Road to Paradise. Paullina Simons
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“No way am I stopping again. No stopping till Aunt Flo’s.”
“Are we there yet?”
“Stop it!”
“I think the dogs have to go again.”
I glanced at Gina. “You sure you don’t want to take your sister and the dogs to California with us? Come on. It’ll be fun.”
Gina snorted.
“I’ll go with you guys to California,” Molly said brightly. “This is fun.”
Now it was my turn to snort.
“You should feed her, Sloane,” Gina said. “Did you know that if the stomach doesn’t produce a new layer of mucus every fourteen days, its digestive juices will cause it to digest itself?”
From the back came Molly’s revolted screeching. “Hmm,” I said, stepping on the gas. “So the good news is, only thirteen days to go.”
I watched Molly’s warpainted face in the rearview mirror when she wasn’t bent over the crate playing with the dogs. She was such a kid, yet the makeup made her look seven, eight years older. She wasn’t my sister, and I couldn’t quite articulate what I felt, but what I felt was this. Why did a twelve-year-old need to look older? Why did a twelve-year-old need cherry-red lipstick, the brightness of which Debbie from Dallas would shy away from? Come on, Sloane, I chided myself. Stop being so old.
“The New Jersey Turnpike is arguably the dullest stretch of land in all of America,” I said.
“Do you know that studies have shown,” Gina said, “that more accidents with people falling asleep at the wheel happen on the Jersey Turnpike than anywhere else in the country?”
“Really?”
Gina shrugged. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But if it isn’t true, it should be.”
Molly piped up once more. “Hey, Shelby, we haven’t seen you in a long time. Where you been?”
“I’ve been around.”
“Not around our house.”
“No.” I trailed off. I didn’t really know what to say. And Gina interestingly didn’t say anything. What do you say? What did Gina say to her mother when her “sister” Shelby had disappeared as if vaporized? I didn’t like Gina’s silence on the subject. She was usually so chirpy. But both her mouth and hands had tensed. She seemed to be almost actively not responding to her sister’s question. We just stopped being friends, that’s all, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Things change, you know? You’ll find out soon enough, Molly. Don’t forget your extra layer of black eyeliner.
Finally! Two hours later, Delaware Memorial Bridge and a wide rushing river; it was the first pretty we’d seen.
“Did you know that the Hudson becomes the Delaware?” asked Gina. “It flows from St. Lawrence in Canada, and then turns into this river.”
“Really?” She was so geographical, this Gina.
“Are we there yet?”
We were there an hour and a half later, at almost eleven.
Aunt Flo, hectored by Gina’s mother, had called the police, alerting them of a mysterious disappearance of a bright yellow Mustang, three “children” inside it (this is how a frantic Mrs. Reed described us to the police officer who came to retrieve us from the Maryland phone booth from which we called for directions) and two small, “very expensive” dogs. While Gina was on the phone with her mother (telling her to calm down or “the trip will be ruined for sure, Mom!”), Aunt Flo could not understand why it took me so long to go two hundred miles. The Maryland state trooper who helped us find the house was nonchalant. “Hit some traffic, did you?” he said.
“Yes, and it hit back.” I poked Gina’s arm, still holding on to maternal telecommunication. “I hope it’s not a harbinger of things to come, going 200 miles in fourteen hours on the road.”
Barely listening, she poked me back. “We weren’t on the road fourteen hours, and you know it damn well is a harbinger of things to come. Mom, I have to go.” Pause. “Yes, of course, we’ll be careful. No, of course, I haven’t pumped any gas. No, of course we haven’t picked up any hitchhikers.” She winked at me.
Aunt Flo, who looked like a carbon copy of Gina’s grandmother Scottie, to whom she was not remotely related, kept berating before salutations. “There was nothing we could do,” Gina endlessly repeated. “We. Were. Stuck. In. Traffic. Remember Shelby, Aunt Flo? Say hello, Shelby.”
“Hello, Shelby,” I said.
Aunt Flo barely nodded my way. “Where are my cannolis, Shelby?” and then without a breath, “But why would you go through New York City? That’s your number one mistake right there.”
So after eleven hours of driving, before being fed or shown our rooms, or given a drink, we parried another fifteen minutes of post-mortem critique about all the wrong roads we took to get to Glen Burnie, Maryland.
I lay in bed that night, my hands under my head, staring at the ceiling. If Marc were here, he wouldn’t stop taunting until Wyoming. He’d say it was definitely my fault. What was I doing in a car with a girl who made my hands anxious and my brain malfunction, a girl who brought her odd sister to be a buffer between us, a girl who could not drive? I hoped Gina could read a map. I missed my comfy pink-roses bed.
Lorna Moor.
My mother’s name filled my insides with an ache like freezing, but all around that aching was a peculiar sort of heat. Emma was related to me. Emma was my aunt. By blood. I was her niece by blood. I had a connection to her. She had a connection to my father. That’s why she didn’t leave, and in Glen Burnie, Maryland, with the planes sounding like they were landing on the roof of our house, that knowledge made me feel better.
Still, my first day of travel had turned out to have in it nothing I wanted, or had prepared for, or planned. I took out my spiral notebook from my duffel and looked over my schedule. We weren’t in Ohio. We weren’t west. We hadn’t gone 500 miles. On the plus side, the lodging was free. Recalling Gina’s little trivia diversions made me smile a bit, but otherwise, I couldn’t relax, or even look forward to tomorrow. But I knew what would make me relax: checking off the items on the agenda for today. Didn’t forget anything. Left on time. Headed in the right direction. Did not get lost. Oh well …
I made a list for tomorrow. That did make me feel better. Number one: Leave no later than nine. I couldn’t make any more plans as I’d left my maps and atlas in the car, and also because I had fallen asleep.
Number one in my plan was out the window at nine-thirty because no one had woken up, not Gina, not Molly, and almost not me.
“How long are we planning to stay?” I asked Gina, when she finally tumbled out of her room around eleven.
“At least a week,” said Aunt Flo, who overheard. “Haven’t seen my darlings in years.”
“Yes, yes, of course. And I hope we have a nice visit.” A week! “It’s just that …” I became tongue-tied. What was there to do in Baltimore for a week? And I had a mission! I had to get to Mendocino. I’d rather spend a week looking for my mother than be here in Glen Burnie. Not wanting to be impolite, I stared at Gina until she said something, about ten minutes later.
“Shelby has to get to California, Aunt Flo. Mom told you. We’ll leave Molly here, but Shel can’t stay that long. She has to be back to get ready for college. And me, too.”
“Yes,