The Last Days of California: A Novel (23 page)

I turned on the TV. There had been no reports of Christians gone missing. Marshall was unavailable for comment. We were going to have to drive back to Montgomery, but I didn’t want to go back to Montgomery, or I didn’t feel like driving anymore, ever. I wondered if we could stay in Arizona. I imagined myself beautiful in Arizona—my hair longer and fuller, my skin clearer. My mother could get a teaching job and my father could find work in a place where people didn’t know about all of the jobs he’d lost. Where he could start fresh. And Elise could have her baby, or not, and no one would give a shit. I thought of other reasons, ways I might try to sell them on it, while I watched my sister sleep.

After a while, I went to the bathroom—my stomach was queasy and I had a dull headache, but I looked better than I ever had in my life—cheeks and lips flushed, eyes burning. My dirty hair looked darker, nearly thick. I studied my pores in the magnified mirror, the light making halos in my eyes.

I turned on the little TV and sat on the toilet. It was a show I’d seen before, the people pretending it was the 1800s. They were on a farm with pigs and chickens and the women were sweating in ankle-length, long-sleeved dresses. A butch woman washed clothes while a more attractive woman made biscuits. You had sex, I thought.
You did it.
I wanted to feel more, for it to hurt, so I kept repeating it to myself.
You had sex. You aren’t a virgin anymore.
I called myself a slut and a whore while digging my nails into my thighs to move the feeling from my chest to my legs.

An hour later,
we were in our parents’ room, lounging in their empty tub while our mother talked to one of her sisters. She’d given us dirty looks when she’d opened the door but hadn’t said anything about not calling her back. She didn’t want to get off the phone.

“I have no idea where we are,” she said. “We could be in Toocumterry for all I know.” Toocumterry was her version of Bumfuck Egypt. She was wearing the dress we called her carpool dress; it was green and blue tie-dye, old and soft. Elise and I were wearing the tank tops we’d slept in. We had our sunglasses on, hair piled on top of our heads with bobby pins. Along with my slight hangover, this ensemble made me feel cool and jaded.

I hooked my arms over the back of the tub and watched the muted TV, the nonevent unfolding across the globe. The rapture hadn’t happened in China or Russia. It hadn’t happened in Japan or Vietnam or India or Cambodia. Somewhere in Australia, a group of drunken revelers released helium balloons with blow-up dolls attached.

“Australians are so weird,” Elise said.

“You’ve never even met an Australian,” I said.

“You don’t know.”

“Who?”

The toilet flushed and our father came out of the bathroom, still in his robe. He paused before taking a seat at the edge of the bed. “That was some bill y’all racked up at the pool yesterday,” he said. He took off his glasses and held the bridge of his nose. “Room service, too. Hot fudge sundaes—everybody likes a hot fudge sundae.”

Elise raised her sunglasses to look at me.

“We didn’t think you’d have to pay for it,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Of course you didn’t.” He didn’t say anything else, and we listened to our mother tell one of her sisters about the fabulous dinner we’d had last night—it was the best lobster she’d ever put in her mouth. The lobsters had been small and overcooked, but our steaks had been good—tender, medium-rare.

My father turned the sound on, a reporter interviewing an unknown man. The man said we were likely to go through the stages of grief from denial to depression. He said we would probably experience psychological trauma and may consider suicide. I looked at my father to gauge his reaction.

I climbed out of the tub and sat next to him. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” he said. Then he patted my leg and said I was his girl and I loved him so much in that moment. I was his girl and would always be his girl.

“It could still happen,” I said.

“No it couldn’t,” Elise said.

“The Middle East is full of Muslims,” I said.

“Australia’s mostly Christian. New Zealand, too.”

Now that she told me she made things up, I was suspicious of everything. I got out my phone and Googled “Drunken revelers in Australia release blow-up dolls,” but there was no sign of these people. Most of the links had to do with women and binge drinking.

My father walked over to the window. “Why don’t y’all go back to your room for a minute and let me talk to your mother,” he said. But we’d left our keys in our room; our bags were in their entryway. Elise pointed this out and asked if he wanted us to go to the coffee shop.

I went to the bathroom and admired my face some more, my red lips. I was thirsty but didn’t feel like drinking any water.

“Jess,” Elise called. “What are you doing in there?”

“Nothing.”

“Will you make me some coffee?”

I sorted through the little plastic bin. “There’s only decaf.”

“Go find the lady.”

“Go find her yourself,” I said. I went to the door and looked out. There was a cart in the hall. I walked over and saw a cleaning lady pushing a vacuum by the window. I tried to get her attention but she didn’t see me so I opened a plastic drawer and took out two packets. Just as I was turning, she met my eye—a flash of hatred and surprise.

I ran back to the room like someone was chasing me and tossed them to my sister.

“It would taste better if you made it,” she said.

I got in the tub and we watched coverage we’d already seen—dozens of news vans camped outside of Marshall’s offices, a wide lot and a half-dozen trailers. A pretty black woman in a pantsuit knocked on a door. No one answered, so she knocked on another and another until she was back at the first one. It was always so damning when no one could be reached for comment. Then it cut to a reporter interviewing a man from the Florida leg. He was in the driver’s seat of a rapture van, his tan arm hanging out the window. The reporter asked if it had been a waste of his time and the man said he had brought many people to God, that lives were changed because of what they’d done. I looked at my father and wondered if he could convince himself he had changed lives. He didn’t look sad or traumatized or angry. He didn’t look anything.

“I hope they show Greta,” Elise said.

“I don’t,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.” I imagined the door to her home ajar, all of her electronics gone. Cats gone, husband. The faces of her plain, overweight children stapled to telephone poles. Long after they were found dead, strangers would still be peering into their eyes.

My father stood and wheeled his suitcase into the bathroom. “We have to be out in forty-five minutes,” he said.

Elise and I looked at our mother, who was now watching something on her phone.

“She hates us,” Elise said.

“Don’t say ‘hate,’ ” our mother said, glancing up at us.

“See? She hates us.” She took the bobby pins out of her hair one by one and laid them on the edge of the tub.

“I always wanted two girls—two girls, two years apart. You know that.”

“I’m sure you were so specific,” Elise said.

“We’re two and a half years apart,” I said.

Elise put her feet on either side of my head and lifted herself into a backbend, her crotch pointed at my face. She moved her head from side to side and her hair swung back and forth like a pendulum.

On our mother’s phone, a crowd cheered.

“What are you watching?” I asked.

She turned the screen to me but I was too far away. “Have you seen this video?” she asked. “This man in Oregon made a video proposal.”

“No. Why would I have seen it?”

The cheering died down and a man was telling a woman he loved her more than life itself. Then he was saying he was going to spend the rest of his days trying to make her happy. He didn’t say anything remotely original and the woman, of course, was crying. When the boy I loved proposed, he wouldn’t say the usual things about how much he loved me or get on one knee. He’d say he wanted to die with me in a freak submarine explosion. He’d say he loved me down to the squishy insides of his bones. I could help him come up with things if he needed me to. Boys had trouble expressing themselves because they weren’t as good with language.

Elise walked over to the desk and picked up the landline.

“What are you doing?” our mother asked.

She turned her back to us and placed an order for room service, more food than we could eat. It was probably going to cost a hundred dollars.

I looked at my mother, smiling at her phone. I wanted to go to her, curl up in her arms. I missed her and wanted to tell her I missed her. At home, we shared bowls of popcorn, sat close to each other on the couch to watch movies. When we were finished eating, we’d scratch each other’s backs.
I want to put you in my pocket,
she’d say,
so I can pull you out whenever I want
. I would imagine myself small, pocket-sized, nestled against the warmth of her leg. I was afraid she would die without knowing how much I loved her, and it made me want to tell her things, let her get to know me, but I didn’t think she’d be able to love me if she knew me.

Our father came
out of the bathroom smelling like Colgate and Barbasol, same as always. He sat on the bed and opened his Bible.

“You won last night, didn’t you?” Elise said.

He grinned, the kind of grin we only saw when he returned from the casino with a wallet full of money. That hadn’t happened in a long time. I couldn’t remember the last time it had happened.

“How much?” I asked.

He raised his eyebrows at us, and his hand moved to his wallet as if to check and make sure it was still there.

“Did you get your picture taken?” I asked.

Years ago, when he first started gambling, he’d won big. He was given balloons and an oversized check and had his picture taken; the photo was hidden in his underwear drawer. Winning was the worst thing that had ever happened to him, he’d said once, in a rare moment of reflection.

“Don’t give them any of it back,” Elise said.

“I’m not going to,” he said, “don’t worry,” and then he began to read as if it were any other morning, only he started at the beginning:
“ ‘The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.’ ”

I closed my eyes and listened, trying to picture the earth without form, the water with a face. I thought I could see the water’s face. It was happy. Elise got up and went to the bathroom. Our father kept reading: God rested, man took his first breath, God planted a garden.

My phone beeped. I hoped it was Gabe, but it was Elise:
Come in here
.

She let me in and sat on the floor, pressed her knees to her chest. “I think I’m having a miscarriage,” she said.

“How come?”

“Because I’m bleeding a lot and it hurts really bad.” She looked at me like I’d know what to do, but I didn’t know what to do. I caught my eye in the mirror.

“Maybe we should go to the hospital,” I said.

“No.”

“Maybe you’re just spotting. I’ve heard that happens.”

Our father raised his voice. “ ‘
Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
’ ”

“It hurts so bad,” she said. “Do you think you could go get me some ibuprofen?”

“Did you check to see if she has any?” I asked, sorting through our mother’s makeup bag: POND’S Cold Cream, Q-tips, thick pads wrapped in pink and green, a tube of brownish lipstick in the shade she’d worn forever.

“I saw it,” she said, “it was a big clot of blood. Clottier than the usual clots.”

I stood there for a moment, looking down at her, and said I’d be back. Then I closed the door and slipped on my flip-flops, thinking about the baby in the toilet, a big clot of blood.

“Elise is sick,” I said, interrupting my father, who was coming to the part where the woman screws everything up, bringing curses upon the ground, turning everybody to dirt.

“What’s wrong?”

“She has a stomachache.”

He took out his wallet and handed me a bunch of ones, said he thought we’d already bought Pepto-Bismol.

At the sundries shop,
the only medicine came in envelopes with two to a package. I counted the money my father had given me—seven dollars—and then counted my own—thirteen. I wanted to spend it all, felt the need to get down to zero. There was no one else in the store so I started setting things on the counter: three packages of Advil, a Diet Coke, a big bag of peanut M&M’s, which were Elise’s favorite, and an
OK!
magazine with Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson on the cover. I took the elevator back up, walking faster as I neared our room. I didn’t know how to feel about what was happening. On the one hand, it would be over, everything fixed. On the other hand—I wasn’t sure, exactly, what was on the other hand, but I knew there was something. And maybe she wasn’t having a miscarriage at all. What did she know about having a miscarriage?

I knocked and my mother answered. “Is everything okay?” she asked, leaning in. I wondered if she could smell alcohol on me. “Elise said she only wanted you.”

“She just has cramps.”

“Oh,” she said, her eyes searching my face. She stepped back and opened the door wider. She knew Elise didn’t have her period; she was the one who was always running out to buy tampons and pads and panty liners, Midol and ibuprofen. Among the three of us, we couldn’t keep these things in the house. My period came at the tail end of my mother’s, would be starting any day now, at any moment, but Elise’s wasn’t due for another two weeks. I wasn’t sure why I had said this and wished I hadn’t.

Elise opened the door to the bathroom and I handed her the medicine; she ripped open a couple of packets and swallowed the pills. “It knew I didn’t want it,” she said. “It could feel it.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said, though I didn’t know if it was her fault or not. Maybe the baby
had
known, maybe it had felt everything she felt. I thought of Rachel, with her half-hideous, half-normal face, and fingered my ring, running it back and forth along the chain so it made a nice zip noise.