Instructions for the End of the World (4 page)

Where could she possibly go after one in the morning on a Tuesday night? No stores are open, no restaurants, nothing. Is she just going for a drive to cool off? Or is her leaving a bigger deal than that?

I picture her driving to a roadside chain motel and checking in, staying there for the night. But then what? Will she come back for us? Or at least for me?

How could she have left without me in the first place? I mean, okay, she was mad and she thought I was in bed asleep, so it doesn't make any sense that she'd come wake me up to take
me
to a motel with her.

I decide she must have just left to get away from this crappy house and my dad, to cool off and sleep somewhere clean for the night. This makes me feel a little better, but I still can't sleep. I look at my phone, at the stupid little No Service message on the screen, and I want to hurl it against the wall. Instead, I open up the text messages and stare at all the ones from my old friends—friends I might never see again.

I hate everything about my life. Everything.

I think about going downstairs and telling my dad that, right now. Telling him exactly how I feel. But I don't. Instead, I keep lying in my sleeping bag and staring at the stain on the ceiling, waiting wide-eyed for morning to come.

 

Three

LAUREL

I can tell no one how happy I am that Annika has come home.

Who would understand?

Not Wolf, who sees his mother's presence as a noose around his neck.

Not Annika, who has never known what she really is to me.

Not my parents, who left fourteen years ago in an acid-trip haze and never bothered to send so much as a postcard.

Every time I see Annika since her return, conflicted feelings well up. Joy, yes, but also disappointment, and something unnamable.

I hover outside her door, my hand poised to knock, but I can hear the lilt of her German accent, worn soft by half a lifetime here, as she talks to someone. She laughs, and my heart pushes against my rib cage. She has been back for almost two weeks and I haven't had a moment alone with her.

I hear the low rumble of a male voice in the room with her, and my hand drops to my side. She already has a boyfriend, only two weeks home? Maybe it's just a friend, but this idea rings false as soon as I think it.

Annika is not the kind of woman men can be friends with. She's too beautiful.

In fact, Wolf's mother is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. It's legendary, her beauty, the stuff of Greek myths.

When I was younger, in all my fantasies, she was
my
mother. Wolf was like my brother, only I wished he wasn't around at all, so I could have all of Annika's attention. I was greedy like that.

I still am.

She has her own private cabin at the north end of the village, which sat empty for the year she was gone. She is one of the original members of Sadhana, and such longevity comes with privileges. Also, Mahesh has a thing for her, I think. He will give Annika whatever she wants, including private cabins no one else can stay in, not even her own son.

So it disgusts me a little to think of some random dude in there with her, his body oil soiling her pristine sheets, his presence ruining any hope I had of an hour alone with her. I just wanted to ask her to have breakfast with me. Coffee, or tea. I wanted to ask her about rehab and tell her about my life and have her look at me like she cares that I'm alive.

I should know better than to want any of this, but I can't help myself.

I turn and start to walk away, when the lock on the door clicks and the door swings open, startling me. Heat rushes to my face, as if I've been caught in the act of doing something wrong. It's the guy, some rumpled Rastafarian with dreadlocks down to his waist, a scruffy beard, and a T-shirt that reads, “I'm a soldjah in Jah army.” There are pillow creases still on his cheek.

He blinks at me, and before I can hurry away, Annika steps into the doorway and sees me too.

“Laurel,
liebling
! What a surprise!”

“Oh hi,” I say, my voice jittery.

“What are you doing here?” She smiles, perplexed.

“I … was just stopping to see if you'd had breakfast yet,” I say, because I can't think of a lie.

“I haven't, no.”

The Rastafarian leans in and kisses Annika hard on the lips. “I'm out,” he says, no trace of a Jamaican accent, which makes his appearance seem like he's wearing a costume. “I'll leave you ladies to your morning.”

He walks away, and suddenly I have what I wanted.

“I was just going to go over to the cafeteria. You want to come with?”

I hate how weak and hopeful my voice sounds.

She runs a hand over her long, blond hair and gives the idea a moment's thought. “How about I drive us to town for breakfast out?” she says. “That way we can have some peace and quiet.”

This is more than I could have dared ask for. The cafeteria will be full of people who know Annika and will stop and talk to her, which means I will be lucky to get in ten minutes of alone time with her. But an entire ride to town and back, a sit-down breakfast where we look at menus and wait for our orders to arrive, then linger over our food and drinks?

Bliss.

“That would be awesome,” I say, beaming. “It can be my treat!”

I have money from helping Pauly with his bike business, but she waves away this suggestion as if it's ridiculous. There have always been unconfirmed rumors of Annika having a massive trust fund. “Don't be silly. I'm buying. Just let me get myself pulled together.”

In a few moments she emerges from the bathroom, dressed. She sweeps her long hair up into a messy bun and slides on a pair of sandals. She smiles at me.

“I'm so glad you stopped by,” she says, and my disappointment vanishes.

She is my Annika again, exuding beauty like some rare species of animal.

We go to her car, a biodiesel Mercedes that's probably twice as old as I am and that smells of incense on the inside and french fries on the outside from the cooking oil it burns, and we ride to town talking about nothing much, small talk. Who has come and gone from the village, and so on. She tells me about traveling around Europe and Asia after her stint in rehab, but this is not what I want to talk to her about.

I have the panicked feeling that this time alone with her is being wasted, that it will pass without my ever getting a chance to say what I want to say.

I'm not even sure what I want to say.

I'm curious about her year away, but mostly I want her to be curious about what's happened to me since she's been gone. I want to tell her my plans, and I want her to give me advice. Should I go to college? Travel? Keep working with Pauly?

I don't know. I need a crystal ball, or a parent, to tell me what to do.

The last option—working with Pauly—feels safest, but also is the most depressing. I have spent nearly my whole life at the village. I want to leave, but I have nowhere to go, no family to visit, no sense of how to be anywhere else in the world. Sometimes I imagine going off to find my parents, who will feel terrible for having left me here to be raised by strangers and who will then try to make it up to me. But I'm not even sure if they're alive, and if they are, I'm not really sure I want to know them.

I want Annika to take me by the hand and tell me what to do. Maybe tell me she will go with me on a trip to Europe, pay for the whole thing herself, show me the world I haven't seen yet, introduce me to her family as her daughter. This last bit, if I am being completely honest, is what I most want. What I could never ask for.

We go into a little restaurant that's known for its herbal teas and vegetarian breakfasts, and Annika glances at the menu before ordering a jasmine green tea and a Greek vegan scramble. I say I will have the same thing, though I would rather have something with cheese and bacon and lots of sour cream.

“So tell me,” she says when the waitress leaves, “what have you been doing with yourself?”

Now, faced with this moment, I go blank. I don't know what to tell her that will sound enticing enough to keep her interest.

I shrug stupidly. “Oh, you know, the usual. School, working with Pauly.”

“Yes, the bike business—how is that going?”

“It's really taking off,” I say. “My designs have been selling well.”

“So you're designing and painting too?”

“I do a few designs, mostly Mehndi stuff Pauly doesn't have the patience for,” I say.

Pauly's business, Art Bike, is pure genius, though I'd never tell him that. He gets old bikes with nice lines, restores them, and we give them artsy paint jobs, then sell them to trendy Bay Area bike shops. Pauly's style is more art deco–influenced, while I'm all about the intricate details.

“Any boyfriends in your life?”

“No.”

“A pretty girl like you? You must have lots of interested guys.”

I warm to the compliment but shrug again. I've never been into relationships, at least not serious ones. There are guys, yes, but what to say about someone I've slept with a few times but never want to spend time with in the light of day?

“I always thought you and Wolfie might end up together. Maybe not now, but eventually.”

She pronounces his name “Volfie,” with a soft German
V.

“Oh god, no.”

“Why is that so crazy? You know each other better than anyone else.”

“That's the problem. No mystery.”

This idea is nauseating to me, like thinking I will someday marry my brother. I don't know how Annika can suggest it.

“Mystery is important,” she says, nodding. “But I can't help wishing. I worry about that boy.”

Wolf has grown strangely withdrawn and quiet these past few years. He has disappeared into himself, and I hardly see him anymore, but when I do, he's often alone. And silent.

“He's fine,” I say, wanting to steer the conversation elsewhere, but I can't think what to talk about.

“He reminds me too much of his father now. I don't want him to go down that road.”

By that road, I know she means suicide. Which Wolf's father committed the year we turned thirteen. I will never forget that detail, since it made me think that thirteen really is an unlucky number.

The waitress arrives and sets down on the table our cups of tea, along with a small jar of honey.

“Wolf would never do that,” I say, unable to get out the words
commit suicide,
but I don't know if it's true.

The old happy-go-lucky Wolf wouldn't, anyway.

Annika smiles, but there is a sadness in her eyes I don't like. It's how she used to look when she needed a hit or a drink, or both.

Wolf exists in my earliest memories as a golden-brown sliver of a boy with gentle hands and watchful eyes. He seemed to have emerged from the soil beneath our feet—that was my childish impression of him. He was dirty, feral looking, a little animal that I felt like I'd managed to tame simply by sitting next to him. And his attention and friendship evoked the same feeling you get when a wild animal graces you with its trust: as if you are chosen.

I still feel that way about him, but he no longer chooses anyone as his trusted companion. Especially not me.

I was the one who first called him Wolfie, and later, Wolf, as if he were my own personal forest creature. Back then he was always Wolfgang, thanks to Annika's prehippie aspiration to be a concert pianist. It struck me even as a small child that it was a terrible name for him.

There was a time (when I was like five years old) when I thought we would always be together, that we would get married and have little golden-skinned babies and live happily ever after.

I don't think that anymore, of course.

I stopped believing in happily ever after long ago, in a land far, far away.

Our food arrives, faster than I would have expected, and when the waitress disappears, Annika smiles across the table at me. “Will you pray with me?”

I freeze, and my stomach drops.

I've heard the rumors—that Annika has gotten all Jesusy. It's the AA, people say in hushed whispers, which was apparently part of her rehab program. She's gone all in. But I didn't quite believe it.

She is reaching for my hand across the table, and I let her take it, not knowing what else to do.

She bows her head and closes her eyes, so I do the same, but I feel like a fraud. I've been raised around spirituality at Sadhana, but not this kind. Not religion, which I've only seen in movies about people living regular lives in regular American places.

Sadhana Village is not like any of those places. Mahesh's philosophy (he's the closest thing the village has to a guru, though he denies such titles and is an aging hippie with a gray ponytail and a passion for white pants) is loosely based on yogic principals, with a little Buddhism thrown in. Mother Earth is the only “god” and “walk in peace” the only prayer.

She is praying out loud, words I can't even register, words that don't sink in, because I am in shock. My beloved Annika, always so near the edge, always a shooting star blazing across my life, is a
Jesus freak
?

When she says amen I murmur the word myself, “Amen,” because I think that's what I'm supposed to do.

But I don't have a clue what it means.

NICOLE

When I wake up in my upstairs bedroom after our first night in my grandparents' old house, I am aware of the silence. I'd fallen asleep with my headphones on, music blaring, to block out the storm of my parents' argument, but at some point I must have pulled them off in my sleep, because all I hear now is nothing at all.

My parents are morning people, so it's never quiet in our house when the sun comes up. Mom is always making breakfast, putting away dishes, sweeping the floor. Dad, when he's home, is always hammering or building or fixing something.