was part of the plan, he was part of the plan, and it was a nice plan.

Then something happened that was not so nice.

No matter how hard I try, I’ll never, ever be nice enough to be part of the plan now. I’ll never, ever be nice enough for Bridger to love me. I used to be a very nice thing, but now I’m ruined. This is my new condition.

 

We are stopped again, waiting for giant cows to decide to get off the road. If I reach out the window I could touch a bison with short, straight horns. It was a little red calf last year. It survived its first winter when a lot of others didn’t. Now it’s all grass and sunshine, baby. Life is good. It is jogging along past D’Elegance, and there is nothing graceful about it. Jolt. Jolt. Jolt. Then it turns. For one minute I’m staring right at it. I see the black, wet nostrils. I see the string of clear slobber spinning out of its mouth. I see the eye that was hidden from my sight, the eye that has been gouged out. The place is still bloody. If that bison weren’t running, there would be flies all over that raw meat. One way or another, this animal will be dead. One way or another, all of these animals will be dead.

 

The Firehole River cuts a deep channel. There is no pussyfooting with a gradual bank at this spot. The grassy mud curls over in a slumping lip and then there’s nothing but river, pure and urgent as melted glass. The bison tracks all run parallel to the water, because crossing here would be dumb, and the big, boneheaded hairballs know it.

I actually have a little stretch of water to myself, which is never guaranteed here in the people zoo. This is the piece of river nobody else wanted. There is no good place to park near here, so I had to hike for a ways. The water’s gone a little warm, which is a matter of degree considering that this river absorbs trickling streams of steaming thermal runoff every day of the year. There are fish in the water at my feet, and they want to stay there. Lips have been ripped. Photos have been taken. A free lunch is greeted with suspicion.

Suspicious fish, warm water, a place that gets whipped into a froth most days when there isn’t snow three feet deep: that’s the situation, and it makes me happy. My one advantage is the overcast sky full of clouds that blunt the light. The silhouette cast by bright sun behind a fly can ruin the illusion. The key will be setting that drift to exactly match the current, no drag on the line, no telltale twitch. I can give a little flick that mends the line. I can use tippet fine as a unicorn’s whisker, just this side of unethical. I’m the girl who knows how to do that.

Assuming I can get my Bead Head Prince on the line, that is. Bead Head Prince nymph, size 12, be steady, I’m your princess. I hold my breath, and it’s on and it’s knotted. I’m still not taking chances with my crappy vision, though. I add a bright pink water balloon as a strike indicator. If I get a fish on, I’m going to know it fast as the speed of light, way faster than the time it takes a tug to actually reach my fingers.

And so, you, there under the water, let’s dance.

I put this moment, I put this moment, I put this moment—here.

The river teaches me to have a smooth and moving surface, and the air teaches me how to breathe when I cast so my arm doesn’t get heavy, and that’s pretty much all there is to life until twilight starts to shut down the day and I need to walk back along the blacktop’s edge to meet up with Odd where D’Elegance is parked beside a picnic table.

 

“Catch anything?” says Odd when he sees me coming.

“Nope.” There are all kinds of lies told about fishing. This is one of them. I caught three fish, each one prettier and bigger than the last. And I set them all free. But Odd doesn’t need to hear that.

“Me neither, but I got my picture took with three Japanese girls. We all made peace signs. They were hot.”

“Good thing I wasn’t with you then, ’cause I would have scared them off.”

“I dunno about that. You might not a had the power. They thought I was real photogenic.”

“They said that?”

“I think so. It was all in Japanese, but I’m pretty sure that’s what they said.” Then he reaches around behind him and picks up a box of cereal and shakes it, “Dinner? We got Lucky Charms and Oreos and stuff to make s’mores. . . . And hey, thanks for loaning me those flies. I lost that Bead Head Prince, though. Sorry for that.”

 

I put my hand into the Lucky Charms box and pull out—mostly crumbs. And a yellow-and-orange marshmallow hourglass. This piece of sugar can stop time . . . or speed it up . . . or reverse it. I just don’t know how to make it work. And I don’t know what I would want it to do, either. What if I reverse time, but nothing changes and I just have to live through everything again? Who would want that? The hourglass makes a little squeak when I crush it between my teeth. I can feel it dissolving on my tongue. Lucky me. I have no milk for my cereal.

I reach for the red aluminum flask and take a deep draw of water. Only, it isn’t water; it stings. It stings all the way down and spurs the tears out of my eye.

“Welcome to flavor country, Polly.”

All I say is “Water?”

“Didn’t take you for a hard-liquor prohibitionist.”

I don’t say that I like a sloe gin fizz while I play threehanded pinochle with my parents or that Bridger’s mom let us have mojitos on the Fourth of July.

“But, if you want water, you got a river. I only brought vodka,” says Odd.

“We can’t drink the river. What if it isn’t clean? We’ll get giardia. We’re more susceptible to infections. . . .”

“Hey, if we need to pull over ’cause you get the runs, OK. But you aren’t going to get that sick, Polly. Death had a shot at you and passed you right up. He took a nibble out of each of us and spit us back out. Until he gets hungry enough to eat leftovers, nothing we do matters. We could drink pure piss and battery acid if we wanted.”

I take another sip from the bottle. I am expecting it this time. It isn’t so bad. It might be pure piss and battery acid, but I’m ready for it now.

We pass the flask and the cereal box back and forth in silence for a while. Then the cereal box is empty. Odd takes the plastic bag out and scrounges the last bits that have been hiding under there. He hands me a pink marshmallow heart.

Odd lifts the red flask and says, “To Gramma Dot and Meriwether Lewis.” Then he passes the bottle to me. I raise it and say, “To Odd’s Grandma Dot? And Meriwether Lewis?”

I feel like I need to join in the toast, but I don’t know the particulars.

“You know what, Polly? They are going to sell all her shit. They are gonna sell it all. They are going to sell her furniture and books and even her lawnmower.”

I’m ready to say how sorry I am . . . and your grandma wouldn’t want you to feel sad . . . and maybe they will let you choose something to remember her by . . .

“So they take her on a fuckin’ two-week cruise of the fjords of Norway, like she can be homesick for a place she never been, and then they’re just going to take her to the new place afterward and hope she’s forgot all about her own home.”

“What?”

“Gramma Dot, she’s got the Alzheimer’s. They say she does. Look, can’t a person forget they were making a grilled cheese sandwich? Burnt toast don’t mean Alzheimer’s. Shit happens. I figure you make enough sandwiches, some are going to catch fire. They could cut a person some slack.”

“All she did was burn a sandwich?”

“The curtains caught on fire a little bit, no biggie. My mom didn’t even like those curtains. Now they’re all, ‘It’s for her own safety,’ and ‘It’s a nice place,’ but you know what? That’s crap. They just don’t want the responsibility.”

I don’t have anything to say about this. And, considering everything I heard so far, I don’t even want ask what Meriwether Lewis has to do with it.

After about ten minutes Odd says, “D’Elegance, that’s Gramma Dot’s. It was the last car her and Granpa Odd bought before he died. She calls it Granpa’s car. Everything on it is original.”

When it is finally too dark to see, Odd says, “She thought I was Granpa Odd once. She grabbed my ass. That was weird.”

 

When I wake up to pee, there is a unmistakable wetness, a sticky heat. I hardly need to touch myself with my fingers to know it’s happened. I’ve got my period. Last time I this happened, I had two eyes. It’s been months. Why now? Did my body just suddenly remember it wasn’t a child? Is this the first time I have blood to spare? Maybe it’s just some biochemical reaction to Odd’s monkey-house armpits. Whatever. It’s a mess. And I’ve forgotten the number-one rule of the Vagina American: be prepared. I really doubt Odd or Odd’s Gramma Dot has stashed a supply of tampons in the Cadillac for this possibility, so I reach down and pull off one of my socks and sacrifice it. Come morning I can replace it with a wad of paper towels. That’ll be fun, sitting on a wad of that mess until we hit a pocket of civilization and I can do better.

Suddenly, for the first time I can remember, I’m afraid of bears. I imagine I smell hot and bloody as an elk roast. My tent doesn’t feel safe anymore. It just makes me blind. It makes me listen so hard my cheeks start to ache.

I give up, unzip the tent, and crawl out. The stars are bright enough to make me dizzy, but starlight doesn’t open up the shadows. I drag out my sleeping bag and head for the Cadillac. I want a barrier a little more substantial than ripstop nylon. D’Elegance will protect me. When I pull the door shut, all the world has to stay outside. She is my protective quarantine. The backseat is too small to feel comfortable, but I fold my legs up and cuddle my cheek against the velvety cushion. My sleeping bag is warm. It’s quieter inside the car. I can’t hear the constant motion of water and air. All I can hear is the stuff inside my head. I hear the song.

 

Come away, human child

To the water, and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand

For the world’s more full of weeping

than you can understand.

 

I hear the song, but it’s not in my voice. It’s in others’ voices, the voices I heard when my mom played the CD over and over again while I was in the coma.

 

Weaving olden dances,

Mingling hands and mingling glances.

 

She found it in my room on my desk and decided it must be special to me. It wasn’t. It was just part of a multimedia thesis on Yeats for English. It was all the versions I could find of people singing and reciting the same poem.

 

In pools among the rushes

That scarce could bathe a star.

 

I know my mom was sitting there, watching me sleep, because her whisper is all tangled up in the song, “It’s OK, Babykid. It’s OK. Mommy’s here. Mommy’s here. Mommy’s here.”

 

We seek for slumbering trout

And whispering in their ears

Give them unquiet dreams.