Zigzag (13 page)

“Do you think it's a new find?” Dory asked.

“It could well be,” the ranger told her. “We had a heavy rain here last week that stirred up a lot of new rocks. This place is constantly changing.”

“Will you let me know if it really is a new find?” Marshall asked him.

“I sure will. Write your name and address on the bottom of the map and I'll let you know. If it's really a whole fish fossil, that's a great find, young man. Maybe you've got a future in paleontology!”

By the time we left Marsh was glowing. Dory and I kept complimenting him, too, on the way back to the car, but Iris was conspicuously quiet. As we stood next to the open doors of the van, waiting for the inside to cool down a little, Dory and I both turned our eyes on Iris.

“What?” she said. I shook my head and Dory looked away.

But when they crawled into the backseat together, Iris gave her brother a light slap on the knee. “Not bad, Marshmallow. Not bad.”

“You're telling me,” Marsh said, grinning like mad.

“So now you're gonna be a paleontologist, I guess.”

“Maybe,” he said, but then added, “if I knew what it was.”

It was the first time we all laughed together without meaning to hurt anybody's feelings.

R
eally, Mom, the bites are mostly gone already.” “I can't believe Dory didn't bring any bug spray along if she intended to camp outside. Did she forget
everything
she learned growing up?”

It was great to hear Mom's voice. I'd only been gone four days, but it seemed like ages since I'd spoken to anyone who wasn't on the verge of either hysteria, rage, or depression.

“Are they right there?” she asked. “Can you talk? How's it really going?”

“They're outside packing the car. I think Dory wanted to give me some privacy.” It had been Dory who'd suggested I call Mom before we left the hotel. She'd even wanted me to use her phone card to do it, but I used the one Mom had given me. I guess Dory thinks we're poverty-stricken or something.

“So, tell me.”

“Well, it's okay, I guess. I mean, Dory kind of goes up and down. Last night she was crying in the bathroom with the shower running. I wouldn't have known about it—Iris and I were in the room next door—but Marsh got scared and came running into our room.”

“Oh, gosh. Maybe this trip is too much for Dory.”

“Most of the time she seems all right—too all right, considering how weird her kids are.”

“Are they driving you crazy?”

“Sometimes they're okay—like when they're asleep. But, take last night for instance. Marsh was all upset because Dory was crying, and all Iris would say to him was, ‘
Grow up, Marshall. The woman's husband is dead.
' And she said it in this terrible voice—you had to hear it—like the
woman
wasn't her own mother, and the
husband
wasn't her dead father. Then, Marshall got furious and started hitting her . . . then she hit him
back
. . . they're almost as dysfunctional as Franny's family.”

For a moment there was silence on the other end of the line, then Mom breathed a sigh. “This whole thing was a big mistake. I shouldn't have talked you into going. They should be spending the summer in therapy, not on the highway. If you want to come home, I'll put the bus ticket on my credit card.”

It's not as if I hadn't thought about it myself, getting the hell away from these nutcases. But that wasn't all there was to this trip—I'd loved walking through the Badlands, and yesterday's drive to Mount Rushmore and then the Crazy Horse Memorial was amazing, too. Just the fact that people had figured out how to carve those giant heads into a mountain made you feel like you might want to do something more interesting with your own life than the puny ideas you'd imagined.

We could actually see people working on the Crazy Horse monument—it's going to be enormous—the chief and his horse will look like they're riding out of the mountain. It was amazing to think that people had goals so huge they knew they'd never accomplish them in their own lifetime—that their children and grandchildren would have to finish what they started.

It had never even occurred to me that all these wonderful,
strange places existed. And now I was in
Wyoming,
a state I never gave a thought to before this trip, and here I was looking at maps and helping to plan our route through it. We were going to see the Big Horn Mountains and the Rockies, too, at least from a distance.

“I'm not really having that bad a time,” I said. “I mean, I like traveling. We're driving through Wyoming today, which Dory says is beautiful. And she has some kind of surprise planned for us tonight. The place we're staying, I think.”

“Right. She told me about it.”

“She told you? She planned it before?”

“You need advance reservations for this place. Besides, I had to know where to send your mail, didn't I?”

How could I have forgotten to ask her! “Did I . . . ?”

“Yes, you did. I sent it on—you should get it in a day or two.”

“He probably didn't even get mine yet. I should have written him sooner, but I'm not that good in letters.”

“I'm sure you're good enough to please Chris, honey. He's in love with you. He won't be critical of your writing ability.”

I could see from the window that the van was ready to go. The doors were all open, Dory had her driving sunglasses on, and the kids were leaning against the tailgate as though their spines wouldn't support their weight. I swear, those two were always tired.

“I think they're waiting for me, Mom. I better go.”

“Okay. Don't let them get you down. And, remember, if it gets really bad, you can ditch 'em and come on home.”

“Thanks, Mom. Oh, I forgot to ask you, are you still going out with Michael Evans?”

She laughed. “I guess I am. Nobody else is vying for my attention.”

“But you still like him?”

“Sure I do. But I'm not making too much out of this, Robin, so
you don't need to either. Get going now, so Dory doesn't get antsy.”

“Bye, Mom! I'll call you again soon.” I was happier than I thought I'd be to know that she wasn't taking this Michael Evans thing too seriously. Not that I had anything against him personally. It was just strange to think of my mother loving somebody I hardly knew. For as long as I could remember, the only person she'd really loved had been me. And, right now, I didn't feel like splitting that pie into smaller pieces.

Dory let me drive the morning shift. The first couple of times I'd driven the minivan I'd been nervous, and, of course, Iris howled every time I braked too hard or parked crooked or anything. But by now I was getting used to it—I could relax a little and enjoy it. I kept thinking about how the world is supposed to be overpopulated, but out here you can drive for an hour and never even pass another car. Wyoming makes Iowa look crowded.

Something about looking into the distance like that makes you think about your own future. I mean, there are so many possibilities out in front of you, so many roads you could take. I decided Dory was right to zigzag across the country instead of making a beeline for Los Angeles. I'd seen pictures of L.A.; I knew what to expect. But all this stuff in between was constantly surprising.

Iris read a book and Marshall listened to his headphones all the way to the Big Horn Mountains where we had a picnic lunch in a field. Marsh was a little bit nervous that one of the sheep we could see in the distance might suddenly lower his big curly-horned head and charge us, but the sheep couldn't be bothered with tourists.

“I'm finished,” he said, stuffing the last quarter of his sandwich into his cheeks. “Let's get going.”

“What's the big hurry?” Iris said. “It's nice out here. Besides, I'm sick of being stuffed into that backseat.”

“You shouldn't have brought so much junk. Mom wouldn't have had to take the third seat out.” The two of them never stopped arguing about who brought more luggage.

“It's beautiful here,” Dory said, spreading her arms and taking a deep breath, “but I guess we should get going. We've got a fairly long stretch still to drive.”

“Great. Why can't you just
tell
us where we're going?” Iris said.

“No, don't tell!” Marshall said. “I want to be surprised!”

“I'm not telling,” Dory said.

Marshall was jumping around, kicking sandy dirt into my lemonade. “I bet I know! I looked at the map. I bet we're going to Yellowstone Park, aren't we, Mom? I figured it out!”

“I thought you didn't want to know?” Dory said.

“I'm right though, aren't I? It's Yellowstone.”

Dory shook her head. “No, actually we're not going to Yellowstone. We're heading south—I told you that. Yellowstone is west.”

Marshall's chin dropped. “What? Yellowstone is, like, the only famous place out here. Why can't we go there?”

“Because it's overcrowded with tourists. I don't feel like driving through a park in bumper-to-bumper traffic.”

Iris grunted. “Figures. The one place we
want
to go and you won't let us.”

“Since when did
you
want to go?” I said.

“Was I talking to you?”

“Girls!” Dory said. She hated hearing Iris and me squabble, even though we did it much less than Iris and Marshall, whose fighting she seemed able to ignore.

Since Dory was driving next, I offered Iris the front seat, which was a little roomier than the back. But instead of being grateful, she just tossed my purse over the backseat and announced, “I'm not sitting with all your junk under my feet!” The
backseat, of course, was strewn with piles of her crap.

It was hard to read in the backseat—too bouncy—and besides, Dory had let Iris put on a CD of some awful prepubescent boy group, and I couldn't concentrate. Marsh had just finished drawing something in his book, so I asked him if I could take a look at his pictures.

“What for?” He eyed me suspiciously.

“Because I want to see them.”

“How come?”

“Because I haven't got anything better to do!”

He shrugged and tossed the book onto my lap. “Okay.”

He must have started this drawing pad at the beginning of the trip because the bulls-eye drawing of Golddigger was one of the first ones. There were lots of cartoon-inspired figures drawn in black pen, many of them toting guns and knives. Also a certain number of monsters holding other monsters' heads in their hands—he seemed to like that theme. Even the picture he'd drawn of the Badlands had a large Cyclops crawling up over a hill. And, as Dory had warned, a good deal of blood was inked in with a red pen.

But there was another theme emerging in some of the more recent pictures: Fish. Even though Marsh had left his fossil drawing with the ranger, he'd obviously stored it in his memory because he'd redrawn it several times, changing the original with odd details. One fish, as you might guess, had a bloody eye with droplets falling down the page. But another one had little wings where its gills should be, and a third had leaves where it ought to have scales—you had to look closely to notice. And all the drawings, even the monster ones, were very well done. I don't know why I was surprised; it makes sense that if you draw all the time, you'd probably get pretty good at it.

“These are good, Marshall. I really like this one!” I said, pointing to the leaf-scaled fish.

Marsh leaned over to see what I was looking at. “No blood.”

“True. You like the bloody ones better?”

“Sometimes. They make me feel sort of . . . good.”

Jesus, this kid. “What do you mean, they make you feel
good
?”

He shrugged again and looked out the window. “I don't know. When I'm nervous or something. It makes me stop feeling so jumpy. When I draw something ugly and bloody it makes me feel better.”

I thought about that. “So, you mean, if you draw something awful, it stops you from worrying so much about real things?”

He looked at me seriously. “Sort of. Yeah, I guess so. It calms me down.”

“Hmmm. That makes sense.” I smiled at him and his chin quivered.

“Does it?” he asked quietly.

“I think so. Maybe you should tell your therapist about it.”

“Yeah, maybe I will. So he won't keep talking about my
violent tendencies.
”

“From what I can see you're mostly violent toward your sister. And she wouldn't win the Nobel Peace Prize either.”

“Are you talking about me?” Iris shouted, never one to miss a reference to herself.

“NO!” Marshall and I said in unison, and then laughed.

“God,” Iris said, craning her neck around the seat in order to give us a disgusted look. “You two deserve each other.”