FOR TWO WEEKS ANDREA BEGGED THE SKY FOR A SNOWSTORM, prayed for impassable Rockies, hoped the car might break down irreparably on the way home from school, or the immigration office would schedule an interview for the day before Thanksgiving. She checked the weather in Spokane, Missoula, Bozeman, Dickinson, and Bismarck every day, eager for a meteorological disaster that would foreclose on the imminent possibility of their own. But no. The weather moved on, the roads remained open. Andrea took the Monday and Tuesday of Thanksgiving week off from school. Since flights to Bemidji, Minnesota, inexplicably cost more than flights to Paris, they would make a road trip.
Beatriz and Lucia planned the route on Google. They sat on the living room couch with the laptop while Andrea wrote lesson plans for the substitute teacher. Neither Beatriz nor Lucia had ever been to the mountains or the Midwest. They wanted to visit a concrete dinosaur park, they wanted to go skiing, they wanted to see bighorn sheep and mountain goats.
“How can you be so excited about this trip?” Andrea asked Beatriz.
“What’s my other option? Dread and fear?”
“That’s where I am.”
“I know. And Luz is gonna pick up on that and then how’s she going to feel? If you make it weird, it’ll be weird. Do I want to go meet the guy whose sperms hatched in your egg or whatever?” Beatriz flapped her hand like a cat swatting at a bug. “Not really. Does Lucia? Yes. Do I want to take a crazy long road trip with the girl I love and the other girl I love and see a lot of weird shit and different lands? Yes.”
Early on a Saturday morning they packed the Corolla wagon. As she shut the trunk, Andrea felt like they were leaving for good, like they would never return to this: this little shingled bungalow, this life, this perfect three of her, Beatriz, Lucia.
How briefly she had gotten to have everything she wanted and loved. Her mopery about the wedding now seemed so petty. She would have married herself off to anyone necessary to keep this unbearably sweet life intact. Playing gin rummy around the coffee table. The mornings when Andrea would get up to make coffee and return to the bedroom to find Lucia in her place, chatting with bed-headed Beatriz. Camping out in the Mount Hood National Forest—okay, they’d only done it once, but they were planning to go again next summer and this time they’d rig a bear hang for their food like they were supposed to. Making pancakes. Beatriz teaching Lucia a Nirvana song in the living room, Lucia concentrating on the plaintive guitar riff as Beatriz sang the verses, until the chorus, where they both laid into the chords, and Lucia howled, “In the sun, in the sun I feel as one,” in her fearless clear voice, and all three of them hollered, “Maaa-rried!”—and then Andrea would thump out the drum fill on the table or counter—“Buuuu-ried!” Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Thunk. Click. Their duffels and backpacks and a booklet of CDs and a Harry Potter audiobook from the library. That’s what they had now. And a road atlas in which Andrea had traced their route in highlighter so Lucia could follow along, a sheer blue line like a vein, pumping them from home to wherever the fuck they were headed.
Andrea took a moment to swallow and breathe and compose her face before heading to the driver’s seat. If Lucia detected dread or fear or resistance, she’d go underground. In that way, Andrea thought, she’s just like me.
They spent the first night in Wallace, Idaho, an old silver-mining town. (“What’s a brothel?” Lucia asked. “Well, now it’s a coffee shop,” Andrea answered. “I’ll tell you in the car.”) At the Stardust Motel, Lucia hopped into the spaceship parked by the sign, posed for pictures, and then they went to their room and ordered bad cheese pizza that still tasted good. Lucia sprawled on a double bed all her own, gorging herself on pizza and cable television. Andrea muted the commercials. Family vacation. If only.
As they rose higher into the Rockies, snow appeared and thickened. Cellular service went out for long stretches. The temperature dropped. Beatriz blasted the heat and muttered, “Caralho!”
“I know what that means,” Lucia warned triumphantly.
“Is it too cold?” Andrea asked. “Should we turn back?” Beatriz shot her a look. “Kidding,” she muttered.
A river ran alongside the highway for a long while, dark water coursing beneath marshmallowy snowcapped rocks and banks.
Was this the way he’d driven? Andrea wondered. What the fuck was he thinking?
Those had been strange days. When she woke up alone that morning, she had known in her gut. That note—Ryan never left notes like that. “Love you”? No way. He was a person who came and went and sent a postcard later. Always already gone. She’d sat with the note for a minute. She reflexively made a full French-press pot of coffee, and drank her half while the rest grew cold and bitter and overextracted. She poured the remains over the porch railing and watched the grounds hit the dirt, looking like dirt. Then she went about her day: fed the animals, walked the dog, went to work. Kept resting a hand on her abdomen so she could feel the baby’s movements inside and out. At Artifacts, Ted noticed this and asked if the critter was kicking yet, and she said no because she did not want to be touched. She called the house once, no one answered, she left a message. Before she went home, she stopped for groceries to give him extra time to get back, just in case; when she arrived, the house was as she’d left it, the note still on the table, Bullet frantic with relief. The answering machine was blinking. She sat and listened to the messages—one her own voice, checking for him; three from Ryan, sounding wired and impatient and apologetic at once. Eastern Washington? There was no reason for him to be out there. The baby turned inside her and she remembered last night: the kick, his hand on her abdomen, his withdrawal. “Oh, please don’t be a cliché,” she said aloud. She made half a box of spaghetti and ate the entire thing out of the saucepan. She changed into pajamas and watched an X-Files rerun with Bullet on the couch. Meena called and she let the machine answer. She got into bed early and read for five minutes before her eyes began to blur and she turned off the light.
Andrea had been half-asleep when the fourth call came. She recognized that she was now supposed to run to the phone and grab it, out of her mind with worry, or livid; the script of such a thing dictated that she scold, or beg, or jubilate. But she had no desire to scold or beg or jubilate. Fuck the script. Eyes closed, she turned her head to better hear his voice coming through the tiny speaker in the living room, scratchy and plaintive as a four-track recording. Soon Ryan stopped talking and with a click, the house went quiet again. Just the gentle hum of the refrigerator, Bullet’s fluttery dream whimpers, the sound of her own breath. A peace came over her. The only thing she had to do was take care of herself and the baby. Let the rest happen. I will just wait, she thought. I will wait and let him reveal himself.
And now, to think this was where he had been. How did he pull off such a drive in that decrepit old van?
“Mom.” Lucia tapped her shoulder. “Can I see your phone?”
Andrea said no, they had to save the battery. Instead, they played Twenty Questions. Lucia went first. She thought for a minute. “Okay. Ready.”
“Who are you?” Beatriz said.
“You can’t just ask that!” Andrea said.
Lucia giggled. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
Eastern Montana. The horses stood close together in their corrals and fields, thick-furred and plush. In Billings, oil refinery smokestacks shot flames. They dutifully visited the dinosaurs in Glendale and crossed into the Badlands, its corrugated buttes the color of blood and flesh and bone. They pulled off at a scenic overlook and got out of the car, zipping their coats to their chins against the wind. “Oh my god, look behind us,” Beatriz said. An idling semitruck pulled away to reveal a bull bison standing at the edge of the parking area nibbling the brown grass. He was horned and mountainous, shaggy flanks like a landscape. Lucia asked for Beatriz’s phone so she could take a picture. She moved toward the bison as if magnetically pulled, and when Andrea realized she wasn’t stopping, she had to run over and grab her arm. “But he’s eating. He’s not scared,” Lucia protested. “I just wanted to get a little closer.”
The kid had no sense of danger yet. That was the problem.
A night in Belfield at the Trapper’s Inn. In nearby pastures and backyards, small derricks swung back and forth like strange little toys. “What are those?” Lucia asked. “They’re funny.”
“They look like oil things,” Beatriz said.
“In North Dakota?” Andrea scoffed. “That would be weird.”
The land settled into snow-dusted fields flecked with beige stubble and a flatness that outdid even Nebraska. The occasional boulder heap in a field was the only topography. The view was one-eighth land and seven-eighths sky.
The light was different here on the plains, clear and thin where Oregon in late autumn was gray and muted. November had always made Andrea a little sad, dimmed her. But this was a particular winter light she recognized from childhood.
Forests filled in around them when they crossed into Minnesota. They finally drove into Bemidji in a cobalt-blue twilight, the land white, the trees black, the scattered houses’ windows incandescent gold.
Andrea clutched the wheel tighter. Beatriz read the directions aloud. Otherwise, they were all three silent.
“Left here.” A dark bait shop, a motel with vacancy, a gas station in a cold pool of light. The trees a black torn edge along the sky. The road darkened as they left the town behind.
“Right at the stop sign.”
Lucia sat forward in the back, seat belt taut against her chest. In the rearview mirror Andrea saw how she looked out the window, eyes wide and scanning, as if she’d see him emerge from the woods. Was Lucia nervous? She looked a little nervous, her lips tight enough to draw in the shadow of her dimple.
“Do you want to check in at the hotel first, Luz?” Andrea asked the mirror.
Luz’s eyes darted to meet hers. “No,” she said decisively.
Oh. She was excited.
Beatriz set her hand on Andrea’s neck and rubbed the nape. Andrea leaned into it. Hold me up, she thought, and she did. But what about Beatriz?
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” Beatriz said. “We’re almost there. Left.”
The road they turned onto was packed snow over gravel, narrow, barely two cars wide, a pale stripe through woods and modest fields, marshes with frosted cattails. Andrea flicked on the brights. Living in a city, she had almost forgotten about brights.
“Here,” Beatriz said. “On the left.”
Click-click, click-click, the needless blinker. A black mailbox with stick-on numbers, mounted on a wooden post. The driveway, narrow and flat, curved through trees and then opened on a clearing with a little cabin. The shades were down, but a glow filtered around them. He was home.
Andrea killed the ignition. The heat died but the car was still warm. “Well,” she said, not moving to unbuckle her seat belt. “Here we are.”
The light came on over the front door.