“STOP THE CAR,” I say. I gather my things from the back seat and lay them on top of my lap. I am not crazy. I didn’t kill Annie, proprietor of the Motel Tonopah. I’m just a sad woman who never wanted to be a wife, shouldn’t have been a mother, but now I have this child and Kate is what I will inevitably go home to. There’s one more trip I have to take before I make my reparations, before I take my pills and sleep through my waking life. This is the end of the line for Cassidy and me. “I’m leaving.”
“Quit the drama, Ellie. I’ll take you where you need to go,” she says, gripping the steering wheel.
“If you don’t stop the car I’ll jump out,” I say.
“And do what? Walk? It’s over 110 degrees out there. You’ll get burned.” Cassidy pulls onto the side of the road and cuts the engine. “This is about those guys last night, right? Why don’t we just get your judgment all out in the open so we can keep going like nothing happened.”
“You don’t like me very much, do you?”
“I never gave the matter much thought.”
“Why did you come for me? On my wedding day, at the hospital.”
“Because you’re the kind of woman who needs saving.”
“And you’re the one to do it.” I open the door and get my suitcase out of the trunk. The heat bears down on my back and I can feel my skin grow hot. I stand there, sleepless, with dust on my shoes. I’m ready to walk away. For a moment I think of Charlie Manson and his family. Is this where they went? Crawled back to a ranch in the desert, living among rusted railway cars, blackbirds, diamondback snakes, and prostitutes named Candy? Was it Cassidy singing off-key next to a beautiful ex-con, whose calloused fingers strummed Beach Boy songs on an old guitar? His eyes were the world she orphaned herself to. After bleaching her hair, did Cassidy tell him she was the sun? If I stand still long enough I can feel Cassidy trembling in the car.
Cassidy rolls down the window. “So that’s it? We have one argument and you take off? Where are you gonna go? Back to Tim, back to playing wet nurse? I’m all you have. I’m hope, Ellie.”
“You know, the day of my wedding I had a visitor, Minnie.”
“That crazy cake baker?”
“Oh, I think you know her better than that. She told me that I should listen to you. That I should make my plans.”
“What are you talking about?”
“So I’m making my plans.” I slam the passenger door hard, wheel my luggage to the gas station, and hitch a ride to the bus station, leaving Cassidy standing in front of her car, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun. Who knew this would be the last time we’d see one another? Who knew that in a few years’ time cancer would breed in Cassidy’s body, annihilating everything in its wake? Tim will tell me that she weighed seventy pounds when she died; she’d become a bag of rattled bones. All that beauty, unrecognizable, and all that hope stolen by cancer. I lie. I will see her one last time when my daughter is older and I lay wildflowers on Cassidy’s grave. The bunch is messy, prickly, and riddled with weeds—exactly what she would have wanted. I will see Minnie standing at a distance.
When I am old and gray with eyes drowning of sleep, I will finally feel the weight of Annie’s words hurtling back to me. I will lie in a bed and see my daughter standing over me. I will see her pry the bottle of pills from my hands. She will smell of butter and burned bread. I will see her hold a pillow over my face. I will hear her say, I’ve always loved watching you sleep.
Not yet.
It takes nearly three hundred and fifty miles to get to Bakersfield, and I’m awake the whole way. The bus rolls along Route 6, through the desert, past pickup trucks and men who chew tobacco in ten-gallon hats, and all I can see is the stretch of road ahead. Truckers honk as they race by, and the woman beside me occupies herself by knitting pink wool booties.
“It’s a bit warm for socks,” I say, by way of conversation, and the woman looks at me, looks at her socks, and resumes the needle clink.
“I have a daughter,” I say.
The woman glares at me and says, “What do you want, a medal? Can I get back to my business now?” Startled, I press my face against the glass for the remainder of the ride. When we leave Barstow, I see a hand-painted sign that reads, Everyone Who Passes through Here Gets Pulled Under. Cassidy used to tell me about her nightmares, how she dreamed of Indians in the desert.
We arrive in Bakersfield in the evening when the air has cooled down to hot. It’s quiet save for the sound of cicadas and the row of old men at the bus station spitting into tin cans. Inside, I ask the man who takes the tickets where I can find the nearest motel. Without looking up from his magazine, he points to a building across the road. “That’s the Bakersfield Inn,” he says. “Rooms are eight fifty a night. You go there and ask for Marla, and she’ll fix you up.” When I thank him he says, “You’re a long way from home.” And in this, we agree.
There are two lamps in the hotel room, and I turn them both on before I call Tim. Sobbing, he says he can’t do this on his own. He’s not built for it. A child needs its mother, not a grandmother who’s out to lunch and not taking any calls. “Your mother calls her Ingrid,” my husband says. “Who the hell is Ingrid?”
“Someone we used to know.” Delilah Martin: I’m scared that she’s going to make you crazy.
“When your mother’s not acting like Greta Garbo, she plays it like she’s got a bad case of amnesia. I swear, Kate and I will be in the room with Norah and she’ll act as if we’re goddamn strangers. Twice I had to call the doctor to sedate her. And this morning, she up and disappeared. Do I call the police? What the fuck do I do? I can’t take another day of this. Not another second. You have to come home,” Tim says, in a way that’s less of an order and more of a plea. He doesn’t mention the hospital and my jailhouse break, fearing, perhaps, that I’d never come home. I know what awaits me, what I’ll have to return to eventually—imprisonment: my daughter, that hospital, my life. But not yet.
“Call my grandfather. He’ll take care of it.” We are so far from that home Tim had made for us in Carmel. I need California; I need to see this through.
My husband sighs and speaks slowly, the way he used to right before the hospital. “Your grandfather has been dead for six months. I held your hand at the funeral. I don’t know what ideas Cassidy’s put in your head . . .”
“She’s gone,” I interrupt, but he’s not listening.
“But you have an obligation. You took a vow.”
“You know what they did. The things they put in my mouth. I can’t go back there.”
“Okay, no more hospitals,” Tim says. He’s crying. I can hear his halting breath over the telephone line. “Just come home, Ellie.”
“I’ve just got to do this one thing and I’ll be back tomorrow night.”
“Tell me where you are. I’ll get you on a plane.”
“I’ll call you when I’m done,” I say, and put down the phone. It’s only then that I realize I haven’t once asked about my daughter. The thing with the bleach, well, maybe it’s not as horrible as I thought.
After I’ve covered the bathtub with cling film, I step in, lie down, turn on the shower, and feel the waterfall cool on my back. I fall asleep to the sound of water. That night I dream about a man standing in front of a refrigerator; the light illuminates his body blue. He removes his belt and coils it in his hands. Outside there are horses. We are in Ireland, on a farm where the sheep and lambs are painted red. A fat woman punches her daughter in the stomach, yanks out her hair in clumps. The daughter whistles in my ear. I wake to the sound of my mother’s voice: We used to have another girl, but she died. We didn’t want to upset you.
I wake to a man shaking my shoulders. The room is a river. “What the hell is wrong with you, letting the water run like that? You could’ve died. You could’ve drowned.”
When I wake, I feel restless. I am the wound my mother keeps dressing.