Mary Miller - The Last Days of California

“Elise,” our mother said, “please.” She asked our father to do something about her, but he got distracted by a deer on the side of the road.

“Do you see it?” he asked. I knew he was talking to me, that I was the one he wanted to show it to.

“I don’t see it,” I said. I never saw anything on the side of the road unless it was dead.

“Right there, at the tree line. You can’t miss it.”

“I don’t see it.”

“It’s right there, ” he said. And then, “You missed it.”

I hated the disappointment in his voice. “I never see anything,” I said, remembering that the animals weren’t going to be raptured. Our father had been trying to prepare us for a heaven without Cole, the dog we’d had for nine years. We’d dropped him off at the vet before leaving Montgomery. He hated being boarded so much and was shaking so bad I’d had to help my father get him inside.

Cole had had a stroke on New Year’s Day and I’d taught him to walk again, fashioning a harness out of an old dress. I’d slept with him on the kitchen floor at night when he’d been unable to control his bladder, while the rest of them slept comfortably in their beds. It was the best thing I’d ever done and I reminded them of it constantly. Cole was fine now, though he ran crooked and couldn’t catch squirrels anymore. I couldn’t imagine anyplace without him, without the small animals he loved to chase. That was my problem—I had no imagination—I couldn’t imagine anything other than what I knew. The way time functioned, for example. Minutes. Waiting. How long a day could be. My biggest fear was that things would go on forever and there would never be any end. The idea of forever terrified me, even if we were in heaven and everything was great there. Surely, it would have to come to an end at some point. There would have to be something else. When I wanted to scare myself, I’d lay in bed and think forever and ever and ever and ever and ever until I thought I might go crazy.

Our father said heaven was going to be perfect in a way we couldn’t even begin to comprehend because we’d never known anything like it. We’d be young and healthy and surrounded by our loved ones. There would be no fear and no hate and no war, happiness and pleasure like we’d never known. I was already young and healthy and surrounded by my loved ones and it didn’t seem so great. And I wondered how good happiness and pleasure could be without their opposites to compare them to. If everyone was beautiful, what would beauty even mean? What would I have to strive for?

“What’s the caravan up to?” I asked.

“Eating at every food court in every mall in central Florida,” Elise said, looking at her phone. “Greta’s a big Sbarro fan.”

“After they eat at Sbarro, I bet they cruise up and down the main drag and stop at Sonic for cherry limeades.”

“Swap the limeades for Oreo Blasts and you’d be right,” she said. Then she started laughing.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“What’s so funny?”

“I just remembered something,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said, angrily. I hated when she wouldn’t tell me what she was laughing about; it was like she did it to remind me that my life wasn’t as amusing as hers.

We passed fields of cows, tails swinging, standing in the sun. They had their heads down, eating grass. Just eating grass all day long. I fingered my gold-plated ring on my gold-plated chain. The ring said PURITY on the outside; on the inside it had my initials: JEM. It was cheap and ugly and Elise had the same one hanging from her own chain. We’d gone to a purity ball, made pledges. We’d worn white dresses, and our father had gotten down on one knee in a school gymnasium to slip the rings on our fingers: first Elise, then me. This had been four years ago, before I’d even gotten my period. Before we’d known better, Elise said, but we’d worn them so long they were a part of us. I felt naked when I took it off.

My memories of that night were good ones. There had been wedding cake and steak and a hot dip made with crabmeat. I befriended a young black girl, a pretty girl with gray eyes. I had never known a black girl before. The school we went to was all-white. The neighborhood we lived in was all-white. I only saw black people at the mall, or driving around in their cars.

Our father scanned radio stations and stopped at a program called Revive Our Hearts , the woman talking about Noah and the end times. The end times seemed to be all that was left to talk about. The woman said if you read the Old Testament, you would see that it had been necessary for God to wipe out the world in a catastrophic flood and it was necessary for Him to wipe it out again.

“The Flood couldn’t have been worldwide—there isn’t enough water in the oceans,” Elise said. “It would have taken five times the water in the oceans.”

Our father wasn’t taking the bait. He turned the radio off and pumped the gas, the car lurching and coasting, lurching and coasting. He did this when he was agitated or wanted to annoy us. If we said something, it would go on longer, but I usually said something anyway to point out what an asshole he was. This time I kept my mouth shut. It was probably making Elise nauseous.

I counted down the miles to the next town—22, 15, 9, 6, 4, 2—and then we were cruising into a little nothing town.

In front of a boarded-up convenience store, a fat woman manned a table full of colorful junk. We passed a man selling puppies out of a cardboard box, a young girl holding one up to get a look at its eyes. We passed a Subway, a tiny post office, and a tinier library. I thought about all these people living in all these towns and how I’d never know them, and something about it seemed sad and strange—maybe it was just that I’d never thought of them before, that they had never occurred to me at all.

“I feel sick,” Elise said. “Can I sit up front?”

“Can we change at the next stop?” our father said.

“No, I need to sit up front now .”

He pulled into a McDonald’s and Elise and our mother swapped. Then we decided we might as well get ice cream.

We were all in a better mood after that.

“Hi,” I said, looking over at my mother, a chocolate shake wedged between my thighs. She looked at me and smiled, her eyes blinking behind the blue lenses. She took my hand and I let her hold it a minute before pulling away.

I picked up my milkshake and turned to the window. At some point, my feelings for my parents had changed. I mostly felt nothing and couldn’t think of anything to say to them, but it was periodically broken by a brief, crushing feeling, a love so intense that there was nothing to do but reject it altogether.

We stopped for an early supper at a barbeque restaurant/gas station. Most of the gas stations were attached to something now. In Louisiana, we’d stopped at one attached to a tanning salon and Elise had tanned, cooking the baby while the rest of us ate shrimp po boys.

A handsome soldier held the door, called Elise and me “ma’am.”

“Thank you, sir,” Elise said, nodding at him.

“Thanks,” I said, so he would look at me and see that I was separate. He touched my shoulder for the briefest of seconds. I love you , I thought, and it felt like the truth.

The place was full of army men in their army hats and pants, stiff long-sleeved shirts. The material looked thick and uncomfortable, but they somehow managed to look fresh. We ordered at the front, but there wasn’t a four-top available, so my parents sat at one two-top and we sat at another, far enough away that we could pretend we were alone. I watched Elise pull the ponytail holder from her hair and comb it out with her fingers. She moved her head from side to side to gather all the stray pieces before putting it up again. The process took a long time, a minute at least. I wanted to talk about the Japanese girl and the dead man, but Elise would accuse me of dwelling on the negative. Debbie Downer, she liked to call me.