There is something primordial about driving at night. I can lie down in my loft and press my head against the front window so I have the most complete view of the night sky. The sun has been set for a little while now, and we’ll be pulling into Fort Stockton a couple of hours later than planned. But that’s okay.
It’s worth it to have a while for driving under the stars. And out here in this middle-of-nowhere stretch of Texas, the stars are thick enough to be a quilt.
It’s different, too, driving versus being still. I’ve spent basically every night on this trip looking out this window at night while everyone sleeps, even in the bigger cities where the stars aren’t as visible. But this time, with the world passing by beneath me, I feel more a part of the road and the stars and the night.
The green has largely gone away, replaced by more rocky cliffs and little tumbleweed shrubs. The treelessness is fascinating to me. It’s like the universe put all the trees in one place and all the stars in another.
There was a tiny used bookstore by the barbecue place and Dr. Hernandez bought me a book about “Black Sam” Bellamy. I picked out a book for Ruth too. A John Lennon biography. When we got back from dinner, I gave Ruth the book and Ellie gave her the take-home order of barbecue shrimp, and we both kept an eye on her until she’d eaten a bite or two. She even read a bit of the book.
Ruth’s sleeping now. I feel better when Ruth is sleeping. Sleeping is restorative. Sleeping is a good sign.
Even though we’re behind schedule, and I’m trying as hard as I can to be patient about getting to the pirate ships and our treasure box, a dinner break and a free book seem like pretty good excuses for a delay.
I hear shuffling and whispering below me. The sound of a map being folded. I turn over and Ellie’s head pops up to the ledge of my loft.
“Can I join you?” she asks. “I better check out the loft at some point, right?”
We both grin, and I scoot myself over to one side to make room. Soon we’re both lying on our backs, looking through the window at the stars while the road continues to pass below us.
“Now this is cool,” she says.
“Right?” I smooth my blanket and it’s like my loft is a house I’m proudly displaying.
We’re silent for a while. My eyelids are finally starting to droop. The light from passing cars washes across the roof like a tide.
“It was cool to meet your friend today,” I say. “If you get a chance, tell her thanks again for the book.”
“I’ll tell her,” Ellie says. I glance over at her. Her eyes are shut. There’s something in her voice, a quiver.
“So she was your therapist?” I say. Then I quickly add, “Not that you have to talk to me about it, if you don’t want.”
Ellie smiles and tucks a gray strand of hair behind her ears. She doesn’t speak for a few seconds, but then says, “She’s a child psychologist. A therapist with social services. She helps kids when hard things happen to them. Some of those kids are dealing with horrific—I don’t know how she does it.”
I nod, even though her eyes are closed. I don’t want to say anything and risk breaking the flow, risk reminding her who she’s actually talking to. How young I am.
She helps kids when hard things happen to them. How old did Ellie say she’d been the last time they spoke? I’ve known Ellie my whole life, so sometimes I forget I don’t know that much about her childhood, about her life before she married into our family.
“For me it wasn’t … nobody hurt me physically, and I’m grateful for that.” She opens her eyes now and looks at me, her face half-hidden in shadow. “I’ve told you before, I grew up mostly with my grandma, right? I was just a bit older than you when my … my mom left me there. I … I didn’t handle it well. I kept having these … these thoughts about just disappearing. Disappearing from myself. My poor grandma was too old to be raising a teenager anyway, but she knew enough to find me someone to talk to. I really needed help when I went and saw Sofia.”
The radio, barely audible, changes from a toothpaste commercial to a classical piano piece. We lie there, letting ourselves be enveloped in the notes and the whoosh of passing cars. I feel my insides shattering a little, imagining what Ellie went through. Again that sense of unfairness rises from my stomach. Nobody should have to go through anything like that, especially not someone like Ellie, someone as warm as the baked foods she gets excited about, who always seems to know what the people around her need, even if it’s just a road trip game or a bag of chips. More than anyone, Ellie deserves that rainbow-cotton-candy world Ruth is always teasing me about. Nobody hurting her. I scoot closer to her and she puts her arm around me and I lay my head on her shoulder.
This is when words are not enough. You are very brave, I want to say. I am so sorry. I don’t know how anyone could hurt you. But the words don’t come close to what I really mean.
“I … wasn’t sleeping for a long time. I felt … I wasn’t sleeping, but I just felt so tired of everything. I just wanted everything to be quiet and leave me alone, and at the same time, I didn’t want to feel alone. But it wasn’t even as … as clear as that. I wanted to be sad, but I couldn’t. I wanted to be angry, but I was just too … too worn down. Sometimes I would start getting ready and would just look in the mirror and think, what’s the point. Sofia told me that my brain was living in that space between a dull reality and this … glittering, shining perfection I expected life to be. Felt betrayed when it wasn’t the bright, golden light I had envisioned. It took me years to figure that one out. How to spot the little tiny gems and jewels of life again. Sofia was an important part of that. She’s why Darcy’s middle name is Sofia.”
Bright, golden light.
Something glittering, shining.
The thing that’s been lurking under the waves of my mind all day breaks to the surface: those first moments pulling into our new home years ago. How for me it was the treasure at the end of an adventure: Something Gold. I think Ruth thought it would be gold for her too. For the first several days we explored together, excited. We unpacked our things. We got into the routine of a new place, a new city. Now I’m looking back and remembering how the initial enthusiasm faded from the way Ruth talked, the way she walked around the house, the way we played. She started wandering through the house quietly, searching, like she was looking for something that wasn’t there, like she’d woken up somewhere she didn’t expect to be. And how maybe I’d been too caught up to really notice.
And then later, those memories from before Ruth got a therapist and medicine to help her. Those days and weeks and months beforehand, watching Ruth stumble around the house while the shell around her got thicker and thicker like a crustacean, and how maybe she was thinking about disappearing too. Her constant tiredness. How the music she listened to in her room got quieter and quieter until it stopped. Was she sad? I would ask. She would say no. And that was true; it wasn’t really sadness. It was an absence. No real feeling, not like contentment, but like a vacuum. No music, no pictures. No pirate stories or anything remotely like treasure. Nothing, nothing, nothing; no Somethings at all.
That is the real Pit.
And without really wanting too, I’m thinking about our kitchen in Tennessee, and coming down the stairs toward it, and that bottom step that creaks. The spaghetti pot unwashed from the night before, that night in those worst weeks. Coming down past my bedtime, my feet in seahorse socks, for some late-night orange juice, and hearing Mom and Dad at the table. Hearing squeaking chairs on tiles. Hearing Ruth’s name and the urgent pressure in my mom’s lowered voice. Hearing my mom say, I am so scared. What if things get worse? What if they get worse and worse until …
Her voice trailed off. That worse and worse until lingered in the air and in my ears with no answer to follow. I wanted my mom to say something else, to finish her words with something happy. I wanted my dad to answer that everything was going to be all right, that there was a solution out there somewhere. But neither of them spoke, and that worse and worse until echoed in my skull. Worse and worse until what? I never wanted to find out.
That night I walked quietly back upstairs, skipping the squeaking step and skipping the orange juice.
Ruth’s therapy visits started soon after that.
If I’m honest, I think those words have set up home deep under the ocean of my consciousness ever since. Ever since, I’ve known I needed to do whatever I could for my sister; to turn my volume down if things were too loud for her.
I try not to be too happy now.
It’s quiet in the RV, except for the rumbling of the road. For a long time, Ellie and I stay together, close and silent. Ellie’s eyes are closed again. My brain literally can’t imagine looking around and seeing only pointlessness. There are always too many exciting things possible in a day for it to be pointless. I want to know what to say, how to respond, but I don’t.
Ruth would know what to say, I think.
Ruth would understand.
Sometime in the middle of the night I wake up. I blink a few times until I realize there’s blue light coming from somewhere below me.
Ruth’s awake too, and on her phone.
Silently as possible, I climb down from my loft. When I sit on the side of her nook, there’s a creaking sound, and she jumps.
“Oh geez, Olivia, you scared me,” she says. Then she gives a smile. A very tired smile.
I want so badly to give her that meaningful something from my conversation with Ellie, but that something is deeper than words, and I don’t know how.
“Sorry,” I say. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“What else is new,” she says.
In the light from her phone, I look again at her shelf. The tattoo, the feather, the program, now a ticket stub from the aquarium.
“Hey, maybe we could add all that stuff to a new treasure box or something when we get to California,” I say. I think again about how, somehow, it’s easier to ask important questions and say impor-tant things in the middle of the night.
The screen reflects in her eyes. “Maybe,” she says. “I’m still…”
She hesitates. I wonder how much of my face she can see in the dark. I decide to prompt her forward. “Still…?”
“I’m still looking,” she says.
“Still looking?”
“Yeah. I … I used to like things.”
Maybe it’s the hope of the treasure we’re heading toward; maybe it’s being around Darcy or talking with Ellie; or maybe I’m just getting a little older, but for the first time, I think I understand what she really means.
“You’re looking for something that’s like it used to be,” I say.
She makes a sound that’s not quite a hiccup. She doesn’t say anything in response, and I sit there for a moment until I realize my hand’s on her foot.
Her voice is soggy with effort when she says, “The feather is really pretty.”