My Diary from the Edge of the World (16 page)

After that she wouldn't leave. I guess she was too confused, and didn't know quite what to do. She just stood several yards away from us as the afternoon wore into evening, watching us with eerily intelligent eyes. It made us uneasy, but with evening coming on we had to set about finding branches for building a fire, so we went to work.

Daisy lingered on. We would have given her food if we'd had any. As the rest of us sat huddled together around our meager campfire, barely talking, Oliver bravely moved closer toward her, pointing into the distance to try to convince her she'd be better off leaving us. She stayed put.

When it had gotten pretty late, Dad insisted we all get some rest and that he would keep an eye on Daisy. Cuddled against Sam on the hard ground, cold and shivering, I thought I'd never be able to get to sleep
for fear of her, but finally I drifted off. I woke this morning to an amazing sight: Oliver asleep on the edge of our circle, and Daisy watching over him, her paw stroking his back, protecting him like one of her own cubs.

Late this morning we all heard a distant call, the telltale sound of a group of sasquatches on the move—even in this remote place. Daisy turned toward the sound, then turned to look back at us with her keen, dark eyes. Finally she stood and slunk away, looking back at us every few steps, until she ultimately turned and jogged in the direction of the sound. Her enormous silhouette grew smaller and smaller in the distance, and now she's gone.

*  *  *

I've been thinking a lot about Oliver, and how he, of all of us, was the one to make peace with Daisy, and the one to let her go, and the one to fall asleep with her stroking his back in the end. I've been trying to figure out why that is, and I think—for him—it's all got something to do with facing the unbearable.

Animals are made to eat each other, and sometimes I wonder why. I wonder if that's part of why the angels rebelled—because they thought the gods were mean
in the way they made the world, or that they were making mistakes, and I have to admit that if I were an angel I think I might rebel too . . . because of Clouds, and people like Big Tex, and because of the helpless way I feel when I hear Sam coughing. (The weird part is that the more of the wild I see, the more I think maybe we're inseparable—people and animals and even the woods.)

Anyway, I can't deny that
I
have a mean streak too.
I
can be cruel. I'm the one who wanted to leave Daisy for dead, and it makes me feel embarrassed now.

I wonder that if you keep growing and changing like you're supposed to, if you always end up embarrassed about how stupid you used to be. Every year I realize how dumb I was the year before. It makes me tempted to cross out pieces of this diary so no one will ever see some of the more embarrassing things I've thought about. (Probably no one will ever read this anyway, so I don't know why I worry.) Still, I suppose a true autobiographer has to be completely honest and not sugarcoat themselves.

*  *  *

Ugh, now I've gotten a teardrop on this page from thinking about Daisy! I have to admit that I worry about her.
Will she make it across the desert okay? Will she get along with the other sasquatches? Will she make it home to her children? It drives me crazy not to know. Mom says handling not knowing what the answers are is one of the hardest things in life, but also a really nice mystery. It doesn't feel nice to me.

“Daisy has a good nose, Gracie,” Oliver just said to me, sitting down cross-legged beside me, with that habit he has of guessing my thoughts. “She's an animal, so she has good instincts. She'll find water and food and find her way home.”

“I hope you're right,” I said. Looking over at him, I fought the urge to reach for his hand. Sometimes I want to do weird things like that. I'm sure Millie, with her head for romance, would say I have a crush on Oliver, but that's not really the way it feels. It just feels like I want him to be happier, and he wants me to be happier. It feels like he's my first really good friend.

I can tell he's worried about Daisy too. I guess what we should really be worried about is ourselves: stranded in the desert with no food and no way to get anywhere. Mom and Dad say that when the sun gets lower we'll have to start walking. Dad says he has a plan and knows exactly where we're heading, that he
can navigate by the stars, but I think he's just trying to keep our spirits up.

If in fifteen years someone finds this diary next to my bleached bones, just know that—

Ugh. My pen is dying. I'm running out of ink.

W
e

It's been almost a week
since I last wrote. No, I'm not just a pile of bones in the desert, and yes, we are alive. I'll resist the urge to jump ahead into everything that's happened over the past few days and instead bring things up to date.

*  *  *

The first thing that saved us in the desert was that we found a couple of bottles of water and some bags of trail mix under a pile of blankets in Daisy's empty trailer. (I really don't know where we'd be if Mom hadn't made that discovery!) The second thing was a little more complicated, as it turned out to be both a blessing and a curse.

That first afternoon after Daisy had left, we hiked for a couple of hours due west, along the lip of the canyon.
Setting off into the uncharted and empty desert like that gave me the same breathless, unhinged feeling I used to get at Wet 'N' Wild Adventure Park in Maine, when I would stand at the top of their biggest waterslide before launching myself down. I kept picturing these old western movies Dad likes to watch—where vultures circle over creatures, waiting for them to die—and looking at the sky to see if any vultures were waiting for
us
. When Millie asked what I was thinking about and I told her, she laughed at me, but it was a tense laugh.

As night fell, we began to look for a place to sleep—somewhere we might find a little shelter against a rock or a cluster of trees. I'm not sure what we wanted to be sheltered
from
, and I guess we didn't know. Maybe just from the roaming eyes of animals that might come our way. In any case, we were all at a real low point, and Sam was running a fever and taking turns riding on each of our backs. Mom had stopped trying to cheer us up, which was maybe the most worrisome part of all. Usually she's the glue that holds the rest of us together.

We finally found a hill littered with giant boulders, which might have given us a view from the top, except it was too dark. We decided to climb it in the morning to get the lay of the land, and then we huddled together
with our backs toward one of the big rocks at the bottom. We were all very quiet and lost in our own thoughts, and nobody said good night to each other.

I was too cold to sleep, and I don't know when I first heard the music, because it seemed to drift into my awareness slowly. When I did finally notice it for sure, I thought I must be imagining it. Then it kept being drowned out by Sam's coughing in his sleep, and then when I'd try to listen again the wind would have shifted direction so that I couldn't hear anything at all. I might never have realized it was real unless Millie, the only other one still awake (she was staring up at the stars thoughtfully, which isn't like her) leaned forward and whispered to me.

“Do you hear that?”

I nodded.

She glanced up at the sky again, then back at me. “Doesn't it seem like there's a weird light coming from up there?”

“Up where?” I asked. Millie's eyes glistened at me in the dark while she nodded upward.

I looked up—there was a dim white glow to the night sky above us, but I'd assumed it was the light of the half moon floating over the canyon and filtering down on
us. I whispered this to Millie, but she didn't seem convinced.

She gazed up the hill behind us, wearing her determined face (which comes out every now and then and makes me think maybe she's found her “inner compass” like Mom says she will). “I'm gonna go up and see if I can see anything.”

“I'll come with you,” I said.

“I can do it alone,” she said, but as if she really wanted me to come.

I stood up and followed her. I didn't like to think of her going off alone, anyway. What if she got lost? Or if some boulder-dwelling creature attacked her?

We tried to make it up the hill quietly, but it was no easy feat—stones slid underneath us and we had to hold on to each other a couple of times just to keep our balance as we navigated between boulders and over the pitted dirt. I wondered if this might be a good time to ask Millie about her secret conversation with the Cloud, but I just couldn't work up the courage to do it. I don't know why sometimes things are so hard to talk about, when in the movies they seem so easy.

The music that I thought I'd imagined could now be heard again, more clearly. It had an echoey quality—like
it was drifting up to us from the bottom of a bowl. And there was no denying it, the sky was strangely lit up in a way that couldn't come from the moon.

Millie was just ahead of me, climbing with more and more speed, hitching herself up over the rocks with difficulty. Just as we reached the ridge, she turned, breathing hard, to pull me up by my sleeve. She swiveled to look out at the view, and gasped. I was a second behind her.

*  *  *

We gaped at a deep gorge that forked off from the main canyon about a hundred yards in front of us. Clinging to the sides and bottom of the plummeting, craggy slopes was a sprawl of twinkling lights coming from thousands of dark little houses made out of clay and stone, lining roads and promenades carved out of the cliffs.

Stone staircases climbed their way up the sides, and standing on landings nestled in rock were tents, conical towers, pyramids with glowing windows—all lit with yellow, flickering lights. We could just make out other strange figures drifting up and down the crooked climbing streets.

“What is that place?” I breathed.

Millie looked at me, her dark eyes twinkling with excitement, as if this had been the answer we'd been looking for all along.

“That,” she breathed, “is Luck City.” And then she turned down the hill, hurrying to tell the others.

Okay, I had to stop
writing, but now I'm back. I'll keep trying to catch up, even though there's enough going on right now to fill twenty pages. I'm so tempted to tell you where I am, but I'm practicing self-denial.

We walked into Luck City before dawn that next morning. We hadn't forgotten Grandma's warning, but what choice did we have? Where else did we have to go? And I have to admit I think we were all a little excited. Mom herded us like geese in front of her as we approached the stairs that led down into the city. “Stay close to me,” she said. “Don't talk to anyone. Don't look at anyone funny. Look away if anyone looks at
you
funny.” She held Sam in her arms, pressed against her tightly, but she also had a twinkle in her eye. “I never
thought I'd see this place,” she said, gazing about her. “How do they have electricity?”

“It's hydropower,” Dad said. He pointed to the other side of the gulch, where we could see a waterfall gushing over the side. “I suppose they've built a waterwheel of some sort at the bottom, though it appears they haven't done a very good job.” Even as we watched, the lights all over town blinked out for a few moments and then came on again.

Despite the early hour, the city was already wide awake, loud, and chaotic. It wove through the gorge like a blinky electric garden, even more intricate and dazzling than it had looked from on top of the hill. We passed clay buildings of all shapes and sizes, some opening outward like giant flowers, some arched or spiraled, some with openings to dark holes tunneling into the canyon walls. Ghosts and a couple of vampires walked past us as if we were nothing new or special, and we saw plenty of people, too—shady looking characters, men in cowboy hats, and tattooed women who looked like they could beat up the cowboys. “How do they all get here?” I asked.

Dad shook his head. “Some probably trek from the main road. Probably a lot come by horse. These are
mostly desperate people looking to win big. The only humans who'd come here,” he explained, “are either hiding out, or seasoned gamblers, or desperate and looking for their last hope.”

We walked past a building that was shaped like a dragon's head on one side, breathing out a fire-shaped building on the other that glowed with the words
SHOPPING! ARCADE!
at the top, lit by hundreds of round, flickering bulbs.

Shouts and music and laughter and yelling drifted from inside.

“What do they gamble with?” Oliver asked.

“All sorts of things. Land, cars, the deeds to their houses. Maps, rare ones, like to the Fountain of Youth. Blueprints of the Underworld. Things like that. They deal in all sorts of currency here,” Dad went on. As if to underline his point, we came, just then, to a building called the Western Beastly Bank & Loan, Lowest Interest Rates in the Canyon, Tastiest Meats for Bartering with Sasquatches. In the window hung shanks of meat and shiny antiques. (I remembered Grandma's trunk of gifts and wondered if the shiny objects were for paying ghosts.) One teller inside was counting out gold coins apparently being deposited by a leprechaun.

We squeezed together as we walked down a narrow
stairway—there was only a thin stone railing between us and the plummeting depths below, and Mom made us keep against the rocky wall. “Okay,” she said, “we're going to find a hotel, get cleaned up, and figure out what to do next.”

Somewhere across the city, a circus barker was yelling for people to “step right up” for the morning's show—a satyr tightrope-walking across the canyon—in fifteen minutes. A group of leprechauns rode past us on old rusty bikes, wearing tiny clothes. “I swear I saw that outfit in the children's section at Walmart when I was shopping for Sam last year,” Millie said, staring at one of them.