“But we’ll never be here again, Oliver,” I replied. “We’re going to the Extraordinary World, and we’re never coming back.”
Oliver kept his gaze behind us.
As relieved as I was, I couldn’t help thinking of what he’d said about Big Tex. I wondered about the word “beast.” I wondered if sometimes, the way everything looks—who’s the beast and who isn’t—depends on where you’re standing.
* * *
Well, now I’m sitting on the fold-out table for a change of perspective, and we’re not sure where we are. It seems that, apparently, when Dad pulled triumphantly out of the circus parking lot, he pulled triumphantly onto something that was not really the road.
The land is flat and dry, and tumbleweeds occasionally blow by us when there’s a strong wind. Every once in a while it looks like maybe we’re on the right track—but then the path seems to disappear, and we have to veer to avoid missing a boulder or a shrub, or we drive right over a little gulch with a thud.
Night is falling, and Mom’s insisting Dad will have to stop soon so we can look at the map and figure things out and try again in the morning.
I wonder what we’ll do if we end up stranded out here in the desert. I have to disagree with my mom that the west might be better without the railroads. What I wouldn’t give for a fast train headed in the right direction.
Daisy, at least, seems to be the only one who’s happy. She’s been humming “Hotel California” loudly from the trailer all afternoon.
November 18th
Morning
Something happened last night that was so strange I almost think I imagined it.
Late in the night, probably around two or three, I got up to go to the bathroom. Climbing down from my bunk, I noticed that the side door was slightly open, even though Mom and Dad are always very careful about locking up. I was just leaning forward to pull it shut when I saw a figure outside in the dark about fifty yards away. I could tell by her silhouette that it was Millie.
The moon was shining down on her, her dark hair was glinting in the dim light, and she was shivering in her thin white pajamas. But the thing that shocked me—and sent chills down to the soles of my feet—was that beside her, very close to the ground, was the Cloud.
She seemed to be whispering to it, her arms across her chest like she was nervous. A moment later the Cloud began to drift back up into the sky, slowly, like a feather falling in the wrong direction, and Millie turned back toward the Trinidad.
Something told me that I wasn’t supposed to see what I’d just seen, so I quickly backed out of sight, climbed into my bunk, and pulled the sheet curtain closed just as I heard her silently slip in through the door and pull it shut with a soft click.
She stood still for a moment, as if listening for something, and then tiptoed to her own bunk and crawled inside.
For a few minutes I lay with my heart thudding against my ribs, listening to see if she stayed in bed. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, but it seemed like the moment I closed my eyes I was out. The next time I opened them it was morning and I could smell that Mom was making coffee at the little kitchenette.
When I poked my head out, Millie was sitting at the table drinking orange juice and talking to Oliver about their favorite movies, as if nothing had happened at all.
I ducked back in here because I wanted to write it down right away, in case the further away I get from it, the more it starts to seem I really dreamed it after all.
November 20th
It’s strange—I’ve never felt quiet in my life, but ever since Big Tex’s Circus I’ve started to feel still inside. Mom once said, back in Cliffden, that I’ve got a “circus soul”—she says I’m full of elephants standing on their back feet, clowns doing flips, girls on high wires, and an extremely loud circus caller. But right now it feels like there’s maybe only one pensive clown counting tickets by the front door.
I can’t stop thinking about Millie and the Cloud. For one thing, I can’t figure out what she was doing, and for another, I’m shocked by her courage in getting so close. I’ve always been braver than her. For instance, one time we found some poison ivy in the yard and got into an argument about who was the least allergic to it. To prove that I was barely allergic at all, I rubbed some all over my hands—but Millie looked horrified and stayed as far away from me as possible for the rest of the day. I did end up in misery when the rash spread all over my palms and between my fingers (apparently I am just as allergic as anyone else) but the point is that I was brave and Millie wasn’t, and it’s like that with everything.
At school when she was younger, boys liked to chase Millie with frogs, and she would always scream and run away (as if there’s anything scary about frogs). She flushes toilets with her foot. She’s always worried that something she owns is out of style, and keeps an eye on other girls in her class to make sure she’s got her clothes and her hair just right. Mom says I was “born with an inner compass” while Millie will have to “work a little harder to find hers.” She says instead of tormenting Millie, I should try to be compassionate. As if Millie’s ever been compassionate toward me.
Anyway, I guess that’s all just a long way of saying that I can’t understand how Millie was brave enough to talk to the Cloud, much less why. I’d guess that maybe she was offering to trade her own life for Sam’s, but first of all, that wouldn’t be very Millie-like, and second, I know that’s not how Clouds work. Just like Grandma said, they pick one person, and that’s it.
The way I see it, there are three possibilities:
1. She was offering the Cloud her beautiful hair in return for Sam’s life, as inspired by Little Women.
2. She was trying to use all her charm to talk it into leaving us alone. (I doubt her skills are effective against death, but Millie’s just conceited enough to think it could work.)
3. She was trying to trick it and set it off course somehow. Millie can be very wily when she wants to be. She’s not half as much of a bubble head as she likes to pretend.
Oliver just interrupted my thoughts. He knocked on the frame of my bunk, and when I opened the curtain, he was smiling at me and looking a little mischievous (which makes me wonder how mischievous he was before I met him and before he got sad).
“I did something I shouldn’t have,” he admitted. “Back at the circus.”
“What?”
He slid something into my hand, and I studied it. It was a small bone.
“It’s from Big Tex’s. It’s a tiny bone from a pterodactyl’s left wing. I thought it could be for your good luck wall.”
“You just . . . took it?” I asked. He flushed bright red, but held my gaze and nodded.
“I wouldn’t have if Big Tex wasn’t so horrible.”
I nodded. “I know.” Still, I worry I’ve been a bad influence on him. Oliver is so good and I . . . well . . . I try to be good. “Thanks, Oliver. I love it.”
I took the bone and taped it to my wall, and now I’m sitting here admiring it and trying to imagine dinosaurs being real. Sixty-five million years ago feels so far away that it seems almost impossible for that time to have existed at all. I’ve been trying to make the number squeeze into my brain like an accordion, but so far I haven’t been able to do it.
Mom has been reading to us from a history book called Trivia of the Twentieth Century (which she found on a paperback rack at a gas station miles and miles back), about how there was almost a World War in 1914, but thanks to poltergeists in the factories (like the Mitsubishi factory, for example) nobody could make enough ships. I think she’s trying to keep us distracted, because Sam still isn’t feeling well and it’s got us all a little down today. He’s been tucked away in Mom and Dad’s room all day, and Mom has been giving him more of his pills, but when I ask what they are, she changes the subject or says something like, “Just something to help him feel better.”
Sam’s like our sunshine—when he’s down, the rest of us wilt. It’s always been that way, but no
w with the Cloud always somewhere in sight behind us (today it’s drifting low, as if it’s tired or thirsty or bored), it’s much worse. It doesn’t help that we’re still lost and that the Trinidad is only barely limping along. All morning we’ve been picking our way westish, along what might or might not be a road, and there’s been no one to ask for directions.
Deeper and deeper we’ve gone into the center of nowhere, and we’ve all grown more silent, as if the world’s swallowed us. Everything is old here. Mom says it looks like “the dry heart of the earth.” These are sun lands we’ve crossed into—there are no clouds except the one that pursues us, though occasionally we can see tiny storms form and disappear far off in the distance, across vast expanses of dry grass. At midday the sun’s so bright I can feel it leaking into the camper, and the air has gotten warmer. Mom’s flipped the map over and over in her hands for hours to try to find our way back to the main road, but at this point it’s useless.
We’ve been seeing the fires of settlements in the far-off trees. Dad says they belong to people who’ve been all over the country since long before my great-great-great-grandma emigrated from Poland, and who prefer living a traditional life out here to being near the cities.
“We’re only passing through because they let us,” Dad says. I can understand how a junky old Winnebago might break the quiet and beauty of this place, so I think it’s pretty nice of them.
Here’s one funny thing: Mom is following Oliver around the Trinidad with her comb right now. If he isn’t careful, she’ll be trying to dress him next.
ABOUT SIX HOURS LATER:
Something unforgettable has happened to us!
It was getting dark, almost night. Millie and I were sitting side by side after I wrote that last entry, being civil for once. (She’s been unusually gentle lately, and kind of thoughtful—looking out the windows a lot. She must be as mesmerized by the views as I am.) Sam had poked his head out from the back, wrapped in his blanket, which I knitted for him in arts and crafts last year (and which is full of holes), and we were all listening to Oliver. He was telling us about this time his mom was in charge of the Go Fish booth at their local carnival. Apparently, she thought fishing was a cruel sport, so she changed Go Fish to Catch the Clover.
“She spent all night,” Oliver said, fighting back his laughter, “making paper four-leaf clovers with little paper clips attached at the end. Everyone was so confused when they had to catch four-leaf clovers with fishing poles.”
I was laughing so hard (even Mom, squeezed in beside me at the table, was chuckling) and Oliver seemed so happy (talking about the mom he said he wants to forget), when the Winnebago suddenly screeched to a halt and we all went thumping forward, falling out of our seats.
“Kids!” my Dad hissed, and looked back at us with a hand to his lips to silence us.
My first thought was the Cloud. I looked up through the windows into the falling dusk, immediately sickened, my heart pounding. But the sky—a darkening purple—was empty for the moment. Then a movement drew my eye downward. The space surrounding our RV was moving like a wave, full of thousands of enormous shadows. They were all around us, moving in unison, engulfing us so that nothing—the road, the desert beyond—was visible but them. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even breathe.
“Buffalo,” my dad whispered.
There had to be thousands of them, parting like a river as they moved slowly around the Trinidad. They walked smoothly and rapidly, but they moved like one creature. Their breath puffed out in the cold air.
We could hear the thud of their hoofbeats, muffled by the glass windows. “Just be still,” my mom whispered. “Don’t startle them.” She didn’t have to say it; we were frozen in place. Even Daisy was completely silent behind us.
At school I’ve heard about the great buffalo herds of the west. But I never imagined I’d see them for myself. I wondered how many hooves it would take to flatten a Winnebago and the people inside it. Hundreds?
“They’re beautiful,” Millie breathed.
It took almost an hour for them all to pass by us, all of us sitting silently, left breathless by the sight.
When the last few had straggled past, and we could see the back of the herd trailing off—shaggy tails and enormous rumps getting smaller and smaller in the distance, and dust rising behind them above the grass—Dad started the ignition. But none of us has spoken since.
November? 24th?
What day of the week is it? My mind is in a haze.
I want to tell you where I’m sitting, but I’ve decided that first I’ll need to tell you how I got here. I’ll start with when we first knew for sure we’d veered too far off course to recover.
“We’re still on the right track,” Dad said over his shoulder that morning. “We’re just a little sideways.” My mom glanced back at us from the driver’s seat, her amber hoop earrings jangling, and I could tell just by her eyes that things were worse than she wanted us to know. Plus we can always tell when Dad’s lying; he sounds extra cheerful.
I was sitting in my bunk, facing front with the curtain drawn open and looking out the opposite window. Tiny, scraggly trees occasionally lined our path, their limbs struggling up out of the red dirt, and a low, thin fog was drifting in patches across the ground.
“This feels very wrong,” Mom said as we veered around a rocky outcropping, and the road rose upward, getting bumpier. “Where’s that fog coming from? Teddy, we need to turn back, retrace our steps. It’s foolish to keep pushing on in this direction.”
“We’ll never make it back to a gas station,” Dad said, still trying to sound cheerful, but less so.
Everyone grew silent and tense as we drove on. The road was dust. It was not a road at all.
“I think . . . ,” Dad began, turning to his left to address my mom, when three things happened at once. The camper shuddered like a train jumping its track, the brakes screeched as Mom jarred forward and slammed down on the pedal, and we all went flying out of our seats.
We were very still for a moment. And then Mom said quietly, “Everyone stand very slowly.” She swallowed deeply and looked out through the windshield at something we couldn’t see. There was something strange about the feeling of the RV, and then I realized what it was. We were tilting.
“We’re going to move out the back, one at a time,” she said. “We need to do it very gently but very quickly.”
Dad, who’d been completely silent and still beside her, looked over at her. “After you,” he said.
As Mom turned toward us, I could see the blood had drained from her cheeks, and her eyes were terrified. She put one foot in front of the other carefully until she reached Millie, and then gestured for her to go on in front. Sam followed, Mom grabbing his hand. I tucked this diary under my arm before I went slowly, gingerly behind them, so frightened my legs felt tingly and numb—though I didn’t know exactly what I was frightened of. I knew that if we didn’t move carefully, something terrible was going to happen—something that had to do with the tilting, tilting into somewhere. . . .
Oliver, who’d been sitting at the table, reached a hand out to make sure I was steady, biting his lip, and then fell in behind me. I looked over my shoulder to make sure Dad was behind him. Mom led us, not through the side door, but through her and Dad’s room. She gingerly unlatched the big back window and raised it, and then one by one, Sam first with Mom lowering him down, we squeezed through the opening into the narrow gap between the back bumper and the trailer. Mom grabbed her knapsack from the overhead bin as she slid out behind us and turned to help the rest of us out. As I emerged, Millie and Sam were standing to the left, gawking, and I moved to join them, Oliver right behind me. As I followed their gaze, my heart flip-flopped in shock.
The front end of the Trinidad was hanging into . . . empty space. It was halfway over the edge of a gaping chasm . . . more than a gaping chasm, which was spilling fog at our feet. And it looked like there was nothing holding it back from falling straight in.
Now I turned to look in the other direction. And if the sight of our camper dangling into an abyss had been unbelievable to behold, what I saw next nearly knocked me to the ground.
There was Daisy’s trailer, two of the four wheels tilted up in the air. A long, thick, hairy arm stretched through the tiny window at the back, taut, having ripped through the one remaining screen. A huge furry paw gripped a small scrubby tree growing out of the desert dust. From inside the trailer came a low, desperate howl. Daisy’s claws slipped a little farther up the tree—it was the only thing, apparently, keeping our Winnebago, and her, from dropping over the edge.
Oliver was leaping forward before my dad’s reaching arms could pull him back. He threw himself at the trailer and worked desperately at the pin that attached it to the Trinidad, and then, suddenly Millie (of all people!) was beside him, working feverishly to yank the pin out of its hole. Daisy’s paw slipped again, the tree bent so far I could hear it crackle as it began to break, and she let out a high squeal of terror.
And then there was a clank and a thud, and both Oliver and Millie fell backward as the pin came out in their hands. Mom let out a sound like a yip as the Trinidad slid. The sound of metal as it scraped rock was deafening as the back end tilted up into the air while gravity pulled the front end down, and then there was a metallic screech as the whole thing tumbled out of sight, dust flying in a cloud around us.
For a moment, there was silence. Then came the CRASH CRASH CRASH somewhere beyond the chasm lip and down.
The trailer stood alone, Daisy’s claws still digging into the tiny tree and holding on for dear life, though the danger was over.
Dad put his hands on top of his head and walked gingerly in the direction of the chasm, not getting too close to the edge, but peering downward. We all walked up behind him and gathered in a cluster to follow his gaze, but the fog that pooled inside the chasm, while thin, was enough to obscure our view.