Mary Miller - The Last Days of California

“Forget it,” Elise said, sitting up abruptly. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m not wearing it again until Saturday, you can tell Dad that.”

“Tell Dad what?” our father asked, opening the door. “You’re wearing those shirts, they cost me twenty dollars.”

“Each?” I said.

“That’s right, each. There’s only one ice maker working in this entire motel. This wouldn’t happen at a Days Inn.” He set the bucket on the table. He was partial to Days Inns. He had brand loyalty: Colgate, Maxwell House, Ivory soap.

“You’re the one who stopped here,” Elise said.

“I don’t like Days Inns. I always find little nests of hair in the bathroom,” I said. “It’s like they don’t even pretend to clean it.”

“But the ice makers work,” he said. He took off his glasses and held the bridge of his nose. Then he opened his eyes and looked blindly around the room. I hardly ever saw him without his glasses—he looked like someone who had been asleep for a long time and had just woken up.

Our mother squeezed the water out of our shirts while he chased a fly around the room with a newspaper. Then she went to the bathroom and did her business, silence punctuated by long airy farts, as our father continued to pursue the fly. Elise and I watched him with the blankest faces we could muster. When our mother came out, she washed her hands and made their drinks—a Sprite for herself and a whiskey for our father. She tried to hand the cup to him, but he was busy taking everything out of his suitcase: stacks of no-iron shirts, bundles of socks, a pile of tighty-whities.

In the doorway, they turned to us.

“We’ll be at the pool,” our mother said. Our father took a sip of his drink and made a face like it was too strong before closing the door.

“Finally,” Elise said. “Good Lord.” She rocked back and forth so the headboard knocked against the wall.

I searched for something to listen to on my iPod, scrolled through each of my playlists. Before leaving Montgomery, I’d made a Heaven mix and Elise had made an End of the World mix, but I was already tired of the songs I’d chosen. I decided on a mix labeled Jogging , though I never jogged. It hurt my knees.

Elise got out of bed and turned the air conditioner on high, checked the closet for extra pillows. She found one and launched it at my head.

“I can’t believe they left the liquor. Is this some kind of test?”

“What?” I asked, taking out an earbud.

“Maker’s Mark,” she said, “whiskey.” She took the bottle out of our mother’s carry-on and held it up to the light like she might find something floating.

“Put it back.”

“What?”

“You shouldn’t drink,” I said.

“I’ll put some water in it and they’ll never know.”

“That’s not why,” I said. I’d found the First Response box in a trash can in Biloxi, faceup, like she’d wanted me to find it. That day, our father had stopped driving after a couple of hours and we’d spent the afternoon feeding the seagulls on the beach; they’d taken the chips right out of our hands. When I confronted her, she set the plastic stick on the table—the lines so brightly pink they glowed. Then she called Pizza Hut and paid for a half-veggie-half-sausage with her own money. I hadn’t asked any questions, how far along she was or if she might want to keep it. We ate the entire pizza while watching Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory , the old one with Gene Wilder.

“Life occurs at conception,” I said.

“Do you just repeat everything people tell you?”

“I’ve thought about it plenty. And it doesn’t matter when the baby becomes a baby. If you let it grow long enough, it’s a baby. This debate about when, exactly, it becomes a baby is stupid.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

“And you just repeat everything people tell you, too. Only it’s the opposite thing I repeat.” I thought I’d made a good point, which she confirmed by not saying anything. But maybe she wouldn’t have to go through with it—she wouldn’t have to have the baby or kill it—because we’d be saved. And after we were saved, the great storms and fires would descend upon the earth and then the earth would explode, and after it had exploded, it would be sucked up by a black hole followed by a quiet that was so quiet it would blow your eardrums out.

I wanted to believe we were special. I wanted to believe all of it—heaven and happiness and joy unlike anything I’d ever known.

“Okay,” she said. “Life occurs at conception and we’re going to heaven and it’s going to be fucking awesome.”

“You have to believe it.”

“I wish you’d stop telling me what I have to believe. I’ve never been to church once—not once—and felt the presence of God, or anything else. So what exactly do you want me to believe in?” She handed me a cup and sat on our parents’ bed.

“I don’t want this,” I said.

“So don’t drink it. Answer me, what should I believe in?”

“It’s about faith. You have to have faith,” I said, realizing it was my own faith that was the issue. Elise had already decided God didn’t exist and she was okay with it. I wanted to go back to the time when I hadn’t thought about whether or not I believed, when I’d gone to church and Sunday school and passed out tracts and it never occurred to me to question any of it. Now everything was in question, all at once, and it mattered.

“What about you?” she said. “Do you feel the presence of God when you’re in church, or do you just stare at peoples’ asses and try not to yell curse words at the top of your lungs? Because that’s what I do. Or I play hangman with you. I like those little sushi pencils.”

I stuck my tongue in the cup—whiskey on ice, undrinkable. I didn’t say anything, but she kept looking at me, waiting. “I count colors,” I said. “How many people are wearing purple or yellow or green?”

“That’s just sad.”

“It’s always some odd color that everybody’s wearing, like half the congregation woke up and decided to wear orange.”

“Wow,” she said. “You’re really boring. It must be really boring to be you.”

“Sometimes I count fat people or bald heads.”

“Bor-ing.”

I spent most of my time, however, looking around at the other families, trying to determine how we stacked up. I looked at bodies and faces, hair and clothes and demeanors. We were usually pretty high up, because of Elise and my mother’s church involvement.

“On Saturday night, I’m going to take off all my clothes and leave them on the grass at whatever shithole motel we’re staying in, and then I’m going to hide in a bush and watch everybody freak out,” she said.

“Good for you.”

We sat there for a while, not saying anything. She drank her whiskey. I looked at my feet. I needed to do something with my feet.

“This isn’t the first time this has happened, you know. Every generation’s predicted the end of the world. We can’t control war or unemployment or drug addiction or poverty but we can predict an end to these things, which makes them seem not so bad.” She picked up her phone and typed while I waited, fingering the birthmark on my thigh. It was pale and Jamaica-shaped. As far as birthmarks went, it was nice.

“Okay,” she said, “William Miller, a Baptist pastor, predicted the end of the world in March of 1844 but it didn’t come so he revised it to April and then that didn’t happen so he changed it to October. Jehovah’s Witness founder Charles Russell said the end would come in 1874 and then 1914 and then 1918 and finally 1975, which would be so long after he was dead he wouldn’t have to worry about changing it again. And then this guy, Marshall, has also predicted the end before. And when he’s wrong a second time, he’ll say he miscalculated and give us a new date—man’s miscalculation, not God’s, of course, never God’s—and we’ll be doing this all over again.”