“I can’t believe it,” Annabelle says to Grandpa Ed, across the table of the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel restaurant. A big pink slab of prime rib sits in front of her.
“That there’s the horseradish.” Grandpa Ed points to a little silver cup of fluffy white stuff. “It looks like sour cream, but if you put it on your potato, you’re gonna be sorry.” He bites the end off of a fried shrimp.
“Thanks for the heads-up. This is wild, isn’t this wild? It feels wrong.”
“If fried shrimp is wrong, I don’t wanna be right,” Grandpa Ed says. “Cheers to you, crossing the border into Idaho.”
“Cheers.” They clink soda cups.
“Ashley Naches is a really good writer,” Annabelle says.
“Front page, Bella Luna.”
The picture is pretty bad, though. Annabelle’s hair has grown out some, but her eyes look absent and hollowed out. She looks haunted and vulnerable. The article is between a piece about a rash of carjackings in parking garages, and an ad for Jerome Machet, DDS. Your Gentle Dental Friend. But she is surprised at Ashley Naches’s words and how tender they are. It is something that could have happened to anyone, but it didn’t happen to just anyone. . . . It almost makes Annabelle sound like someone worth rooting for and believing in.
And, now, a few nearby people apparently do. Six residents of Rockford, Washington, and seven members of the Coeur d’Alene city council, plus the mayor, also met her by Grandpa Ed’s RV in Worley. They gave her a bottle of Martinelli’s sparkling cider and a gift certificate for dinner and two rooms at the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel. Another teen reporter, Jax Jones from Coeur d’Alene High, took her picture shaking hands with Mayor Ellis. The fire truck balloon hovered next to her, trying to get in the photo like Sierra Kincaid always does.
“It’s weird, though. I keep feeling like someone should just haul me off to jail right now.”
“Stop it, kiddo.”
“Look where we are.”
Outside the restaurant window, there’s a giant teepee and a beautiful lit pool. Through the wide doorway of the restaurant, she can see the blinking rainbow lights of slot machines, and there’s the ringing and clanging of a win. Okay, honestly, there’s only a handful of people out there, and one guy in the restaurant, and the waitress seems tired, but still.
“Che figata! I can’t wait to sleep in a real bed.”
“That’s not what you said back at the Sleepy Inn. ‘I've got a real bed.’ ”
“That was different.”
“How was it different?”
“Mind your own business. Hand me one of those rolls, would ya?”
“Because Mom was paying then?”
“That’s got nothing to do with you.”
“Why do you two always fight? I mean, what about la famiglia?”
“You love, you fight. You fight, you love.” This makes no sense, but whatever. He saws his roll open. Slaps on the butter.
“But why do you fight? Is it a big family secret?”
“No secret. I told you.”
“You never told me.”
“I told you a hundred times.”
“Something about Nana.”
“She was sick. With cancer. Your mother thinks I should have made her see a doctor sooner. Nana kept saying she had a backache. Her stomach was bloated out like a balloon. . . .”
Annabelle is silent. What was she thinking? They were so happy a minute ago. God, she really has a way of messing things up. She could spoil a parade.
“You don’t think I tried? I tried. You can’t make someone do what they don’t wanna do. And you can’t always stop ’em from what they’re gonna do.”
“Right, Bella Luna?”
“Right.”
“Capisce?”
“Yeah.” It’s a hard thing to hear. Or, at least, to truly believe.
“Look, they got that molten lava cake,” Grandpa Ed says.
• • •
Oh, wow, the room is fancy. If she were a movie star, this would be the room she’d get. Wait, maybe if she’d just gotten married, because, look. There are rose petals all over the bed, and a silver ice bucket on a stand.
She checks the place out. It’s so roomy that she flings out her arms and walks around like that. You could fit five people in the shower. Or maybe just two active honeymooners, haha. She opens the cap of one of the little bottles on the bathroom counter and sniffs. Yum. There’s shampoo and conditioner, but also lotion and rectangle soap and round soap and bumpy, massaging soap and a shower scrub soap. It is a party of soap! In the closet—awesome, a robe! First order of business: She takes a shower and puts that baby on.
She lies on her back on the bed in her white robe. The bed is still made, and she just lies there with her arms out and her feet together, like the Jesus on the cross that hangs over their kitchen doorway. The flower petals are all around her.
Annabelle smells like lavender. It’s astonishing, really, how she’s a different person from the one who was just standing at the crossroads, kicking dirt and flinging a rock at the railroad sign.
She is a different person from the defeated Annabelle, the giving-up Annabelle. She is sort of a victorious Annabelle, lying among rose petals on the honeymoon bed of the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel. You never know what a day will bring, which is both the good news and bad news of life.
She has decided to keep going, as anyone could tell by her closed eyes and calm expression. She realizes that all big decisions are ones that must be decided and decided again. She imagines that when you fall in love, you must decide to be in love a million times or more, and when you go to college, you must decide again and again to stay in college, and the same thing is true when you decide to run across the United States of America after a horrible tragedy.
When you are a person who cares for any other person, you must decide and decide again to care, she also understands. Her friends and family have. Grandpa Ed has. Her mother has. In spite of the fighting and blame, he comes to dinner and they celebrate the holidays together. In spite of the fighting and hurt, Gina invites him to dinner and to celebrate the holidays together. They hang in there with their love.
Annabelle holds a rose petal to her nose and smells. Oh, it’s so beautiful and rose-y. It smells like what it is, deep red and velvety. When you are a human being, you must decide and decide again to go forward. You must, or you won’t move from the worst that life offers to here, the bed of the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel.
Crawl, walk, or run: forward.
She falls asleep. She is so exhausted, she conks off right there. It is astonishing how untroubled she looks, in her white robe with her eyes sweetly shut, the rose petal still balanced on her nose. The man back in the truck at the border had been right: That was where things changed.
The problem is, they will change and change again. Good to bad to good to bad, the universe spins, which means morning then darkness then morning. She hasn’t forgotten her future, but, still, she is in the good. She has been lifted by strangers, and lifted, too, into sleep. The dream is something about silos and a truck and a yellow field, no longer desolate but full of color.