As we drove, the sun came out. Most of the clouds from yesterday were gone, and the day was more beautiful than a day had any right to be. Maybe even that was some kind of omen—a beautiful day for the last day of life as we knew it.
“So, how are we going to find Dad, if we don’t know where to look?”
Mom said, “Oberlin’s tiny, Liv. I mean, tiny. If he’s there, we’re going to find him. And as soon as businesses are open, I’m calling the D.A. and the police department. They’ll know for sure what’s going on with Robert Saenz, if he’s been paroled, or what.”
I had a vision of us stopping pedestrians in Oberlin and asking if they had seen a white man, six-one, late forties, probably two hundred pounds after all the junk food we’d eaten on the trip. But most of the men I’d seen in the Midwest fit this description, at least roughly.
Out the window was farmland, white houses and big red barns, trailers cropping up here and there out of nowhere, the occasional cow or horse behind a barbed wire fence. It was all so peaceful and so wrong. If a genie appeared right now with the promise of three wishes, I would ask to go back in time. Not just to the day that Dad went up on the cafeteria roof, but to the night when Daniel died. I’d insert myself in the scene, intervene in some way—which was just the sort of thing that never worked out in time travel movies. It was like stepping on a butterfly in the past; the reverberations could be huge. Maybe I’d even find myself in a different sort of crazy situation, a new nightmare for which I was solely responsible.
Besides, not everything that happened after Daniel died had been bad. For some reason, I remembered Dad and me eating our TV dinners in front of old reruns. Dad could do a voice that was a dead ringer for Mr. Ed’s: I wish that guy would just leave me alone. It’s not natural for a man to be so attached to a horse. If I could keep some of those moments and still have Daniel alive and Mom with us, I’d climb into a time machine in a second.
We both jumped when we saw the first sign for Oberlin, and Mom gave the gas pedal another steady push. When we met up with Dad—if we met up with Dad—I would have all kinds of questions for him. But I had to take advantage of this moment with Mom. I pinched my eyes shut, as if I were making a wish, and said, “Tell me about your road trip with Dad, the one you took to California.”
Mom looked startled. “Where did that come from?”
“I just want to know. Before we get there, and before it’s too late and I never have a chance again.”
Mom considered this. I was grateful that she didn’t say Of course you’ll have another chance to ask me anything you want! For once, we were on even footing. “But what’s there to say?”
“Nope, that’s not good enough. Dad tried to buy me off with that.”
“It was just so long ago. I can’t imagine it’s interesting. Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“Mom, come on.”
“Well, okay.” She paused for a few seconds, probably calling it all back. “We had our trunk loaded with all this junk from college, and then all these wedding gifts we’d unpacked from their boxes to make more room, and we’d rolled the breakable things in our clothes. It was pretty tricky to unpack when we got to Sacramento, because when we picked up a flannel shirt, a drinking glass would come rolling out of it.” She smiled a little. “See? I tried to warn you, not interesting.”
“No, it is. It’s fascinating. Keep going.”
Mom sighed. “We didn’t have much money, so we only stayed twice in hotel rooms, and we spent the other night in the car. That was somewhere in Utah outside Salt Lake City, and your father woke up with a massive crick in his neck, so we stopped and bought a bag of frozen corn for him to hold against his neck, and then we threw away the corn at a rest stop somewhere in Nevada.” She was smiling faintly. “I haven’t thought about that in a long time.”
“And you were happy,” I said.
“And we were happy,” she confirmed. “I don’t think I’d ever been so happy.”
“And then Daniel was born,” I prompted, continuing the story.
“Well...I mean, years later. Five years, almost exactly.”
“And you were happy,” I said again.
Mom’s smile was broader now, her face relaxing, although her hands were still clenched on the steering wheel. “We were so happy. I wish you could have known your brother then, Liv. He was such a serious little kid. The second he could speak, he had a million questions about everything, and he was always very skeptical about our answers. Sometimes I heard him asking your father the same things he’d just asked me, like he was checking to make sure we had our stories straight. This was before he started piano, of course—after that, he had a one-track mind.”
“And then you moved,” I prompted.
“Then we bought that crazy old little house. I fell in love with it the second I saw it, but I really had to work on your father to convince him. Where I saw potential, he saw serious amounts of hard work.” She had a faraway look, as if she were chasing the memory.
“And then you had me.”
“And then we had you.”
“And you were happy?”
“Of course!”
I looked out the window.
Mom glanced at me. “Why did you say it like that? Was there any question we were happy?”
Because after Daniel, you didn’t need me. Because I’ve never heard anyone say a single bad thing about Daniel, ever, and it stands to reason that there’s no point in improving on perfection. I bit my lip, holding this back. Because when Daniel died, I should have somehow taken his place and become the wonderful daughter to replace the wonderful son—and I didn’t. I became the messed-up kid who was afraid of her own shadow and who had failed P.E., twice.
“Of course we were happy,” Mom repeated, stung. “You had a very happy childhood.”
“I don’t remember,” I whispered, which was mostly true. It was as if the world of after, with all its awfulness and emptiness, had somehow obliterated the good of before.
“Well, I do. By the time you came along, Daniel was already in school, so you and I were home a lot during the day. That’s before I had my little studio, so sometimes I propped you up in your car seat in the garage, and you watched me paint things.”
“And inhaled the fumes...” I murmured.
“You remember!” Mom looked less frazzled than she had before, her face open and happy. “When you were a little older, we’d finger-paint out there. Once for your dad’s birthday, we made him a giant card on a canvas tarp that had to be twelve-by-twelve. You stamped hundreds of wet handprints all over it, and it was so runny with paint that it took days to dry.”
“What happened to it?”
“It’s probably still out there, all rolled up in a corner. It turned out not to be very practical for long-term display.”
“What else did we do?”
“Well, you used to come with me to estate sales way out in the boonies, all over northern California. We’d just pop in some music and sing along until we got there. This is when I discovered that you loved Peter, Paul and Mary.”
I laughed now, grudgingly. “Did I have a choice?”
Mom sang, slightly off-key, “‘Puff the magic dragon, lived by the sea...’”
I picked up the next line, giggling. “‘...and frolicked in the autumn mist...’”
“‘In a land called Honah Lee,’” Mom finished.
“I can’t believe you let me sing such druggie songs when I was just a little kid.”
“Oh, please. Druggie songs. I still maintain that it was a song about a magical dragon in a kingdom by the sea.” She continued humming a verse or two, and I tried to figure out if I actually remembered these trips, or if I only did because Mom was re-creating them for me.
“What about Dad?” I asked.
“What about him?” My question had startled her.
“Back then, was Dad happy, too?”
“Of course he was. We had this perfect little family, like we’d always wanted. You should have seen how proud he was of you, how much he loved having a daughter. I used to worry that you weren’t ever going to learn to walk, since he insisted on carrying you everywhere, hoisting you onto his shoulders or swinging you so that your feet didn’t even touch the ground.”
I didn’t remember him carrying me, but I remember sitting on his lap in front of the TV, the evening news on low. He always smelled vaguely of chalk dust and the chemicals used in the science labs. At some point I had become too old for sitting on his lap, and too old to want that, either. At some point I’d pulled away from his kisses and rolled my eyes when he said, “I love you.”
“But I wasn’t good enough.” I couldn’t stop myself from saying it.
“What are you talking about?”
It felt as if I had something stuck in my throat, or maybe my throat was closing all on its own, like the onset of anaphylactic shock, apropos of nothing. I’d learned about that years ago and dutifully recorded it in my Fear Journal. I forced the words out: “If I were enough, then we wouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I took a deep breath. “If I were enough, we wouldn’t be here right now. Dad wouldn’t be in Oberlin, living out some stupid-ass revenge plot. If I were enough, you two would have stayed together for my sake. If I were enough, the world wouldn’t have stopped the second Daniel died. If I were enough...” I couldn’t finish, I was crying so hard.
“No,” Mom said, crying, too. “No, no, no...”
She wanted to pull to the side of the road, but I wouldn’t let her. I’d been following the little red dot on my GPS that showed our car moving closer and closer to our destination. It was like watching a horror movie, and not any one horror movie in particular, but all horror movies, where you knew something bad was going to happen, but you just couldn’t look away.
And then the battery in my phone died.
We counted off the miles using Mom’s odometer, our dread mounting: eighteen miles. Sixteen.
Mom said, “He probably just wants to scare him.”
And I said, “Right!” because it was the only thing to say.
The man who bought a massive container of chicken noodle soup from Costco when I was sick, and then brought a bowl to my bedside—he wouldn’t kill another person. The man who had given me all those piggyback rides—he wasn’t a killer. The man who had been Mr. K, who had stayed after school almost every day to help his students understand their homework—he couldn’t hurt anyone.
Fourteen miles, eleven. I needed to throw up. No, I needed to use the bathroom again. No, I needed to call Sam, to call anyone, to get some advice.
I looked out the window at the neat Midwest grids of land—a farmhouse here, a barn there, a truck traveling along a frontage road there. It was all so isolated. You could scream here, and no one in the world would hear it. You could fire a gun, and—
“Why are you slowing down?” I gasped. “Go faster!”
“This is our exit,” Mom said, pointing to a sign I’d missed. “Didn’t you say Highway 58?”
I was about to burst out of my skin, like a piece of overripe fruit.
And then we saw the sign: Oberlin Welcomes You.