Ellie and Eddie pull up in the RV at 8:37 a.m. Three minutes later, my bags are loaded up and I’m ready to go.
“Somebody’s excited,” Eddie says, grinning.
“Heck yes,” I say, and we high-five. I know he’s just as excited. One of our stops along the way is in Houston, where their daughter, Darcy, is going to college. It’s one of the things that got the idea for this trip started, and we’re all excited to see her again.
This trip developed slowly, like an emerging photograph in a darkroom, and it’s finally about to be displayed in full color.
“Okay, guys,” Ellie says. “I have researched basically every best food stop between here and California, so get ready to eat!”
Ellie and Mom talk together for a minute, quietly. They’ve known each other so long that they share mannerisms, like the way they talk with their hands. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but Mom says something with a worried face and Ellie puts a hand on her shoulder. Ellie’s good at that, knowing what other people need. She’s the one who’s always got extra hair ties, Neosporin, or hand sanitizer in her purse. And she introduced Ruth to the album Love at First Sting by the Scorpions.
I run my hand along a painted stripe on the side of the RV and give it a soft pat.
“Isn’t she gorgeous?” Eddie says, coming up behind me. He looks up at the RV like it’s a majestic elephant at the zoo. He’s always looking at things and talking about things like they’re utterly wonderful, and it makes it easier for me to look at them that way too. Like I have permission to see things effervescently. He’s the one I picked when I needed to interview someone outside my immediate family for a school project.
“Most spectacular thing I’ve seen today,” I say.
This giant RV is our home for the next little while. Our home away from home until we reach the Pacific Ocean. All the way to relaxing on the beach, scuba diving at pirate ships, and digging up old, happy memories.
The digging-up part is just me and Ruth. A little bit like it used to be.
I sense something hiding under the waves of this trip, like the treasure itself. It’s a trip on roads and through towns and cities, yes, but it’s also a trip through those memories. Through who we were, which means who we still are, and who we can still be. The move years ago had been exciting for us, for the most part. I’d had a few friends I was going to miss, and leaving our house was scary, but new adventures were exciting, weren’t they? Plus I’d still have Ruth, and that’s what mattered. She’d started having a few dark moments before the move, but she told me she was excited about it too, that maybe after a move things would be better. We had so much fun doing the Treasure Hunt across the country I thought things were getting really good again. It wasn’t until after the move that she started feeling … far away.
Mom and Dad sandwich me in a big hug.
“Be safe,” Mom says. “And be good for Ellie and Eddie. Remember the Instagram rules. I’m so, so excited to see all the pictures you take.”
“And have fun,” Dad says.
Ruth steps out onto the front porch with her luggage, the blue tips of her spiky black hair flashing in the sunlight, and Dad catches her in a tight side hug and plants a kiss on the top of her head.
“Hey, Mom?” I say.
“Yeah, sweetie?”
I step away from Dad and Ruth, and Mom leans toward me. Before we leave, I feel like I need someone to know at least a tiny bit about what I’m going to try to do. “I’ve got kind of a surprise planned for Ruth at the end of this trip and I really hope she likes it.”
I don’t want to say too much more about it, and Mom doesn’t ask. I knew she wouldn’t. She just brushes her hand down my hair. “My patient, patient girl,” she says. “You always take such good care of your sister.”
That urgent voice deep in my mind says, But not good enough.
Well, that’s about to change. This trip is going to be more than good. It’s going to be the Viking hoard of Treasure Hunts.
I look between the RV and my sister, then back to my mom. There’s blue sky and concern reflected in her eyes.
“I hope it helps,” I say.
Above anyone else, I think, Mom knows what I mean. That I’m talking about my plan and this trip and the pirate ships and … well, everything. Anything. Mom pulls me into a gripping hug, her hand tense on my back.
“Me too,” she says. “Me too.”
Mom steps over and gives Ruth a hug and says something in her ear that I can’t hear. Ruth sighs and nods.
Then Ruth steps past me toward the RV. “Okay then, let’s go,” she says.
Ellie and Eddie are already on board. Ruth climbs up and I’m the last one in, and I turn around on the top step and wave at my parents.
“Bye,” Ruth calls from behind me. “Come on, Olivia, close the door.”
I call goodbye one more time, then close the door. I watch through the window and Mom and Dad are standing there, arms around each other’s shoulders. I remind myself it’s only going to be a week until I see them again.
Besides, I have Ruth.
Now we’re ready to go. Ellie and Eddie head to the front. Eddie puts his Nashville Predators cap on his round, bald head and cheers as he slides into the driver’s seat. There’s a small bedroom with a queen bed in the back of the RV that will be their territory on this trip. I climb up into the loft above the driver’s seat, the spot I’ve claimed since I knew this trip was happening. Below me, on the driver’s side, behind the seat, I see the small couch, a tiny counter and sink, and then the bathroom. Across from that is a little nook with a built-in sleeping space. That will be Ruth’s space. There’s a shelf in her nook too, on which she’s already carefully laid her book and a spare pair of earbuds. She takes out a notebook and pen and jots something inside—probably the title of a song or some lyrics she wants to remember, or poetic lines of her own making. Then she adds the notebook to the shelf too.
I peek over my ledge and Ellie looks up at me and grins. She’s got a round nose that wrinkles when she smiles, and clear blue eyes that always look like she’s thinking about something far away. She’s got a big atlas open on her lap. She likes having a physical map to look at and see where we are, even though Eddie’s plotted our course in his phone.
“Are we all ready?” asks Eddie.
Yes! I think.
I really, really hope so.
My sister’s bladder is the size of a pea. Or something, because we’ve only been on the road for a couple hours, but she’s already been in the tiny RV bathroom for almost twenty minutes.
I’m starting to get worried. I always get nervous when she spends too much time cooped up like that. Alone. It’s not usually a good sign.
Finally Ruth steps out of the tiny bathroom and the door claps shut behind her. She tosses her phone onto her bed like she’s mad at it and then collapses onto the bed herself and pulls out her notebook and pen.
I’ve stayed curled up in my loft. I watch my sister from behind the cover of one of my National Geographic magazines. My stomach churns and clenches like it always does when Ruth is mad.
Mad, though, is sometimes better than the alternative. Mad at least means she’s there inside, that she’s feeling things and functioning okay, and that her medication is allowing her to process feelings, even feelings like anger or frustration. Without the medication, it becomes too much.
I know Ruth packed the medication she takes for her depression, because I checked when she wasn’t looking. Not that I expected her to leave it behind, accidentally or on purpose. But you just can’t be too careful.
One of the worst parts about depression is that it’s not like an outside illness, where you can see the broken bone or the red swollen nose. It’s an inside illness where you have to know the subtle signs.
Which is why I’m not super thrilled about her spending so much time alone in the bathroom.
I clutch my stuffed killer whale to me. I’ve learned to pay close attention to any of Ruth’s signs that I can see because the last thing I want to be is clueless. If I don’t pay attention, I might hurt Ruth in a way I don’t mean to.
Maybe a distraction will help. “It is absolutely the most perfect summer day!” I call down.
“Shut up,” Ruth says.
“Hey,” Eddie calls from the driver’s seat. “Let’s everybody be nice.”
Ruth grips the sleeve of her hoodie in one hand and rolls her eyes. She plugs in her earbuds and twirls her finger around her iPod.
Even though it’s the first day of what should be the most incredible trip ever, today is turning into one of Ruth’s bad days. There are normal bad days, and then there are really bad days. The really bad days are when Ruth falls into what I call The Pit. I know the difference between a normal bad day and The Pit. I know the difference, because I know the signs. At least, some of the visible ones, I hope.
Sign number one: She’s listening to John Williams. That’s not so unusual, except that when Ruth is in The Pit, she feels words like barbed wire. She once told me that sometimes when people speak, it’s like broken glass in her bloodstream. Which means that when she’s in The Pit, even David Bowie and Freddie Mercury—her music gods—are out. She can’t stand the words. So she listens to the Saving Private Ryan soundtrack.
Sign number two: She’s wearing socks. Again, not so strange, except Ruth likes bare feet. Hood for her head, but nothing on her feet. Ruth’s an enigma like that. This changes, of course, in The Pit. On the really bad days, her feet are so cold she could stick them straight in a fire and they’d still be frozen. I guess socks are the best she can do. She hasn’t told me this directly, but when she goes into her bedroom and emerges hours later with a deeper, hurting heaviness around her eyes and the quarter-note socks on her feet, I know.
Maybe socks and orchestral music aren’t bad things, but they mean sad, hard things are happening in Ruth’s head. Tender, painful things happening with her depression. Sometimes dangerous things. When her medicine isn’t working like it should. When words start hurting. When she stops being able to sleep and no food tastes good.
The thing is, depression can look different for each person. And treatment can look different too. Before Ruth went to see the doctors, before she started taking medicine, it was like all her thoughts and emotions piled up in this swirling chaotic wave until it all became too much, tidal, crashing down into numbness. And it took lots of tries with different kinds of medicine and different doses before the doctors and Ruth found one that calmed the whirlpool going on in her mind. There were some that didn’t really do much, or maybe even made it worse. Some gave her headaches when the dose was too high. Some seemed to work at first, but then it all came swirling back, along with extra nausea. But after experimenting, they found one that worked, and the right dosage to help Ruth think and feel a little bit more like her healthy self.
Ruth told me some of this herself—the tidal waves, the crash down to numbness. The rest is what I’m trying to learn from watching Ruth up close, trying my best to understand something she can only express in metaphor, trying to figure out what an inside hurt looks like on the outside.
I’ve tried to learn the signs. Her signs.
I want to watch Ruth’s face when we find our old box and open it up and see the shells she put inside, and her favorite necklace, and the pictures I took of her. Pictures of us dancing and playing pirates and all the times when we were happy Treasure Hunters. Because I think that will be a good day. A really good one.
Pirates were the thing we always had in common, even when we had different taste in most other things, from clothes (I like stripes and polka dots, she likes black) to movies. I loved Babe, the pig movie, but Ruth said animal movies were dumb and the moving mouths were unrealistic anyway. I still love it, but of course I’m not going to say that.
Ruth’s favorite movie is Edward Scissorhands. She says it has some of the best music and some of the best costumes. She made herself her own Edward Scissorhands suit for Halloween when she was thirteen, complete with carefully cut cardboard hand-blades. While a man with blades for fingers doesn’t seem any more realistic to me than a talking pig, I’m not going to say that either.
We both love pretty much any movie about pirates. Even the cheesy ones.
My job on this trip is to watch out for the signs. That’s my responsibility because I’m her sister. Ellie and Eddie know about things too, but I’m still the sister. That doesn’t mean, though, that I can’t take advantage of the situation. Because I mean, come on, pirate ships. Not every girl gets to go on a cross-country road trip in the loft of an RV, and I’m going to make the most of it. This is going to be one of the greatest trips of my entire life. I’m going to make sure of it.
My head is pressed against the window, where I can look at the lollipop sky and the passing trees and the tops of cars that look small from up here. I wish I could see it all at once, and never stop looking. I’ve got that whole stack of National Geographic magazines, but I’m so distracted by the looking and watching that I haven’t needed them very much yet. Even the telephone poles look beautiful today, and I can’t resist taking out my special camera and fiddling with apertures and shutter speeds and taking a few shots. If I set a wider aperture, more light gets in, which is good for inside the RV, where it’s a little bit darker. Then I play around with shutter speeds: faster for clearer images, slower if I want blurry things in motion. With my camera in one hand, Murphy next to my other, and my stack of magazines behind me, I could stay in my loft forever.
I take out my phone and pull up Instagram, where I’ve only got one shot so far. A cool, low-angled picture of the front of the RV, with crazy clouds in the sky behind it. It took me a long time to convince Mom and Dad that I needed to start a travel photography account so I could keep pushing myself and my photography skills, so I could start growing my photography career, maybe even work my way toward getting some gigs, and that this trip was the perfect opportunity to start that up. Finally they agreed, with the caveat that I had to keep to the Instagram rules. Fine by me. I know I’m young to be a photographer, but Instagram means I can show people what this thirteen-year-old can really do with a camera in her hands. And I’m going to spend as much time practicing with this new camera as I can before we get to California and the pirate ships.
A feed of beautiful pictures, all helping me practice and get ready for one day being the best photographer National Geographic’s ever had.
There’s a motorcyclist with a ponytail and a leather jacket in the lane to our left. I feel like banging on the window and shouting at him, We’re going to a pirate ship! We’re going to a pirate ship!
I slip a magazine from the top of my stack and flip it open. Even though I usually read every word (even the ads), today I just look at the pictures of luminescent pink jellyfish and fuzzy fur seals. The seals’ eyes are reflective, and they’re staring at the camera like it might be something good to eat.
If I had three wishes, I think I’d use all of them to be the person behind that camera.
I look down from my loft and watch Ruth’s dark blue nails scroll through her iPod. Maybe I wouldn’t use all three wishes on fur seals. I’d use the first one for something else.
When you’re driving across the country playing Treasure Hunt, one word doesn’t quite do it. You need several words, maybe even a whole rhyme. A rhyme Ruth made up, and one I’ve remembered for three years.
Something New
Something Old
Something Magic
Something Gold
These are the words I have sharpied on the back of those four pictures tucked carefully in my closet at home. I can see those four pictures as vividly as if they were in front of me again.
So really, my secret plan isn’t my secret plan at all. It’s Ruth’s. But the idea of doing the same Treasure Hunt again as we go back across the country came into my mind like a gift. Because even though there were hard things about moving, we had each other. She’s the one who sat by me every night while we moved away from everything familiar and played me music while we looked at my pictures. And Ruth doesn’t even have to know I’m doing the Treasure Hunt, not at first, because I’ve got my camera. I can subtly take photos of Ruth at every stop, finding ways to replicate as perfectly as possible the images from the first time around. Look at the pictures I took of you, I’ll tell her at the end. I’ll surprise her with the pictures, and when she sees them, she’ll know. And for the last and final picture—our Something Gold—we can have Ellie or Eddie take a picture of us holding not moving boxes, but our Treasure Box.
We had each other then, and I want her to know that we still do.
Look at all the magic and gold treasures we’ve found, I’ll say.
Olivia’s Treasure Hunt Surprise. That thought makes me chuckle to myself.
Ruth planned the previous Treasure Hunt based on the major cities we were going to be passing through, dividing the clues among them. I’ve done the same, and was pretty excited when I realized that Something New would coincide with our first major stop: New Orleans. And now we’re on our way.
I lean farther out from my loft, trying to get Ruth’s attention. I try to think of something to say to her, a question to ask, just as an excuse to check in. Checking in is the only thing I can think to do to help. The only thing I’ve ever known to do. To make sure she’s not getting sucked into her own little earbud world too badly.
I run my camera strap through my fingers and wonder what image could capture the time before it felt like our treasure was floating farther and farther away.
“Ruth,” I say.
She pulls a knee up to her chest and ignores me, but I know she can hear me.
“Ruth,” I say louder.
She yanks an earbud out of her ear. “Stop, Olivia. Yes, I’m fine. No, I don’t care how many new followers you have on Instagram. Or whatever else it is you’re going to ask me. Just leave me alone for two seconds.” She puts the earbud back in and slides deeper into her bed.
I swallow and pull myself back into the loft. For the millionth time in my life, I feel a little crazy at all the things I can’t do for my sister. I try—try to do something that will help—and half the time I just make things worse. As I watch her, I burst with the desire to pull down the sun and warm her feet. Or do anything. But I also know that sometimes just seeing the sun, or my face, makes her shadow darker. And so I sit, Buddha-like, while my stomach and heart do cartwheels around each other.
A Treasure Hunt that’s both old and new will show her all the things I want her to see. That’s something I can do.
That’s what I love so much about a good photograph.
Ellie heard Ruth’s frustration and is watching her over her shoulder. After a moment, Ellie unclicks her seat belt and walks casually back to the mini-fridge by the couch. She pulls out two thermoses of water and two plums. She sets one of the waters at Ruth’s feet and holds out a plum.
“I’m fine,” Ruth says, looking at her music.
“Eat,” Ellie says softly.
Without really looking, Ruth takes the plum and bites into it. Ellie leans back onto the couch and eats too. They don’t talk, only eat while Ruth flips to the next song. As she gets some food in her, I can see Ruth’s shoulders relax a bit.
Ellie is good at this. Natural, like she knows what to do without really having to try.
When Ruth’s done eating, she holds her pit out and Ellie takes it and throws the pair of pits into the trash under the sink.
And like that, everything seems a bit more calm.
I watch my sister.
Something New. Something Old. Something Magic.
And at the end, Something Gold.