She swings her skinny self up onto the horse and then grabs my wrist and helps me haul myself up behind her. The horse is very patient. We clip-clop out of the parking lot to the huge infinite expanse behind the bar. It’s lit by the moonlight and the streetlamps, and it goes on for miles until it dead-ends into a shadowy mountain range miles and miles away in the distance.
We get onto the grassy field, and Zoe makes a clicking sound with her mouth like they do on TV, and then she kicks the horse with her heel, and he takes off. The cold breeze whips at our faces, and the spilling, tumbling, clomping of the horse’s hooves pounds the earth. We’re kicking up dust behind us, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced. The most free I’ve ever felt. At first I keep my face pressed against Zoe’s back, and then when I hear Zoe yahooing, I yahoo too. I let go with one arm, whip it around in a circle as if I have a lasso, and I yahoo into the night.
After about ten minutes of this, Zoe pulls on the reins and slows the horse down to a slow trot. There is a small hill in front of us, and she points to it. “There. Over that ridge. We can probably see them from there.”
“Really?” I ask. “Buffalo?”
I dismount, and Zoe slides off too.
“Zoe!” I whisper-yell.
“What?”
“A tumbleweed,” I say. “Look!” I point to a dry beige vessel glowing in the moonlight. Its spiky thorns wrap around the emptiness, cradling it like a vase. “It’s art,” I say.
“It’s beautiful,” Zoe says.
We climb to the top of the ridge and peek over. We look down and see more miles of nothing.
Zoe seems a little defeated. Like she fully expected the field to be ass to elbow in buffalo. I don’t know why she was so confident about it. “I could have sworn . . .”
“It’s okay, Zoe. We saw a tumbleweed. That was cool enough.”
“It’s just a dead bush. Okay. Let’s go. We have to return this horse. Maybe we’ll see a buffalo tomorrow.”
We ride back to the parking lot, where it seems Dillon and Colby have not even noticed us missing. They’ve probably already hooked up with some other girls. Easy come, easy go.
The horse keeps farting as we try to lead him back into his trailer and cover him with a blanket because that’s what we’ve seen them do on TV. And we can’t stop laughing.
As soon as we stop, he farts again, and we’re laughing so hard we don’t have the muscle control to finish the job.
“Okay, get serious,” Zoe says. [horse fart] “We have to [horse fart] hook him into the front [horse fart] with the bungee.”
“Ahaha. Ahaha . . . aha . . . Okay, I’m done laughing.” [horse fart]
Eventually we get him in and lean up against the back of the trailer. We take some deep breaths to recover from the laughter, and then Zoe says, “Over there.”
The bar is called the Wild Buffalo, after all, and in front of the parking lot stands a huge one made out of fiberglass. “I’ll take your picture with him, in case we never see a real one.”
“Okay.”
Zoe pulls out the Polaroid she stole from Penn Station and snaps a photo of me on top of the rust-colored beast, and we get back in the LeMans and head toward Yellowstone, which, according to my Native sense of direction, is directly beyond Orion’s belt.
We find a rest stop when we’re tired, and we manually crank the seats back and look at the stars through the rectangular sunroof. It is a clusterfuck of stars. More stars than I’ve ever seen in my life, denser than the freckles on Dillon’s face.
“I’m happy,” I tell Zoe.
“I’m glad,” she says.
“I don’t know if it’s the altitude or the clean air or stealing horses or what, but it feels like my esophagus and my heart and my stomach and my throat had been hog-tied for my whole life and someone has finally set them free.”
“That’s what this was about, little dogie. Setting you free. It’s good to get away. And look at this . . .” she says, and she waves the Polaroid shot of me on the buffalo in front of my face.
“Whoa,” I say, bringing it closer to my nose. There’s me on top of the buffalo wearing the same outfit I’ve had on for three days, but with a cute cowboy hat on my head. I’m smiling, which is rare, and below me is an enormous shiny fiberglass buffalo. But it is white. “Maybe it was the flash,” I offer.
“I don’t think so. I think it is a sign. I think it is your destiny. You’re destined to do something good here on this planet. Like white-buffalo good.”
“Right,” I say.
“Right. It is your destiny.”
“Well, you can do something good too.”
“Not here. My destiny is somewhere else. My destiny is bigger than the Earth. It’s beyond it. Out there,” she says pointing to the stars.
“You’re going to be an astronautess?”
“No. We’ve been on divergent paths, my friend. For you, this trip was to help you find freedom, tap you into your white-buffalo goodness. I am trying to get back to them. I’ve been following them. Trying to catch up to them, and when we meet, they will take me with them.”
“Zoe . . .”
“I don’t expect you to understand,” she says. “I don’t want to force you to believe me. You don’t have to believe in them. But I do. They will come for me.”
“Zo . . . what you have—your condition—it sometimes makes you have big thoughts like that,” I say. I honestly am flabbergasted. I thought she was getting better. The happy emotions I was feeling just minutes ago swirl around me and sink into a deep, vacuous, familiar black hole of worry. She is not healed.
“They showed me things,” she continues. “They took my hunger away to study it. To figure out what makes humans tick. And little by little I am becoming one of them. I don’t have to eat. I don’t have to use the bathroom. Or sleep. I have nothing to lose by going with them.”
“Noah,” I say, finally pulling out all the stops. “What about Noah?”
Zoe turns away, almost visibly in pain. “He of all people will understand this. And you have to tell him about it. Tell him where I went.”
“But I don’t understand where you are going.”
“It’s an exoplanet. Around an M-dwarf star between the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra. There is life. But their lives are different than ours. Less dependent on physical bodies. They can convert themselves to energy. They can travel through lightning. I think they’re trying to find me with all these wacky storms.”
“But Zoe—”
“No ‘buts.’”
“But . . .”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I just want to be a devil’s advocate for a sec. If you do have something like bipolar disorder—”
“Which I don’t—”
“You could have auditory and visual hallucinations. It’s part of it. Your brain could just be misfiring a little. And these storms. They’re part of climate change. They’re what we have to get used to now in this new world we’ve created.”
“You’ve known me my whole life, Hannah. And I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“I don’t think you’re lying.”
“Whatever,” she says, and I can see her start to shut down.
“Zo . . .”
“I am not crazy,” she whispers.
And then she tries not to cry. She catches a sob in her throat, and I feel horrible. She is finally pared down to her true self, and I can’t believe her. I can see her building a new wall, brick by brick, around herself. She takes a deep breath, sits up straight, and swallows the emotion. Her feeling of being entirely alone and misunderstood.
I can’t take it anymore. “I believe you,” I say. “I believe that you had some kind of experience. I truly do,” I say. “But that doesn’t mean that you have to run away. You can still make things work here. On Earth,” I jok
e. “There are so many fashion-challenged earthlings who need you here. I need you here.”
She laughs a little through her tears, before we try to get some sleep.
BETRAYAL
When we get to Yellowstone, we pull up to the park ranger booth and pay the entrance fee with some rolls of dimes that the park ranger insists on breaking open and counting. “Are you serious?” Zoe asks. “Each roll is five dollars. You’re just going to have to roll them up again later.”
The park ranger holds up her hand and says, “You made me lose count. I have to start again. Ten, twenty . . .”
Finally, we get some maps of the park and some literature that reminds us seventeen thousand times not to feed the bears or the buffalo. We drive along the curved wooded roads until we find an inclined meadow off the shoulder to our right. The frost has not yet melted off the grass, and there is some hovering loopy mist hanging low to the ground as if the earth is blowing smoke rings with a big earth cigarette.
We look for buffalo, but we don’t see anything but grass.
“Let’s go to Old Faithful,” I say.
I am in way over my head. What I found out last night is that there are limits to my faith in Zoe. They are at the outer limits of the galaxy, but they are limits nonetheless. Because I know too much about her past.
And because I’ve read at least thirteen case studies on bipolar disorder since her latest escapades. And in seven or more of the case studies, the patient experienced hallucinations involving talking to God. Or worse, being God. I think what happens is that when they are depressed, patients feel so worthless that the only way for them to get their self-esteem back is to exaggerate it. It becomes a habit, this grandiosity, until it gets out of control and bipolar people start to believe they are superhuman.
That hypothesis makes a lot more sense to me than Zoe actually having been abducted by aliens. She’s just trying so hard to seem worthy. To herself, mostly. And trying to go somewhere where someone will appreciate her. I understand this, but I do not know what to do. So when she is digging through the rolls of coins in the backseat, trying to gather enough for some geyser souvenirs, I switch on my phone.
The irony of betraying Zoe in the parking lot of Old Faithful does not escape me. But in a way I am being faithful to her. I went about it the wrong way at first, but now I know she needs professional help.
I’m sure with the AMBER Alert, my phone number has been submitted to the police, and as soon as it’s recognized that it’s back on the grid and communicated to local authorities, we will be swarmed with rescue personnel. I imagine choppers and everything. But maybe this is my own grandiose thinking. We are not that important in the scheme of things.
We de-LeMans and I ask Zoe to go buy me some corn chips at the beautiful new visitor center that looks like a Swiss chalet ski lodge with a chevron-shaped window that frames the geyser perfectly if you want to watch it from inside.
I walk into the ladies’ room and think I’m safe, since “alien Zoe” doesn’t have to pee anymore, and I take a look at my phone. It is overwhelmed with voice mails, e-mails, and text messages. Surprising, though, is how many of them are from Danny. And my mom. She’s written me page-long text messages apologizing and promising things will be different when I get home.
Danny has sent photos, though. Of him in his adorable sunglasses next to his ice cream truck. In Pennsylvania. Then in Chicago. And Iowa. The last one is at Indian City! With Rosemarie. Is he following us? He’s got his long arm around her cushy shoulders, and they smile, Rosemarie’s gold tooth glinting a little in the flash. I touch his crooked nose on the screen and trace his lips. I’m about to actually kiss my freaking phone, that’s how in love I am with this boy, when Zoe yells into the bathroom.
“Hannah! Two minutes until she blows!” She stands outside my stall and leans against it waiting for me.
“Okay,” I say. “Coming!”
“What are you doing?”
“Peeing.”
“Well, hurry.”
I am dying to text Danny and tell him where I am. It takes every ounce of energy for me to stand up, hide my phone in a deep inside pocket of my sleeping-bag coat, and step out of the stall.
“Come on,” Zoe says as I wash my hands. I look at myself in the mirror. In the National Park, they discourage vanity. People should be focused externally—on the beauty and wonder of the natural world, and not on the size of their pores—when a miraculous geyser is about to blow, so they installed foggy mirrors that don’t show the details of your face. I look at it anyway and try to see it the way Danny would. I am not as hideous as I often imagine I am. My eyes are intense, like my dad’s, and my nose is not as big and pointy as I sometimes envision it. “Let’s go!” Zoe says.
A huddled mass of travelers in primary-color parkas squeezes around the perimeter of the geyser. “We have to go over here. This place is crawling with webcams,” Zoe says, so we stand in the farthest corner of the viewing area and wait for 10:37, the next eruption time according to a chalkboard beneath Old Faithful’s name plaque.
A digital clock counts down the seconds. A park ranger with a microphone stops educating people about geothermal phenomena and turns our attention to the hole in the ground. The tourists focus their cameras, about to be amazed. Ten, nine, eight.
“I saw you turn on the phone,” Zoe says without looking at me. She is staring at the pool where Old Faithful is supposed to erupt. Three, two, one.
Nothing happens. People stir. Has this ever happened before? Can this happen? What does this mean? Moms engage in nervous laughter as kids whine for justice. They traveled ten hours in the car for this? I hear them thinking.
Zoe is still staring with abnormal intensity at the pool, and then she reaches her hand toward it as if she’s shooting it with some kind of invisible superhero ray. The ranger gets back on the microphone. “Ah, folks, um, this has never . . .” he says.
Zoe turns to me, winks, drops her hand, and Old Faithful erupts, white and queenly like a liquid statue of the Madonna, but twenty seconds off schedule.
When I turn back to Zoe, she is gone.
LOVE
I am numb—only energy, without a physical body, like Zoe’s alien friends—as I sprint into the parking lot and try to figure out in which direction she fled. I know if she doesn’t want to be found, though, Zoe will not be found. Already her weather radio, the turtle backpack with Tasery in it, and her corn-pollen sack are missing from the trunk. She also took $157 in coins. I know she is sprinting nimbly through the woods until she can find a kindly trucker to take her south through Colorado and Utah.
I’m out of breath, but I make one phone call before I turn it off again and hope that the authorities missed my temporary blip on the grid. Maybe they had even canceled the AMBER Alert. If they found out what Zoe did to Officer Franz, they may have decided we weren’t worth retrieving.
“Danny!” I say breathlessly. “I lost her!”
“Where are you?”
His voice brings me back into my body. My hands quiver, even now, itching to touch the muscles rippling beneath the soft cotton of his T-shirt. I shake them, trying to punish them for not staying focused on the crisis at hand.
“I lost Zoe,” I say again.
For the first time in our lives, I let her down, and I let her down hard. It feels awful. It feels so awful I can’t even feel. I’m still in shock. I want to cry, but there is a mask-like tightness around my eyes constricting my tears.
“I’m at Yellowstone,” I say. “I think she’s on her way south. She’s chasing the weather.”
“Okay. I’m right behind you. In Gillette. If you drive south to Buffalo, I’ll meet you there, and we can continue on through Utah.”
“What? How did you know where we were?”
“Zoe’s been calling me.”
“She has?”
“Every time you w
ent to the bathroom, from a pay phone. She called first to ream me out. She was so pissed at me for hurting you that she had a few choice words for me. But I explained to her that the Rebecca thing has been petering out for months. I explained I wanted to see you. So a day later she began calling me every day. She just kept telling me that you were going to need me and that I should drive west on I-90. So I did. I really want to see you.”
I was about to say “You do?” as if I didn’t deserve his attention, but instead I say, “Me too. I think about you a lot.”
“How much?”
Like every five seconds. Or more. Or continually. In the background of all my other thoughts is the perpetual thought of you, I think, but I don’t say it out loud for fear of scaring him away.
He doesn’t let me answer before blurting, “Meet me in Buffalo.”
When I get to the gas station he told me to drive to, he stands there leaning against his ice cream truck in his sunglasses and barn jacket, like that iconic picture of James Dean. Only he’s taller. And less perfect. And much more beautiful, in my opinion.
I park and try not to feel ashamed of my greasy unwashed blond hair as I walk over to him. I hug him and lean my cheek against his broad sculpted chest. He tilts my chin up, and I can feel him pressing against me as we kiss. The chemistry between us is animal. I can tell he can feel it too. Honestly, we haven’t spoken more than 5,000 words to each other in our whole lives, but there’s this whirling vortex inside me that needs to pull him into my body. Into my life.
“We have to go,” I tell him as we break away. “We need to catch up to her.”
“She’s on foot,” Danny says. “And I’m a fast driver.” And then he smiles that smile that makes the corner of his eyes crinkle.
“Just a minute!” I say, putting a halt to it, imagining the sound of a needle scratching off an LP. “What about Rebecca? Is it really over? You were with her one hour after you left me that night. It took you one hour. You can’t be alone for an hour to think about things before you crawl back into her lair?”