Mary saw Hannah cock her head inquisitively and crane her neck to better see her squatting sister, the curiosity of the uninitiated. “Just give me the bag, Bunny,” Mary snapped, and Hannah quickly passed it down, then faced straight ahead, her cheeks flushed. As Mary reached inside and pulled out a thick maxi pad, fixing it over the stain, she realized that while there was little she hid from Hannah there was also little she fully explained. Mary pulled her jeans up and stood in one swift motion, then she got back in the truck, and staring at Hannah’s profile, she pulled the door shut. “Sorry,” she said. “I just didn’t want to sit there bleeding everywhere.”
After many, many more miles, Mary nodded to a sign. “Look,” she said.
Hannah followed the direction of her sister’s attention. “What’s the Continental Divide?” she asked.
The last time they had crossed it, that great spine where the earth heaved up and split North America, Hannah had been much younger. The West was outside of Mary’s natural range. “It’s a line,” said Mary. “Of mountains. On one side, everything leads to the Atlantic. On the other, everything leads to the Pacific.”
“You mean all the rivers and streams and stuff?”
That divide always seemed profound to Mary, something with a significance greater than hydrological. “I mean everything.”
Hannah looked at the land around them, and Mary suddenly wished that they were taking the high road, the difficult road. The road with the grand views and dramatic vistas. They were passing through the Great Basin, where the mountains bowed away, letting high arid land create the pass the early settlers used to travel when the country was untamed and loosely mapped. She imagined the white curves of their covered wagons like gaping mouths, a visible symbol of their propensity for hardship and error.
Mary leaned forward so her fingers touched the glass of the windshield as the Blazer sped past the sign. “Crossed it first,” she said, smiling at her sister.
But Hannah looked at Mary as if she were getting too old for these games. “So we’re going to the Pacific?” she asked.
Mary nodded. “Yeah, Bunny,” she said.
After the sun bled out into the enormous sky, after its color was leached by night, after a star-speckled blanket replaced all that was above them, after Mary’s eyelids began to feel weighted, the Chase girls pulled off the interstate and found the warm lights of a small motel set near the side of the road.
Mary stretched her arms, pushing against the resistance of the fixed steering wheel. “I’m glad we’re stopping,” she said. “I think I need a bed.”
Hannah looked at the sign, with its movable black letters advertising the room rate. “Thirty-nine dollars a night,” she said, her voice hopeful. “That’s not bad.” Hannah always preferred motels to camping and knew the disappointment of pulling back out of the parking lot when Mary deemed an establishment too expensive.
Mary felt a yawn overtake her words. “Yeah,” she said, talking through an open mouth. “It’s not too bad.”
In the room, Mary dropped her backpack onto the floor just inside the door. “I’m taking a shower,” she said. “I feel disgusting.”
Hannah followed her in and more gingerly placed her own bag at the foot of the double bed. “I’ll have a bath when you’re done.”
Mary turned on the water and let it run hot for several minutes as she sat on the toilet naked, the still water below. She let the room become hot, let her skin start to bead with sweat, then she drew back the vinyl curtain and stepped over the wall of the tub into the water’s stream. Mary always luxuriated in showers like this, in warm water washing over her body in a place that was someplace other than where she had been that morning. It felt like a baptism. A rebirth that could happen again and again.
She drew her hand between her legs and washed herself clean, rubbing her hands over a slick wet bar of peach-hued soap, then letting them slide up and down her body, under her arms, up to her neck.
When she turned off the water, her fingertips were wrinkled and white. She turned her head upside down and dried it roughly with a thin white towel, put on a fresh pair of underwear, hand-washed the stained ones in the sink, then she opened the door and left the bright bathroom in a cloud of steam. Hannah was sitting on their bed, her back against the pillows, her knees angled up, and a notebook in her lap.
“Whatcha doin’?” asked Mary, as she reached into her bag and pulled out a T-shirt, putting it on over her head, the ends of her hair saturating its fabric.
Hannah didn’t raise her head. “Writing a letter.” The dim lamp beside her cast a wan yellow light through the room.
“To who?”
Hannah took a breath, annoyed either by the interruption or her inability to put words to page. “Shawn,” she said.
“You miss him,” Mary said, trying to mask her surprise as fact. There was only one boy Mary missed after he was gone. As she looked at Hannah, as she thought of how the childish lilt had left her voice, of how her pink pilled T-shirt stretched across her chest. And Mary felt a panicked urgency to better arm her sister for womanhood, to find out just how mature she had become. She sat on the edge of the bed.
“Is he the first boy you’ve liked like this?”
Hannah gave her an annoyed glance. “I never said I liked him,” she mumbled, her gaze again on her letter. And Mary saw her flush.
“But you do.”
Her brows tight, Hannah stared at her notebook.
Mary’s voice was soft when she spoke. “You know about sex, right?”
“Geeze, Mary!” said Hannah, angrily closing her notebook. “Don’t be disgusting!”
“It’s important, Bunny.”
Hannah grunted and, with her notebook clutched to her chest, made for the bathroom. “I don’t want to talk about this!” The door slammed behind her.
Mary waited a moment. “Bunny,” she called. When only silence met her, she rose and walked toward the thin, hollow bathroom door. “Bunny,” she said again, her hand trying the knob, feeling it halt.
“I need privacy!”
Mary paused for a moment, looking at the blurred lights of the parking lot beyond the drawn ruffled curtain. “Mom never really told me about sex.” She felt herself smile. “I think she was scared that she’d give me ideas. But we all want what we want, Bunny. We’re all just animals, really.” She felt Hannah’s attention beyond their divide. “Just make sure you tell me before you do it. There’s some stuff you need to do. To be safe.”
And though Hannah didn’t respond, though she wouldn’t come out of the bathroom until Mary was under the covers and the television was yammering in the background, Mary knew by Hannah’s inability to meet her eye that she had heard her.
THE CHASE GIRLS STAYED THE NEXT MORNING until it was time to check out, lying on the bed and basking in the infinitude of being nowhere. The motel served Saran-Wrapped Danish, hard-boiled eggs, and oranges for breakfast, and Mary and Hannah ate them in their room, Hannah feeling the optimism of going somewhere, Mary feeling the relief of having left. The Chase girls were always happiest in those brief moments of in-between, when neither of them was sacrificing, neither of them being sacrificed.
When it was time to go, Mary stopped at the front desk.
“Enjoy your stay?” asked the woman who sat there. She had round features and a gap between her front teeth. She wore her thin blond hair pulled half back on her head and didn’t look up from her book as she spoke.