They eat breakfast together like it’s totally normal. River offers Ella three different kinds of cereal and two different kinds of milk. Leanne is pleased with whatever’s going on in her lab; the vaccine is going to work fine. Sometimes, apparently, it doesn’t. Ella is glad she didn’t know that part; one more thing to worry about. It should be ready in a few hours—the small dose they’re making just for her.
While they wait, they go into Walmart, where Ella helps River record a vlog in which they set up giant girl dolls and then aim to knock them down like bowling pins, except instead of a bowling ball, it’s River riding a child’s tricycle. It makes a big noise and mess, and then they hide and struggle not to laugh. Ella is scared, a little, but River explains that it’s not actually illegal, and no one can really do anything, and even if they did they would go after River because Ella fits their heteronormative assumptions. Which doesn’t really make Ella feel any better, but by then they’re across the store picking up fried chicken for lunch. River pays for everything, and Ella thanks them, and they shrug and say, “Bless my patron saints, ad revenue and Patreon.”
As Ella finishes her lunch, she starts to look around and notice little things. The way Leanne won’t eat her chicken off the bone but has to scrape off all the meat with silverware first. The tiny tattoo River has of a stylized frog on their middle finger. The way the light shines in through the little kitchen window and almost makes it seem like a real kitchen instead of a really big van. There’s a hollow feeling in her chest, knowing she has to leave this comfort and strike out on her own into the unknown. She has a bad feeling about what’s to come, but she doesn’t know how to put it into words in a way that wouldn’t make her seem like a big, superstitious baby.
Finally, she can’t pick over her lunch anymore, and her drink is down to ice. When was the last time she had ice? She dumps her trash in the garbage and briefly wonders where the garbage in the RV goes, and as she’s standing there, staring into the trash can, River says, “It’s going to be okay. You know that, right?”
“It really is,” Leanne adds. “It’s bound to be better than where you’ve been.”
Ella’s throat locks up. She doesn’t want to cry again. Even if the whole reason she’s here is because she started crying in a drugstore and these two people, out of all the people in the whole world, stopped to give a shit.
“I know,” she says, a choked whisper.
“You’re going to have a nice drive—make sure you’ve got a good playlist lined up or a podcast or audiobook or whatever—and you’re going to drive right into that fairground parking lot and find your mom, and everything is going to be okay.” River pulls their wallet out of their back pocket and puts a twenty on the table. “That’s for parking and incidentals.”
Tears well up in Ella’s eyes as she takes it. “Why are you guys being so nice to me?”
They exchange a wry glance, but it’s Leanne who answers.
“Because we were both lost and fucked up when we were your age, and if just one person had reached out, it would’ve meant the world.”
“And we weren’t even going through a pandemic decade,” River adds. “Life was borderline normal then.”
“You shouldn’t have to be out on your own.”
“But—” Ella starts.
River jumps in. “Okay, have you ever seen, like, a really cute dog just walking down the road, and it’s got a nice collar and is well cared for, and you know that it’s not an abandoned dog, you know somebody really cares about it and is missing it, and you just want to catch the dog and call the number on the collar?”
Ella sniffle-laughs. “I’m that dog, huh?”
“You’re that dog,” they confirm.
“Woof woof.”
Ella barking breaks up the tension, and they all laugh, and then things move way too quickly. They have her sit down in the recliner while Leanne vaccinates her, narrating the entire process so that she can repeat the process. It’s actually kind of anticlimactic, after everything else. Such a small, simple procedure, and soon, she won’t have to worry about accidentally killing anyone. River puts a bandage over the tender spot and gives Ella two more Oreos, and then they’re hugging her goodbye outside her car. Leanne hands her a big ziplock bag full of neatly organized medical supplies and papers and explains again how to administer the vaccine and reminds her to never share needles and to always take precautions and refrigerate any remaining vaccine. River gets Ella’s social media handles and makes her promise to stay in touch, and then she’s in her car and tuning up the podcast River recommended, and the RV pulls out of the Walmart parking lot and onto the road, headed in the opposite direction.
On her way to the highway, Ella passes Big Fred’s Floors. It’s a beautiful morning, and she dreads every time she has no choice but to drive past this haunted hellhole, knowing full well that in the best of times, what she saw there made her furious on behalf of women, and in the worst of times involved a corpse. Much to her surprise, the corpse is gone, and a woman in overalls is painting flat white paint over the place on the wall where the stain was. There’s a work van parked by the building, and the dismantled LED sign sits beside the open rear doors. A new sign sits in front of the tiny building, the endposts sunk into satisfying piles of sand surrounded by pots of marigolds and impatiens.
SIMPLY ELEGANT REMODELING BY GRACE, the sign reads in stark black script, refined and modern, with sketches of a kitchen sink in front of a window.
Maybe the woman with the paint roller is Grace. Ella hopes it is.
Just seeing that woman out there, painting over the bloodstain, dismantling the horrible sign, maybe turning this nasty little shed into a booming business—it brings Ella this odd lift of hope. She’d forgotten that, much like a hurricane, the pandemic would eventually run its course, that there is always a promise of sunshine at the end of all the rain. That’s one nice thing about Florida—the worst thunderstorms bring the most beautiful and surprising rainbows.
She zooms away from the intersection, noticing for the first time in a very long time that she’s breathing, that her body is moving, that she can take a full breath, if she focuses. Ella has never driven more than thirty minutes from home. She’s never navigated a new highway by herself. And now she’s following the map on her phone to a place she’s never been, where she doesn’t know what will happen.
Her biggest fear isn’t that she won’t be able to find her mother.
It’s that she’ll learn that her mother doesn’t want to be found.
48.