In the morning Dad was awake before I was, showered and dressed and sipping coffee from a paper cup by the time I opened my eyes.
“Ready for some fun?”
“Um, no,” I groaned, looking at the digital alarm clock on the nightstand. “It’s only 7:45.”
“Usually we’re at school by now,” he pointed out.
“But this is vacation. This is our grand voyage.”
Dad rolled his eyes. “Still. Bus leaves in half an hour.”
I struggled to a sitting position. “What bus?”
“It’s an expression.”
“I don’t think that’s an expression.”
He sighed. “Just hurry up, Liv. I’ve got a surprise for you.”
Grumbling, I dragged myself out of bed and began digging around in my suitcase, sorting my clothes into piles. I’d been living out of a suitcase for exactly one day, and already my whole world felt disorganized.
We were on the road by eight-thirty, an undigested, doughy cinnamon roll from the sorry-looking continental breakfast lodged awkwardly in my stomach. I dug in my backpack and came up with my Fear Journal, just so I could have it at the ready. I’d filled several pages last night, while Dad was “clearing his head,” but he’d been back within a half hour, as promised, bearing his and hers giant blue slushies. We’d fallen asleep in front of an episode of Law and Order: SVU and I’d woken with an electric-blue tongue.
And now this, whatever this was. We passed Battle Mountain and Elko, the towns resting flat on the horizon, their buildings as small as doll furniture. I squinted into the distance, trying to figure it out. Surprise! I’m leaving you in the middle of Nevada. Or Surprise! We’re not going to Omaha at all. We’re going to drive all the way to the East Coast to get some really great lobster. Whatever he was thinking, Dad seemed more relaxed than he had yesterday, but more focused, too—like a ship captain following the route that had been charted for him.
Eventually, we took an exit marked by a small sign: Bonneville Salt Flats. I took off my headphones and sat up straight, paying attention as we drove north, the freeway behind us.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
We went miles without passing another car. I looked at my cell phone: one single bar for reception. A mountain range was ahead of us; to the right was a vast, empty space that I realized must be the salt flats. The experience was freaky in an end-of-time sort of way, as if we were driving into a Twilight Zone version of our own world after it had been decimated by an asteroid or whatever it was that decimated entire worlds.
And then we turned right, down a skinny road that led to nowhere. The pavement stopped abruptly and all around us, as far as I could see, was a shimmering white sea of salt. Above us, the sky was so blue it made my eyes ache.
“What is this?”
Dad explained it to me: we were looking at the remnants of a massive salt lake, now a forty-mile stretch of land so desolate that it was used for setting land speed records. “That’s later in the year, though—August, mainly. Right now we’ve pretty much got the place to ourselves. What do you think?”
“It’s cool.” It was a bit of an understatement for how vast the space was, how shiny and strange.
Dad slid the Explorer into Park and took the keys out of the ignition.
“What are you doing? We’re getting out?”
He unbuckled his seat belt. “We’re switching places. You’re going to drive.”
“Um, no. I’m not.”
“Yeah, you are. Think about it, Olivia. There are no other cars out here, so you can’t possibly bump into anyone. There’s nothing for miles that you could crash into. You can go as slow or fast as you want. There are no lanes, no crappy drivers who don’t use their blinkers. It’s perfect.”
I could see that these were excellent points, but I was shaking too hard to concede. “I don’t know. I think I’m a better passenger than a driver.”
“Well, let’s find out.” He used the lever on the bottom of his seat carefully, inching the seat forward to accommodate my height.
“But I don’t have any training or anything.”
Dad walked around the Explorer and tugged the passenger door open. “Let’s go, Liv. The world is your salt flat.”
I bit my lip. “Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Definitely not.” He gestured over his shoulder to miles of glistening, empty white. “What could go wrong?”
“That’s the last question to ask me,” I said. “I’m the chief cataloguer of what can go wrong.”
Dad waited.
“It is pretty,” I conceded, stepping out of the car. Pea-sized pebbles of salt crunched beneath my feet like clumps of snow. I took a few steps, digging the toes of my combat boots into the salt, and then picked up speed, breaking into an almost-run, sending salt flying like gravel. “Dad!” I called over my shoulder, the words reverberating off the flats.
For just a moment, I felt like a kid—a happy kid, the one I’d almost forgotten about, who had lived in my body before Daniel died.
“Liv! Catch!” Dad called suddenly, and I turned in time to see his key ring hurtling through the air in my general direction. I sighed, snagging the keys before they hit the ground.
We climbed back in the Explorer, and Dad talked me through it—foot on the brake, shift to Drive, ease onto the gas. We left the paved road and glided onto the flats, the tires slipping at first, skidding slightly before finding their traction.
It was the coolest and the scariest thing I’d ever done.
“Okay,” Dad said, settling back for the ride. “Now don’t be afraid to go more than ten miles an hour.”
I felt his smile rather than saw it, since I didn’t dare to look anywhere other than straight ahead. The Explorer was parallel to the freeway, which was just a tiny gray line in the distance. I took a deep breath, pressed down on the gas and just drove. The sun glinted off the salt, the whole valley a vast mirage of diamonds. Dad rolled down the windows and the air hit us, briny and sharp, the way wet beach towels smelled on the drive back from the ocean. My skin felt tingly and alive. I was having way too much fun to remember how terrified I was.
“Let her loose,” Dad instructed, and I pushed down harder on the gas, squealing as the Explorer lost its footing and found it, digging eagerly into grooves of salt left by other drivers, releasing a reservoir of pent-up energy.
Tears gathered in the corner of my eyes, but I was laughing, too. I brought the speedometer up to eighty before I eased up on the gas and spun the car around in a wide, arcing turn. We lurched forward as the car came to a complete stop, but Dad was right—it didn’t matter. There was just about nothing I could screw up here. There was no speed limit to break and, as long as I stayed clear of the mountains, nothing to brake for, either. There wasn’t one single thing like a tree or a street sign that I could hit, not a single pedestrian in danger. And even though I was in the middle of nowhere, somehow it wasn’t lonely at all. It was almost as if the whole universe had taken me into its arms and given me a big, gentle squeeze.
Let it go, Olivia. Let it go.