Our Something Gold picture from last time—the one Mom took of Ruth and me holding our boxes, standing in front of our glowing new house—isn’t quite the last Treasure Hunt photo I have. There’s one more, from our last Treasure Hunt that we did only a few months after we moved. On my birthday.
We moved in the summer, and then in November I turned eleven. Ruth and I had only been in our new schools a few months. I was much too nervous to have a party that involved inviting kids in my class who I didn’t know that well. So it was just the four of us: Mom, Dad, Ruth, and me.
The night before my birthday, Mom had tucked me in and told me she was sorry I wasn’t going to be able to have a party with all my friends from back home, and I could tell she was worried. She didn’t need to be though, because that zoo trip we did the next day became one of my favorite birthdays ever.
Ruth seemed tired, but when we walked through the gates, she grinned at me and said, “Geometric!” She pulled out her small flip notebook. I already had my camera.
At the zoo that day, sometimes we ran from exhibit to exhibit, and sometimes we sat for a long time and watched. Especially the gorillas. There was a new baby gorilla, and we watched it roll around and pull its mother’s arm and chuck straw in her face.
I got a great shot of the shapes on a giraffe’s neck. I took pictures of fish scales and polar bear noses and even the perfectly circular sewer cover. My best shot from that day, from that Geometric Treasure Hunt, was a close-up of the diamond-shaped scales on the crocodile’s shoulder. Ruth jotted down song ideas and lyrics in her notebook. Sometimes her eyes got a little glazed and I had to remind her to keep going, but she didn’t complain or grumble or snap at me or anything.
She didn’t even get upset when, that night, I chose Boggle for our game. Ruth and I had already gone through my pictures and listened to her short “Geometric Treasure” playlist (with epic songs like “Turning Circles” by Judas Priest), and then we all sat up to the table. Mom had made a German chocolate cake, and we laid it in the middle of the table while we played and ate straight from the pan.
Halfway through round number five, I realized Ruth had put her pencil down and she was staring blankly at her paper. Mom noticed too.
“Hon?” she asked, so softly I barely heard. “If you want to go lie down, that’s okay.”
The words seemed to take a moment to get through Ruth’s haze, but when they did, she blinked and shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I can…”
She picked up her pencil, but her grip was so weak it dropped to the floor. She didn’t even have the energy to bend down and pick it back up.
The sand in the Boggle timer ran down.
I put my pencil down too. “I know! Let’s go watch Edward Scissorhands!”
Dad cleaned up the game and Mom got the movie set up. Ruth and I flopped next to each other on the couch. She’d been having some trouble sleeping, and I had a faint hope that she would doze off during the movie and get some rest, but my guess was that she probably wouldn’t. She would stare at the screen the whole movie, like usual, so wide-eyed I wouldn’t know if she was seeing every tiny thing that happened or seeing nothing at all.
I’d noticed Ruth’s bad days for a while, even for a short time before the move. I’d started trying to learn the signs. But that was the first day I saw the real battle with herself deep in her eyes, in her shoulders and hands. That was the first night I saw how desperately hard she was trying.
I can’t know what kind of effort it took, but as the movie started, Ruth nudged my side with her elbow. “Happy birthday, punk.”
The RV smells of oranges when I wake up, and I can feel the rumble of the road underneath me. Through shut eyelids I register the brightness and I can hear the murmur of Ellie and Eddie’s quiet conversation. There is a line of sweat along my sternum where I’ve clutched my stuffed killer whale all night.
A Journey song comes on the radio, so soft I can barely hear it, but I lie and listen and let myself keep my eyelids shut. I once heard a professional photographer on YouTube say that she spends some time every day with her eyes closed so she can keep her mental lens fresh. So I do that too.
And then I’m ready to find the perfect picture.
I roll away from the window and look out from my loft. Ruth is in her bed, with her iPod and a magazine.
We’re going to be getting to New Orleans later today.
Something New, here we come.
Last time, our Something New day was in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We found murals that had recently been put up at Lions Park, with a big banner across the top that said, NEW INSTALLATION SPONSORED BY LAS CRUCES PARKS AND RECREATION. I pointed to the sign and said, “New! That’s perfect!” Then I took pictures of Ruth jumping as high as she could right under the big green letters of NEW, her arms flung up high in the air. Throughout our day at the park, Ruth jotted down song ideas and built up a “Something New” playlist. That night we huddled on her motel room bed and listened to the songs—songs like “Brand New Key” and “New World Man”—and I showed her all my pictures, especially the jumping shots.
Later on, I printed out the best one. I wonder if she knows I still have it.
I don’t think it’s going to be hard at all to find cool new street art of some kind in New Orleans. Plus New is right in the city’s name, so it probably won’t even be hard to find somewhere for another jump shot of Ruth right under the word, just like before.
I roll onto my side and the loft creaks and Ellie looks up at me. “You awake, Olivia?” she says. She leans back and smiles. “How’d you sleep?”
“Great!”
“We got more oranges and yogurt,” she says.
“Sweet!” I say. I hop onto the back of the couch and down onto the floor. Eddie turns the radio louder and I hum along.
I look up and realize Ruth has been watching me. “Great,” she says. “Miss Perky’s up.” She rolls her eyes and goes back to her magazine. Oops. But Ruth’s late-night obnoxious selfie is enough to keep me going all morning. Even if she’s snippy now, that picture has to mean she’s at least sort of okay. That the worst stuff isn’t happening again. I’ll keep on keeping tabs, of course.
Curled up on the little couch, I eat a quick breakfast, toss my yogurt carton away, then look out the window at the glorious day. The brush is thick on either side of us, but the land is flat and the sky is open and bright and cloudless. I watch out the window for a while, looking for picture inspiration, then climb back into my loft.
My phone battery is getting low. It’s time for my turn with the car charger again. But I have a text from Mom that says Call me.
“It came,” says Mom immediately.
“Oh, good!” It is a photography book I ordered that didn’t come in time, a book with tips from real National Geographic photographers. “So you’ll bring it to San Diego?”
“Yes! How’s everything going so far? You guys okay?”
“We’re all doing great. We’re past Tuscaloosa now.”
“Oh wow! And you guys slept in the RV last night?”
“Yep. It was cool. I miss you, though,” I say.
“Oh, Olivia, I wish I could be there.” She clears her throat, and I know what she’s going to ask next. “How’s Ruth?”
I knew she was going to ask that, and for maybe the first time I wonder about why. There are tiny questions beginning to whisper from opposite corners of my mind. Mom asks me how Ruth is doing because she knows I can handle the responsibility, right? That she can rely on me to keep the upbeat going. And that feels good, and feels like me. I want to be that person. But if that’s a real, honest answer, then why do I also feel like I could truthfully say that I’m worried? How heavy a load on her shoulders would it be if I told her both answers? What would she do if I said I wanted her to know that yes, I, Olivia, am a happy person, but also, very frequently, anxious?
I glance down at Ruth. She’s not curled into a ball. That’s something. The tattoo square is still on her shelf, peeking out from under her notebook.
“She’s okay,” I say.
“Yeah,” says Mom.
“Hey,” I say. “Remember those murals in Las Cruces? When we were on the drive to Knoxville?”
“Murals?”
“At that park, remember?”
“Oh, right! You guys took, like, five hundred pictures. What were the…”
“They were murals of roadrunners,” I say. “Dad kept saying meep meep.”
Mom laughs. “Oh yeah! I remember.”
I remember how every time Dad made that sound, Ruth laughed. One time she laughed until she snorted. When we took pictures, I remember her lifting her arms way up high in the air like she was flying.
I check again to make sure Ruth’s earbuds are in and she can’t hear me. “That move was … the drive was happy for … for all of us, right? I remember it being happy.”
I hear Mom inhale. “I remember Ruth hoping it would be a good move. Hoping really hard. You helped her with that.”
So much effort went into that Treasure Hunt, and I think Mom is right about Ruth. Signs of really bad days had recently started popping up like Bobbitt worms, and maybe Ruth was hoping that a move across the country would wipe them away from the start. We were both hoping.
We talk for a few more minutes, about Dad stressing out about his new client, like he always does. About when they’re going to be flying out to meet us, about her lecture. She tells me she’s keeping up-to-date on my “travelgram” and I tell her I know, because I’ve seen all her comments.
I try to imagine exactly what my mom is seeing as she’s talking to me on the phone. Maybe the scratches on her desk? Dishes in the sink? That might be a cool photo project one day—take two relatives, show the different things they see, far away, nearby. I wonder if there’s a chance they’d ever be seeing the same thing.
“Tell Ruth I love her,” Mom says. “And tell Olivia I love her, too.”
“Very funny, Mom,” I say.
After I hang up, Ruth asks about making a pit stop, and I’m relieved that she’s speaking, if only to ask to pee in a toilet that isn’t moving. When we stop and all get out of the RV, Ruth doesn’t immediately follow, which worries me, but as I get into the service station, I look back through the glass doors and see her stepping down out of the RV.
This service station is a fancy one. It’s got a big lot spread with a handful of eighteen-wheelers and even a fountain out front. They have a whole row of vending machines with much more variety than earlier ones. They have a spinner full of postcards.
Ruth walks into the restroom and I grab a couple of fruit leathers. After I use the bathroom, I get my camera from the RV and look around the parking lot for potential Instagram pictures. The closer we get to New Orleans, the more excited I am about the Something New pictures I’m going to take.
The sun makes me squint. In front of the RV is an oil stain that’s shimmering in rainbows. I pull my camera out of its sling and aim it at the spot. The sun is way too bright for a perfect shot, but I play around with the settings and see if I can get the white balance to work. I take a couple practice shots, but they go between bleached-looking and muddy. I’m fiddling with the settings again when Ruth’s reflection appears in the oil puddle. I hurry and click before she can move. One more for the “Sisters” folder.
“Why are you taking pictures of the asphalt?”
I open my mouth to tell her that there was a cool rainbow, that she had shimmering colors across her reflection, that I was just experimenting and practicing and I knew it wasn’t going to be, like, the greatest photo ever or anything. But when I see her raised eyebrow and wrinkled nose, I don’t know what to say, and she rolls her eyes and heads back to the RV.
Eddie walks out of the station with bananas and sunflower seeds. He comes over to where I am and looks at the puddle I’m looking at.
“Oh hey, that reflection’s kind of cool,” he says.
“Yeah? I mean, I was taking pictures, but it’s weird…”
He tears open the corner of his sunflower-seed bag. “If you think it’s cool enough to take pictures of, that’s what matters, right?”
“Ruth thinks I’m weird.” The words blurt out of me. I’m not sure exactly why I wanted to say it, but somehow saying those words out loud to Eddie feels like a relief. Like I’m unloading something I’ve been trying to carry by myself.
Eddie looks at me carefully. “One person’s weird is another person’s Vincent van Gogh, and where would we be without our Vincents?”
For a moment I wonder if he means I’m the Vincent or Ruth is, and then Eddie’s eyes wrinkle into their usual grin and I realize he probably means both. I also realize I’m going to have that “Vincent” song by Don McLean stuck in my head now for the rest of the day. I wonder if Ruth has it on her iPod. I bet she does.
Eddie’s looking up at the sky, his mind on a tangent. “That’s what’s so great about the Impressionists and the Postimpressionists,” he mutters. “They’re painting an experience, not just visual likeness.”
I look up at the sky where Eddie’s looking. I wonder what he’s really seeing, and if photography can paint an experience too.
Eddie sighs, looks back at me, and smiles. “Hey,” he says, “let’s see how many sunflower seeds I can catch in my mouth at once.”
He pours at least a third of the bag of seeds into his palm, then chucks them high into the air. He doesn’t even look around first to see if anyone is watching. The seeds clatter down around us like hail and despite his wide-open and upturned mouth, he catches precisely zero.
We step into the RV together, laughing.