“Yeah,” replied Mary, setting the key in front of her, the room number written in masking tape and affixed to a brown plastic disc on a chain. “This is a nice place.”
With their late start, Mary knew that she would have to drive into the night, and so when they stopped for gas that evening, Mary bought a large coffee, pouring it from a discolored glass carafe into a Styrofoam cup. She felt a man at the beer case staring at her.
“Thirsty?” he asked. She turned to face him. He was rat shaped, with thin limbs and a plump torso. His hair was long in the back. She could see that he had an erection, and he shifted his weight as he looked at her, his hand still holding open the glass door of the cooler.
“No, just tired,” she said. “My medication makes me sleepy.” It took all of her will to keep her face impassive.
“What kind of medication is that,” he said, wanting to find the salacious in any and all details.
“My antipsychotics. I just got out of a mental institution.” She waited for the statement to register on his face. Then she jutted her head forward, bared her teeth, and hissed—a wide-eyed, wet-fanged, unrestrained feline hiss.
“Jesus,” he muttered, as he skittered away, glancing over his shoulder as he hurried out the door, leaving Mary to pour the cream into her coffee, smiling as she stirred.
As Mary walked back out to the truck, she looked around. All along the interstate, there were places like this, brightly lit truck stops with rows of gas pumps and glassy-eyed clerks who didn’t look up as they counted out your change. “You should put your seat down,” Mary told Hannah, as she got back in the Blazer. “Get some sleep.”
“Aren’t we gonna stop?”
“I think we should keep driving,” she said, as she turned over the engine, set the gearshift into reverse, then rested her arm over the seat as she looked behind her. “We’re making good time.”
After another hour or so, Mary saw Hannah’s eyes start to slip shut as the wide flat road skated by mountains that were shadows at the edge of the dark. Mary was looking at them, trying to make out their detail when up ahead she saw a figure slinking next to the road, four legged, black bodied, in relief against the night. She took a quick breath and sat up straighter just as it stopped and turned. Yellow eyes to yellow eyes, it looked at Mary, and just as quickly, the truck sped past; Mary looked in her rearview mirror, and it was gone.
“Bunny, did you see that?” Mary asked, without thinking; asked through quickened breath.
“What?” said Hannah.
“That animal,” she said, with less urgency, questioning now whether she should have mentioned it at all.
“What was it?” asked Hannah sleepily, adjusting herself in her seat and curling to her right.
“I don’t know,” said Mary. “It might have been nothing.”
Mary did drive all night, reaching the coast and following it south while Hannah snored lightly next to her. She drove on a road that hugged the line of earth and sea, curving where it curved, turning where it turned. Mary felt the pleasant weariness of travel in her arms as one hand loosely held the steering wheel, her left foot lodged up against the dashboard. Driving was now as reflexive and unconscious as breathing, its motions and demands were no more or less great than those of her own body.
She had passed through small sleeping towns, their windows lidded and black, and stretches of narrow road elevated above a dark ocean. She rolled her window down so she could hear it, the water’s rhythmic churning. And as she let her hand slide through the thick night air, as she played with its resistance, she felt a dreamlike smile take her face; it had been a long time since she had been near the ocean.
When the sun first reached over from the east, it cast a yellow light on the water, drawing up droplets of the Pacific with its magnetic warmth. And it was through that mist that Mary first saw it. Her foot lifted reflexively from the gas, and the Blazer glided with the road. It was a grand old hotel, set on a bluff, looking both elegant and otherworldly, both of the moment and of the past, like a place from a tale. Like a place that might be home. And though Mary would later question her memory of that moment, whether the bath of golden light was a sleepless hallucination, at the time, it seemed like the Chase girls’ own private manifest destiny.
Mary pulled onto the shoulder of the road. “Bunny, look,” said Mary, resting her hand on the back of her sleeping sister’s head. “There it is.”
Jostled, Hannah opened one eye with a sharp breath and downturned mouth. But as soon as Hannah’s eyes found it, she stilled.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” asked Mary. Hannah, of course, didn’t know why Mary had chosen this hotel. Hannah, of course, didn’t understand its significance.
Hannah still only looked, blinking her way into lucidity.
Mary reached across and pressed a button, releasing the glove compartment, and pulled out a camera. The girls rarely used it since film and developing were so expensive.
“Smile,” she said. And before Hannah could object, with her face innocent and lovely and fresh with sleep, Mary took her photograph, the hotel in the background. In a couple of weeks, the film would be developed. And Mary would stare at the photograph in a way that she sometimes did with pictures of Hannah. Then she’d do what she had done a dozen times over the past few years. She’d put it in an envelope, seal it shut, and write out an address she knew by heart. Because time could testify for what Mary couldn’t. And anyone could see how much Hannah looked like her father.
Twenty-five
1976
At first, Mary decided not to think about it. She decided to tightly fold up the facts in her head again and again. Mary could do that. Mary could lock away parts of her mind, of her heart. Mary could hide things.
But sometimes she’d lie in bed and stare up at her ceiling and listen to Diane laughing with Barry in the bedroom across the hall. And she’d let her mind unfurl itself, the inconceivable future spread out for her examination.
It was summer. The Water’s Edge had paying guests. And Diane was in love. Or seemed to be. She was dressing nicely. She was dabbing drops of perfume behind her ears. She was pulling the loosening skin of her face taut and looking in the mirror.