“There’s going to be flies and all manner of smells, some of which will be me vomiting, so please just do it.”
They retreated down the row. I pulled out a scarf from my back pocket and wrapped it twice around my face. It reeked of petrol fumes that made my head woozy. I’d also commandeered a pair of thick gloves with a built-in ice scraper. I pulled these on and checked that the others had gone far enough away. Then I took a deep breath and wrenched open the passenger door, hitting the ground as the swarm of flies pelted over my head. I scrambled up and grabbed the door handle to haul myself inside the vehicle. The stench absorbed me like a sponge, and I found myself trying to palm it away with one hand while I reached for the atlas with the other. The map splatted down into the footwell, and I fell back onto the road, pulling the scarf down just in time to heave onto the back wheel.
“Told you,” I said to Lola and Jack, who were watching me from three car-lengths away. When my stomach settled, I crept low along the road and slid my hand inside to grab the atlas, slamming the door shut as soon as I had it and scurrying away in a crouch like a rat with a morsel. I threw the map at Lola, who caught it in gloved hands, and ripped my scarf off. Jack handed me a packet of wet wipes, and I disinfected my face and hands while he did the same to the cover of the map.
“Tell me it has grid references,” I said, through a mouthful of lemon-scented tissue.
Lola flipped through the pages.
“It has grid references,” she said, after settling on a page and folding the book open to inspect it. “Could it be the Yorkshire Moors?”
“Let me see,” Jack and I said, at the same time.
“No, somewhere over here.” Lola made a circle with her fingernail. “On the coast. They’re taking us to a harbor.”
“I never realized the Yorkshire Dales was different to the Yorkshire Moors,” I said. We had broken into the garden center café, and the kids were spread out between the tables, munching organic apples and knobbly carrots from the farmers’ market stalls and tasteless fair-trade chocolate from the display by the checkout. The air was humid with the pall of rotting salad leaves.
“What goes on in all these places?” Lola asked, tracing over the map all the neatly labeled villages and towns that lay between us and the coast.
“I know more about the Serengeti than Yorkshire.”
“That’s not surprising; you grew up there.” Lola glanced to where Joni was hunched over a barbecue tray out on the patio, toasting sweet-corn cobs to eat on the long drive. “Mom still thinks home is Pennsylvania. I know it’s my roots and all that. Don’t tell her I said so, but the place doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“People are jigsaws, I think, made up of all their experiences. Home may be one big piece or lots of little pieces, but it’s only one part of the picture.” I whisked creamer into my tea, trying to break up the archipelago of powder lumps on the surface. “When I was a kid my mother went through a phase of saying ‘there’s no place like home’ in this ominous voice that she had when she’d been drinking. I guess I hadn’t seen The Wizard of Oz, because I thought she meant there was no such thing as home. I thought it was a bit brutal, even as a six-year-old.” I laughed a bit to show Lola that no harm was done. She just gnawed her lip in response. “In retrospect, I think she was very unhappy. But, of course, you never consider that your parents might be happy or unhappy or anything in between. But anyway. Jack’s an expat kid, too, right?”
“His parents moved to Hong Kong after his father left the army.”
“Right.” I sipped the tea and shoved the plastic drink away.
She poured some Snapple into a teacup and savored it while she studied the map. Jack and Kofi had gone back for Woody. We would go ahead to check out these coordinates from a vantage point on a cliff top. The map showed a lookout symbol, and I thought I knew the place: Whitby Abbey. I’d never been there, but it was a famous tourist attraction, the site of picturesque ruins. It would be sign-posted and easy for Jack to find. We planned to rendezvous there later. But Lola was still with Jack in spirit if not in body, her finger tracing his route to the school. It wasn’t far, but our world had shrunk, and its dangers, concentrated. My scale had shifted so that I could no longer see the big picture, only the next mile and the one after that, as though I were driving at night with my headlights on. We traveled a land of little terrors, a place where one misstep might kill: one gulp of tainted air, one wound we couldn’t treat, one single bullet. Death would be small. Tiny. It would snatch us in the space between one breath and the next.
“Where is Jack now, do you think?” Lola snapped me out of it.
“He’ll be fine.” Because what could go wrong for an untrained teenage driver who has “borrowed” a brand-new Audi for a race across the countryside to find three lost children? “We’ll see them tonight at the coast.”
Lola scraped her chair back from the table with a grating protest and gathered up the map. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I’m excited about the prospect of sitting on a real toilet.”
I watched her high-step across the shop and into the ladies, and I closed my eyes and said a quick prayer for Jack. Come back safely, Jack, I whispered inside my head. Don’t make Lola hate me forever, you cocky little bastard.
The peaceful interlude created by the snack break degenerated into bickering between the boys. I sent them off to the loo in batches, while the others went scavenging for more drinks and rations. Billy scooted onto my lap, and I wiped his mucky face with a napkin dipped in Snapple. I don’t know why I bothered: his clothes were stiff with filth. The genteel setting of the garden center café threw our dishevelment into the spotlight. Quite frankly, we were a shambles.
Joni came in looking for carrier bags for the food. She sniffed the air in the café. “We stink.” She walked over and hammered on the door of the boys’ toilet, yelling at them to get washed.
“Let’s pick out some clean clothes.” I pulled my kids over to the gift shop.
“Isn’t that stealing?” Charlie asked, his eyes fixed on a cabinet of Swiss Army knives.
“In the circumstances, I think it’s known as looting.”
His eyeballs swiveled back to mine. “Isn’t looting naughty?”