Julia's Daughters

We’re all quiet for half an hour, after we get back in the car. I take Interstate 15 north. We’ll soon cross the northwest tip of Arizona and go into Utah. There’s less traffic now that we’re past the Vegas Strip and I relax a little bit.

My Icee is delicious. It’s been so long since I’ve had one. Years. In my battle against the bulge, I gave up dessert, butter on my bread, and frozen drinks, both alcoholic and nonalcoholic. Too many calories. Too much sugar. Which is why this tastes so good, I’m sure. I open my bag of pretzels and have one. “Pretzel?” I offer the bag to Izzy.

She’s got Doritos and cheese puffs and red licorice. And sour gummi worms. I should have told her to put it all back. Too much saturated fat and sugar for anyone, but she was so excited back at the mini-mart to be allowed to get what she wanted that I decided what the hell? A few days of junk food won’t hurt any of us. Haley and I could both stand to put on a couple of pounds. And if we stay with Laney, there won’t be a string of sugar or triangle of trans fats to be found in her cupboards.

Izzy’s holding her blue Icee with both hands. The bags of snacks are on her lap. “Sure.” She wedges her drink between her legs and the cheese puffs take a nosedive to the floor. She takes the bag of pretzels, removes a handful, and offers it back to me.

“Pass them to your sister.”

Izzy looks at me like I just told her to stick her head in a gas oven. Her lips are blue from the drink.

I should probably choose my words carefully; we’re all so fragile. But I react to Izzy with semi-annoyance. I’ve had just about enough of this. “You wanted to come with us, so you’re with us. But I’m warning you, this silent treatment you’re giving your sister? You’re going to have to let it go, Isobel. I’m not driving three thousand miles with the two of you not speaking to each other.”

Haley reaches between the seats and grabs the pretzel bag from Izzy. “I never stopped talking to her. She stopped talking to me when I killed Caitlin.” The pretzel bag rattles and I hear her bite a pretzel.

It takes me a beat to respond. I’ve been going over in my head different ways to open a conversation with Haley about Caitlin, about the accident. I’ve been trying to think about things we need to talk about that will help us get out of this hole we’ve dug for ourselves. All three of us are down here in this black pit; I see that now. Izzy may seem okay, but she’s not. How can she be? I cannot imagine the willpower it’s taken for her to go fifty-one days without speaking to the only sister she has left.

I put my drink into the cup holder on the console. I’m getting a brain freeze. “You can’t say that, Haley.”

“What?”

“You can’t say that you—” My voice catches in my throat and I swallow and fight the wave of pain that threatens to wash over me. I push through. “You can’t say you killed Caitlin.” My words come out staccato and loud.

Izzy freezes, pretzels in one hand, the big cup in the other. Her blue lips are wrapped around the straw.

“But I did.” Haley sounds like a little girl.

“No,” I manage. “You got into an automobile accident and your sister died in that accident.” I nod as I say each word, to make my point.

“But I caused the accident. I killed her.”

I make myself look into the rearview mirror at her. “It was an accident, Haley. You didn’t do it on purpose.”

As I speak the words, they reverberate in my head. I know she didn’t mean to run the stop sign. I know she didn’t mean to hurt her sister. But I also know, as I say the words, that I still blame her, somewhere deep inside, where logic doesn’t reign.

What kind of mother does that make me? An unfit one?

I stare straight ahead as the dry, barren, brown scenery whizzes by us at sixty-plus miles an hour. I hate Nevada. I hate the sun that beats down, baking the earth until it’s cracked and lifeless. I hate the dull, monochromic landscape. I long for green forests and sparkling lakes and ponds. I ache for the scent of pine trees and grass.

I hear Haley crunching her pretzels. I glance at Izzy. She’s just sitting there, drink in one hand, pretzels in the other.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” Izzy says softly to me. “I don’t know if I can ever speak to her again. I know it’s bad of me. I know I should, but I just . . .” She looks like she’s going to cry. “I can’t, Mom.”

I reach between us and pat her knee. I can’t force Izzy to speak to Haley. I know that. But this is the first time I’ve said a thing about it. I’m their mother. It’s my place to tell Izzy it’s not right to do this to her sister. It’s my place to tell Haley she can’t hold herself responsible for killing Caitlin. “Drink your Icee before it melts,” I say kindly.

We cover thirty miles before I speak again. We’re all quiet, lost in our thoughts. But it’s time to dive in. I know I can’t waste the precious time I have in this car with my girls. I think about some of the stuff I read yesterday about the grieving process. Lots of Web sites talk about the importance of talking about the deceased.

“You know what I miss?” I say. The question is rhetorical. I don’t wait for either of them to respond. “I miss the little notes Caitlin used to leave me. The pink and purple sticky notes. Remember? She had that big cube of them. She’d leave them on the refrigerator: Buy almond milk. On the counter: Home after cheer.”

We go another five miles. Ten. No one says a word and I’m frustrated. Do I say something else? Do I ask each girl to tell me a memory she has of Caitlin? Because this isn’t going to work if Izzy won’t speak to Haley and Haley won’t speak to me.

We cover another ten miles before Izzy speaks up. “When I had that turtle. The one that died. Caitlin used to leave me notes on the turtle bowl that said, Feed me.” She laughs.

I smile at Izzy’s sweet memory. I’m fairly certain the turtle died of starvation, or at the very least general neglect, but I keep that to myself.

A few miles later, Haley speaks from the back. “She always signed her name with hearts over the I’s. Like she was a fourth grader, or something.”

It sounds like a dig, but the tone of Haley’s voice is nostalgic.

Tears well in my eyes, but I don’t let myself cry. I have a note in my jewelry box that Caitlin left me on my bathroom mirror one morning, sometime around Christmas. She was in there borrowing my good tweezers, which always made me crazy because she never put them back. The note said, I love my mom, with a drawing of a pair of tweezers. She signed her name with hearts over the I’s.

Izzy sucks loudly on her straw, getting air with the frozen drink. “Caitlin made the best grilled cheese sandwiches. With lots of butter and cheese. I miss those sandwiches.”

“Rye bread from the deli and three kinds of cheese. There must have been a thousand delicious calories in one of her grilled cheese sandwiches.” I sigh and reach for my drink.

I hear Haley rattling a package and look in the rearview to see her opening a pack of pistachios. “She snored,” she says. “I used to lie in bed and listen to her. I could hear her all the way in my room.”

“We kept talking about having her tonsils and adenoids out, but she never wanted to take the downtime,” I tell them.

Haley cracks open a pistachio nut. “This is going to sound dumb, and I know I complained all the time, but I kind of liked hearing her snore. It was like . . . everything was normal in the house. Like everything was okay.”

I feel a lump rise in my throat. “Remember that time she used her phone to record you snoring because you kept complaining that she was keeping you awake?”

Haley laughs. Not a full-blown laugh, but more than a chuckle. “I do not snore. I think she faked the whole thing.”

“I don’t think so.” Izzy shakes her head as she puts her drink in a holder. “I think it was real.”

She doesn’t speak directly to Haley, exactly, but I feel like it’s a step in the right direction.

“I miss the way she laughed. She had the best laugh, ever. Anyone want any pistachios?” Haley holds the bag between the two front seats.

Izzy makes an event of opening her bag of Doritos and crams several chips into her mouth, crunching loudly.

I feel bad for Haley. “I’ll take a couple.” I hold out my hand and she drops some into it. I crack one between my teeth and the meat of the nut falls into my mouth. It’s good. Salty. I didn’t really want any, but it feels right to share something together, while we share our memories of Caitlin. Something about breaking bread together. I can’t believe two months have passed and we’ve never said we missed her. “Want one?” I hold my hand out to Izzy.

“Got these.”

“They’re really good,” I cajole.

She crunches another corn chip in response. It’s kind of obnoxious, but she is only ten. I forget that because she acts older most of the time.

“Caitlin liked Doritos,” Izzy says. “Cool Ranch. She liked the classic nacho cheese kind, but her favorite was Cool Ranch.”

I notice that’s the flavor she’s eating.

“And she liked cheese puffs,” Haley says. “And licorice and gummi worms.”

The snack foods Izzy picked when she was allowed to choose for herself. I wonder if those will always be her favorites now.

I hear Haley’s window go down. I look into the rearview, but I can’t see what she’s doing and I’m immediately apprehensive. I hear something rattle down the window and against the car and I realize she was probably just throwing out shells. I don’t know why I’m concerned. The doors are locked. It’s not like she’s going to go out the window of the moving car. And she seems like she’s resigned herself to the trip. I need to let my anxiety go and trust her until she gives me a reason not to.

“Which way are we going?” Izzy asks.

She pulls an iPad out of her backpack on the floor, only she doesn’t have an iPad. Hers, a hand-me-down from Ben’s office, broke just before Caitlin died. We had intended to get her a new tablet and just never thought about it again. And she never asked.

“That’s not yours,” Haley accuses.

It has a pink neoprene cover.

It hits me hard. It was Caitlin’s.

“Is it okay, Mom?” Izzy looks up at me; she can tell I’m upset. “I took it off her desk. I wanted to look stuff up for our trip. It’s still got a data plan. I checked.” She hugs it against her and the bag of Doritos. “I thought it would be okay.”

“It’s fine.” I glance in the rearview mirror. “You have your own, Haley. There’s no reason why Izzy shouldn’t have Caitlin’s.” I wait. “Is there a reason why you think she shouldn’t have it?”

I hear carbonation hiss as Haley opens her Coke. “It’s just weird. To see it.” She points. “I got her that sticker. It came out of one of those old-school gumball machines at the bowling alley. I had to keep putting quarters in to get the one she wanted. I think that one sticker cost me like four dollars in quarters.”

“Which one?” I ask. The pink iPad cover has stickers all over it. There are flowers and peace signs, the word war with a red circle around it and a line through it. One of the stickers says Eat Natural.

Caitlin was my budding hippie. I have no idea where it came from. Neither Ben nor I have ever been particularly environmentally conscious. We recycle and we have solar panels on our roof and at the office, but that’s mostly a reflection of where we live. We try to eat healthy, but it was Caitlin who introduced us to organic grains and grass-fed beef. I know that children are genetically a mixture of their parents, and they’re certainly affected by their environment, but I think Caitlin was a prime example of how our children grow up to be individuals.

“The sparkly pink peace sign.” Haley leans forward to point at it.

Izzy flips the cover back to conceal the stickers, almost snapping Haley’s finger with it. “Can we go through Bryce Canyon, Mom? It takes a little longer than just staying on this road, but there’s a natural bridge there I want to see.”

Haley makes a derisive sound and slides back on her seat. “We’ve seen that.”

Izzy keeps her eyes on the iPad. “It’s not actually a canyon.” She brings up photos of the area on the tablet on her lap. “There are these things sticking up everywhere called hoodoos.”

“Don’t you remember when we went there a couple of years ago?” Haley sips her Coke. “Dad wanted us to go on this family hike and—”

“They call hoodoos fairy chimneys sometimes,” Izzy goes on, talking right over Haley. “They’re made of soft rock with hard rock on top and they can be as high as a hundred and fifty feet tall. It’s supposed to be one of the best examples of hoodoos in the whole world. It will be cool to see them. Especially if we don’t come back.”

“Mom. Tell her she’s been there.”

“We’re coming back to Vegas,” I tell Izzy.

“The reason it’s not actually a canyon,” Izzy goes on, “is because technically a canyon is made from the erosion of a single stream. Bryce Canyon was made when—”

“Mom! Will you tell the little twit that we’ve been there? That she’s seen the houdinis.”

“Hoodoos,” Izzy corrects.

I glance at Izzy. “You have been there. You were five or six. Please, no name-calling, Haley.” How many times did I holler that into the back of our minivan while hauling Caitlin and Haley around? They always got along well, probably because they were so close in age, but they also teased and picked on each other unmercifully.

“Don’t you remember, we saw people in the canyon riding horses and you wanted to know why we were walking. You wanted to ride and I took you to see the horses,” Haley tells Izzy. “Mom had packed apple slices and we asked the guide and he let you feed them to his horse.”

Izzy balances the iPad on her lap. “I thought it would be neat to see. The elevation is a lot higher than Zion National Park. Interstate Fifteen goes right past Zion. I just thought we could take the long way and go through Bryce Canyon instead.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to go that way, Izzy.” Haley leans forward, one hand on my seat and one on Izzy’s. “I was just saying you’ve been there. You just don’t remember.”

“I think it would be cool to see it,” Izzy says quietly. “You can see the natural bridge from the road. There’s like a place to park your car so you can take pictures and stuff, but we don’t have to do that. We could just drive by. I think the road hooks back up with the interstate.” She’s on Google Maps now, checking the route.

I take a sip of my Icee that’s melted. It’s not nearly as good as it was. “I don’t know. I was hoping to make Grand Junction today. See how far we’d be going out of our way. I was just going to stay on Fifteen and then we’ll be on Seventy at some point.”

“We’re going to Grand Junction?” Haley says from the backseat. “As in Colorado?”

I shrug. “It’s a decent-size town. Five-hour drive from here, probably. I figured we’d be able to find a hotel there easily.”

Haley slumps against the backseat. “I didn’t think we were going that far today.”

“Bryce Canyon is kind of out of the way,” Izzy says. “Let me see how far.”

Haley rattles the bag of nuts. “Can I see the iPad when you’re done?”

Something about her tone of voice seems off and I glance in the mirror.

Her gaze meets mine. “What? I was going to see what hotels are in Grand Junction. Maybe find a place to eat nearby.”

“Tell me how far off Fifteen Bryce Canyon is,” I tell Izzy. I glance in the mirror at Haley again. She has her fingertips pressed to her forearm. I’ve seen her do it a couple of times since we left the house. It seems to be some sort of comfort thing. I hope she’s not wanting to cut herself. “Then let Haley use the iPad for a couple of minutes.”