I've lived in the city my whole life.
I'm not saying I didn't know all this other stuff was out here. I knew. I went to school. I saw pictures of the country. I watched TV. And I saw some movies. So I knew it was out there. But that didn't exactly prepare me for this enormous world.
I know Mercury and Jupiter and Pluto are out there, too. I just hadn't planned on visiting anytime soon.
Now, I don't want to seem in any way like I'm not happy. Because I am. Very happy. And if there's one thing I really don't like, it's when people get everything they ever dreamed of and more, but they're still not happy. All they can do is complain.
I never want to be one of those people. So I will just say two things very quickly and then get back to being happy.
One. I am in a lot more pain than I realized. I didn't know how bad I was hurt until the Vicodin ran out. Tony was really nice to get me some ibuprofen, and I took about eight, I think, which helped a little but then it also made me sick to my stomach.
Okay, that's too much complaining. I don't like complaining.
Number two is not a complaint so much as a fear: I don't know if Tony's grandmother knows I'm coming. Not to mention me and Natalie. So what if, at the end of the line, she just says no?
I keep telling myself that Tony and I would work out that problem together. And that helps a little. But it keeps coming back into my head.
Enough of that. I'm going back to happy.
We made a stop late at night, after dark. It was one of those stops where they turn on the lights and you can get off the bus for fifteen minutes if you want. Go in the station. Walk around. You have no idea how much it means to walk around if you haven't ridden a bus for days.
I thought Tony was sleeping, so I got off by myself. Left Natalie sleeping draped over Tony's lap. Hoping she wouldn't wake up and find out that she had trusted someone in her sleep.
I didn't go inside.
I was just standing in this field near the bus station. Looking at the stars.
I'm pretty sure that, when Tony first told me about the stars, he thought I wasn't listening. You can always tell when someone thinks you're not listening. It makes them talk a lot harder. I was listening, but I was just worried about the thing with the two kids he didn't know existed, and I guess that's why I seemed far away.
I wanted to see so many stars. If that was really true.
Maybe it wouldn't be true until we got to his grandmother's house in the desert. But we had gone far enough that I thought it would pay to check.
I dropped my head back. It was a clear, clear night. There were more stars than I had ever seen in the city. Maybe not as many as Tony said to expect. But then again, we weren't half there yet. Maybe we were picking up stars all along the way.
I decided I could wait.
And, while I was waiting, this was enough in the star department to keep me busy for now.
After a minute I felt Tony move up against my shoulder.
I spun around real quick to see where Natalie was. If she was still on the bus. You can't just leave a baby on a bus. Sick people will steal a baby. But she was sleeping on Tony's shoulder. So I relaxed.
He put his arm around my waist. Soft. Careful not to hurt me. It hurt a little. Everything hurt a little. But I didn't say so, because I didn't want to make it go away.
I said, quiet so as not to wake Natalie, “Are there more stars than this in the desert?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Lots more.”
I liked his voice. It was starting to sound familiar to me. I liked that he was not a guy who would leave Natalie on a bus.
“This is nice for now, though,” I said.
And he said, “You can sort of think of it like a coming attraction.”
Then we were going to get back on the bus, but just before we did, I saw this family—a guy and a lady and two kids—standing there, like they were seeing somebody off. And they had a golden retriever.
Sometimes I'm afraid of dogs, because where I lived in the city, they're not all nice. Not by a long shot. But golden retrievers are always nice. So far as I know. When I was a kid, my best friend, Stacy, had a golden retriever. I loved that dog. He died, though. She said he died of old age, but he was only twelve. That seems too young to die of old age, even though I know they say that's about right for dogs. And even though he did act kind of old. But it still doesn't seem fair.
I went up to the couple and asked if I could pet their dog, and they said I could.
The dog wagged his tail at me, and he licked my hand three times, so that made me feel good.
For a long time, not much has made me feel good, so when something does, I notice. It may be some weirdly small thing that somebody else wouldn't even bother to tell. Maybe wouldn't even notice. But I haven't had as much practice with this happy thing as they have.
I think Tony was afraid of the dog, but I told him to just reach his hand out. He did, and the dog licked the back of his hand, and he smiled.
Then, just as we were getting on the bus, this girl a few years older than me got on with a little boy. A little blond boy about five or six years old.
So, I don't mean to complain, but that's three.
I still did my best to get back to happy. But that little blond boy made it a much longer trip.
There's something about a bus trip that makes you want to sleep. Maybe it's just the sheer boredom of it. The country is so big, and the bus is so slow. You start to ache to put more miles behind you, faster. Sleep is a blessing, because you wake up, and a piece of the trip is over. And you blessedly missed it.
But there's more to it than just that. There's also something about the bus that makes you able to sleep. Something about the rolling, vibrating motion. It hypnotizes you. The flat, monotonous scenery, rolling by the window. The farms and wheat fields that could just as easily be part of the last state, or the next. It's better than counting sheep.
Add to that the fact that I hadn't had one decent night's sleep in probably close to two weeks, and I think it forms a clear picture. I slept most of the first night and most of the second day. In fits and starts. With interruptions for walking dazed into bus stations, where the lights were always too bright, to use a real restroom or buy a bottle of orange juice. But, back on the bus, I'd be back to sleep.
Half the time when I woke up, Maria would be sleeping. Sometimes Natalie would be looking past me out the window. I wondered if she viewed it as something like a TV or movie screen. Or if she fully understood that we were moving miles away from everything we had ever known. My hope was that she didn't fully understand. Because that was a truth I was barely old enough and brave enough to handle myself.
The second night I woke up and knew that, unfortunately, I'd had enough sleep to last me for a while.
Maria was asleep with her head on my shoulder. Natalie was sleeping across both of our laps, her legs and feet on Maria's lap, her upper body on mine. Her thumb in her mouth, of course, and a death grip on that precious piece of fur. One of her elbows was digging into my thigh. It hurt a little, but I didn't want to disturb her.
Her hair was falling across her face, so I reached out and brushed it back again. It felt so soft. I got that feeling again, like when I stood in the thrift store touching that rabbit fur for the first time. The feeling that I understood Natalie and her needs.
So for a minute I just stroked her hair. Brushed my hand over it, enjoying not only the softness, but the peacefulness of her sleep.
Then I put my hand in the middle of her back and rubbed it softly. Because I knew how much it had meant to have my mother do that for me. Kids need to be touched. Loved in a way they can actually feel. If I was going to be one of the grown-ups in this kid's life, I was going to see to it that she had some of what every kid needs. It's only right. It's just the only decent way to be.
I felt Maria's head shift slightly on my shoulder. I looked over to see that she was awake and watching me.
“It makes me so happy to see you two getting along,” she said.
“I want you to be happy,” I said. And it was true. But we both knew I hadn't done it just for her, because I hadn't even known she was awake. Which, I guess, is part of why it made her so happy.
She kissed me softly, and then we fell under the spell of kissing again, the way we did on Delilah's couch. It went on for a long time. Her tongue felt so velvety smooth against mine, and I remember thinking how real that was. And maybe if that was real, so was all the other stuff that seemed like it never would—never could—hap-pen. But those were just disjointed thoughts in my head, and they didn't even last very long. Kisses like that fill up the whole world. Drive every thought out of your head. Pull you right down into the present moment. Which was probably a good place for me to stay.
In a few minutes we had to consciously force ourselves to stop, because it was pulling us toward a place we couldn't possibly go yet.
Instead she just leaned the side of her head against mine and we talked in a whisper.
“It's hard to stop,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Does your grandmother know I'm coming? Or does she think it's just you? Tell me the truth, now. Please.”
“She knows you're coming. She's fine with it.”
“But she doesn't know about Natalie.”
I got a little clutch in my stomach when she said that. “I'm not sure. Delilah is the only one who's talked to her since …” I trailed off, not quite knowing how to label that Meeting Natalie moment. “I'm not sure if that's something she would have mentioned or not.” I tried to sound casual. I tried not to let on that I was worried about that, too.
“How long can we stay with her?”
“As long as we need, I guess. As long as we want to. She has this little guesthouse.”
I was planning on saying more but she cut me off.
“We'll have our own house?”
“Well, a little one. But I have to warn you. She says it's a mess. It's going to take us probably a solid week of work to get it ready. We'll probably have to sleep on her fold-out couch until then. All three of us. So the first week could be hard.”
“No, that'll be good,” she said. “That'll give us something to do. I'm good when I get to clean or something. Takes me out of myself.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes. I was wondering if she could even help clean in her condition. I think we were both looking out the window. I know I was. I thought I could see the dark outlines of mountains in the distance. The scenery was changing. Suddenly it felt very real, being in a whole different part of the country. It felt foreign and strange and exposed. I reminded myself of Mojave, and the windmills, because it was something familiar. Something I held out to myself, for down the road. A place I already knew and loved. Even if I hadn't seen it for years.
Then I felt bad for Maria, because she didn't even have that.
“I never showed you the picture of the windmills,” I said. “I brought it with me that first night. That first night you weren't there.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “I don't even want to think about that night.”
“I'm sorry.”
“It's not your fault. What did you do with the picture?”
“Oh. It's with me. But it's in my big bag. The one that's in the baggage compartment. Not the one under the seat.”
“Oh,” she said. “I guess it doesn't matter anyway. I'll see them with my own eyes soon enough.” We watched the landscape roll by in silence for a little while longer. I remember wishing I could lie down. Get into some other position. My ankles and feet felt too big. They were blowing up like balloons. My back had a kink in it. I was beginning to hate the bus seat. It felt like a prison. And we still had so far to go.
I started thinking that maybe it was weird that Maria and I didn't talk much. That she hadn't asked me where we'd stay or how long until now. That she still wasn't telling me more about herself or asking more about me. It hit me that maybe that was weird.
I say maybe because how was I to know? Other than Delilah, I'd never gotten to know anybody. So how could I know if we were doing it the usual way or not? But something felt empty about it. And I couldn't bring it up, because I didn't know how a thing like this was supposed to be.
As if she was reading my mind, she said, “I don't even know your last name.”
“Mundt,” I said.
“Oh. Mine's Arquette. I just thought it was too weird to run away with somebody when you don't even know their last name.”
“Easy enough to fix, though,” I said. Liking that she and I seemed to have been in something of the same place in our heads.
Then she said, “Tell me again about it.”
“What? The desert?”
“Yeah. The windmills and the heat and the mountains and the stars at night. Like you did that night on the subway.”
So I ran through it all again, with all the detail I could possibly remember. I knew she needed it. So I tried to make it feel real.
THE LAST DAY AND A HALF WERE HELL. I don't know how to say it any better or any more plainly than that. It was torture.
First of all, I can barely describe how my body felt after three or four days of sitting in basically the same position. My back screamed with pain. I had a serious kink in my neck from sleeping wrong on it. My feet were so swollen it hurt just to wear my shoes. But I had to, because if I took them off, my feet would have swelled to the point where I doubt I could have gotten them back on again.
Then I had to try to translate my own pain into what Maria must be feeling. How would I feel if I had all this plus broken ribs?
I was pretty sure I could see the answer on her face. The skin of her face looked almost gray to me. She spent a lot of time with her eyes pressed shut. Once I saw her take nine Advil, all in one handful. I wondered if even that helped much at all.
I started feeling apologetic about it. I never should have asked her to leave when she was still injured, and in pain. What was I thinking? How selfish was that?
“I'm really sorry I couldn't afford something better,” I said. “Like a plane.”
She looked at me strangely. Like that was the last thing in the world she expected me to say. “I couldn't even have afforded the bus,” she said. “So don't feel bad.”
But I think I mostly still did.
Then, to cap it all off, Natalie entered a new phase. She would pull her thumb out of her mouth. Look at me for a moment. Then turn to her mother and say, quietly—almost under her breath— ”Where's C.J.?”
I had no idea who that was, and part of me wanted to ask, but I didn't. Maybe they had left a dog or a cat behind. Or a best friend. Maybe that was what she called her father. Which made me wonder again what kind of bond she had with her father. If she missed him.
I could tell it was hard for Maria to be forced to talk at all, but she usually said something vaguely comforting in return.
“Don't worry about it, honey, we're going to a new home.”
“We'll be fine with just us. We're going to a really nice new place.”
“Don't be afraid, honey. Everything is going to be fine.”
Except for one time. There was this one time. I had been looking out the window. Noticing how the landscape had turned to desert. We were either in Arizona or New Mexico, I'm not sure which one. I wanted to point it out to Maria, because to me it was a source of comfort. We were already in the desert. But I'd seen her look out the window once or twice and not register much reaction. I didn't want to be like Natalie, forcing her to respond through her pain. So I just watched it myself, and took comfort.
After a while I closed my eyes. But I wasn't asleep. But I think maybe Maria thought I was. I heard Natalie's thumb pulling out of her mouth. That soft, wet sucking sound I'd heard so many times. And I braced for it.
“Where's C.J.?”
“I miss him too, honey,” Maria said.
I sat still with my eyes closed for a long time. I didn't want her to know I'd been awake. I could feel this pain like a knife slicing into the vertical space between my ribs. Just under my heart. It was a radiating pain, almost a burning.
She might have been talking about a dog or a cat. She might not have been talking about him.
This tumbled around and around in my head for a long time. Finally I just had to put a stop to it. I just had to put it out of my mind. There was nothing else I could think to do. But the point of that knife never found its way out again. Every time I took a full, deep breath, I could feel that little knife point wedged underneath my ribs. Reminding me.
BY THE TIME WE PULLED INTO BAKERSFIELD, I was just full-on scared. What if Grandma Annie wasn't there? I hadn't even talked to her myself since finding out when our bus was arriving. Did I even have her phone number with me? If not, would it be listed? Could I get a listing for Delilah and then call Delilah and get Grandma Annie's number?
When I thought of Delilah, a strange feeling swayed through my stomach. If only I could be sitting on her couch right now. Where everything was familiar and safe.
Grandma Annie will be there, I told myself.
But that was scary, too. What if she was someone I could barely talk to? What if we didn't like each other much now that I was grown? What if she took one look at Natalie and said, “No way. That's just pushing a favor too far.”
I tried to avoid Maria's eyes, because I didn't want her to see how scared I was. And I didn't want to see how scared she was. But I think we both knew that we both knew.
As the bus turned into the station, I saw a blue pickup truck with reddish-brown primer spots sitting more or less by itself in the parking lot. I couldn't have told you, until that exact moment, that Grandma Annie used to drive a blue pickup truck with reddish-brown rust primer all over it. But I knew when I saw it. I didn't figure it was the same truck, though. She must've gotten a new car by now. It just reminded me.
Maria carried Natalie into the station. I carried the two enormous bags.
She was there. Waiting to see who got off the bus. Problem is, when you get to a station, it's like a break for everybody. A chance to get off the bus and eat or walk around or use the bathroom. So everybody got off the bus, whether they were going to Bakersfield or not.
So I was looking at Grandma Annie, knowing it was her—with her sun-damaged skin and her long, straight gray-blond hair and her unusual gray eyes—but she kept looking right through me. Looking at everybody to try to see somebody who could be me.
I dropped the heavy bags, raised one hand. Caught her eye. I watched her face change. I wish I could describe how it changed, but it's hard. It started out as worry, that's easy enough. But it turned into something deeper and harder to pinpoint. If I had to try, I'd say it turned into pleasure at seeing me, mixed with sadness over not seeing me for so long. After all, I'd grown a good three feet since then. I was like walking, breathing evidence of all that water under the bridge.
She ran to me, and threw her arms around me, and I picked her up. It wasn't hard. She was little and light. I didn't know I was about to do that. But her head barely came up to about my shoulder, so I just grabbed her around the ribs and picked her up to hug her, and we both laughed.
“Oh, my God, look at you,” she said. “You're a grown man.”
I put her down and saw she was crying.
“Grandma, this is Maria.”
She wiped at her eyes, like she was ashamed of her own tears. Extended a hand for Maria to shake. At this point she must have made some kind of mental note, even in her current over-emotional state, of the fact that Maria was holding a kid. But nothing got said out loud. Nothing registered to the degree that I could see it.
“And Natalie,” I said.
“Hello, Maria. Hello, Natalie. Pleased to meet you.”
She shook Maria's hand, then offered to do the same for Natalie, who buried her face in her mother's neck.
“She's just shy,” Maria said. “Please don't take it personally.”
I watched Grandma Annie take a big, deep breath. Settle herself into the moment.
“Well,” she said, “let's go.” I grabbed the big bags again, and we walked. “We'll be a little crowded in the front of that truck,” she said. “But I guess we'll manage.”
We said nothing in response. I wasn't sure what to say. I wasn't sure if I had just been told there was a problem or not. But one way or another, it was a problem I couldn't solve.
We walked out of the bus station together and out into the desert morning heat. I guess it was about eighty. Not so bad as it would be later that afternoon. But it felt like the desert. It wasn't New York City. You could know that with your eyes closed.
“Remember this old truck?” I heard her ask. And, sure enough, she walked us right up to the blue pickup truck with the rust-primer spots.
“This truck is kind of hard to forget,” I said.
“Still runs great. And that's what counts, right?”
The truck didn't have air-conditioning. Which is tough in the desert. But I guess that's not what counts.
“It has two-sixty air-conditioning,” she said.
“I never heard of that,” I said. “What is it?”
“Roll down two windows and drive sixty miles per hour.”
So that's what we did.
WHEN WE GOT TO THE PLACE where I could first see the windmills on the pass up ahead, I pointed them out to Natalie. First, I mean. I mean, it was a general announcement. An overall announcement. I wanted Maria to see them, too, of course.
But what I said was, “Look, Natalie. Look at the windmills.”
I'm not sure why. Tradition, I guess. Kids need to see windmills.
Maria was sitting in the middle, between me and Grandma Annie, and she ducked her head down to see. “Wow,” she said. “Wow. Somehow that's not what I was picturing. I mean … I don't know what I was picturing. But, I mean … wow.”
Natalie just stared at first. Blinked. Then she decided she wanted to see them out the window, so she launched off Maria's lap, pushed off with both hands and landed on my lap, and it hurt Maria's ribs. We could all hear it. She let out a sound like a cross between a grunt and a roar. I could feel the rabbit-fur muff land lightly on my feet.
Natalie hung her whole head out the window, her thin hair blowing back in the hot wind, and I instinctively held her around the waist, as if she might fly away like a bit of paper.
“You okay?” I asked Maria.
She nodded gravely. “My ribs are taped up,” she said to Grandma Annie.
“Oh,” Grandma Annie said. A note of something in her voice. One of those things you can hear even when the person isn't saying it. “Had an accident?”
I looked at her quickly and cut my eyes away and Maria never met her eyes.
“Yeah,” Maria said. “An accident.”
But after that things were weirdly uncomfortable. And I wasn't sure why. So I did the only thing I could think to do. I hung my head out the window and looked at the windmills with Natalie. It made me happy, like something you thought was only a dream, and now here it is. I think Natalie could tell I was happy. I'm not even sure what makes me say that. But I'm still pretty sure it was true.
I noticed that she didn't have her thumb in her mouth for maybe the first time since I'd met her.
I said, “Natalie, do you like the windmills?”
“Yeah,” she said.
Word number four from Natalie to me.