CHAPTER THIRTEEN

NO NAME-CALLING

Despite its newly upcycled insides, the camper’s bones and joints were old. Uneven pavement or a break in the asphalt brought on a bouncing wheeze like the whole thing was made of rusty springs. If the camper’s tires crossed the fog line and ran up against the edge of the highway, I’d hold my breath, fearing we’d tumble, top heavy, into the ditch.

I pictured the dozens of accidents I’d seen over the years, unbalanced trucks toppled and in the median, RVs lying sideways like fat, beached harbor seals, unable to roll back upright. Holly always drove faster than I did; she did everything like she was on a deadline.

I ventured a look in the front cab. Summer sat cross-legged with her wrists on her knees in a meditation pose: back straight, chin lifted, eyes closed. Holly stared through the windshield and said, “Uh-huh. Okay.” I realized she was on the phone when I saw her earbuds.

“Darling,” she said in her Nice Holly voice. “There’s no cramping this time, right?” She paused.

I could see in the reflection of the rearview mirror that Holly looked fearful. Her expression, the tone of her voice made me hold my breath. I listened hard.

“What did the doctor say?” I wished I could hear Rosie’s report. “We’re making good time, sweetie. We’ll be home soon.” Holly touched her face, wiped her eyes.

I almost touched Holly’s shoulder to offer a squeeze of reassurance. She’d scoff, brush me off, so I kept my comfort to myself. Besides, what did I know about the knife-edge Rosie and Holly lived on? I’d had an accidental conception with the easiest of pregnancies and deliveries. Holly would be sure to remind me of that, as if that was another blessing I didn’t deserve. That my pregnancy was accidental, which somehow negated my love for my daughter, which ignited, once again, my indignation. However it was that my daughter came into my life, nothing had made me happier.

My phone buzzed, and as if my daughter knew I was having a mothering moment, she texted.

MADDIE: I’ve got a handle on the internship, Mom. But the babysitting! I’m supposed to make dinner for the kids. I don’t know what to make. Also, I accidentally fed Lyddie milk chocolate, and she’s had diarrhea all morning. I’m terrible at this job

I texted some ideas for an easy meal. I comforted her about her mistake and sent her an internet link with a list of foods with hidden milk in them. While I problem solved for Maddie, I was totally engaged with being her mother. But then she texted:

MADDIE: OK. Later mom. I love you

And she was gone, and I was once again alone with my thoughts, stuck in a camper in the middle of who knew where. There was no quid pro quo from kids. No How’s the trip going? Or, Are you having a good time? That’s not how the parenting contract went. For every ten times parents supported their child, their child might think to respond once in kind. Typically I didn’t notice such things, but for some reason, listening to Holly talk to Rosie, watching the self-sure Summer in the passenger seat of this rolling rust kettle, I was feeling lonely. I realized this feeling was going to be my life, and my shoulders sagged.

My mind wandered to the moms of Maddie’s friend circle. More often than not, they spoke with extreme irritation about their husbands.

There was Genevieve Post and her husband, Jim. After Jimbo forgot to bring the seven-layer bars that Genevieve had individually packaged and priced herself to the swim team bake sale, she said, “Well, what do you expect? Men are one chromosome away from a cricket.” It was clear from that woman’s expression she was not kidding.

And Melissa Trenton’s exasperation was real when her husband’s marketing position had been phased out, and he was on the job market for the third time. “Listen, if I could phase him out, I would phase him the ef out so fast and replace him with a drone. At least the drone moves if you push a button. It would be so satisfying to have something, anything, at my command.”

As many times as I was conflicted about being a single parent, just as often I was relieved. When things went wrong when you were single, you had no one to blame but yourself—which cut the accusations in half because no one was looking at you disapprovingly. You were alone in blaming yourself for all the errors you made.

I remembered the shaman’s words, wondered if there was any wisdom to be had there, and began googling down a speedy e–rabbit hole. And, after an hour of increasingly tense browsing, I reviewed my history.

Are shamans real

Spirit animals and you

Animals that saved people’s lives

Six surprising animal and cancer facts

Health effects of letting your dog sleep in your bed

Nine things happy healthy people have in their bedrooms

The best summer sex toys

Why does everyone hate Gwyneth Paltrow?

I closed my eyes, let my disorder take over, and when I woke we were in Utah.

Outside the dusty camper windows lay a wide-open landscape. Cliffs in shades of pink and orange were punctuated by scruffy brush and layered stone. The geography looked like a colossal birthday cake that had been left in the searing sun to bake, dry, and petrify. An occasional off-kilter wooden shack dotted the vista just like in the westerns made here decades before.

Sometime between my googling, reading, and sleeping, Summer had taken over the driving, and Holly had curled up in the passenger seat. I could hear her congested inhale, still sleeping soundly despite the cramped space. I scooted between the two seats and spoke softly to Summer.

“Are we close?”

Summer blew a kiss over her shoulder. “Good morning, Princess Sleepy.”

“I think I might be Sleepy the dwarf.”

“I think his name is Sluggish. There’s some kombucha in my bag. Take a sip.”

Her sweet greeting and offer had me feeling cared for. I squeezed Summer’s shoulder and said, “I’m glad you’re with us.”

Summer hugged my hand between her cheek and shoulder. “I know you are. Can’t say the same for your soul mate over there.”

“My soul mate?” I laughed.

Summer widened her eyes for emphasis. “You two may make each other insane, but there’s no denying your connection. You are two peas in a pod.”

“I don’t think that expression means what you think it means.”

“Oh, I know what it means, all right.”

“How long has Holly been asleep?”

“See how much you care? You two are the best kind of women.” She swallowed, and the tip of her nose went red.

“Summer?”

She waved me off. “She’s been sleeping for a while. You’ll both be fresh for our reunion with Peanut. Holly called the sanctuary. He’s there and waiting for us.”

“She’s so practical. So prepared. I should have done that.”

“You’ve got a lot going on. You’re keeping track of your best friend, your daughter, and healing from the past. Also, this man you are texting.” She caught my eye in the rearview mirror and wiggled her eyebrows suggestively. “What’s that all about?”

“Is this part of your magical aura reading?” Her insight did seem magical.

“No, sweetie. I snooped your phone when you were sleeping. It should be password protected, hon. I can show you how to do it. We can pick a number even you won’t forget.”

“Hey!” But I didn’t really care. What did I have to hide? “I can remember my passwords. I don’t have it protected because I have nothing to hide.”

“That’s what everyone thinks, but when our privacy goes haywire and the fascists come to get us, you’ll wish you had a password on your phone.”

I squinted through the dirty windshield into the dry but colorful vista and said, “I don’t know what to say to that.”

“Take it from me. When that video of me and that Italian porn star surfaced at Coachella, I realized how fragile our privacy is. You have to get all your photos off the cloud.” She air quoted “the cloud” as if it wasn’t a real thing.

“You had a sex video on your phone?”

“No, someone filmed it from a hole in a hotel room in Vegas.”

“So it wasn’t stored in the cloud from your phone?”

“No. Why does that matter? Sam, you need to straighten some things out with your inner deer.”

“What are we talking about?”

“Oh, Sam.” She sighed like she’d been my parent for more years than she liked to admit.

Talking to Summer was like listening to the old Girl Scout song “The Song That Never Ends.” There was a circularity on the surface that made sense but was also crazy making. I would have tried to sort out this conversation, but rising out of the desert, right at the foot of a bluff that looked like an erect head of a python, sat the sign for the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. Summer yanked the steering wheel to the left and hit the edge of the asphalt. By some miracle we didn’t tip over and skid into the ditch. The popping sound of pebbles and stones kicked up against the underbelly of the cab, and the combination of the swerving and the noise woke Holly.

I heard Holly grumble and say, “What tha?” It was nice that when Holly was asleep, I could relax, but this was the next stage, and I needed to be alert and not sleepy with avoidance.

There were a lot of things I was expecting to see when we arrived at the sanctuary, but the reality far outplayed my imagination. Even after seeing photos, I couldn’t have been further off with my animal-camp fantasy. This place was not a hippie establishment with thrown-together lean-tos and food troughs scattered in the fields. Along the driveway to the center of the sanctuary were tidy cabins and a place to camp and park RVs. A wide green field corralled horses within white fences, all seemingly held in place by an umbrella of wide blue sky. A few hundred feet more, and our camper rolled to a stop at the bottom of a cliff where the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary Welcome Center was housed.

“This is not what I imagined,” Holly said with a bit of wonder in her voice.

“Me either. It’s stunning.”

Summer said, “It’s amazing, right?”

“Have you been here before?” I asked.

“No. I’d never heard of it until I met you guys.”

I shook my head. “It’s so orderly. So organized. I thought it was going to be a huge field of dogs, and we’d have to search for Peanut for hours.”

Holly shrugged. “Honestly, me too.”

“You guys, that’s silly. They can’t mix animals and let them run all over the place. They would kill each other. Transmit disease and generally reproduce.”

“I thought you didn’t know anything about this place.” I glanced at Summer.

“I don’t,” Summer said. She put the camper in park, opened the door, and slid out of the seat.

Holly glanced at me and rolled her eyes.

My heart leaped. Was that an accident on Holly’s part, a by-product of waking up and not having her irritated-antennae tuned in and focused on me? Or was this a bonding moment, like when people lived through a hardship and found an inside joke in the darkness, or when soldiers from the same platoon who otherwise hated each other came together to save the day?

“You two drive me crazy,” Holly said, and my soldier’s heart broke in two. I wanted to stop my feelings right there, get ahold of them, and say, No, don’t do it. You’ll only be hurt in the end. But being with Holly again had me feeling the freedom I’d felt in college, admiring her fierceness, wanting it for myself.

“Summer, I looked up your IMDb page like you suggested, and you did a whole special on the sanctuary two years ago. There’s a photo of you with an enormous parrot on your head,” said Holly.

“Oh yeah,” Summer said, slamming the cab door. “I forgot about that. We hoped that would take the place of the porno.”

I climbed from the back into the front seat and out of the passenger-side door right after Holly.

“Summer,” I said, annoyed, “can you just try to be more honest with us? I mean, I think you owe us that.”

“I’m an artist, you guys. Truth is a flexible concept.”

“No, it is not.”

“I got you here, didn’t I? I think you owe me a thing or two. But you can pay me back another time. I’m going to the pig house. I have an old beau there who, if I remember right, knows how to treat a lady.”

I watched her walk away. Sometime in the night, Summer had replaced her white jeans and platform shoes with a prairie skirt and flip-flops. She’d given herself two braids that hung on either side of her face. From behind she looked like an eighth grader who hadn’t gone through puberty. It was endearing.

“Have you seen her eat yet?”

“I have not,” said Holly, “but she must have eaten something from that giant bag of hers. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a month’s worth of bento boxes in there.”

“Maybe,” I said, unsure. “I’m worried about her.”

“Don’t worry about her. Summer takes care of Summer.”

It felt good to stand on the pea gravel and not feel the sway of the camper, the growl of the engine beneath the seats. The canyon had a photographic quality to it, as if we were standing in front of a green screen while a technician projected the perfect Utah scenery and weather for our pleasure. I stretched and said, “What’s the plan?”

“This isn’t a heist, Samantha. We’re going to go inside, ask where the canines are housed. Tell them we are here for the dog and probably sign a paper. Then, if all goes right, we will pick him up and leave.”

“What about Summer?”

“She can stay here. I snatched the registration and insurance for the camper when she thought I was sleeping.”

“You did?”

“Someone had to.”

“We’re just going to drive off and leave her?”

“Do you want to drive twenty-three hundred miles across country with her? Who knows what she’s got up her sleeve.”

Yes. Yes I do. I was not prepared to be alone with Holly. And I liked Summer. Simple as that. In some ways Holly seemed more of a stranger to me. My Holly wore a tie-dyed shirt with cats on it to sleep. Often she’d slip on a pair of jeans and go to class braless, makeup-less, her hair pulled into a pony. I searched Holly’s face for my past mischievous friend. Her leaner, more angular self, her pale-yellow button-down shirt. I didn’t know this strict person. This humorless woman.

“Holly, we can’t just leave her here.”

“I think we can, Samantha. What’s she doing with us anyway? Doesn’t she have some famous friends she can plague? She’s unpredictable and could be unstable. All those mists and ointments she’s always rubbing into her skin—they’re probably hallucinogens.”

“You sound like my grandmother. She just seems lost.”

Holly smoothed her hair, which was the equivalent of taking earrings off before a country-western bar fight.

“Lost like you, Sam? Does she make you feel better about yourself?”

“Wow, Holly.” I shrank back. I tried not to, but I did.

“Say it, Sam. You can’t bear to think about being stuck driving with me. You’d rather have that train wreck between us than spend any time with me.”

I clutched my hands together to stop them from shaking with frustration. She was right, of course. She could always read me—and there it was, the sadness again.

“Summer may be a train wreck, but at least she’s not . . .” Mean? Severe? Unfunny? I hesitated for a moment. My next word might change our relationship forever. If I named Holly, I’d better be careful, because once that label was out there, she would never, ever let me forget it.

In the pause I heard Summer’s voice from behind me. “No name-calling. No garbage dumping. No bringing up past grievances. Remember the rules. And Holly, stop trying to trap Samantha, using me as bait. She’s not as strong as she seems.”

The bright Utah sun brought out the lines in Summer’s sober face. Lines that had come from a mix of joy as well as sadness and defeat, just like the rest of us mortals. I was catapulted back to my grade-school playground, feeling again the sting of hearing from girls that my jeans were too short and my cartwheels sucked.

She looked between us. “I came back to get my sunglasses. This sun is brutal.” She turned, and as she walked away, she lifted the registration and insurance folder out of her bag and held it straight in the air with one sinewy arm. It was a glorious flipping of the legal bird, and I thought, Score one for Summer .

“Dammit. She’s sneaky,” said Holly. “How much do you think she heard?”

“What difference does it make, Holly? I heard all of it.”