In some ways, starting at the Hop felt like starting my life over. It felt like a second chance, a chance to be someone new, and it felt right that I had to take two planes and a car to get there—being reborn should take some effort. The flight’s hazy in my memory, I popped some of Ma’s sleeping pills and passed out right away. The drive, though, it’s fresh in my mind.
It was like this: three hundred kilometers of desert, orange and open and flat, like driving on the sun, then there was the Hop. It was this mansion among nothingness. Beautiful and unexpected, a birthmark found during a one-night stand. Coming across it felt intimate. It felt like, there you are. Like, I’ve been looking all over for you.
It was easy to find, the Hop was. By the time I got there, its gift shop was billboard famous. Every fifth sign along I-11, slotted between pro-life images of fetuses spiraled in wombs, advertisements for car accident lawyers, some new drug that’ll cure your depression, a McDonald’s burger, bigger and better than their other ones, then the Hop Gift Shop: clothing optional. A girl, arm slung over her breasts, legs spread for drivers, but instead of genitalia, there was a split pomegranate between her thighs, its insides appropriately pink and wet. I wondered how many hopeful truckers had turned in their seats, checked their rearviews, fingers crossed that, for some reason, the uncensored image might be on the back.
It wasn’t. I checked. The back of the billboard read hell is real and 1–800-call-jesus. A handy reminder for those of us en route to sin.
Back home, Ma and I lived down the road from a church with a sign out front that read Let Jesus Enter You, and every time we drove by it, Ma would shake her head. She’d say, Not without a condom.
I was trying not to think about Ma, those early days at the Hop. I was trying not to, but sometimes it seemed like she was more in my head than I was.
* * *
I was thirsty, I remember that. Thirst was a thing I let myself feel. Thirst was easy. Some feelings are knots of emotion and pith, complicated and heavy, like sadness, like loss, like grief, feel the weight of that, grief.
I kept my mind off her by thinking about everything else. Like, highway. Dashboard. Eighty miles an hour. What’s that in metric, like 120? The imperial system. Pounds. Ounces. Yards and feet. Toes. That guy who sucked my toe while we had sex. Sex. Sweat. My AC had quit two hours ago, and my face was licked with sweat, drooling down my temple, settling above my lip, and when I wiped at it, new beads took the place of old ones immediately, like they’d been waiting in line, eager for a chance to surface. It was hot. So hot it felt like a trap.
A clanging came from deep in the car’s belly. My Corolla was pregnant with something mechanical. I asked it, “Can you be quiet?” but the car clattered its response, and so instead I became louder, it’s all relative, sound, suffering, all of it. I lowered my foot on the accelerator and turned up the radio.
* * *
Ma and I had liked taking road trips. We did it with the windows down and the AC on blast. We liked to feel fast. She’d inhale her way through a pack of cigarettes and I’d puff on pretzel sticks to match. We asked the radio questions and let it tell our fortune. Where are we going? Ma asked the dash, and I pressed to skip the station, and how we hooted when AC/DC said highway to hell. Ma tried again: Are we going to win the lottery this week? We landed on a commercial, Only two dollars ninety-nine!
* * *
I exited the interstate and things got quiet fast. Without the road noise, the other cars, the signs, the billboards, the world felt still and flat and big. It was not New Zealand. In New Zealand, you existed between mountains. Back home, you were always heading toward something, an end, the edge. Here? I drove. There was a hot haze coming off the tarmac, and I couldn’t see the end of the highway—here, I was heading for a vanishing point. The radio dipped into country, then pop, then a religious station with a deejay who kept saying “Hallelujah” in between all the static. It sounded like an exorcism. I killed the sound and drove.
There were these big black birds. They came out of nowhere and started swooping low in the sky, their flight plans following the path of a conductor’s hands, they swooped and swooped and swooped. I could almost hear the orchestra they conjured with their wings. Heavy on string. A wailing violin. The birds themselves seemed to be silent. I thought, If this were a movie, these birds would be some clunky symbolism, and then I thought, But this is not a movie. The birds multiplied. Sometimes they got so close to the windshield I winced.
I hated birds. I still do. Once, as a kid, I tried to pick up a gosling. Tiny, fuzzy, a walking ball of lint. They were waddling in a row at the lake, five of them behind their mother. The last one in line was lagging, weaving drunken zigzags and losing its way. I’d crouched to set it on the right track when its mother turned around. She looked me in the eye and quacked twice, warning shots, then charged. She chased me around the park, wings spread wide, her honking, me howling. Ma held her stomach and laughed and laughed.
You don’t mess with a ma’s babies, bunny, is what Ma said when the goose finally tired of her tirade. She took her goslings, all five, and drifted off on the water, surrender as sudden as her ire. We’ll do anything for our babies.
* * *
My phone rang, and I let it. Gary, Lacey, Fi, whoever it was, I was starting anew and I would not be taking the past’s calls. I considered tossing the phone out the window, and I would’ve if I were in a movie, Nicole Kidman on the run, mysterious, shrouded in sexy mystery. I would’ve lit a cigarette and thrown the phone and watched it shatter in my mirror. But I wasn’t Nicole Kidman and I had less than $100 to my name, so I waited for the phone to finish vibrating and switched back to the GPS.
* * *
The owner of the Hop—Daddy—he assured me over one of our many phone calls that my accent would be an advantage. “You’ve got that exotic factor,” is what he told me. “You should play it up,” he said. “Wear some Crocodile Dundee shit, you know? One of those hats with the corks.”
I didn’t correct him on the country. I needed the job, and I got it after sending a portfolio of photographs, portraits, close-ups, nudes, full-body shots, as well as a video of myself engaged in a selection of sexual acts. Daddy called in the middle of the night, oblivious to time zones or uncaring or both. “How soon can you get here?” he said. “I can fast-track your visa. We’ve got an unexpected vacancy.” I didn’t like the sound of “unexpected vacancy,” but I was nodding anyway. Daddy told me he’d never hired a girl without testing her out first. By testing her out, he meant fucking her.
It was three in the morning when I hung up on Daddy, and I got out of bed and packed my bag right then.
* * *
Without Ma, even though I inherited the house, I didn’t have a home anymore. I had a run-down, wrong-side-of-town two-bedroom shithole between the city’s dump and a patchwork of cow paddocks. I had a toilet that ran without end and rusted pipes and carpet that peeled up at every chance it got and black mold spreading over the ceiling like whispered gossip. It was so quiet in that house without her. Even with the infinite voices of reality television, the Kardashians, The Bachelor, The Real Housewives of Somewhere blaring in the living room, and the video of a smoker’s cough I’d found on the internet and played on a loop, it was so quiet it made me motion sick. Like I was floating, couldn’t get my bearings, like being in a suddenly pitch-black space, like missing the last step on the staircase, my whole world vanished in an instant.