Twenty-four

1989

What came after Mary and Hannah left the swamp that second time was this: years. Vast expanses of time that sped by like the flat empty land where they were spent. They passed those many days in the middle of the country, in towns that rose up out of the yellow horizon like islands, isolated and hours from the next.

As Mary drove between those towns, she used to watch the storms gather in the sky, their opaque gray clouds churning, bending earth and air toward them. They called them twisters in those parts.

The girls would stay in a town for two months or maybe three. Mary would find temporary work washing dishes or cleaning rooms or doing whatever work for whichever business needed an extra hand. Sometimes Mary would take money for other things. She wouldn’t talk about what those were, but neither was she ashamed of them. The things she did to survive were automatic, reflexive, and once they were done, they were no more than dust in her tracks.

She liked the Midwestern boys, with their awestruck professions of love, with their earnest, down-on-one-knee sentimentality. She liked their pale backs and strong tanned arms. She liked their simple minds. She always chose the docile ones. The tame ones. The ones who would do anything for her. Or, rather, she let them choose her. Mary’s instincts were keen enough to steer clear of the ones with dark eyes and matching hungers. When she encountered one of those, it was time to leave.

Mary marveled at how many towns there were in this swath of the country, how many that seemed just alike. It was a safe place for her to have Hannah. The authorities didn’t bother much with truancy, and their homeschooling laws were lax to nonexistent. These were places were kids grew up working on farms, not sitting in classrooms. But Mary was diligent about Hannah’s schooling, and they would often spend their evenings scratching out equations or reading whatever Mary could find. She taught Hannah algebra by the time she was eight. They’d find owl pellets in fields and dissect them, organizing and identifying the rodent bones. And at night they’d sit together reading the same page in the same novel, Mary waiting for Hannah to finish before she went on to the next.

Hannah grew up during those years. Grew taller and leaner, her fledging breasts just starting to become visible under her T-shirts. Her sense of privacy blossoming with her body. They were staying in a trailer in an RV park where Mary was helping out for the summer when Mary opened the bathroom door without knocking.

“Hey!” Hannah yelled, bumping her hip against the open door, but not before Mary saw her pull her shirt down. Hannah had been looking at herself in the mirror.

“Bunny,” scolded Mary. “Relax. It’s not like I’ve never seen boobs before.”

Hannah pushed her way out of the bathroom, mumbling something unintelligible and storming out of the trailer. “Pretty mature!” Mary called after her, the door clanging, then swinging wide open. “Keep acting like that, and those boobs are going to crawl right back up into your chest!”

She watched the back of Hannah’s form as she stomped over the dry dirt, then Mary went back into the bathroom.

“Jesus,” she moaned, when she saw the state of it. Her makeup was spread all over the counter and her razor was in the sink still covered with shaving cream. “It’s not like you have any hair yet!” she called to the sister who couldn’t hear her. “Come on, Bunny,” she muttered to herself, rinsing the razor clean. Hannah had been getting into her things more and more, slicking on lipstick and splashing on the Jean Naté that some boy had bought her in some town.

They’d be leaving the park in the morning. Mary hadn’t yet told the owners, but the tourist season was nearly over; there was no longer any reason for them to keep her around. After she cleaned up the bathroom, she began packing. She had done it so many times and they had so wonderfully little, it was a mechanical act. They had clothes and shoes, they had sleeping bags and coats. Mary had makeup, a hairdryer, and some books that she kept. Hannah had Barbies and some stuffed animals. Their lives were containable and transportable. Home wasn’t a place.

When their backpacks were packed and fully zipped, Mary set them beside the thin metal door of the trailer, then went to go find Hannah.

It had been a dry summer so the grass was sparse—ragged yellowing clusters holding to the dry dirt. The park was starting to clear out, only cinder blocks and bare earth marking the spots vacated by the summer people’s RVs. Mary wondered if there was a place on the planet that didn’t have summer people.

She walked to the small aboveground pool where she could usually find Hannah, taking the steps up to the wooden platform. Helen was in the water. Helen came up from outside Oklahoma City every summer. All day long, she’d glide from one end of the pool to the other like some huge pelagic mammal. “You looking for your sister, honey?” she asked, drawing closer to Mary like a surfacing walrus.

Mary nodded, then she brought her hand to rub the back of her scalp. It had been hot in the trailer. “Have you seen her?”

Helen reached the edge of the pool by Mary’s feet, turned and pushed off again, her pale thighs powering her off the wall. “I saw her walk by a little while ago,” she called behind her. “She was walking toward the fields.”

“Thanks,” said Mary. She paused before heading back down the steps. “Have a good swim,” she called behind her.

“You, too, honey,” replied Helen, as she absent-mindedly dunked underneath the water.

The park was surrounded by thousands of acres of slender green stalks of corn. Mary and Hannah had walked in those fields a few times, their eyes following the lines of the plants up toward the blue sky above, knowing that they were concealed by the terrestrial. In another month or so, the combine harvesters would descend on that land like massive churning beasts, leaving nothing but yellow ankle-high husks.

When Mary reached the field, she walked along its edge. Hannah was mad at her, as she had been more often lately. There were some kids at the park Hannah had become friends with. They would leave together when Mary started work and run in a pack all day long. Mary would see them at the pool, she’d see them at the playground, she’d see them sitting on the ground by the shady side of the trailer, their backs in the dirt, their heads on one another’s bellies. It was Hannah, another girl, and a boy. Hannah, Kim, and Shawn. Kim had left a week ago and Shawn, just the other day. The night he left, Mary had lain next to Hannah in bed and listened to her crying and fiercely wiping her eyes in the dark, letting out only nearly inaudible high-pitched whines. That was when Mary decided it was time to go, time to push on to the next place.

It was getting close to suppertime, and Mary turned around and headed back to the park; Hannah would be getting hungry soon. She pushed open the door to the trailer, feeling the tinned warmth hit her. They kept the windows open, but the late afternoon was always insufferable. “Bunny!” she called from the threshold, not wanting to go inside. In reply, there was only silence. But on the floor, just beside the door in a neat little parallel, sat Hannah’s dingy white canvas sneakers. “Bunny, I know you’re home,” called Mary, kicking off her own shoes, feeling the dampness of her soles. “I see your Keds!”

There was no real answer, but from the bedroom, Mary heard a muffled cry of frustration. It was just like Hannah to go to the trouble of hiding only to reveal herself with orderliness.

Mary pushed into the bedroom, and her eyes scanned the empty room. “Where are you?” she asked.

From below the bed where Mary and Hannah’s sleeping bags lay, Mary heard Hannah’s voice. “I’m not leaving.”

“Bunny, come out from under there.”

“No.”

“Bunny . . . ,” Mary started. Then she got down on her belly and lay on the floor next to Hannah. With her hand in between her cheek and the worn industrial carpet, Mary looked at her sister. Hannah was facedown, resting her forehead against the back of her hand. Mary looked at the chipped and faded pink nail polish on Hannah’s fingers. Hannah had picked out the color earlier in the summer, and Mary had painted them for her. “Why are you hiding?”

“I’m not leaving tomorrow. I don’t want to go.”

“Summer’s done,” said Mary, her voice gentle. “Everyone’s leaving here soon. Your friends are already gone. Kim and Shawn are gone. There’s no reason to stay, Bunny.”

Mary watched the side of Hannah’s face redden, watched her eyes tighten, listened to a high, steady whine come from the back of her throat. “Kim and Shawn had to go,” she said, her words an accusation. “They had to go to school.”

“Bunny, what are you saying? You want to stay here and go to school with the eight farm kids who live here all year long? You want to live in an unheated trailer this winter?”

Hannah sniffed and rubbed her eyes hard against her hand. “No,” she said, her face still down. “I want to go to a school like the one I used to go to.”

Northton, on the few occasions it came up, was never mentioned by name. “We can’t go back there,” Mary said.

Hannah finally turned to face her, the whites of her eyes shot with red, her lashes slick and moist. “Why?” she asked.

“We just can’t.”

And Hannah turned back to the floor. “I knew you’d say that.”

For a long time, the Chase sisters lay next to each other in silence, Hannah under the bed, Mary on the floor beside it. They lay there as the sun began to sink, until the light through the window was yellow gold, until their hair was wet with sweat. They lay there as all the towns and all the time and all the boys since they left Northton took their turn in Mary’s mind. They lay there until Hannah spoke, her voice weak. “I don’t want to drive anymore, Mary.”

Mary reached under the bed and put her hand on the back of Hannah’s head, feeling her damp curls, feeling the dip at the base of her skull. “I know, Bunny,” she said. “We don’t have to anymore. This’ll be the last time. I’m gonna find some place better for us. Some place where we can stay.”

The next morning, they drove for hours before they reached the interstate, through endless stretches of corn that covered the Midwest like a landlocked sea. The only signs of humanity came by way of the occasional silo or farmhouse, silhouettes against the early-morning sky. They didn’t talk during the first stretch of that drive. And as Mary let her head rest against the seatback, she thought of the infinity of miles she had traveled in that truck. The Blazer that was still running due to minor miracles and boys who knew how to rebuild engines and change timing belts. Its passenger’s-side door didn’t open anymore, rust had eaten away a small hole in the floor of the truck bed, and the exterior was spray-painted a matte black, but the Blazer still ran.

Next to Mary sat Hannah, slowly eating a donut from a box, picking off one piece at a time.

“What kind is that?” asked Mary, though she could see it was chocolate glazed. She just wanted Hannah to talk.

“Chocolate,” answered Hannah, as she stared out the window, her forehead against the glass.

“Pass me one.”

Hannah’s limbs suddenly seemed leaden, and the effort of retrieving the box of donuts from her feet, taking one out, and extending it toward Mary seemed calculated to look tremendous.

“Thanks,” replied Mary. She took a bite, a large green sign for the interstate coming into view. “The highway’s coming up soon,” she said, her mouth half-full.

“So?” grumbled Hannah.

“I just thought maybe you’d want to know where we were going.”

Arms over her chest, Hannah looked out through the passenger’s-side window. And not for the first time, Mary tried to divine her sister’s features. To determine which parts of her came from whom. She listened to the car’s tires thud against the road, waiting to see if Hannah would take the bait. Waiting to see if Hannah would ask. But Hannah remained silent. And when the on-ramp for the highway came and the Blazer curved smoothly to the right, Hannah immediately looked at Mary.

“West?” she asked.

Mary smiled and nodded. “We’re going to Utah,” said Mary. “We’re converting to Mormonism. We’ll learn how to make Jell-O molds.”

Hannah shook her head and gave an artful roll of her eyes. “Seriously, Mary.”

Mary chuckled, her hands on the wheel. “Alright, Bunny,” she said, her voice quiet. “We’re going to California.”

“California?” asked Hannah, a smile forming at the corners of her mouth. “Where in California?”

“A town up north. Right on the ocean. There’s a famous hotel there.”

“And we’re going to stay there?” Hannah asked, her words a test.

Mary nodded. “Yeah, Bunny. We are.”

“And I’m going to go to school.”

“You’re going to go to school.” Mary felt the rhythmic bumps of the road underneath her tires. “But you know, since you haven’t been in a while, you have to start over again in kindergarten.”

“Shut up, Mare,” said Hannah, with her arms crossed over her chest, but the smile was still on her face. Throughout all of their travels, the Chase girls had never been to California. Mary extended her arm out to her sister who knew nothing so well as the curve of Mary’s side. And after a reluctant moment, Hannah folded into it, resting her head on Mary’s shoulder.

 

THE GIRLS DROVE ALL DAY UNTIL the land started to hint at the massive mountains that broke out of the earth in the distance, hiding behind the cloak of cloud and sky. They ate donuts and unwrapped American cheese singles, sandwiching them between slices of white bread. When they had to go to the bathroom, they’d pull off to the side and squat next to the Blazer with the door open.

“Shit,” Mary said, as she peered down at the slick red-brown oval staining the lavender cotton of her panties. She hung on to the door handle with one hand for balance.

“What’s wrong?” Hannah asked.

“Pass me down my purse.”

Hannah reached for the beat-up bronzed leather bag that Mary had carried forever. Since Miami. Since before. “What’s wrong?”

“I got my period.”

Mary saw Hannah cock her head inquisitively and crane her neck to better see her squatting sister, the curiosity of the uninitiated. “Just give me the bag, Bunny,” Mary snapped, and Hannah quickly passed it down, then faced straight ahead, her cheeks flushed. As Mary reached inside and pulled out a thick maxi pad, fixing it over the stain, she realized that while there was little she hid from Hannah there was also little she fully explained. Mary pulled her jeans up and stood in one swift motion, then she got back in the truck, and staring at Hannah’s profile, she pulled the door shut. “Sorry,” she said. “I just didn’t want to sit there bleeding everywhere.”

After many, many more miles, Mary nodded to a sign. “Look,” she said.

Hannah followed the direction of her sister’s attention. “What’s the Continental Divide?” she asked.

The last time they had crossed it, that great spine where the earth heaved up and split North America, Hannah had been much younger. The West was outside of Mary’s natural range. “It’s a line,” said Mary. “Of mountains. On one side, everything leads to the Atlantic. On the other, everything leads to the Pacific.”

“You mean all the rivers and streams and stuff?”

That divide always seemed profound to Mary, something with a significance greater than hydrological. “I mean everything.”

Hannah looked at the land around them, and Mary suddenly wished that they were taking the high road, the difficult road. The road with the grand views and dramatic vistas. They were passing through the Great Basin, where the mountains bowed away, letting high arid land create the pass the early settlers used to travel when the country was untamed and loosely mapped. She imagined the white curves of their covered wagons like gaping mouths, a visible symbol of their propensity for hardship and error.

Mary leaned forward so her fingers touched the glass of the windshield as the Blazer sped past the sign. “Crossed it first,” she said, smiling at her sister.

But Hannah looked at Mary as if she were getting too old for these games. “So we’re going to the Pacific?” she asked.

Mary nodded. “Yeah, Bunny,” she said.

After the sun bled out into the enormous sky, after its color was leached by night, after a star-speckled blanket replaced all that was above them, after Mary’s eyelids began to feel weighted, the Chase girls pulled off the interstate and found the warm lights of a small motel set near the side of the road.

Mary stretched her arms, pushing against the resistance of the fixed steering wheel. “I’m glad we’re stopping,” she said. “I think I need a bed.”

Hannah looked at the sign, with its movable black letters advertising the room rate. “Thirty-nine dollars a night,” she said, her voice hopeful. “That’s not bad.” Hannah always preferred motels to camping and knew the disappointment of pulling back out of the parking lot when Mary deemed an establishment too expensive.

Mary felt a yawn overtake her words. “Yeah,” she said, talking through an open mouth. “It’s not too bad.”

In the room, Mary dropped her backpack onto the floor just inside the door. “I’m taking a shower,” she said. “I feel disgusting.”

Hannah followed her in and more gingerly placed her own bag at the foot of the double bed. “I’ll have a bath when you’re done.”

Mary turned on the water and let it run hot for several minutes as she sat on the toilet naked, the still water below. She let the room become hot, let her skin start to bead with sweat, then she drew back the vinyl curtain and stepped over the wall of the tub into the water’s stream. Mary always luxuriated in showers like this, in warm water washing over her body in a place that was someplace other than where she had been that morning. It felt like a baptism. A rebirth that could happen again and again.

She drew her hand between her legs and washed herself clean, rubbing her hands over a slick wet bar of peach-hued soap, then letting them slide up and down her body, under her arms, up to her neck.

When she turned off the water, her fingertips were wrinkled and white. She turned her head upside down and dried it roughly with a thin white towel, put on a fresh pair of underwear, hand-washed the stained ones in the sink, then she opened the door and left the bright bathroom in a cloud of steam. Hannah was sitting on their bed, her back against the pillows, her knees angled up, and a notebook in her lap.

“Whatcha doin’?” asked Mary, as she reached into her bag and pulled out a T-shirt, putting it on over her head, the ends of her hair saturating its fabric.

Hannah didn’t raise her head. “Writing a letter.” The dim lamp beside her cast a wan yellow light through the room.

“To who?”

Hannah took a breath, annoyed either by the interruption or her inability to put words to page. “Shawn,” she said.

“You miss him,” Mary said, trying to mask her surprise as fact. There was only one boy Mary missed after he was gone. As she looked at Hannah, as she thought of how the childish lilt had left her voice, of how her pink pilled T-shirt stretched across her chest. And Mary felt a panicked urgency to better arm her sister for womanhood, to find out just how mature she had become. She sat on the edge of the bed.

“Is he the first boy you’ve liked like this?”

Hannah gave her an annoyed glance. “I never said I liked him,” she mumbled, her gaze again on her letter. And Mary saw her flush.

“But you do.”

Her brows tight, Hannah stared at her notebook.

Mary’s voice was soft when she spoke. “You know about sex, right?”

“Geeze, Mary!” said Hannah, angrily closing her notebook. “Don’t be disgusting!”

“It’s important, Bunny.”

Hannah grunted and, with her notebook clutched to her chest, made for the bathroom. “I don’t want to talk about this!” The door slammed behind her.

Mary waited a moment. “Bunny,” she called. When only silence met her, she rose and walked toward the thin, hollow bathroom door. “Bunny,” she said again, her hand trying the knob, feeling it halt.

“I need privacy!”

Mary paused for a moment, looking at the blurred lights of the parking lot beyond the drawn ruffled curtain. “Mom never really told me about sex.” She felt herself smile. “I think she was scared that she’d give me ideas. But we all want what we want, Bunny. We’re all just animals, really.” She felt Hannah’s attention beyond their divide. “Just make sure you tell me before you do it. There’s some stuff you need to do. To be safe.”

And though Hannah didn’t respond, though she wouldn’t come out of the bathroom until Mary was under the covers and the television was yammering in the background, Mary knew by Hannah’s inability to meet her eye that she had heard her.

 

THE CHASE GIRLS STAYED THE NEXT MORNING until it was time to check out, lying on the bed and basking in the infinitude of being nowhere. The motel served Saran-Wrapped Danish, hard-boiled eggs, and oranges for breakfast, and Mary and Hannah ate them in their room, Hannah feeling the optimism of going somewhere, Mary feeling the relief of having left. The Chase girls were always happiest in those brief moments of in-between, when neither of them was sacrificing, neither of them being sacrificed.

When it was time to go, Mary stopped at the front desk.

“Enjoy your stay?” asked the woman who sat there. She had round features and a gap between her front teeth. She wore her thin blond hair pulled half back on her head and didn’t look up from her book as she spoke.

“Yeah,” replied Mary, setting the key in front of her, the room number written in masking tape and affixed to a brown plastic disc on a chain. “This is a nice place.”

With their late start, Mary knew that she would have to drive into the night, and so when they stopped for gas that evening, Mary bought a large coffee, pouring it from a discolored glass carafe into a Styrofoam cup. She felt a man at the beer case staring at her.

“Thirsty?” he asked. She turned to face him. He was rat shaped, with thin limbs and a plump torso. His hair was long in the back. She could see that he had an erection, and he shifted his weight as he looked at her, his hand still holding open the glass door of the cooler.

“No, just tired,” she said. “My medication makes me sleepy.” It took all of her will to keep her face impassive.

“What kind of medication is that,” he said, wanting to find the salacious in any and all details.

“My antipsychotics. I just got out of a mental institution.” She waited for the statement to register on his face. Then she jutted her head forward, bared her teeth, and hissed—a wide-eyed, wet-fanged, unrestrained feline hiss.

“Jesus,” he muttered, as he skittered away, glancing over his shoulder as he hurried out the door, leaving Mary to pour the cream into her coffee, smiling as she stirred.

As Mary walked back out to the truck, she looked around. All along the interstate, there were places like this, brightly lit truck stops with rows of gas pumps and glassy-eyed clerks who didn’t look up as they counted out your change. “You should put your seat down,” Mary told Hannah, as she got back in the Blazer. “Get some sleep.”

“Aren’t we gonna stop?”

“I think we should keep driving,” she said, as she turned over the engine, set the gearshift into reverse, then rested her arm over the seat as she looked behind her. “We’re making good time.”

After another hour or so, Mary saw Hannah’s eyes start to slip shut as the wide flat road skated by mountains that were shadows at the edge of the dark. Mary was looking at them, trying to make out their detail when up ahead she saw a figure slinking next to the road, four legged, black bodied, in relief against the night. She took a quick breath and sat up straighter just as it stopped and turned. Yellow eyes to yellow eyes, it looked at Mary, and just as quickly, the truck sped past; Mary looked in her rearview mirror, and it was gone.

“Bunny, did you see that?” Mary asked, without thinking; asked through quickened breath.

“What?” said Hannah.

“That animal,” she said, with less urgency, questioning now whether she should have mentioned it at all.

“What was it?” asked Hannah sleepily, adjusting herself in her seat and curling to her right.

“I don’t know,” said Mary. “It might have been nothing.”

Mary did drive all night, reaching the coast and following it south while Hannah snored lightly next to her. She drove on a road that hugged the line of earth and sea, curving where it curved, turning where it turned. Mary felt the pleasant weariness of travel in her arms as one hand loosely held the steering wheel, her left foot lodged up against the dashboard. Driving was now as reflexive and unconscious as breathing, its motions and demands were no more or less great than those of her own body.

She had passed through small sleeping towns, their windows lidded and black, and stretches of narrow road elevated above a dark ocean. She rolled her window down so she could hear it, the water’s rhythmic churning. And as she let her hand slide through the thick night air, as she played with its resistance, she felt a dreamlike smile take her face; it had been a long time since she had been near the ocean.

When the sun first reached over from the east, it cast a yellow light on the water, drawing up droplets of the Pacific with its magnetic warmth. And it was through that mist that Mary first saw it. Her foot lifted reflexively from the gas, and the Blazer glided with the road. It was a grand old hotel, set on a bluff, looking both elegant and otherworldly, both of the moment and of the past, like a place from a tale. Like a place that might be home. And though Mary would later question her memory of that moment, whether the bath of golden light was a sleepless hallucination, at the time, it seemed like the Chase girls’ own private manifest destiny.

Mary pulled onto the shoulder of the road. “Bunny, look,” said Mary, resting her hand on the back of her sleeping sister’s head. “There it is.”

Jostled, Hannah opened one eye with a sharp breath and downturned mouth. But as soon as Hannah’s eyes found it, she stilled.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” asked Mary. Hannah, of course, didn’t know why Mary had chosen this hotel. Hannah, of course, didn’t understand its significance.

Hannah still only looked, blinking her way into lucidity.

Mary reached across and pressed a button, releasing the glove compartment, and pulled out a camera. The girls rarely used it since film and developing were so expensive.

“Smile,” she said. And before Hannah could object, with her face innocent and lovely and fresh with sleep, Mary took her photograph, the hotel in the background. In a couple of weeks, the film would be developed. And Mary would stare at the photograph in a way that she sometimes did with pictures of Hannah. Then she’d do what she had done a dozen times over the past few years. She’d put it in an envelope, seal it shut, and write out an address she knew by heart. Because time could testify for what Mary couldn’t. And anyone could see how much Hannah looked like her father.