The house is small and gray with white trim, surrounded by a chain-link fence. There’s no grass in the yard, just weeds and dirt, but in the shade of the porch I see bright children’s toys—a plastic tricycle, a wagon, a three-legged stool. I might have siblings living here, or at least half siblings.
“So, do we just knock?” Daniel asks.
All my breath has left me, and I don’t even know how to begin to respond. I approach the house, forcing one foot in front of the other until I’m standing close enough to the yard to place my hand on the hot metal of the gate.
Daniel plants his hand on my shoulder and says, “Okay, I’m right behind you.” Though, even his voice sounds weak right now.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath.
Of course right then my phone rings. The sound of the ringing alerts a massive, narrow-eyed dog that was hiding in the shade behind the plastic wagon to our presence. He leaps halfway across the yard in a single bound, and he’d be over the fence in a heartbeat if he wasn’t hitched to the porch by a long metal chain. The dog strains against his leash, slobbering on the dirt, while I stare at the word Mom, which is flashing across the screen of my phone.
My thumb hovers over the green answer icon, but then the front door of the house opens, and a large, pale, shirtless man with a disorganized assortment of tattoos and a bushy goatee stumbles into the daylight brandishing a metal pipe.
I answer the call and say loudly, “Mom, can I call you back in, like, two minutes?” I’m hoping that the dog’s barking doesn’t sound quite as monstrous over the phone.
“Oh, my goodness, Nora. Where are you?”
“We stopped along the way,” I say, counting on her not to look at the location tracker on my phone. I doubt she will; technology isn’t one of her strengths. “And there’s this dog. Don’t worry. I’ll call you back in two minutes.”
“Okay, sweetie—”
And then I do something I’ve never done before and never intend to do again: I hang up on my mother.
The man with the pipe shouts at the dog, “Dawson, shut the fuck up.”
“Dawson, as in Creek?” Daniel whispers at me. I dig my elbow into his ribs, keeping my eyes forward.
The dog keeps barking, so the man jumps down the steps and pulls on his chain. The dog yelps, then circles behind the man and lies down heavily in the dirt.
The man steps toward us, and from this distance I can make out some of the details on his tattoos. There’s a cartoon-looking devil on his right bicep, a wide-branching tree tattooed across his sternum, and beneath his left collarbone there’s a word written in elaborate script. As he steps closer, I realize that the word is Teresa.
The man plants one end of the pipe in the dirt and leans on it. “You want to tell me what you’re doing here?” he says. “We don’t need missionaries.”
“No, I’m, uh”—I can’t take my eyes off that name on his skin—“I’m looking for Teresa Johnson. Does she live here?”
His eyes narrow suspiciously, which is not the reaction I was hoping for. “Who’s looking for her?”
“My name’s Nora, and I—” I take a deep breath, but the words come out more easily this time. “I think she might be my birth mother.”
“Not possible.”
He says it quickly, leaving very little room for doubt. Still, I have to ask, “Are you sure? My birth parents named me Summer. I was adopted out of Santa Barbara County, but now I live south of Los Angeles.”
“The girl Terry gave up lives in Denver. At least, that’s what she thought last time she went looking for her. And she never named her nothing.”
I pause, my heart drifting in the direction of my toes. “Are you sure?”
“Well, you never know anything for certain with a bitch like that.”
I don’t know whether that makes me feel better or worse. “Is Teresa, or Terry”—I peer into the darkly shuttered interior of the house—“is she home?”
The man shakes his head. “No, kid. She’s been locked up at that place north of Fresno since last month.” He climbs back up to the porch. When Dawson attempts to follow, he shoves him back with his heel. “Bitch got high and stole some shit in the city. Got caught on camera and everything.”
I let out all my air. I’ve considered lots of possibilities, but never this one. “Prison?”
“She’d only been out a couple months, too.” He spits aggressively at the dust near his dog. “If she does it again, they’ll throw away the key. Good fuckin’ riddance.”
Maybe the man says good-bye, but if he does, I don’t hear it. The next time I’m aware of anything, Daniel’s arm is around my shoulders, and he’s guiding me back the way we came.
“Oh, my God.” I feel like I might vomit.
Daniel’s fingers tighten on my shoulder. “You okay?”
I stop walking and shrug off his arm, take a deep breath, then another one. My heart feels like it’s trying to pummel its way out of my chest, but I need to sound normal for what I’m about to do. I take out my phone and call my mom.
She answers after the first ring. “Nora, are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I step away from Daniel and close my eyes, focus on the sound of my mother’s breath, on the sound of my breath. “We’re on our way to Reedley now. But reception’s not going to be great.”
Daniel’s eyes widen. I think he’s impressed.
“Is everything okay? I thought I heard a commotion—”
“Flynn was gassing up the van, and this pit bull was barking at us through the window of a truck.” I’ve always considered myself a terrible liar. I’m almost disappointed all these lies have been coming so easily to me.
“Well, be careful,” my mom says. “And tell Flynn to be careful.”
I hold my phone to my chest, then shout, “Hey, Flynn, my mom says to be careful.”
Daniel leans over. “If he’s any more careful, we’ll have to walk to Reedley, Mrs. Wakelin.”
I hold the phone back to my ear and say, “I’d better go, Mom. But I’ll call you tonight.”
After we hang up, I press my phone between my hands and sink to the curb. Heat from the cement bakes through my jeans, but I don’t even care. Because my birth mother might be living in a prison north of Fresno.
“So, what’s our move, Bass Girl?” Daniel says.
I open my phone and look up the place the man—I realize now that I never got his name; if it was Martin, then I don’t even want to know—must have been talking about. It’s a little over an hour away by car, and there’s no public transportation around here, so car is the only way I’m getting there.
“I need to know if that’s her.”
Daniel sits next to me, close enough that his leg is touching mine. “Are you sure?”
He’s communicating a thousand things with those three words, but all I can manage in response is a nod, my eyes still glued to the screen of my phone.
He stands, then helps me up. “Then I guess we’d better find a way to get to this prison.”
I have no words to communicate what I’m feeling right now, and it doesn’t help when Daniel wraps his right hand around my left one and says, “We’re in this together, Bass Girl.” So I just try to focus on the feeling of his palm pressing against mine.
I don’t know how visitation works at prisons, but I assume things start closing at around 5:00 p.m., which gives me just over two hours to get there and see Teresa Johnson. We’re supposed to start playing at the restaurant at 6:00, which shrinks our timeline even further. Of course, I know that this gig isn’t exactly high stakes, but I don’t want the guys to know I know it.
Daniel follows me quietly as I retrace our steps out of the neighborhood. At the intersection of the next two main streets, there’s a gas station, and at the gas station, there’s a semitruck with Idaho plates. Half an idea leaps out at me. I turn to Daniel and say, “I know how to get there.”
He looks baffled, maybe even concerned, as he says, “How?”
Even Daniel will hate what I’m about to do, so I say, “You should go back to the room. Stall. Tell the guys that I had some kind of issue and needed—” I see a skinny man in a red baseball cap stepping around the back of the truck. Even from here, I can see that his left arm looks more tanned and wrinkled than his right, probably from spending so much time on the road.
Daniel prompts, “Needed what?” But I’m already jogging toward the man in the cap. He’s halfway into his seat when I reach him and ask, “Are you heading up the 99 through Fresno?”
Behind me, Daniel says, “No way, Nora,” but I ignore him.
The man looks at me, then Daniel, then back at me. “Yeah,” he says. “You lookin’ for a lift?”
I nod.
“Both of you?” the man says, eyeing Daniel again.
Daniel sighs. “Yeah, I guess.”
I squeeze his hand once and say, “Thank you.”
“How far do you need to be goin’?”
“Berenda or Chowchilla,” I say. “About an hour north of here.” The man is squinting at us, absentmindedly picking at a thin scab on his hand, and it occurs to me that he’s wondering if he can trust us. I take a chance and tell him, “I’m looking for my birth mother, and I think she might be in the women’s prison up there.”
The man’s eyebrows lift.
“I’m not certain it’s her,” I say. “But we’re just passing through today, and this may be my only chance to find out.”
The man nods, then gestures to the other side of his cab. “There’s three seats. You both buckle up.”
“Thank you so much,” I say.
As Daniel and I run around the front of the truck, he says, “Just so you know, I’m coming with you because there is safety in numbers, not because I’ll be able to bust out secret street-fighting moves if this guy pulls a gun on us.”
I glance back at him and say, “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.”
I hoist myself up the steps and let myself into the cab, climbing to the center seat. As I pull the buckle across my lap, the man says, “You really shouldn’t be gettin’ rides with strangers.” A little trail of goose bumps begins to rise out of my arms, but then Daniel’s in his seat, and the man is putting the truck into gear. As he pulls away, he says, “But I got two kids of my own, and I know that when they decide they’re gonna do something, they’re gonna do it. I’d rather give you a ride myself than have you hitchin’ with some other guy who might be up to no good.” He looks over at me. “But don’t you be doin’ this again. You hear?”
He talks for the next hour without pausing or asking us a single question. He tells us about his kids (Samantha and Charles, twenty and twenty-two years old), about his wife (Lucy, a cop), about the house they live in (built in 1920; they don’t make them like that anymore), about what he plans to do when he retires (fly-fish, exclusively). He tells us about the audiobook he’s been listening to for the last several hundred miles (“John Grisham. Have you read any John Grisham? No? Well, you should read one of his sometime. That man knows how to tell a story”). And he talks at length about the joys and trials of driving trucks (“First year’s the hardest, no doubt. There’s a trainer driver in the cab with you most of the time, and you get the short runs, so money’s no good. But if you stick with it, and you’re comfortable with your own company, then the life can’t be beat”).
The prison is three miles off the main highway, but he takes us all the way. “It’s five minutes for me, but an hour walk for you two,” he says. “Can’t let you go all that way by yourselves, now can I?”
I tell him I appreciate it, but he just goes on with the story he was telling about his wife killing a raccoon that had gotten into their garbage cans. Eventually, he slows down, pulling his truck over to the side of the road. On our right, there’s an endless orchard—just fruit trees for as far as I can see. They’re covered in blossoms now, so I can’t tell what kind of fruit they’re going to bear, but in a month or so, I bet the boughs will be heavy with them. On our left, there’s a driveway, which is framed by a wide stone sign on one side and a colorful tile mural on the other. Down the road, I see a guardhouse situated between the incoming and outgoing car lanes. Behind that, a parking lot surrounded by limp evergreen trees.
“This’s as far as I can take you, but”—he points to the driveway—“you head that way, and they’ll be able to direct you to the person you’re lookin’ for.”
Daniel opens the door and leaps to the ground.
“You take care,” the driver says, as I follow Daniel out. “And good luck.”
“Thanks.” I glance over my shoulder at the guardhouse. The exit-side barrier arm lifts, and a silver minivan pulls through toward the road. “Uh—drive safely. And enjoy your fly-fishing.”
Daniel and I retreat into the orchard while he pulls his truck away. Once he’s gone, the only sound is the soft patter of human voices coming from the guardhouse. The prison itself is set back from the road. The views to my right and to my left are identical—just the edge of an orchard and a thin line of asphalt disappearing to the horizon.
“‘California Department of Corrections and Rehabi-litation,’” Daniel reads off the sign. He glances at the road behind us. “This is not how I expected this day to go.”
“Me, either,” I say. “You can stay here, if you want.”
“You can keep saying that, but you know what my answer’s going to be.”
That makes something inside me settle, making it possible for me to lead the way forward, between the sign and the mural, toward the guardhouse.
There are two women inside. On the far side of the guard station, there’s a plump blonde woman with thin, curly hair, which is gathered into wispy mounds around her full, moonlike cheeks. She’s assisting a car full of people passing through the other way and doesn’t seem to notice us. On our side of the guard station there’s a thin woman with midnight-black skin and slick gray hair, which is tied back into a tight bun. She’s focused on her computer screen and doesn’t seem to notice us, either. We stand there for several seconds, waiting, before I work up the nerve to say, “Hi,” but the word comes out softly, on a breath. Finally, I take a deep breath and manage to say, “We’re here to see Teresa Johnson.”
Without looking at us, the woman says, “New visitors stopped being admitted two hours ago.” She types something, her fingers punching rhythmically at the letters. “Did you miss an earlier appointment?”
It strikes me, suddenly, the way a cold sometimes just hits you in the back of the throat, that I should have looked into visitation procedures before dragging Daniel all the way out here. It’s too late now.
“Not really.”
The woman looks up from her computer, but not at us. Instead, she looks over our heads, clearly hoping to find an adult to speak to, or at least a vehicle for us to leave in. She’s probably not used to having people approach the guardhouse on foot. “The prisoner you’re here to see isn’t expecting you?”
“No.”
“Are you on our list?”
I shake my head, pressing my lips together.
The woman stretches her neck so she can see as much of the road as possible. “Where did you come from?”
“We got a ride.”
“Was this ride of yours that truck I just saw pull over and drive away?”
Until about thirty seconds ago, my plan seemed brilliant, destined for success. The rapidity of its reversal makes me want to evaporate.
“I just—” I take a deep breath. The sun feels hot on the back of my neck; sweat beads at the base of my skull. “I’m here to see Teresa Johnson. I think she might be my birth mother.”
The car on the other side of the guardhouse pulls away, and the blonde woman looks over at us before she turns to her computer.
Our guard’s eyes go wide. “So, do you mean to tell me that this Teresa Johnson may not even know you exist?”
I shake my head again.
“This isn’t a day spa. It’s a prison. You can’t just walk in, ring a doorbell, and ask for Terry.”
“Can you at least tell us if she’s here?” Daniel says, sounding much less panicked than I feel.
The woman takes a deep breath, then turns to the computer in front of her and punches a few keys.
“Teresa Johnson. She’s here,” the woman says. “Here’s what I can do for you. I can have a letter delivered to her with your name and phone number, and she can call you tomorrow. But to visit an inmate, you’d need to write a letter to her requesting an application. She’d need to sign it, then send it to you. Once the visiting sergeant here received your application, she’d either approve or reject it. If you were approved, you’d get put on a visitation list. It could take weeks.” Her tone softens. “I’m sorry I don’t have better news, but we do have a phone number you could have called. This information is on our website.”
Daniel says, “Thank you,” because it’s obvious that I’m not capable of speaking.
“Do you have some way to get back to wherever you came from?” the woman says.
The blonde woman on the other side of the guardhouse leans over. “I could drive them home when my shift ends.”
Our guard looks at her like she’s speaking the same crazy language we are.
“No, that’s okay,” I say, but Daniel elbows me.
“How else are we going to get back to Reedley?” he whispers.
“Reedley?” our guard says. “You hitched a ride here from Reedley?”
Daniel pulls me away from the guardhouse, back toward the road, and places his hands on my shoulders. “Nora, we need to text Flynn.”
The sun is edging toward the horizon, but sweat is still streaming down the center of my back. I’m not sure I’ll be able to take my next breath until my lungs stretch to gulp the hot, dusty air.
“Trust me, I don’t want to call him any more than you do,” he goes on. “But we need a ride, and we need to not get that ride from a stranger.” He looks at the women in the guardhouse behind me. “I think we’ve exhausted our good luck in the rides-with-strangers department.”
“Then everyone will know what I’m doing,” I argue, weakly. But he already has his phone out and is typing a message, so I sit on the side of the road and stare at a trail of ants marching over the gravel—each ant in its place, following a prescribed path toward some inevitable destination. How relaxing that must be.
Daniel’s phone buzzes, and he answers the call. “Yeah,” he says, his voice quiet. “Yeah, the prison.” He pauses. “We, uh, we got a ride with a truck driver.” He holds the phone away from his ear, then brings it closer to say, “We’ll be here.”
I pick away the larger stones that are blocking the ants’ trail, until they have a smooth highway through the dust. As I watch them march along the straight and narrow path, I wish that just once an enormous hand would reach down from above and clear the way forward for me.