The Last Days of California: A Novel (7 page)

“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.”

“Not me,” I said.

She set her phone down. “Now let’s pretend we’re on vacation and having fun.”

“I am having fun,” I said. My bra strap slipped down my arm so I unhooked it and pulled it through my shirt. All of my bras were hand-me-downs from Elise, too small and worn out. “To the Pacific Ocean,” I said, raising my whiskey. “May there be dolphins and no jellyfish.”

We knocked our cups together, spilling some onto the floor, and brought them to our lips. I kept mine clamped tight. I’d had alcohol before but I’d never been drunk. At parties, I’d go behind a bush and pour my drink out, or shut myself in a bathroom and dump most of it down the sink. I’d once held my can sideways like I was so intoxicated I’d forgotten how to hold it until a boy asked me what the hell I was doing and I’d found it didn’t work that way. I didn’t know how it worked, but I had seen what people could do when they were drunk—Shannon cried and locked herself in bathrooms. She’d once given a stranger a blowjob in a parking lot.

I watched the liquid on top of the carpet, not seeping in.

“I miss Cole,” Elise said, braiding a chunk of her hair. She could have been on TV she was so pretty. She was so pretty she had gone and gotten herself pregnant.

“I bet he’s depressed without us,” I said.

“Of course he’s depressed—they keep him locked up in a cage with his own shit and only let him out once a day.”

“That’s terrible,” I said.

“And I miss Dan.”

It occurred to me Dan might not be the father, that it might be Abe, but she wasn’t going to mention Abe because he’d broken up with her and started having sex with her best friend, Laura Lee, or maybe he’d been having sex with Laura Lee all along. The baby was Abe’s—I knew this suddenly and clearly—and for a moment I was glad. But then I felt like an awful person. If God could see my heart, I’d never be saved, and of course he could see my heart. He was God.

“Maybe if I’m holding Cole in my arms he’ll get to come with us,” I said. “Like
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
.”

She stacked her pillows and readjusted. “These pillows are too high. I knew we should have brought our own.”

“But we’d forget them and the maids would give them to their grubby children.”

“I’m going to get a crick in my neck,” she said.

“That’s a funny word.”

She smiled at me and said, “I need to go to the store. Do you want anything?” But then she took the knife out of her pocket, opened it and started trimming the frayed pieces of blue jean from her shorts, making a little pile on the bedspread. She was the only girl I knew who carried a pocketknife. She’d found it while hiking. Our father said it was an excellent find—an expensive knife in good condition.

“Our movie’s about to start,” I said.

She held out her cup. “Hit me one more time and put some water in it.”

I poured more than I should have and she drank it down. “I wish you’d stay,” I said.

“I’ll be right back.” She took some money out of her wallet and folded it into her pocket. “If they come back, tell ’em I’m trying to score some weed,” she said, and went out the door.

I checked to see how much she had—fifty-eight dollars, nearly as much as I had. I took two fives and dropped them into my purse, and then carried the bottle to the bathroom and held it under the faucet, filling it past the level it had been. I thought about the Japanese girl and how she’d looked asleep but was probably dead, her insides a jumble of smashed organs spilling blood all over the place. I put the bottle back in my mother’s carry-on and looked around at the shirts dripping on the carpet, our clothes and shoes everywhere. Despite all our stuff, the room felt emptier than when we’d walked in.

I poured out my drink and rinsed the cups, put my toothbrush in one of them. Then I took my phone outside and sat against the door. The workers were gone, and other than a pair of goggles, there was no evidence they’d been there.

It was eight-ten
and eight-twenty and eight-thirty and my parents would be back any minute. I was tired but knew I wouldn’t sleep well because I was thinking about how tired I was and how much I needed to get a good night’s sleep, which was exactly what you shouldn’t do. You should go about your business like you’re not even tired. You should stay out of bed as long as you can. I’d probably get four or five hours and wake up when it was still dark out, lie in bed waiting for the birds. Every morning the birds sounded different because they were different birds.

A man in a room across from me opened his door. He was black and muscled, tall and bald and handsome. He looked like a soap opera star.

He stood there for a moment with the light behind him, and then turned and said something to the woman in bed. She was plump and white with long dark hair, wearing only her panties. The woman gestured to the man to close the door, but he left it open, walked over to his car, and took something out of the trunk. Then he walked off in the same direction as Elise—toward the bar and gas station. The woman got out of bed with her breasts swinging and slammed the door.

A minute later, Elise came walking back across the parking lot with a paper bag in her hand, a cigarette burning brighter as she inhaled. She had a fake ID that said she was twenty-one. Once, she’d had me quiz her on the new facts of herself: height and weight and date of birth. She’d even memorized the license number, a long number that would only look suspicious if she rattled it off.

She sat beside me.

“You look homeless,” I said.

“A homeless man bought it for me,” she said, taking a swallow. “Or maybe he wasn’t homeless. He had a debit card.”

“Where’s your ID?”

“I don’t look anything like that girl.” She spread her legs, nearly to a full split, and I recalled the uncomfortable positions I used to sit in as a child, when my body could easily bend itself into different shapes.

“I thought we were going to order pizza,” I said.

“There’s a whole counter of fried shit over there—I could go get you something. Taquitos, chicken fingers, potato logs . . .”

“That’s okay.”

She swiped her cigarette on the bottom of her flip-flop and tossed it into the parking lot. “Don’t mess with Texas,” she said.

The bald man came into view, cradling a sack in his arms.

“When I passed him in the store, he grunted at me,” she said.

“What’d you do?”

“What do you think I did? I ignored him. You have to ignore them or they’ll be encouraged.”

The man opened his door and looked over at us before closing it. I wondered what he was saying to the woman—if they were kind to each other or if they yelled and said horrible things. They were probably on drugs, like my dead cousin. Like her, maybe they’d once had normal lives, with normal families who’d loved them and they’d just gotten off on the wrong track. Or maybe things had always been like this and they didn’t know any other way. Life was mean and people were mean and there was no room for kindness.

Elise lit another cigarette and called Dan. He didn’t answer, so she left him a message, said she was having a terrible, awful time. Then she checked to see what the Florida leg was doing. “Greta had a fender-bender,” she said, “smashed a headlight. And everybody’s giving her the finger today.”

“I bet she loves that.”

“Seriously, though—why are all these people so unattractive? Being religious is no excuse to be this unattractive.” She passed me her phone and I looked at the woman, overweight with messy gray hair, wearing a raincoat.

“Maybe she’s just unattractive and religious and the two don’t have anything to do with each other,” I said.

“I don’t know about that.”

“I’m sure there are a lot of ugly atheists out there, too.”

“She could at least dye her hair—she’s only like fifty or something. Or maybe forty.”

“Some women don’t care about being beautiful.”

She looked at me like I was insane. “The agnostics have to be the best-looking group,” she said. “Extremists rely too much on their extremism.”

I went inside and flipped through the stations until I found
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
. It was my favorite scene, the kids lost in the grass. They were so small a stream of dog pee was a river, a baby ant the size of a Volkswagen. They were so small, an oatmeal cream pie could sustain them for years. It was every kid’s dream, like finding a house made of candy in the forest. The older boy, Little Russ, was hot, even with his eighties hair, and I wanted to sleep in a Lego while he kept watch over me. No—I wanted him to forget his guard duty and climb into the Lego with me so I could run my fingers through his soft, feathered hair.

When I went to get Elise, she was gone. The lights were off in the bald man’s room and I imagined the woman straddling him while he held her hips, rocked her gently back and forth. At home, we had a set of my mother’s old encyclopedias and I would read and reread the entry for Sex: “A man and a woman lie next to each other and the man places his penis inside the woman’s vagina. This is usually pleasurable for both parties.” It was the dirtiest thing I had access to. We didn’t get the premium channels and I didn’t look at porn on my computer because I might forget to clear the history. Of course I wouldn’t forget, but it was possible, and I’d never live down the shame.

My mother looked
nearly girlish with her hair loose, smiling. She gazed up at my father and he leaned down and kissed her head. Occasionally, I caught glimpses into their world and it bothered me that I could never be a part of it, that I couldn’t know them in the way they knew each other. We all knew each other completely differently, in ways that would never overlap.

“Where’s Elise?” my father asked.

“I think she went to the store,” I said.

“What are you doing out here by yourself?” my mother asked.

“The moon is nice.” We all looked up at it, big and fake-looking with clouds snaking across it. My father had a book called
We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle
that he liked to quote from. The book alleged that the moon landing had actually taken place in Nevada, and in between shooting footage the astronauts had visited strip clubs. Elise showed me a full-page spread of an exotic dancer as evidence that our father was an idiot. It was his thing, not believing in anything but God, as if to believe in anything else—man’s landing on the moon, global warming—would be disloyal.

My mother opened the door and I took off my shoes and got in bed. I watched my father take an envelope out of his bag. He unfolded the purple-and-orange prayer rug and knelt on it, facing the window. Before we’d left, he’d told us we each had to kneel on it at some point and circle our prayer needs and then he’d mail it to another family and they’d mail it to another family like a chain letter.

I’d knelt on it the first night and circled every single need: spiritual revival, devotion, monetary concerns, temptation, health and well-being, stress and anxiety, salvation.

On one side of the rug was a picture of Jesus’s face. His eyes were closed, but it said if you continued to look at them, they would open. They hadn’t opened for me and I wondered if they were opening for my father. I’d only glanced at them because it reminded me of standing in front of a mirror chanting Bloody Mary, something I’d done at a sleepover once that had freaked me out. It would have been horrifying if Jesus opened his eyes, same as it would have been horrifying if a Bloody Mary had appeared in the mirror. Had anyone in the history of the prayer rug seen His eyes open? And if they hadn’t, and no one was ever going to, why did it say that we would?

“Call her,” my mother said.

I liked the picture that popped up, Elise’s face in the plywood body of a meerkat at the Atlanta zoo. It rang and rang. I hung up and tried again, but there was still no answer so I left a message, trying to make it sound like she was on the other end. But then my mother asked where she was and I had to tell her I’d left a message.

“Maybe her phone’s dead,” my father said. Elise was always letting her phone die. I didn’t understand how peoples’ phones were always dying—all you had to do was plug it in at night. Who were these people who couldn’t even manage that?