“What?” I gasped.
“These rent-a-cop thugs were my ‘escorts’ to a teen boot camp,” Savannah went on. “You know, like the army for troubled kids? I didn’t get to say good-bye to anyone, I didn’t get to pack a bag. I just screamed, all the way outside, where they put me in a van and drove me to Idaho. That stunt alone cost my parents five thousand dollars—how sick is that? And I spent the next three months in the woods, chopping logs, digging up stumps, eating slop, and being screamed at. Once I missed curfew and they put me in a cell for two days. Solitary confinement! But then, a few days before I turned eighteen, I ran away.”
I was shocked. “What about your parents?” I asked.
“They know I’m safe,” she said. “But they can’t know where I am.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
She shrugged. “We’re getting over it, me and Lucy. I mean, I am, and she’s helping me. Her people got rid of her, too, didn’t they, girl? They sent her to the pound. But I saved her, and now we travel together.”
I made the decision right then. “I can take you as far as you need to go,” I said. “Wherever that is.”
She turned and smiled at me. “Thanks, you’re the best. But I think I gotta do this on my own. I’ll go with you until—”
“Until Denver,” I said firmly. “I’m not letting you out on the side of a highway. And I’m giving you money for a hotel.”
“As long as it takes dogs,” Savannah said.
“Of course,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “Really. Thanks a lot.”
She didn’t really want to talk much more after that—it was as if reliving that experience had exhausted her. Or maybe it was just her journey, which was obviously long and complicated.
But I bought her lunch and then dinner, and at seven o’clock that night, I left her in the parking lot of a Best Western on the outskirts of Denver.
She wouldn’t let me take a picture of her face, so instead I took a picture of Lucy, sitting by her feet. She wasn’t looking at the camera. Instead she was gazing up at the girl she was bound to, and I swear to God she was smiling.
I’d taken a lot of pet pictures in my day, but this, by far, was my favorite.
Chapter 19
AN HOUR later, I checked into a downtown hotel and showered off the eastern Colorado dust. It was still too early to go to bed, and I was too restless to veg out in front of the TV, so I walked down the street until I heard the sound of live music coming from the open windows of a tavern.
I went inside, ordered a gin and tonic, and tapped my foot to the music. When I got my drink, I raised the glass to Savannah and Lucy. I hoped their story would end happily. And I wished I’d ever have a way to know.
“You can join in if you like,” someone said.
I turned to see a man about my age, wearing black-framed glasses, with a violin tucked under his arm. He gestured toward the circle of people a few feet away, whose acoustic bluegrass had first pulled me into the bar.
“Now I wandered far away. From my home I’ve gone astray,” sang a woman with a high, clear voice.
I smiled. “Thanks, but I’m not a performer,” I said.
“I can tell you play an instrument, though,” he said.
I looked at him more carefully. He was handsome and broad-shouldered, but he squinted like he couldn’t see me very well.
“You can? How?” I asked.
“You would’ve said ‘I can’t play.’ But instead you said you don’t perform.”
“Very perceptive,” I said, smiling. “Okay, I don’t play anymore.”
“What did you used to play?”
“The violin, actually,” I admitted. “In a big high school orchestra, where I could blend in with the crowd. If I screwed up, no one but my stand partner could tell.”
He smiled. “We’re just here to mess around, and we’re a pretty forgiving group,” he said. “I’m new to music myself.”
I was surprised to hear that. “You seemed really good—for the two minutes I heard you play, anyway.”
He sat down on the stool next to me. “I practice four hours a day.”
“Wow, I was lucky if I hit twenty minutes,” I said.
The bartender placed a beer in front of him and he took a sip before saying, “Doctor’s orders.”
“The beer?”
He laughed. “No, the practicing.”
I could tell there was a story in this, and I leaned forward. “Please tell me how it came to be that a doctor wrote you a prescription for music.”
“If you really want to hear it,” he said.
“I do.”
He told me he’d been a soldier in Afghanistan, riding in a truck with a soldier from another company, when they hit an IED buried in the road.
“I didn’t have my Wileys on,” he said, “just a pair of Ray-Bans. So glass and shrapnel went right into my eyes. I couldn’t see a thing. I was bleeding all over the other guy, but he managed to clean me up. And then we were stuck there, in the shell of the truck. We were shooting at anything that moved—well, he was; I was shooting blind.”
When they weren’t shooting, he said, they were telling each other about their lives, because they knew they were more likely to see an RPG heading their way than any kind of rescue vehicle. It seemed like the last conversation they’d ever have with anyone. Eventually, they’d used up their ammunition, and the only thing left to do was take cover and wait.
“I still couldn’t really see anything, but he knew the enemy was moving in. And so he covered me with his body—this man I’d never met before in my life. And because of that, he took a bullet to his back.”
He stopped for a moment and drank half his beer in what seemed like one long gulp.
“Hard luck poppa standing in the rain,” sang the bluegrass folks. “If the world was corn he couldn’t buy grain…”
“We made it out alive,” he said. “Which was a miracle. But he can’t walk, and I can barely see. When I got home, I was so full of anger I didn’t know what to do. And then my doctor, who I’d always thought was some VA quack, told me to learn an instrument. I said, ‘I can’t see to read music.’ And he said, ‘That’s what your ears are for.’ I didn’t have the money for a guitar, which is what I really wanted, but my friend had this old violin. So I taught myself how to play it.” He patted it where it lay on the bar. “That soldier, Pete, saved my life. But so did this.”
“That’s an incredible story,” I said.
He ducked his head, like no big deal. Said, “I’ve got more where that came from. But let’s go play something. You can borrow my violin.”
He held it out, insistent, and so I took it from his hands. I tucked the instrument against my neck, feeling the cool smooth bowl of the chin rest. I took the bow in my right hand and curled my fingers around it.
It had been such a long time.
“We’ll start with something easy,” he said.
And so I played “Barbara Allen,” and then “Man of Constant Sorrow,” with a group of Colorado strangers, and I wasn’t even terrible.
Which is not to say that I was any good, either.
But if that didn’t qualify as coming out from behind my camera lens, I didn’t know what would.
Chapter 20
THE SUN had barely risen over the Mt. Galbraith foothills when I parked my dirty van in a rutted parking lot and set out along a trail above the city of Golden, Colorado.
I wanted to pause before the next leg of the journey, which was going to be a long one. I wasn’t ready to sit behind the wheel for ten straight hours again, for one thing. But there was another reason for the break: it seemed to me that when I arrived at my final destination, my whole life could take a turn.
I hiked the rocky path alone for the first hour. My only company was a half dozen hummingbirds that darted through the air on invisible wings. The trail rose through scrubland, with pockets of sage and Ponderosa pine, and I felt wild a
nd alone.
I also felt like I needed to exercise more regularly: after only an hour, I was out of breath and my legs had become Jell-O.
Eventually I crossed paths with a family—two determined-looking parents and two sullen teenagers, one of whom was staring at his phone while hiking.
I waved and said cheerfully, “Great day for a walk!”
“Whatever,” one of the teenagers muttered; the other ignored me completely.
I smiled sympathetically at the mother, thinking, Good luck with those grouchy children of yours. But she didn’t smile, either, and in fact looked at me quite angrily.
I took a picture of their backs as they walked away. Even their posture seemed affronted. I wanted to call after them, Hey, if you don’t like it, don’t do it!
But it wasn’t any of my business, so I kept on walking.
Toward the summit of the mountain I stopped and took in the grand rugged isolation; somewhere out there, in those brown, craggy peaks, was the Continental Divide. I took pictures of the vista, but only because it seemed like I should. It was the pictures of people I cared about.
In a way, I felt like I was carrying everyone with me as I traveled. But they weren’t baggage; they were more like buoys, lifting me up and nudging me along.
I thought again about what my dad had said—Wherever you go, there you are—and I realized that I had to disagree with that. A journey could change a person, and not just by atrophying all her leg muscles.
As I stood above the wild desolation of central Colorado, I could finally admit that I was going to California. And that I was going to call up the first boy I’d ever loved.
And then? I’d just have to see what happened next.
Chapter 21
UTAH PASSED by in an eighty-mile-per-hour blur, and, after a night in a musty Budget Inn, I crossed into Nevada.
The land stretched out flat and dusty on either side of the highway, and on the horizon I could see only barren hills. I’d heard people call Route 50 in Nevada the Loneliest Road in America, but to me, it felt more like the loneliest road on Mars.
After singing every Beatles song I knew, followed by every Bruce Springsteen and then every Rihanna, my throat hurt, my ears rang, and the sound of my own voice was aural torture to me.
This might have been the time I started wishing for something—anything—to break up the monotony. And pretty soon something did.
I heard a boom, and right after that the car began to shake and careen to the right. I slammed on the brakes and skidded off onto the gravel shoulder, adrenaline coursing through my veins.
I waited for a few minutes until my panicked heart slowed. I was fairly certain I knew what had happened, and a look at the right front tire confirmed it: something had punctured the rubber, and it was totally flat.
As I looked in the back for the spare I knew I’d never be able to put on the van, I tried to cheer myself up by thinking about how this would be a good story to tell someday: about how I was stranded for hours on a deserted highway until I got rescued by a long-haul trucker who wasn’t at all perverted. Everyone would laugh when I got to the moral: Be careful what you wish for.
Then a horn sounded, and a white van pulled up right behind me. An older man with mirrored sunglasses climbed out of the driver’s seat and called, “Gas?”
I couldn’t believe my luck. I hadn’t seen a car for what seemed like two hundred miles, but here was help, just when it was desperately required. “Flat, actually,” I said.
He walked over, and as he did, more people got out of the van—eight in total, men and women of varying ages, wearing matching T-shirts that said I WANT TO BELIEVE.
Suddenly I wondered if I was about to be kidnapped by a cult. That would also make a great story, assuming I could overcome my indoctrination and somehow escape. I readied myself to run.
“You got Triple A?” the old man asked. He took off his baseball cap, which said THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE, and ran his hands through a shock of white hair.
I shook my head no. You’d think a woman driving across the country would’ve signed up for it, but that was just more advice I hadn’t taken.
But he didn’t bat an eyelash. He just walked around to the back of my van and removed the donut tire. “I think this’ll do you until the next service station,” he said. “We’ll get Jordan to put it on.”
A guy who I presumed was Jordan nodded and got to work with the jack and lug wrench.
As we stood there in the windy desolation, I said, “I really, really appreciate this.” I tried to think of a polite way to ask if they now expected me to join them, maybe to become one of Jordan’s wives. I settled on, “Where are you all headed?”
“South toward Area 51,” the old man said. “Did you ever wonder if we weren’t alone in the universe? If so—or hell, if not—you’re welcome to come along. It’s just a little detour.”
I hoped my face didn’t betray my surprise and delight. These people weren’t cultists; they were UFO hunters on a field trip.
Jordan looked up from my tire. “The last time I went, I saw something shoot across the sky—it must have been going six hundred miles an hour, not too far from me, and it didn’t make a sound.”
The old man nodded. “Jordan’s seen wilder things than most.”
I squinted my eyes against the sun’s glare and thought about how much this trip had taught me about strangers—and how, after only a few minutes, they weren’t strangers anymore.
Driving south with a vanload of alien-hunters? That would be a story.
I glanced at my van, and then over at theirs. Nobody looked insane. I was lonely, and I was supposed to be on an adventure.
I smiled at the old man. I said, “Sure, I’d love to come.”
Chapter 22
AFTER JORDAN fixed my flat, I followed them for a few miles to the crossroads, where I pulled my van well off the highway.
“We’ll have you back here in ten hours,” the old man, who called himself Chili, said. “A lot sooner than any tow truck’d pass by.”
And so I became a passenger for the first time in almost two weeks, tucked in the backseat between Marge, who insisted that military scientists were currently reverse-engineering a captured alien spacecraft, and Annie Rose, who claimed to have seen a bright diamond-shaped craft hovering and spinning over an Ohio cornfield last month.
The strange thing was that both of them seemed like intelligent, rational women. Annie Rose, in particular, was well versed in physics; a former professor of applied mathematics, she’d spent her retirement boning up on the possibilities of interstellar travel.
Then the man sitting in front of us, who introduced himself as Mitch, turned around and said, “I bet you haven’t heard a story like this. Last summer, I was driving home on a road I’d driven a hundred times before. But when I came around one of the curves, the highway was suddenly completely different. It had eight skinny lanes, and in each lane were dozens of little egg-shaped black cars. The sky was orange, and there were three high, jagged mountains I’d never seen before. And I just knew I’d been teleported to another dimension.”
“Personally I think he’d had a few margaritas that night,” Marge said, nudging me.
“How’d you get back to this dimension?” I asked.
Mitch shrugged. “I don’t know. I just kept driving. And I was praying, you know? Praying so hard I wasn’t even breathing. And then the highway turned a corner again, and when I got around that bend, I was back in our world.” He paused to let this sink in. “But the thing was, now I was on a totally different interstate than the one I had been on. It took me two extra hours to get home.”
“I wish something like that would happen to me,” Annie Rose said. “Then I could die happy.”
Meanwhile, the landscape we drove through looked more and more extraterrestrial: the flat tops of mesas glowing in the late afternoon sun, the cloudless sky nearly white with heat. Maybe aliens come here because it looks like their home planet, I thought w
ryly.
We reached our destination at dusk and spread out alongside the road. Almost everyone had brought folding chairs, and Chili set up a telescope. As we settled ourselves in, there was hardly a sound, as if everything around us were holding its breath. We watched the stars come out by the thousands. Low above the horizon, Venus shone brightly.
We waited. And waited.
“Please oh please,” I heard someone whisper.
Then I saw something streak across the sky, high and fast, and I sucked in my breath.
“What?” Marge said. “Did I miss something?”
“Only a shooting star,” Jordan assured her.
“Or, more accurately,” Annie Rose said, “the visible path of a meteoroid as it enters the earth’s atmosphere.”
Jordan snorted, but I felt a twinge of disappointment. Not that I’d really thought I’d see a UFO tonight. And come to think of it, if there were evidence of extraterrestrials, I wouldn’t want to know about it. Life was complicated enough already—I didn’t need an alien species to worry about.
I liked this oddball group of people, though, and part of me wanted them to experience something magical.
But it wasn’t to be. After a couple of beautiful but uneventful hours of staring at the stars, Chili said we should probably head back. Oddly enough, no one seemed that disappointed.
“It’s like fishing,” Mitch told me. “You can’t always catch a prizewinning bass.”
“But the fish can’t laugh at you,” Marge pointed out. “That’s what the aliens are doing. Looking down on us from superconductor-powered spaceships and hootin’ and hollerin’ over how dumb we are.”
“Speak for yourself,” Mitch said, laughing, and Marge swatted him on his elbow.
I wanted to keep listening to their stories, but it was after midnight and the humming of the wheels on the asphalt quickly lulled me to a dreamless sleep. I didn’t wake until they’d pulled up to my van.
It was still predawn when, bleary-eyed, I thanked my new friends and climbed into the driver’s seat.