“Where are we going?” I panted. The second my grandmother had closed the door behind us, Mom had taken off at a sprint for our car. For a moment I thought she might have been worried about parking her Volvo on a public street in a not-so-fantastic part of town, but even when the car was in view and clearly fine—stereo, hubcaps and windows all intact—she hadn’t slowed her pace.
“Hurry up!” she called over her shoulder.
I would have liked to point out to her that my combat boots were not exactly ideal running shoes, mainly since each boot weighed approximately five pounds, and running down the street in them was a little like trying to swim with a block of cement on each foot. Why hadn’t I ever considered this before? It would be absolutely impossible for me to swim in these boots. If one of my million water-related fears ever came true, I would sink like a stone.
Mom started the engine while I was still a half-block away, and the second I slid into my seat, she was already pulling away from the curb.
“Whoa,” I said, yanking my door shut. “Um, hello, I don’t even have my seat belt fastened yet.”
“All right, Liv. Get out your phone. I can get us back to the freeway, I think, but I want to make sure we’re taking the shortest possible route.”
I stared at her, not understanding. “Home, you mean?” Even as I asked it, I realized I had no idea what home I might be referring to, or what exactly we were going to do when we got there. Omaha or the long haul back to California?
“Not home,” Mom said grimly. Her jaw was set, her hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, and she was leaning forward, as if the weight of her body alone could propel each turn. The Volvo stuttered along, accelerating too hard one moment, braking too suddenly the next.
I stopped myself from blurting out something about being tired, and wanting to stop at a hotel so I could shower and brush my teeth and pee without worrying about the million contaminants on the seat of a gas station toilet. I was hungry and overwhelmed. In less than a day, my dad had left with only the crappiest of explanations, I had discovered living grandparents who were less than outstanding and now Mom was going to get us killed in the dark on our way to who-knew-where.
But there was something in Mom’s voice that made me shut out the whiny, self-absorbed Olivia and give her all my attention. I groped around in the dark for my cell phone. The red warning light was on; I had less than twenty percent battery life, but at least it was something. “Okay,” I said, trying to keep my voice level and calm, like an air controller with a lost pilot. “Where to?”
“Ohio,” Mom said automatically. “Oberlin, Ohio.”
Oberlin? My hands were shaking so hard, I could hardly navigate the screen on my phone.
Even though I had worn only black for as long as I could remember and had spent serious time chronicling the ways a person could die or be dismembered, I wasn’t at all interested in visiting the place where Daniel had died. The fact that my brother had died in Oberlin meant it wasn’t even in the top million places I wanted to visit.
I waited for Mom to explain it to me—why we were headed to Oberlin, why she thought Dad might go there. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she and Dad were both off their meds—swinging without warning to the manic side of the pendulum. Her eyes looked wild, dancing in her sockets as if she were tracking something on the road in front of us, rather than following the road itself, which was long and dark and increasingly lonely the farther we got from Chicago. The night opened before us, shrouded in an inky, ghostly black.
Finally I whispered, “I don’t feel so good.”
Mom’s eyes flashed at me. “What, like you’re going to throw up?”
It had felt more like passing out than throwing up, but once she said the words, throwing up seemed like a very real possibility. Everything inside me was being turned upside down and inside out—like some strange disease where my internal organs suddenly began leaking through my skin. I pressed one hand against my stomach and the other against my mouth.
Mom reached around her seat with one arm and located an empty Walmart bag. I held it a few inches from my face, even more nauseated by the smell of the plastic.
“What is Dad going to do in Oberlin?” I asked, my words escaping into the bag. The initial wormy feeling of nausea had passed, but it was way too soon to say I was out of those woods.
Mom shook her head back and forth several times, as if it was too awful to say, or she was trying to shake the thought right out of her head.
Still, I needed to hear her say it. “Mom? What’s Dad going to do? What’s going to happen in Oberlin?”
Mom hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “Olivia, will you promise not to take this the wrong way?”
Well, shit. Was Oberlin the home of some other long-lost relative, another person I may or may not want to know? I whimpered, “What?”
“I need you to shut up, okay? I need you to just shut up.”
So I did.
And we drove.