The sky swirls gray when I wake up in the morning. No rain yet, but before I’ve been awake for five minutes, I see multiple flashes of lightning far off. Thunder woke me, I realize. For a while I just lie there, watching the gray clouds come in.
It’s Something Magic day.
We are on the winding-down days of our trip, or at least the driving part. We have an eight-hour drive to Tucson today, and I text the information for the rattlesnake bridge to Ellie and Eddie.
I lean over the edge of my loft. “Hey, I just text- ed you guys the link for this rattlesnake bridge in Tucson that I found. Do you think we’ll have time to stop there?”
“Rattlesnake bridge?” Eddie says, keeping his eyes on the road. “That sounds cool!”
Ellie checks the link I sent her. “Maybe we can stop there before we check into the hotel,” she says. She glances out the windshield and up at the sky. “Unless the bridge gets hit by lightning before then.”
Get Ellie and Eddie on board with my Something Magic plan: check. This time things will work. Then tomorrow we’ll drive the last six hours from Tucson to San Diego. San Diego and Sunset Cliffs, where Ruth and I will dig up our Something Gold, our final treasure.
Plus scuba tours start the day after that. I’m so electric with excitement that I feel like I’m going to be a target for that lightning. I want to pull my camera to me and cuddle it. I can see the underwater picture in my head, the glow of light above the water rippling through the waves to the moss-covered wood of a ship.
I grin to myself and stretch. Maybe it’s the increasing nearness of Wreck Alley, maybe it’s waking up to a thunderstorm, but my veins are buzzing.
Ruth is slouched against her pillow, her hood pulled low enough I can barely see her eyes from this angle. I send a thought her way, hoping maybe she’ll catch it and look up and smile, but she doesn’t. The white cords of her earbuds stream from the hood like IVs. Finally she does see me, and when she catches me looking, she turns onto her side, facing the wall.
We go out for pancakes. Ruth comes to the restaurant with us, but I only see her stab at her food without taking any bites, and mostly she sits there looking like she wishes she hadn’t come. I pour a cup of orange juice and slide it to her.
“Want to try some of my sausage?” Ellie asks.
Ruth shakes her head.
After breakfast Ruth is the first one to climb back into the RV. Ellie steps to the side and takes out her phone, and I stall long enough to hear her.
“Hey, me again,” she says into the phone. It’s the voice she uses when she’s talking to my mom. “Yeah, she doesn’t seem to be doing much better … No, no, don’t cancel your conference lecture yet, but I’ll text you the website for this clinic in Tucson that Eddie found.”
I climb back up into the RV.
Doctors are a good plan. And my plan—my plan is a good one too. It hasn’t really gone like I wanted, that’s true, but maybe from now on it will, and if we can just make it to the treasure, make it to Something Gold, maybe it will be the kind of glittering treasure to lighten wherever the dark corners are in Ruth’s mind.
Now Ruth’s back on her bed and I’m in my loft and we’ve finally left Fort Stockton. The rain has started. It’s coming in a steady sheet over the windshield.
My mind is too buzzed and drizzly to focus on reading or taking good pictures. I’ve been attempting to read for almost an hour, but now I lay the book open on my stomach and put my hands under my head. I let my mind wander for a while. It goes to the normal things—treasure, pirates, pictures. Ruth.
Maybe all these things are bubbling around in my brain like ingredients in a cauldron, coming together into a perfect Something Magic picture.
Today would be a really good day to find some magic somethings, that’s for sure.
My legs are jittery. I lie on my back, my knees bouncing off each other until I feel bruised.
The rain is still pounding, making plinking noises on the roof.
We’ve been driving for hours. I check on Ruth again. She’s sitting up in bed, earbuds in, a pencil hovering over the notepad in her lap. I see metered lines, scribbles on the page corners.
She’s writing a song. Her face has a little more color. Maybe she did eat a few bites of pancake? Maybe they’re starting to do some good? The page is not quite half full.
I climb down from my loft, going to the fridge as an excuse. Maybe she’ll still be up to talking with me, like last night.
“Working on a song?” I say. I do my best to keep my voice casual, nonchalant. The surest way to shut her up is to make a big deal out of it.
She nods. I get a plastic spoon and a yogurt and sit at her feet. She doesn’t roll her eyes or tell me to move. The eraser of her pencil rests between her lips and there’s a crease along her forehead. Her eyes are still pained and dark, and this close I can see beads of perspiration along her hairline. There’s something frantic about her scribbling and erasing.
I want to ask her about Something Magic, but instead I say, “How much does it cost a pirate to get her ears pierced?”
She lets her pencil drop to her lap and looks at me. “Huh?”
“A buccaneer,” I say, and my straight face collapses into a grin.
She gives me a little shove with her foot and now she’s the one trying not to smile. “Weirdo.”
Ruth puts the pencil tip between her lips again and goes back to glaring at her notebook.
“What’s your song?” I ask. I’m risking overstaying my welcome, and I’ll leave her alone soon, but I want to take every chance I can get. Her eyes are wide and there are odd blotches of color on her cheeks. I’d be more worried, but she’s sitting up and talking. I don’t know what to think.
“I need a word,” she says.
“Starboard.”
Roll of the eyes, but more friendly this time. “No, I mean like … um, I don’t know. Something about like, how unpredictable life is? Or not quite that. Like, that it’s bigger or different than we think it is? And love is like that too? I don’t know, that doesn’t make sense.”
I think of my favorite vocabulary word from English class. It’d make a good Treasure Hunt word one day. “Chimerical.”
She looks up at me. She’s biting her pencil now. She pauses for a moment, and I can practically see the word making its way across her forehead.
“That means, like, whimsical, right? Or like, unreal?”
“Yeah. ‘Unrealistic and wildly fanciful.’”
She hovers her eraser over the page. “Then if I changed you to all…” She erases a few words, writes in something new, adds another sentence at the end. Her lips mouth the words as she reads through it.
She looks up at me, and the smile on her face is wild, searching, sad.
“Thanks,” she says.
The Christmas I was six, Ruth and I each got a stuffed animal in our stocking. I got Murphy. His black-and-white face and beady eyes peeked out over the white fur trim of my stocking. I scooped him up first thing. That year I hardly noticed any of my other presents.
Ruth got a stuffed penguin with a slightly crooked left wing. She named it Yoko. (She was going through a Beatles phase. At age nine.) She also got a DVD with all the Beatles TV specials and Mom made popcorn and we watched them all. Ruth focused on the DVD and tried to act like she was a little too old for stuffed animals, but she brought the penguin to watch the movie with us and slept with it that night. I remember hearing her talk to someone and when I opened the door, she looked embarrassed and tossed Yoko to the foot of her bed. “Knock!” she yelled.
A few weeks later I stayed home from school with a cold. Mom was sick too. The movie I was watching ended and Mom was sleeping, and I didn’t want to wake her up.
So I pulled Murphy off my bed and took him on an adventure around the living room couches until I decided he was lonely and needed a friend. I opened the door to Ruth’s room and took Yoko off her bed.
I took the killer whale and the penguin back to the living room and played Treasure Hunt. I wasn’t so good at coming up with the words myself, so I used singing, a word Ruth had used for one of our recent Treasure Hunts. I played that they were in a band together, a killer-whale-and-penguin duo. I took them all over the house, looking for all the Bluetooth speakers. I took them to the piano, to Mom’s round brush that looked like a microphone, to the mantel in the living room that was the perfect stage. I played until I was too tired to think of any more singing treasure. I took Murphy back to my room and collapsed on my bed for a nap.
I left Ruth’s stuffed animal in the living room, and Ramses, our dog, got to it. Guess he couldn’t control himself when he saw the perfect chew toy lying unattended in the living room. When Ruth got home from school, her penguin was ripped and shredded across the whole main floor, headless, gutless, every limb torn off except the misaligned left wing. And it was my fault.
Dad took Ruth to the mall that night and let her pick out whatever animal she wanted, plus a Ringo Starr poster. Ruth came back with a pink elephant that she never slept with, put the poster above her bed, and didn’t talk to me for a week. We didn’t play Treasure Hunt for even longer.