“I want to make it to Cape Flattery.”
“But there’s no hurry.”
“Isn’t there? Really? In one day yesterday we had what we thought might turn into a brush with the police, you decided you might surrender yourself to them, and we had a mechanical breakdown. I want to get there before anything else goes wrong.”
“Oh,” the girl said, simply.
They lay in silence for several minutes.
Then Allie said, “We can go back there, you know.”
“Back where?”
“Fort Bragg. Casper.”
“I just told you I’m anxious to get to our destination.”
“On the way back, I mean. We can go back through there. You know. If you want to see him again.”
“I don’t.”
“Oh. Well, then . . . why did you kiss him? If you were going away right after and you never wanted to see him again?”
“You just answered your own question,” Bea said.
“I don’t get it.”
“Oh, honey. Casper is a nice enough person. But the last thing I want to do is tie myself up with another man. My goodness. That’s how most of the last fifty years of my life disappeared, even though I didn’t know it before now. And believe me, that’s all it takes. One little kiss and then you’ve thrown your lot in with someone, and your whole life has to be built around him. And all the parts of you that don’t fit with him have to go into hiding, and all the ones that do have to come to the surface and act like they’re the whole of you. The entire reason I did what I did is because we both knew I’d be gone in a few hours. It’s the first time in my life I ever got to do a thing like that and not stay around to pay the price. You’ll understand when you get older.”
“I doubt it,” Allie said. “But I’m happy for you all the same.”
“Besides,” Bea said. “Must love cats.”
“Right. Must love cats. I’m with you on that.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Don’t Cross Your Boardwalks Before . . .
“Can we stop at this lighthouse?” the girl whined. “I really want to see one.”
“What’s this sudden obsession with lighthouses?” Bea asked, continuing to drive. Not even slowing.
“It’s not sudden. I’ve always liked them. But I never got to go in one.”
“How do you know they even let people go inside that one?”
“Because there’s a big sign telling people to pull in and park.”
“That hardly proves your case.”
The girl sighed deeply. She had the cat on her lap, and was scratching between Phyllis’s shoulder blades.
“Doesn’t matter anyway now,” she said, all teenage mopey. “It’s passed.”
A long pause, during which Bea assumed she was meant to feel guilty. She decided against it.
“You know,” Allie said, “there’s such a thing as too much hurry.”
“Maybe not in our situation.”
“Oregon is almost gone. We drove it in mostly one day. We hardly saw the Oregon coast.”
“I saw it. Where were you? All you had to do was turn your head left.”
“But if you don’t even have time to stop and see a lighthouse . . .”
“I’ll tell you what. After we see Cape Flattery . . . which was your idea, as you’ll recall. After we see all the coast we have ahead of us . . .”
But she stopped, and never finished her thought.
They had talked very little, if at all, about what they would do after Cape Flattery, and it wasn’t the slightest bit sorted out in Bea’s head. In fact, she wasn’t sure she could remember why it felt important to go there in the first place. Except that it felt important to go somewhere, and that seemed the farthest place imaginable.
Maybe an hour later Bea spotted a place to pull over and enjoy the view. It had room for five or six cars, with a low stone wall to keep you from rolling right over the edge and falling a hundred feet to the sea. No one was parked there.
Better yet, there was a lighthouse less than an eighth of a mile or so up the coast, and this would be a good spot from which to view it.
Bea made a sharp left and pulled in. She shifted into “Park” and shut off the motor. The lack of constant engine noise felt stunning. It felt like silence, though Bea could clearly hear dozens of seals barking, and the crashing of surf. She could feel a ghost of the vibration of the steering wheel in her arms and shoulders. It felt like buzzing.
“We stopped,” Allie said. “I don’t believe it.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Bea said, which was true enough, though not the reason she had pulled over.
“There’s no bathroom here,” Allie said.
“I’ll just have to make do.”
The girl stepped out of the van and looked around.
“Not much privacy,” she said through the open passenger door.
“You go out and look at the lighthouse from here, and I’ll stay inside and use the bucket. And then I’ll just . . . quietly empty it outside.”
“Okay,” Allie said, clearly wanting no more details. “Whatever.”
It was several minutes before Bea stepped out of the van, what with drawing all the curtains and then opening them all again.
The girl was leaning over the waist-high stone wall, barking at the seals. Imitating their raucous clatter.
Bea set the bucket in the dirt and walked to her.
She looked down the dizzying cliff to see the seals crowding the rocks at the water’s edge. The wind swept her hair back and made her narrow her eyes.
“What do they have to be so noisy about?” she asked the girl.
“Just excited about life, I guess.”
“You know . . .” But then Bea stalled.
“What?”
“We never really talk about what we’ll do after Cape Flattery.”
“Hmm,” Allie said. “Drive home, I guess.”
“Home being exactly where?”
“Oh. Good point. Maybe we’ll want to stay up there.”
“Too cold. It’s nearly Canada. Don’t forget we have no heat and no air-conditioning unless we’re driving. We have to choose our weather carefully.”
“We could go inland and down a different route and see a whole different set of things.”
“Again,” Bea said, “it’s all about the weather.”
“Right. Hot inland.”
“And only getting more so.” Bea watched the way the sunlight sparkled on a swath of ocean all the way out to the horizon. Like a path to somewhere. Somewhere not of this world. Somewhere Bea was not yet ready to go. “We could come back down the coast. And this time we could go slow and see the lighthouses.”
“That sounds like a pretty good plan,” the girl said.
“I only bring it up because I sometimes think about Cape Flattery and . . . how do I say this? I feel like maybe it’s an artificial goal.”
“No, it’s real. I found it on the map.”