“Regular fill, please,” I tell the gas station guy. How much is it going to cost to drive there and back, plus get a hotel? Maybe I’ll just come home after the funeral. If I get too tired, I can lock my doors and sleep in a rest area.
In the backseat is a duffel bag with my laptop, a book, and a few clothes. Not much, but it nearly cleaned out my closet. What do you wear to a funeral? In the movies, it’s a black dress, stockings, pumps. Sometimes a hat with a veil. I don’t have a black dress or a fancy hat. I brought a pair of black work pants and a plain black T-shirt, and they’ll have to do.
I can’t remember if I went to my mom’s funeral or what I wore to my grandmother’s. I was seven when Grandma died, old enough to know she was in the long wooden box. Too old to hide underneath a pew, crying, but that’s what I did. People stood in the back, arguing. About me. I put my hands over my ears, but I still saw lips curl back, heard the hiss of words, saw fingers point in my direction.
Huddled miserably underneath that pew, I knew what the arguing was about. No one wanted me. Me with my nightmares and my bad parents, one dead and one on the run.
The gas guy interrupts my thoughts with a total that makes me flinch. After I leave, I try not to hear the squeal that happens when I make a sharp right turn. My Mazda 323 is three years older than I am. The color is “champagne beige,” but it’s really just tan. I got the car off Craigslist. Since I can’t afford to fix anything, I keep the stereo turned up and pretend I don’t hear bad noises. I get on the freeway and start heading south.
After Grandma died, I was in foster care, first with one family and then another. They’ve all blurred together. Was the first family the one with three dogs? The one with four sets of bunk beds? The one where the parents got a divorce?
Then when I was eight, I was told I was getting a forever family.
Only it wasn’t really a family. Just a woman, Tamsin Reinhart, who had visited a few times. She was an orthopedic surgeon in Portland. She was in her forties and had never been married. Maybe at some point she could have had a baby of her own, but Tamsin was all about efficiency. Adopting an older kid meant she could skip diapers and toilet training and the terrible twos. An eight-year-old, she must have figured, already knew how to dress herself and entertain herself and do pretty much what she was told. Tamsin—she wanted me to call her Mom, but I never did—bought us matching mother-daughter dresses to wear to church the first Sunday after the adoption. Pale green with little yellow flowers, the dresses swirled around our ankles when we walked. She held my hand, even though I tried to pull away, and afterward everyone came up to compliment us.
But I missed Medford. I missed my friends. I missed my school. I still missed my grandmother, with her soft body and unrestrained laugh. Every Halloween she dressed like a witch, ratted up her hair, and took out her top teeth. Tamsin was stiff and careful and never less than perfectly dressed. I had nightmares nearly every night—I still have them—and Tamsin didn’t know how to deal with my screaming as I fought off invisible monsters.
And I missed my name. My real name. Ariel Benson. When she adopted me, Tamsin had it changed to Olivia Reinhart. Reinhart so we would have the same last name, like a real mother and daughter. And Olivia because she thought Ariel sounded tacky, like the mermaid in the Disney movie.
It’s true. I remember Grandma talking about it. My mom named me after a cartoon movie character.
At Tamsin’s, I was lonely and scared, but determined not to show it. And I was angry, too, at all the changes everyone said were for my benefit. Looking back, I don’t think anyone prepared Tamsin for how I would test her. That first week, she gave me a book she’d loved when she was a girl, Black Beauty, and I “accidentally” spilled water on it. I spit out the tasteless pale yellow macaroni and cheese she made. I’d never had homemade before. And every day, I told her I wanted to go back to my old foster family, where there weren’t any rules about bedtime or watching TV or not eating before dinner.
I didn’t trust that it was real. So I pushed Tamsin away.
And it worked.
Within three months, I was back in the foster system. Tamsin cried when the grim-faced social worker drove up to the house, but still, she let me go. When I was younger, I told myself that it was proof she hadn’t really loved me. Maybe the truth was it could have worked out if both of us hadn’t been so hurt or if we had given it more time.
I thought if Tamsin gave me back, I could return to my old life. But I didn’t get anything back, not even my old name. The social worker said it would be too confusing to change, since they had decided I should stay in the same Portland school Tamsin had enrolled me in.
The freeway sign reads SALEM NEXT 3 EXITS. An hour has slipped by. It’s only nine, and the funeral’s not until two. I haven’t been back to the Salem Walmart since I was found there nearly fourteen years ago. Maybe going in will help me remember what happened.
Inside, it’s crammed with people and TVs, shoes and ketchup, toilet paper and tubs of blue cotton candy. I was found curled up underneath a fake Christmas tree, but since it’s August, the seasonal display’s theme is back-to-school. The crayons and pink erasers feel full of promise. Every time I started at a new school, I told myself things would be different. This time I would have tons of friends. This time I would raise my hand. This time math would make sense.
This Walmart just seems exactly like the Portland Walmart I’ve been to a half dozen times. I get down on one knee, like I’m going to tie one of my black Vans, but really it’s so I’m about the same height as a little kid. I squint. Does any of it feel familiar? The shelves looming overhead, the bright lights?
And there’s a worker in this row now, a middle-aged guy in a red vest, filling a display with packages of yellow pencils but looking at me. Does he think I’m a shoplifter?
I guess my missing memories won’t be restored like a puzzle piece snapping into place. I walk out empty-handed and get back in the car.
The farther south I go, the bluer the sky gets. The clouds thin and disappear. The day heats up, so I roll down my window. I drive through long miles of evergreens, forests that stretch to the horizon.
I find a radio station playing old music from the nineties. In a couple of years, I’ll be as old as my parents were when they died. It’s as if they’re stuck in amber, like the scorpion in a necklace I once saw at Goodwill. They’ll forever be wearing out-of-date clothes and smiling with slightly crooked teeth they couldn’t afford to get fixed.
I’ve got those same teeth. Foster care doesn’t pay for braces.
At the rest area outside Roseburg, a dark-haired girl sits cross-legged in front of the cinder-block restroom, her head tipped back against the wall, her eyes closed. Her sign reads JUST TRYING TO GET HOME. As I leave, I put a dollar bill in her white paper cup, but she doesn’t stir.
Finally, I’m through the mountains and driving down into the Rogue River valley. It’s more a feeling than a memory, but these tawny, folded hills, like a golden blanket pushed down to the foot of a giant’s bed, are so familiar.
It’s only four miles to Medford, and I’ve still got nearly two hours before the funeral. There’s one other place I want to go.
My grandmother’s house. My house, really, or it will be when I turn eighteen. Until then, I get the rental income. At least I used to, until three months ago, when the last tenant left.
I take the exit and follow the directions. And there’s the house, familiar and not. Tiny and square, gray, with peeling white shutters that were probably last painted long before Grandma died.
I park next to a huge yucca bush with sword-shaped leaves. A sign stuck in the tall grass reads FOR RENT BY LEE REALTY.
I’m looking through the front window at a worn gold couch next to a battered coffee table, when I hear a voice behind me.
“I know who you must be.”