We’d taken the food to go, but when Roger struggled to take a bite of his burger while pulling out of the parking lot, it became clear that this was an eat, then drive situation, and he’d pulled back into the parking lot. I hadn’t realized until Roger told me, after we’d ordered, that In-N-Out was a West Coast–only burger chain. There was no In-N-Out in Connecticut, because clearly that state was an inhospitable wasteland.
“It’s annoying,” Roger said, shaking the paper sack. We’d long since finished our individual containers of fries, but apparently there were still a few stragglers rolling around the bottom. Sure enough, he pulled out a small handful. “Because I missed this all year while I was at school. The closest one to Colorado is in Utah, which is a little far to go for a burger. But it might have been doable. Except for the fact that I didn’t have a car.”
I took a sip of my milk shake to buy myself some time to think about a response. “Colorado?” I finally asked, remembering the bumper sticker. “That’s where you go?”
He nodded. “Colorado College, in Colorado Springs. It’s a good school. And I have a lot of great friends….” I thought I saw something pass over Roger’s face for a second when he said this, but then it was gone. “Anyway, I’d planned on being here all summer. But after finals, my father began insisting that I spend the summer with him in Philly.”
“That’s where your father lives?” I regretted the sentence as soon as I’d said it. First of all, he’d told me that back in the kitchen. Second of all, I’d already known it. Third of all, I had a feeling that it was going to be a very long four days unless I could stop acting like such a moron.
But if Roger noticed, he wasn’t letting on. “Yeah,” he said, shaking the bag again and coming up with more fries. “He lives there with his new wife and her son. He freaked out when he saw my grades and said he wanted me there so I can, and I quote, ‘learn some discipline.’ Which sounds like a great way to spend a summer. I don’t know anyone there. And what am I supposed to do in Philadelphia?”
“Eat cheesesteak?” I asked, on impulse.
Roger laughed for the first time, a loud, reverberating laugh that seemed to fill the whole space. “Right,” he said. “Cheesesteak and cream cheese.”
I guess neither of us could think of any more Philadelphia-related foods after that, because silence fell between us. I took another long sip of my milk shake and could feel Roger looking at me. I glanced over at him and saw that he was reading the back of my T-shirt, with the list of the cast members printed on it.
“This musical,” he said. I noticed he pronounced “musical” like it was in a foreign language, like it wasn’t a word he’d said very often. “You were in it?” He sounded surprised.
“Yeah,” I said, turning to face him so he would stop reading my back. “I was, um, the lead.” I saw Roger’s eyebrows shoot up, and I looked back down at the plastic lid of my milk shake cup. I could understand his surprise. Even before it had happened, people had always seemed surprised to hear I was an actor. But I’d always loved the chance to become someone else for a few hours. Someone for whom the words had been written, every gesture and emotion plotted, and the ending figured out. Almost like life. Just without the surprises.
“So,” I said after a moment, “we should probably get back on the road, right?”
Roger nodded. “Probably.” He took a sip of his root beer and looked out at the freeway. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I don’t think it’s going to take us four days. Some friends of mine drove cross-country, and they did it in thirty-six hours.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Though I don’t think they ever stopped—I think they just drove straight through. And they probably sped a lot,” he added.
“Huh,” I said, not exactly sure how to respond to that. It hit me that, while I didn’t want to do this, Roger probably wanted to do it even less. Why would a college almost-sophomore want to spend four days transporting a high schooler across the country? Maybe this was Roger’s way of saying that he wanted to get it over with as fast as possible.
“Have you ever taken a road trip?” he asked.
I turned to squint at him and shook my head, feeling very lame. I knew that he didn’t mean a family excursion to see a historical landmark. He meant a road trip, the kind that cool people took in college. “Have you?” I asked, even though I had a feeling the answer was yes.
He nodded. “Just in-state, though. Up to San Fran, down to San Diego. And I don’t know …” He paused and peered into the bag. He shook it hopefully, fished around inside, and came up with three fries. He took one and offered the rest to me. “Last two,” he said. “Go for it.” I took one, leaving one for him. He smiled and ate it, looking pensive. “I guess I just thought that this trip might be more of a real road trip,” he said. “I don’t know. More interesting places. And at least a route we could pick ourselves.”
I took a sip of my shake, hoping my relief wasn’t obvious. So it wasn’t me he had a problem with, just my mother’s version of the trip. Which was entirely understandable, given the places that she’d chosen for us to stop.
I thought about what I’d just reread in my father’s book. About going out and just driving, and how you can only do it when you’re young. For the first time, it struck me that this trip could be something worth recording in the scrapbook, after all. “Well,” I said, not entirely able to believe I was about to suggest this. “I mean, I guess we could go other places. As long as we’re there in four days, does it really matter which way we go?”
“Really?” Roger asked. “What about your mother’s reservations?”
I shrugged, even though my heart was pounding. It was a legitimate question. Knowing my mother, she’d probably be calling every hotel to make sure we’d checked in. But there was a tiny, reckless piece of me that wanted to be the difficult one for once. That wanted to make her worry about me for a change. That wanted to show her what it felt like to be left behind. “I don’t care,” I said. This wasn’t exactly true, but I liked the way it felt to say it. It was something Charlie would have done. And something Amy! would never do in a million years. And as I thought about the four hundred dollars in my front pocket, it occurred to me that we might be able to use it to buy just a little bit of freedom.
Roger blinked at me. “Okay,” he said. He turned to face me more fully and leaned back against the window. “So where should we go?”
“We’ll still get there by the tenth, right?” I asked quickly. My mother was not going to be happy we were ignoring her route, but I knew she would have a conniption if we took longer than the allotted time. “This is just a detour,” I clarified.
“Just a detour,” Roger agreed, nodding. He smiled at me, and I felt the impulse to smile back. I didn’t, but the feeling was there, for the first time in months.
The In-N-Out employee to our left suddenly raised her volume and began screaming at her soon-to-be-ex. Apparently, his name was Kyle, and he knew exactly what he’d done. Feeling like I was overhearing something I probably shouldn’t, I jumped to my feet and began to walk around to the front of the car when I saw that Roger hadn’t moved. He was still listening to the breakup with a slightly nauseated expression on his face.
“Roger?” I asked.
“Right,” he said quickly, getting up as well and crumpling the white paper bag. We buckled ourselves in, and Roger started the engine. “So if this is going to be a real road trip,” he said, backing out of the parking space and heading toward the exit, “we need to get some road trip essentials.”
“Like gas?”
“No,” he said. “Well, yes,” he amended, looking down at the gauge. “But there are two things that are absolutely necessary if you’re going to be hitting the road.”
“And what are those?”
Roger smiled at me as he paused at a stoplight. “Snacks and tunes,” he said. “Not necessarily in that order.”
“How do you feel about Billy Joel?” Roger asked,
scrolling through his iPod. We were still sitting in the parking lot of the Sunshine Mart, as Roger insisted that we couldn’t start driving until there was a soundtrack. He’d offered to play one of my mixes, but I had put him off, letting him pick the music. Most of what was on my iPod was Broadway musical soundtracks or oldies, and it didn’t seem like Roger was a secret Andrew Lloyd Webber fan.
I looked up from the road atlas. “Fine, I guess.” I didn’t want to tell him that most of my knowledge of Billy Joel came from the musical Movin’ Out. I retrieved my snacks from the plastic bag, placed my cream soda in the back cup holder, and opened my Red Vines. Roger had loaded up on Abba-Zabas, telling me that they could only be found in California—making me wonder yet again why on earth anyone would ever choose to live in Connecticut. I pulled out his root beer and placed it in the front cup holder for him, then placed the snack bag behind me in the backseat.
“So Billy’s in,” said Roger, spinning his track wheel and clicking on the center button. “Excellent.”
I focused back on the map, tracing my finger over all the freeways that crisscrossed and bisected the state of California, which seemed impossibly huge. In the atlas, it took up five pages. Connecticut, I’d seen when I flipped past it, shared a page with Rhode Island. I turned to the page that covered central California, and as soon as I saw it, I knew it was where I wanted to go: Yosemite National Park. It was a six-hour drive from Raven Rock, and part of it had been founded by my ancestors on my father’s side. We used to go up every summer for two weeks—my father, Charlie, and me. We’d stopped going a few years ago, not for any specific reason. It just seemed like none of us had the time anymore. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it until I saw it on the map, just up the interstate, half a state away. “I think,” I started, then cleared my throat. Roger looked up from his iPod and at the atlas on my lap.
“Do we have a heading?” he asked, smiling.
“Maybe,” I said. I looked down at the map, at my finger resting on the blob of green that represented the national park. What if he didn’t want to go? What if he thought it was stupid? I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to go. Lately I’d been doing my best to avoid places that reminded me of things I didn’t want to be reminded of. But it was suddenly the only place I wanted to be. I took a breath. “Have you ever been to Yosemite?”
You ain’t never caught a rabbit, and you ain’t no friend of mine.
—Elvis Presley
NINE YEARS EARLIER
“Are we there yet?” Charlie whined, kicking the back of my seat. I turned around to glare at him, slouched in the backseat and staring out the window.
“Stop it,” I said. “It’s annoying.” Charlie responded by kicking my seat again, and harder this time. “Daddy!” I said, turning to my father, who was driving.
“Yes?” he asked. He was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel in time with Elvis, totally oblivious to what was going on behind him.
“Charlie’s kicking me.”
“Is he really?” My father shifted his eyes to the rearview mirror. “That’s an impressive reach, son!”
“I mean,” I said, frustrated, “he’s kicking my seat.”
“Ah,” my father said. “Well, in that case, please refrain. Your mother isn’t going to want footprints on the upholstery.”
Charlie muttered something I couldn’t hear and, I saw in the rearview mirror, slumped even farther down in his seat. On these trips, I was always allowed to sit in the front seat, because when I was little I’d gotten carsick. I no longer did, but now it was habit. When my mother drove with us on long trips, she sat in the back with Charlie, and the two of them read their respective books the whole time, the only sound being an occasional burst of laughter from something one of them had read. I’d see Charlie pass my mother whatever he was reading at the time, his finger on the page to mark what had made him laugh, and I’d see my mother smile in return.
But when we were in the car, their private world of books didn’t bother me for once. Because my father and I had our own routine in the front seat, and I had responsibilities.
He had taught me to read a map about the time I was learning to read, and I was always the navigator. “All right, my Sancho Panza,” he’d say. “Tell us our course.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but I didn’t care. I was important. I was in charge of making sure we were going the right way and, if there was traffic or a road closed, finding an alternate route. When a CD needed changing, I was in charge of putting in the next one. But it wasn’t like there was a lot to choose from. Generally, when my father was driving, it was all Elvis, all the time.
He’d put two packs of Life Savers in the cup holder, and I was allowed to have as many as I wanted, provided that when he held out his hand, I was ready to unwrap one and drop it in his palm.
Charlie kicked my seat again, this time a repetitive pattern that grew increasingly annoying. Rather than giving him the satisfaction of turning around again, I just stared straight ahead and helped myself to another Wint-O-Green.
Whenever it was just the three of us, Charlie became especially annoying. He was always more fidgety than I was, and reading was the only thing that had ever calmed him down.
The kicking grew harder, and I whirled around in my seat again. “Stop it!”
“Come on, son,” my father said, looking behind him. “Tell you what—you can pick out the magnet this time, how about that?”
“Whatever,” Charlie muttered, but he sat up a little straighter and stopped kicking.
“And do we see it approaching?” asked my father, turning down “Hound Dog” for the occasion. I looked out the window to my left, and there it was. Yosemite. There was the small wooden guardhouse, and the guard in his green uniform outside it, collecting twenty dollars from every car that passed through and giving them a permit and a map. Then he would wave us through the gate, allowing us to enter another world. I tipped my head back as far as it would go to look up at the trees.
“We see it,” Charlie called from the backseat, and I held my breath, waiting for my father to say what he always said when we passed through the gates.
“We’re back,” he said, “you glorious old pile of rocks. Did you miss us?”
I’d like to dream my troubles all away on a bed of California stars.
—Wilco
“Wow,” Roger said as we stepped out of the reservations office. “Bears, huh?”
“Bears,” I confirmed. I was relieved that there had been a cabin available at all. Apparently, most people made reservations for their cabins months in advance, something that hadn’t occurred to me, as my father had always taken care of that. But they’d had a cancellation, and we’d gotten the last available cabin. Not the kind of cabin we always used to stay in, but one of the canvas-tent cabins. It had only one bed, which I was trying not to think about at the moment. But it had taken us so long to get there—and then an hour just to get to Camp Curry once we’d reached the Yosemite gates—that having to turn around would have been really depressing.
After we’d paid for the room, we’d had to watch a video of a bear mauling a station wagon, then sitting on the ground and eating the chips the owners of the station wagon had left behind at their car’s peril. Watching it, I actually wondered why the camera operator didn’t do something, or at least send someone to warn the station-wagon family. But the message we were meant to take away was that bears at Yosemite were dangerous, especially to vehicles. And then we’d had to sign releases saying that we wouldn’t sue if our car got mauled, even if we had taken the chips out.
We walked back over to the main parking lot, down by the Curry Dining Pavilion—what we’d always called the lodge. Although it was growing dark, there was still enough light to see to get around. Which was a good thing, because when it got dark at Yosemite, it got dark. There were no lights around anywhere, except by the lodge. Which made it easier to see the stars, but harder to find your cabin. As we walked down the paved path, I not
iced Roger looking up, mouth hanging slightly open. I looked up as well, at the scenery that I could still make out. Even though it wasn’t my first time there, Yosemite was still stunning. There were mountains and huge, ancient trees everywhere, making you feel tiny. The air was clearer, and crisper, and had always made me want to take more deep breaths. It had always seemed to me to be a place apart, with none of the normal rules that applied elsewhere. For example, having to take your shampoo out of your car to stave off hungry wildlife.
We packed up all the snacks, and took my one suitcase and Roger’s two out of the car. Then we set off to find Cabin 9. I soon realized, when the paved path turned to gravel and wood chips, that there was a reason most people coming to Yosemite didn’t bring big rolling suitcases. Mine kept getting caught on the wood chips and flipping over, and refusing to roll. Not to mention the fact that the people walking by—the ones who’d prepared to be at Yosemite, carrying flashlights and wearing fleece vests—probably thought I looked ridiculous. But I finally got it up to the cabin, where Roger was standing outside, looking down at his phone.
“All set?” he asked, looking a little distracted.
“Yep,” I said, then inwardly cursed myself. The cabin, as advertised, was made of white canvas, with a green-painted door. A set of four steps and a railing, also painted green, led up to it. The bear locker was at the bottom of the steps. Roger and I went through our things and locked anything that bears might think was food—that is, everything—inside the metal box, making sure that it was latched closed. I looked at it a little dubiously. The cabins we used to stay in hadn’t had these, and I wasn’t confident that this little metal box could withstand hungry bears, especially when station wagons were no match for them. I also didn’t like the fact that it was so close to the cabin. Wasn’t that kind of like setting the appetizer right next to the main course?
Trying not to follow this line of thought to its conclusion, I took the small brass key they’d given me and opened the cabin door. I found the light switch just inside and turned it on. The cabin was very small, with the one bed taking up most of the room. The bed was metal, painted white, and unmade, with a set of sheets and two gray scratchy-looking blankets resting on top. Clearly these were not luxury accommodations. But the bed looked small. I doubted it was even queen-size.