Road to Paradise

“I don’t remember saying that. How do you remember this?”

“It’s just the kind of stuff you remember.” Montesano? Minnesota? Mira Loma?

“I don’t think I said it.” Emma shook her head. “It’s possible I said it, but, Shelby, I was talking to a five-year-old. You asked me when your mother was coming back. What was I supposed to say? I just said something to make you feel better. Like she was far away and couldn’t leave. But honestly …”

Commercial ended; we went back to watching “Dynasty”.

That night, I pulled out a map of the United States. After thirty minutes of carefully combing the fourth largest state in the union, I gave up. Maricopa? Mission Viejo? Mira Flores?

“I don’t think it’s a town,” Emma continued the next day, as if she knew I’d been looking, thinking about it. “I thought she went to have a rest at a mental hospital. Like Bellevue. Or Menninger in Kansas.”

“What was the name of the mental hospital?”

“Shel, I don’t know. I wasn’t serious.”

“You know she went somewhere.”

“I don’t know.”

“You told me a name back then. I know you did. Did she have family from there? Why am I so sure it begins with an M? That it has four syllables?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mariposa? Minnelusa? Miramonte?”

She rubbed her eyes, as if she were tired of me. The commercial ended, “Dallas” came back on, and Emma had no time to respond. Nor did she respond during the next commercial. And then “Dallas” was over and she got up and said, “I’m going to bed. Goodnight.”

“I thought maybe that’s why you got me a car,” I said after her. “So I could go visit my sick mother at the Montezuma mental hospital.”

Emma turned around. “I got you a car,” she said, “so you could be free. You kept saying you wanted to be. So now you are. I don’t know where your mother is. I never knew.”

“I’m not going to be gone long,” I said. “Just a few weeks. Maybe two.”

“Two weeks? Takes longer than that to drive there and back.”

“Nah. I’ll be quick. Maybe two and a half. I’ll be back by the middle of July. You’ll be okay for a couple of weeks, won’t you?”

“I’ll be okay,” said Emma. “But two and a half weeks to where? And starting when?”

I bought a map of California from the Rand McNally store in New York City. I put my finger on the letter M in the town index, and went down, mouthing the names to myself one by one, from Mabel to Mystic, and then back again from Mystic to Mabel.

The third time through, at two in the morning, I found it.

Mendocino.

Men-doh-SEE-no.

Mendocino!

I couldn’t sleep until Emma woke up at five.

“Mendocino!” I exclaimed later, like an operatic clap.

She gazed at me through bleary, blinking eyes, as if she’d just woken up. “You have your notebooks, your running stuff?”

“Emma, Mendocino! Isn’t that right?”

“I think so,” she said. “That sounds almost right. Do you have your lunch, or are you going to buy one in school?”

“I’ll buy one in school. It is, it is right. It feels right.”

“Good. You want some eggs before you go?”

I had eggs. I had orange juice.

Mendocino=Missing Mother.

Emma! I wanted to yell. But yelling’s not our style, unless I’m angry. But how could I be angry? Marc told me Emma could have spent as much as $5000 (though I told him that was impossible) on my car so I could go find my mother. It had been so long since I’d seen her. She might be wondering how I’d been.

I laid out the map of the United States on the floor of my room and studied it like the periodic table. I measured my route with a ruler as I used to in Miss Keller’s class, with an X-axis and a Y-axis and plot points along the way. I measured the miles in days and inches. I used physics (time and distance), geometry (points along the X-axis) and earth science (weather conditions in July) to determine my course. I used my seventh-grade social studies to help me with geography. My trouble was: seventh grade was a really long time ago. I thought after Pennsylvania came Kansas, then Nevada, then California. I took earth science in ninth grade, and geometry in tenth, but physics was a senior year subject, and afraid of flunking I opted out of the physics program, and so was stuck with the most rudimentary knowledge of the space-time continuum. As in: how long does it take to travel 3000 miles? Oh, but the Shelby Mustang can fly at 136.7 mph! The Kitty Hawk didn’t go that fast. Twenty-two hours. I could be there and back in two days. Sweet. Three if I dogged it.

Utah’s time and distance didn’t even make it into my calculations. I don’t have to go through Utah to get to California, I said to myself, and dismissed it. I lost interest in geometry and physics somewhere before crossing the Mississippi.

What became clear to me was this: with my flagrant and obvious limitations, I don’t know what I was thinking, planning to go by myself. After Iowa, I had no strategy for the rest of the country. And I like to nap in the afternoons. How could I nap if I was the only one driving? With so many skillsets clearly missing, a vague half of the western country appearing to me monolithically when I slept—snow and yellow flowers between two vast bodies of water—I was on a rack of doubt.

Which was precisely why when Gina approached my breasts in the locker room and offered to go with me, to split the costs and share the driving and the fear, I did not say no right away. Anxiety danced in me, but summer danced in me, too. I was eighteen, out of high school, and had a 1966 stock-car racing Mustang with black Le Mans stripes. And Gina didn’t. Though she had had other things that I know meant a lot to her. Boyfriends, and things.

Gina and I were like sisters in kindergarten. She lived on Summer Street, a short walk away, and had a stay-at-home mom, a working dad, a grandma living with them, and a sister she didn’t get along with, but still—an actual sister.

Her mother didn’t mind that we used to play mostly at her house; she said she didn’t like the endless parade of strangers through mine. I don’t know quite what she meant by that. Strangers didn’t parade through our rooms above a garage. So there we were, tight and inseparable, and suddenly, just like that, out of the blue, for no good reason, almost to spite me, my bestest bud Gina becomes friends with the mousy, gossipy Agnes Tuscadero, whom I didn’t like to begin with but after the revelations at the Tuscaderos’ idle-talk kitchen table, I hated like Jews hate Hitler. Gina said we could all be friends. She didn’t understand why the three of us could not all be friends. So we feebly played together, got together, walked into town, went to Larchmont beach, talked about being grounded, getting freedom, lying to our parents, and suddenly, just like that, out of the blue, for no good reason, it occurred to me it wasn’t Agnes who was the third wheel.

Marc said Gina was not a serious person, that she was too lightweight for me. I deserved a better, more profound friend. Like him.

Gina maintained we were all still friends. Every Saturday she kept inviting me out, to the beach, to Rye Playland. “Come on, the more the merrier.” She wouldn’t take my no for an answer, though it was the only answer she kept getting. Except once. A year ago June she invited me out to a club with her new boyfriend Eddie. “Come out with us, please? I really want you to meet him. I want him to meet all my best friends. You’ll love him. He is so funny.”

“What about Agnes?” I said glumly.

“She’s not as funny.” Agnes apparently was grounded. I couldn’t believe I agreed to go as Agnes’s pathetic mid-day Friday, afterthought replacement. But I went.

Eddie was pretty funny.

Then Agnes wasn’t grounded anymore, and Gina cold-turkey stopped asking me to go places with her. Nearly the entire senior year had cruised by and we had barely spoken till the afternoon in the locker room.

Gina and I weren’t such strangers once, but there is something so personal about traveling in a car with someone. So intimate. Sharing the minutes of your day, your every minute for days, maybe weeks, with another human being. I couldn’t understand why in the world she’d want to come with me. But the thought of traveling alone was not entirely pleasant. Tension was inherent in both scenarios. On the one hand, Gina, but on the other, terror and alone! It was like that Valentine’s Day Hallmark card for fools: “BEING WITH YOU IS ALMOST LIKE BEING WITH SOMEONE.” Now that was sentiment I responded to. What was better: Gina or violent dread?

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” I told her when she accosted me again in the hall.

“Well, I have to know soon.”