They’re on the road again—they’ve been on the road for two months—and Ella sits at the small kitchen table, finishing her homework and making sure Brooklyn stays mostly on task with her workbook while Mom drives the motor home. It smells comfortably of lavender potpourri, a vast improvement over everywhere else she’s stayed since leaving the house she grew up in.
She doesn’t know what else happened that night, after Mom killed Dad. Chris drove the tour bus to a hotel and helped her and Brooklyn and Nana get over…the lump…as if he were chivalrously whisking them over a puddle. She didn’t look down, didn’t breathe, just jumped and hurried away, following Brooklyn off the bus and into a clean, pretty lobby with free chocolate chip cookies. They got an adjoining room with Nana, who took a couple of pills and fell into a deep sleep. The next morning, Arlene took Nana to an urgent care, paid her bills, and got her the antibiotics she needed. Nana came out of her fever almost a different person.
She’s funny and sharp. Even her voice has changed, like she has a country accent now. She walks differently, actually sees her granddaughters instead of basically looking through them to her next hair appointment. Ella is starting to kind of like her. Brooklyn loves her and is attached to her, which blows Ella’s mind. A lot happened between them, while she was living at Mr. Reese’s house. Part of her is glad to share the burden of being Brooklyn’s nanny and playmate and best friend and nighttime comforter, but part of her feels so threatened at losing something. She’s not even sure what’s being lost. She just knows that Nana has gone from some weird caricature of a country-club queen to a real person. And she also knows that Nana is dating Steve, the VFR wrestler who looks like a banker, and actually seems to love him.
Life with the VFR is pretty sweet. They have their own motor home, and yeah, Ella sleeps in a tiny bunk bed over the cab, but it’s her own bed, and her dad didn’t die nearby and it doesn’t smell like dead cat, so she can’t complain. Nine women—who have no knowledge of that night—still sleep in the tour bus where it happened, but she made it clear she’ll never set foot in there again, even if it has brand-new carpet.
They travel, and Harlan’s built extra days into their schedule so the fighters can rest and they can enjoy whatever city they’re in or spend time at a nearby beach. She’s seen more of Florida than she ever did in her previous life, and none of it with the ominous storm of her father sitting just a little offscreen in every photograph, ready to explode at a moment’s notice.
But the coolest thing is that now that the VFR is popular, Harlan is loaded, and when he found out she had the vaccine recipe, he made a few calls and bought the right machinery. Ella emailed Leanne for some names, and now Tara and Pedro travel along with the VFR in their own motor home and vaccinate as many people as they can, as many people as want it. Everyone in the VFR got the vaccine first, of course—Ella was so proud to be the one holding the needle.
Like Leanne and River said, there are still people out there who cling to their disease, who carry an illegal baggie of pepper, knowing that as long as they want to roam free, they’ll be safe from whatever previously threatened them. Ella doesn’t blame them. Not everyone’s monsters have been exorcised.
It’s actually been nice, letting the past go. Ella has a new phone with a new number. She has a new email account. Nobody back home knows where she is, how to find her, if she’s alive or dead. Olivia and Sophie probably don’t even notice that she’s gone. Hayden sent her one more email titled I MEAN IT FOR REAL, and she logged out of that address and never looked back.
She has Brooklyn and her mom and Nana. She has everyone in the VFR, which is like a family. She has Indigo, who’s become the best friend she’s ever had, and who somehow finds all the best music and knows exactly which taqueria to visit in whatever city they’re in. And she has Arlene and Chris and Sienna and Harlan, who’s like some magical combination of grizzly bear, movie star, and rich uncle.
And maybe the weirdest part is that Ella has a paying job now. She helps Sienna cook all the food, and she gets a real wage, and she’s got her own bank account without her dad’s name on it.
No. Wait.
The weirdest part is that her mom is basically a famous pro wrestler. The VFR is expanding, selling out bigger and bigger venues. Celebrities pay to stop by the greenroom, and Ella has pics of herself with her mom and Guy Fieri and John Oliver and Nicki Minaj, although not all at once.
Things are, impossibly, good.
The Violence is disappearing, whether because of herd immunity or heavy mosquito spraying or the fact that the vaccine is spreading, slowly but surely, thanks to an army of secret volunteers. The expensive one that rich people pay for? No one needs it. The guy who bought it went under in some insider trading scam. The government never actually developed one. The president is being impeached—again. The world is righting itself.
And they never talk about Dad.
Like, ever.
There aren’t a ton of good memories, and the last one set everything else on fire.
Even Brooklyn doesn’t ask about him, although Ella’s pretty certain that one day, when she’s older, she’s going to have questions.
Ella kept her shielded the whole time, and she’s pretty sure Brooklyn didn’t see anything. After Chris covered him up, Brooklyn asked what the lump was, and Ella said it was dirty laundry, and Brooklyn seemed to believe her. By all rights, the kid should be completely messed up, but she still dances through life in mismatched socks and a tiara, although Harlan bought her a couple that aren’t chipped and cracked, which won Brooklyn’s love forever.
Living in the motor home with her mother, grandmother, and sister, everything came out, bit by bit, all the words Ella never thought she’d say or hear. Each one of them had a story to tell, and there were so many apologies made and accepted, so many tears, so many hugs. Ella isn’t sorry for anything she did while she was out there, alone in the world, and her mother doesn’t want her to be. Nana is sorry for pretty much everything, but hearing from her and Brooklyn about what they went through together—it made her go from hating Nana to maybe possibly understanding her. People call her Patty now. Chelsea calls her Mom, but with a lot more warmth than she used to. It’s the happiest Ella’s home life has ever been, which seems like an odd thing to say after a pandemic and the death of a parent.
Which isn’t to say she’s not totally messed up.
She is.
And she has a counseling session every Thursday with Arlene where they work through it, and at first she was resistant, but it really does help.