She felt she should say more, but her thoughts would not seem to untangle. And, suddenly, sleep was no longer in the picture.
Bea stepped out of the van in her pajamas and bare feet and looked up at the riot of stars for a few minutes. Inside herself, without words, Bea was fighting back against a strong, uneasy feeling that their adventure was about to come to a crashing end.
Bea figured she had been driving in the dark for at least an hour, maybe more like two. The girl shifted and seemed, from the sound of it, to be waking up.
Bea heard a muffled sentence, but couldn’t make out Allie’s sleepy words.
“What did you say?” Bea asked over her shoulder.
A minute later the girl flopped into the passenger seat, wrapped in a blanket. Her hair fell over her face, a disheveled mess. Bea could see her blinking too much by the soft light of the dashboard instruments.
“I said, ‘Why are we moving?’”
“I couldn’t sleep. So I figured I’d drive.”
“What time is it?”
“No idea. It’s too dark to see my watch.”
“What time was it when you started driving?”
“About three.”
They drove in silence for a time, the only sounds the familiar hum of the engine and the occasional whoosh of another car going by headed south.
“So . . . ,” Allie began, “not to criticize or anything . . . but it sort of seems like this hurry thing of yours is getting to be . . . maybe a little bit . . . obsessive?”
Bea paused, feeling she had to shape her thoughts before presenting them.
“I keep having this feeling,” Bea said after a time, “that something will happen. Something . . .” She knew there was more to say, but she never said it.
“That’s just a leftover feeling from Fort Bragg.”
“Maybe,” Bea said, though she didn’t think so.
“But it doesn’t feel that way.” It wasn’t a question.
“No.”
Allie sat back and looked out the window.
“Any idea where we are?” the girl asked after a time. “Oh, wait. Never mind. There’s the turnoff for Lake Quinault. I know where that is from the map. You know it’s rain forest around here?”
“I thought rain forests were only in places like South America.”
“Most of them, I guess. But there’s still some in Olympic National Forest. Which is more or less where we are.”
“How do you know all this?” Bea asked, her voice a high whine of emotion she had not seen coming. “Everywhere we go, you seem to know something about the place. You’re like an encyclopedia with legs and a mouth.”
“So I paid attention in school. I had no idea that was a bad thing.”
“It isn’t,” Bea said with a sigh. “It’s very good. And I’m glad to know the things you tell me. I guess it just makes me feel like I know nothing.”
A mile or two of silence.
“You can go back to sleep,” Bea said. “I promise to drive carefully while you’re not in your seat belt.”
Allie scratched her nose. Then she rose without comment and disappeared into the back of the van.
A few moments later Bea heard the girl’s voice drift back up.
“You have these feelings a lot?”
“The inadequacy thing, you mean?”
“No, I mean that something bad is going to happen.”
“If you mean, do I worry a lot, yes. I always have. But an actual sense that I can feel something coming? Not once before in my life,” Bea said. “It’s actually quite unlike me.”
She waited for an answer from the girl, but none ever came.
They were driving along the water at Neah Bay—a place Herbert would have called “spitting distance” from their Cape Flattery destination—when Allie called for her to stop the van. Bea pulled over as best she could, but she had to drive a little farther to find any place to get off the road.
“Back up!” Allie shouted. It sounded happy, not alarmed or alarming. “Back up, Bea!”
“I can’t back up. There’s no place to park back there.”
“Fine. We’ll walk back.”
“To what?”
“Come on. You need to see this.”
They stepped out into the cool, damp morning. Into this little town on the Makah Reservation. Just at the very edge of Neah Bay, a shallow inlet along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Bea blinked, feeling the world had changed overnight. This was nothing like the coast they had been driving all these days. This was new.
She followed the girl until they stood under a tree just a few dozen yards from the beach. Allie was looking up, so Bea looked up, too.
“What are we looking at?”
“Ever seen three bald eagles in a tree?”
“I’ve never seen one bald eagle in a tree. I’ve never seen a bald eagle. They don’t have those in the Coachella Valley.”
“Well, you’ve seen three now,” Allie said.
Bea followed the girl’s pointing hand.
Halfway up the tree, spaced a few feet apart, perched three enormous birds. Identical, like triplets. Dark brown feathers. Brilliant white heads. Light-colored eyes, staring down at Bea with stern concentration. They looked almost angry. Forceful. Their beaks and talons formed a sharp color contrast of yellow.
“Wish I had a camera,” Allie said.
“Yes, that might have been a nice thing to take on our adventure, but we didn’t think of it.”
“I have my iPhone. But it’s silly to take photos on it when I’m just about to pawn it.”
Bea felt her eyes go wide.
“Those telephone-computer things are also cameras?”
The girl only sighed and shook her head. They began the walk back to the van together.
“We have to stop and get a permit,” Allie said.
“What kind of permit?”
“This is Makah Indian land. They get to charge us to be on it if they like. You need to buy a recreation permit to park here and see the sights.”
Bea stopped walking abruptly. It took Allie a minute to notice.
“See, there you go again. How do you know all this? Don’t tell me they taught you that in school.”
“No, it was on the sign. There was a sign about it when we drove onto the reservation.”
“Oh,” Bea said, and began to shuffle along again. “I guess I wasn’t paying good enough attention.”
“Here’s the thing,” Allie said, jumping back into the van. “I got the permit. And it wasn’t expensive. Only ten dollars. But the boardwalk trail to the cape is three-quarters of a mile.”
“Round-trip?”
“No. Each way. A mile and a half round-trip.”
Bea felt something sag and nearly collapse inside her.
“Oh dear. I was afraid of this. I can’t even remember the last time I walked a mile and a half.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Not driving on. Not doing anything.
“So what are you going to do?” Allie asked.
“What can I do? I’m going to walk it.”
Bea could feel a ball of tension slip out of both of them and fade.
“Good for you, Bea.”
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to come all this way and let three-quarters of a mile stymie me.”
“I don’t know what ‘stymie’ means.”
“Good. Finally. Something I know and you don’t.”