The Key to the Golden Firebird (16 page)

She continued pulling her fingers through his hair, right down to the nape of his neck. His skin was cool, and she dragged her hand along it casually as she pulled her arm back. She pressed her fingers down into the soft fabric of his cotton shirt. A strange tingling spread through her body.

It seemed to turn her brain back on.

“We should probably drive back,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “It seems kind of late.”

Pete didn't get up right away, so she gave him a gentle push out of the cart.

 

When they pulled back up to May's house, they stared at the RV in the driveway. All twenty-six feet of it. Longer, actually, since the Firebird was latched onto the back. So more like forty feet. The chain holding the Firebird on seemed way too small, and the mess of wires and lights would be impossible to disentangle.

“So that's it?” Pete said.

“Yep.” May nodded, getting out of the car. “Want to see?”

It was very dark inside the RV. Shadowy mounds covered the sofa, the table, and the floor. There was a light smell of mold in the air. May found a tiny battery-powered camping lamp on the counter and switched it on. It emitted a feeble glow.

“See this?” May said, grabbing a dish from the kitchenette sink. “We stopped using these dishes when I was five. All of this other stuff is just junk we haven't gotten around to throwing away. It's like we're taking a trip in a garage sale.”

She sat down on one side of the bench-style kitchen table. Pete shut the door and sat on the other side of the table. May could barely even see him over the pile.

“This isn't going to work,” he said. “I'm coming over.”

“Okay,” May said. “See you when you get here.”

Pete came over to May's side and joined her on the bench.

“This stuff reeks,” she said, cringing. “It's probably been baking in here all night. It's going to be unbearable tomorrow.”

She reached up and pulled a box down from the top of the pile.

“Operation,” she said, feeling the thick dust under her fingers. “We used to play this.”

“I remember,” Pete said. “I think I swallowed some of the pieces.”

“That's right. I dared you, and you did it. What did you eat?”

“Definitely the Adam's apple. And the butterfly from the stomach. Maybe the funny bone.”

“God.” May laughed. “You would do anything. Brooks and I used to sit and think stuff up to get you to do. I'm glad we didn't kill you.”

“You wouldn't have learned how to drive.”

There was something very deliberate about the way he said it.

“Right,” May said. “I guess you can't complain about having to teach me, you know, since—”

“I wasn't complaining. Like I said, I wanted to.”

“Oh. Well, thanks. It's been…good. It's kind of weird not wanting to kill you. Much.”

“Yeah.”

They were shoulder to shoulder now, the box between them.

“This box is so filthy,” May said. “Did I get dust all over you, or…”

And that's when it happened. It was almost too dark to see Pete's face distinctly, but May saw a shadow coming closer. Her first instinct was to brace herself in panic when she felt Pete's lips trying to find hers (he missed at first, catching her nose). But then she found herself reaching up to
his face and wrapping her arms around his neck, and in a moment she was leaning back against the window. Pete was leaning into her, and she was sliding farther down on the bench.

And the panic was gone.

a brief history of

1. Mike and Anna Gold drive Brooks (age six), me (age five), and Palmer (age three) to Williamsburg, Virginia. Brooks throws my Barbie out of the Firebird on I-95. As cosmic retribution, she is seized by car sickness and hurls into a shopping bag from Baltimore all the way to the Virginia state line.
   
2. The next year the Gold family joins the Camp family for a trip to Florida. I get a very serious case of sunburn while riding in the back of the Firebird on the way there—one so bad that it causes me to barf nonstop. I spend two days in the motel being cared for by my mother while everyone else goes to Disney World. Pete brings me back the stick from his Mickey Mouse Popsicle as a present.
   

At seven o'clock the next morning, dressed in the same blue camouflage T-shirt, May carried a laundry basket full of food to the RV. She gazed down the length of the behemoth before climbing in. Even at this hour, it was already hot. The air was heavy and wet. When she stepped inside the RV, May felt herself explode in perspiration. She set the basket down and started loading up the kitchenette counter. Spaghetti. More spaghetti. Taco shells. Cereal. Ziti. Peanut butter.

It was going to be a starch fest.

When she was finished, she turned and stared at the spot where she and Pete had been the night before. The Operation box was on the floor. May quickly moved to pick it up, as if it were somehow incriminating. Once she'd picked it up, though, she was flooded with emotion. She held the box as if it were a love letter.

“What are you doing?” Palmer greeted her, pushing in with a waterproof sleeping bag.

“Nothing,” May said, tossing the box back onto the stack. “This fell.”

“Whatever. Move.”

Palmer managed to knock over most of the groceries May had just piled on the tiny counter. She shoved her way back into the bedroom, which was one tiny space with two small beds. There was what looked like a large curtained shelf right
above these beds; this was really yet another bed. This “room” was where the three of them would be sleeping (Palmer had already been assigned the shelf-bed). Brooks had brought her bags down the night before, and her things alone took up most of the tiny space. May had thrown hers on top.

“Where is my stuff supposed to go?” Palmer whined. “You guys took up all the space!”

“Snooze, you lose. We got down here first.”

“I'm moving this crap out.”

“You can't. Mom's sleeping on the pullout couch. You can't put it there.”

Assorted grumblings from Palmer as she climbed over the bags.

“Where's my bed?” she yelled.

“Behind that curtain.”

May heard the curtain being drawn back and Palmer's groan.

“How's it going?” Their mom was at the door, travel mug in hand, beaming over the entire disaster site.

“Palmer's complaining,” May said.

“Uh-huh,” she said, walking away from the door and toward the cab. “Make sure all of that stuff is secure. We're leaving in half an hour.”

An hour and a half later, when Brooks had woken up, when the dishes were finally done, and the map had been reconsulted, the four Golds were ready to go. As she climbed inside the RV, May took one last quick glance at the huge load they were towing behind them—the Firebird dangling off the back like an uncontrollable tail that could wipe whole lanes of traffic clear off the road in mere seconds.

“We're going to kill everyone,” she whispered to Palmer.

“Shut up,” Palmer replied.

The driver's seat was the only uncluttered space, so the girls each had to find themselves a place to sit. Brooks was stretched out on one of the bench seats at the table and was already trying to go back to sleep, even though she'd only been in the RV for thirty seconds. Palmer nestled amid the sheets and towels on the sofa. May got the passenger's seat, which was completely surrounded by bags. She had to tuck her legs up.

“Listen to this,” their mom said as she started the engine. “The Starks told me that all we need to do is fill a big container with hot water, our dirty clothes, some detergent, and a rubber ball or a sneaker. Then we stick it on the back of the RV, and it bounces around while we drive. It acts just like a washing machine. We can try it on the way back if you want.”

She's lost her mind,
May thought.

 

It took six hours for them to get there. Palmer and Brooks slept for most of it. Their mother listened to talk radio. May put her headphones on her ears and stared out the window. She didn't want to be going on this trip. It was so strange—for years, all she'd wanted to do was get away from Pete. Now the thought of being separated from him was more than she could take.

May replayed the scene from the night before in her mind. She would find that the memory worked well with one song, so she'd play it over and over until she got bored and had to search out a new song. Then the scene would come alive again, with different nuances. It was one thing to know someone in a
sitting-across-from-them kind of way; it was another thing entirely to lie on top of someone. Everything she knew about Pete was different now.

Of the many varieties of pathetic she had been in her life, May was proud that she had never slipped into the I'm-obsessed-with-my-boyfriend kind—although this was largely due to the fact that she had never had a boyfriend. Now, she realized, she was already slipping into the behavior. She was going to be like one of those pathetic girls who had to call their boyfriends on their cell phone every two minutes, except that she didn't have a cell phone. Maybe she would start writing things like MG + PC = TRUE LOVE 4 EVER on her notebooks. Then the transformation into Totally Pathetic Girlfriend would be complete.

Then again, she thought, she shouldn't be premature. The one useful life lesson that Brooks had taught her was that you shouldn't assume someone was your boyfriend without solid evidence. But this was Pete. And she knew Pete. And she felt pretty certain that was what he was thinking—that he should be her boyfriend.

She replayed the scene several more times, looking for clues on this subject.

After about four hours the memory started to wear a bit, so she tried to distract herself by reading the RV camping guidebook that she'd found in a pocket on the side of her seat, trying to get a sense of what was going on. Anything was better than looking up and seeing the trail of destruction she was sure they were leaving behind them.

“Okay,” she read aloud, “gray water means the water from
the shower and the sink. And black water…oh God…” May put the guide down. “They have actual bathrooms there, right?”

“I'm not sure,” her mom replied.

May sank lower in her seat.

 

When they arrived at the park, it took twenty minutes for their mom to steer around the narrow roads to get to their space. It took three people to guide them in, but the ride finally came to an end. Their mom hopped out, strangely energetic.

“We have to hook up the water,” she said, “and the electricity, and I think maybe the air…or that might be with the electricity. I'll have to ask. Go down and look at the ocean. It'll take a few minutes.”

“Where is it?” May said, looking around the lot.

“It's the ocean. You should be able to find it.” She strode off in the direction of the park director's trailer, which they had passed (and, May would have sworn, hit) on the way in.

“I'm staying here,” Palmer said, sinking down into a chair.

Brooks and May walked off without her and promptly got lost in the tangle of tiny roads. All the trailers looked pretty much identical to theirs, so they couldn't get their bearings. The same kids rode past them on their bikes four and five times in a row and started giving them strange looks.

“Maybe we should ask someone,” May finally said.

“We're standing next to the ocean, but we can't find it,” Brooks explained. “Imagine what that's going to sound like.”

They kept walking in circles until Brooks spotted a small path lined with railroad ties that they hadn't noticed before.
They followed this through another campsite, this one filled only with tents, until they found themselves walking on some sand. They followed the sandy path to an inlet and the inlet to the ocean.

“There it is,” May said. It was a beautiful view—a gorgeous, clean beach surrounded by a wall of enormous rocks along the inlet. People fished from these. Since it was getting late, people were starting to take down their umbrellas and chairs and head back to the park.

“Well, here we are,” Brooks said. “Want to go back?”

On the walk back, they discovered that the entire trip actually took three minutes, not the forty they had spent getting there in the first place.

“We're going to starve,” Palmer greeted them.

“What?” Brooks asked.

“Something's wrong with one of our cables or something. We have no electricity.”

May and Brooks looked up at the dark windows of the RV.

“Mom's seeing if she can borrow one from someone else. She's going around to all the other trailers. We're supposed to find the grill. It's in one of these things.” She pointed to the small hatches at the base of the RV.

“Don't we need keys for those?” May asked.

Palmer squinted at one of the hatches.

“Yeah.”

“Did she leave the key?”

“No.”

“The water's running, right?” May asked.

“No. We didn't have some kind of hose.”

“Well,” Brooks said, sitting down at the picnic table. “Who's having fun?”

 

The cables and hoses couldn't be found before dinner, so plans were made to take the Firebird back to town to pick up some fast food. But as May had anticipated, her mother didn't know how to detach the car from the complicated system of chains and lights that held it to the RV. Some neighbors came over and showed them how to do it.

It was almost eight o'clock before they were finally able to get out. They brought back a bag of hamburgers and drinks and waited for the man with the cables and hoses to arrive. The rest of the night was spent attempting to hook everything up.

By eleven they had electricity and water, but—despite the hours of sleep that most of them had gotten in the car—everyone seemed too tired to care. They all decided to use the bathhouse instead of the slightly frightening bathroom (especially since they weren't entirely sure that they had connected the water supply to the correct feed line, and the consequences if they had made a mistake were too dire to even imagine).

Washed, groggy, and annoyed, the Gold sisters piled into their “room.” The beds were only a foot apart, and Palmer kept climbing in and out of her shelf, stepping on May and Brooks's pillows and heads.

“I don't get it,” May said, trying to settle herself in her bed. “Mom said she'd been camping before. She said she and Dad used to go all the time.”

“That doesn't mean anything,” Brooks replied. “Remember
how she used to tell us that when she went to Amsterdam to see Aunt Betje, they used to like to go for coffee all the time?”

“So?”

“Dad told me that in Amsterdam a coffee shop is where you go for pot.”

“Oh…”

“Mom smoked pot?” Palmer leaned down from her shelf.

“Mom did a lot of things,” Brooks answered. “I think what she meant was that she and Dad went camping, and Dad put everything up.”

“Makes sense,” May said. “She doesn't lie. She's just—”

“Mom smoked pot?”

“It's legal there,” Brooks said. “Go to sleep.”

“Dad never told me that,” May said.

Brooks turned her back to May and switched off her overhead light. May followed suit. A moment later something soft fell over her nose and mouth.

“Could you keep your socks up there, Palm?” she said, removing the sock from her face.

A hand came down and clawed up the sock. May closed her eyes and went back to the place in her mind where she and Pete were always kissing, and she stayed there until she fell asleep.