“She likes to do it herself,” Perry said, and Cam smirked a little because Perry still hadn’t learned when to keep her mouth shut. Cam waited for her grandmother to erupt. Three . . . two . . . one . . .
“Your mother does everything by herself. The least you can do is help her pack your suitcases into the trunk. She does everything for you and this is how you repay her? Ingrates. That’s what you are, a couple of ingrates. Don’t have kids because this is how they treat you.”
“Wait, Nana,” Perry said, “she really does like to do it herself.”
Oh, Perry, thought Cam, shut up!
It was true, of course. Alicia had a sick, neurotic blueprint for packing the trunk in the most efficient way, and she needed to be in complete control of it. But that was beside the point. When Nana was on the rampage, you just needed to stand clear.
Cam watched her grandmother swallow a sip of grapefruit juice and then watched her rheumy eyes narrow as she stared at Perry and contemplated her next move. Cam saw it coming, but before she could warn Perry to get out of the way, Nana tilted her little juice glass and threw its contents toward Perry’s face.
The pinkish blob of liquid flew through the air in slow motion before it landed with a splat on Perry’s forehead. Perry sat midgasp with her mouth half open and her bangs dripping and stuck to her head. She was deciding whether to laugh or cry, and since she’d had a bad week with everyone blaming her for Tweety’s escape and all, she cried first. But she looked so ridiculous that Cam started laughing, and then Nana started laughing, until they were all laughing and crying at the same time and the ice was officially broken.
Cam reached over the table to pass Perry a napkin, her sleeves riding up. She tried hastily to pull them back down, but it was too late.
“What’s that?” Nana asked. In the last three days, the blueberry spots had gotten worse. Cam’s right forearm was pocked with ugly, raised purple bubbles the size of dimes that marked the plodding progress of the disease and its ambitious plot to take over her entire body.
“What?” Cam said, sneaking her thumb back into the hole she’d created in the wristband of her sweatshirt to keep her sleeves down.
“Don’t say ‘what.’ You know what I’m talking about. That. On your arm.”
“Bug bites,” Cam said.
“We don’t have those kinds of bugs in Hoboken.”
“Ah, but you haven’t been to the Magic Tree,” said Cam.
“Campbell. Should you go get that checked out?”
Campbell just shrugged. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’m sure Mom’s finished packing.”
The three of them walked down the narrow, wood-paneled staircase to the front hall. Cam first, then Nana, and Perry trailed behind, jotting something down into her brown notebook from Izanagi. “Miracle number thirteen,” she said as she wrote, “Nana is walking us to the door.”
“Yeah, what are you doing, seeing us to the door?” asked Cam. Normally after pretending to be angry and then throwing a faux tantrum, Nana retreated to her bedroom without even saying good-bye.
“Just making sure you get the heck out of here,” Nana joked.
Outside, it was a glorious day. Their ridiculous rig took up two metered spots on Church Street. Alicia wiped some sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, looking pleased with herself. Everything was packed up and ready to go.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Bye, Ma.” She gave her mother a hug without even realizing how strange it was that Nana had actually made it outside to see them off.
Perry hugged her grandmother. Nana apologized for the juice.
“I guess it’s our turn,” Nana said. Cam and Nana circled around each other like wrestlers in a ring.
“Yeah.”
“You want to just do one of those exploding fist-bump things?” Nana asked, holding out her fist.
“You can hug me if you want,” Cam said.
Nana wrapped her arms around Cam and Cam choked back her tears. “I’m going to be okay, Nan.”
“I already know that about you. You asked me what I believe. I believe that you are going to be okay,” Nana said, and she squeezed Cam one more time. “Now go. I have my ten days of crying to do.”
TEN
THEY WERE BACK IN THE VAGINA TRAIN AND HEADING NORTH. CAM missed Lily. It had been days since they’d left North Carolina, and still Cam could not get the words he’s using you out of her head. That was probably a little harsh, as was the word desperate. She wished she could take it all back.
They passed blue sign after blue sign advertising the fast-food options at each exit. Cam still got a little excited, a vestigial feeling from her overeating days, when she saw a good sign—one with four or more restaurants at one exit. But the thought of eating any of that garbage now turned her stomach. She had a metallic taste in her mouth, and she felt nauseous, with a strange pain shooting from her jaw down into the sides of her neck. She wished she could just throw up and maybe feel better.
After they had gotten through New Jersey and Connecticut, the strip-mall landscape on the side of the road had slowly and thankfully disentregrated until they were flanked on both sides by forest. Aside from her time at summer camp, Cam had never really been flanked by forest before. She peered through the trees, taking snapshots with her eyes of the ancient, falling-down rock walls and the ruins of an old chimney left standing after a cabin fire. Then the forest seemed to get darker and denser until she could barely see through the trees. It was all Hans Christian Andersen-y, and maybe, Cam had to admit, a little magical—as if there might be pixies and leprechauns hidden among the mushrooms or monsters lurking in caves. That was until she looked up and saw five beautiful semis piled with long, dead trees headed south toward the paper mill. So much for magic, she thought.
Their mom rolled over the perfect sine wave of the Maine Turnpike. It was as if they were driving up and down along the humped back of a giant sea serpent.
Perry bobbed her head back and forth as she mouthed the words to some tinkly Taylor Swift song. Their mom had gotten Perry a new phone when she got Cam one, just to be fair, which, if she hadn’t been so sick, would have really pissed Cam off. But that was the thing about dying. It made you shrug off the truly petty concerns in your life. Let Perry enjoy her Taylor Swift. Even if she had lost Tweety.
“This must be it,” Alicia called from the driver’s seat. It was still daylight, but a street lamp shone on a bulbous pink and orange Dunkin’ Donuts logo that sat right smack in the middle of the Exit 33 sign. Exit 33 had absolutely no other amenities, apparently. No gas. No lodging. No special attractions. Just a Dunkin’ Donuts.
“I thought you said this was hard to find,” she said, glancing up the exit ramp. One winding path led straight to a white brick Dunkin’ Donuts at the top of the hill. The edifice itself was tiny, but it was lit up by the enormous three-story-high neon sign.
“It’s a miracle!” Perry exclaimed, and she reached again for the notebook.
The Dunkin’ Donuts driveway was not even paved. Tiny rocks popped beneath Cumulus’s tires as they pulled in.
“You’re supposed to go through the drive-through,” Perry remembered.
Alicia steered the car toward the rusted squawk box in the back. It seemed to have been dented by some teenage vandal’s baseball bat. The speaker scratched with a staticky crackle. They heard a woman’s tired voice ask, “Ayuh?”
“Um,” Alicia started. “Three whoopie cakes,” she said.
Cam exploded in laughter, and Perry squealed.
“I think it’s whoopie pie,” Cam corrected.
“What difference does it make?” Alicia asked, beginning to giggle herself. They were all punchy from having been too long in the car. “Whoopie pies,” she said into the squawk box. “And three chocolate milks.”
“Whoopie cake just sounds so wrong.” Cam laughed as they pulled around to the pay window.
“Whoopie pie. Whoopie cake. It’s all just very wrong,” Alicia agreed.
A large woman with greasy black hair tied back in a bun must have heard them laughing because she scowled at them as she took their money and handed them their whoopie pies, which were basically big flat Devil Dogs, and chocolate milks.
“Apologize, Mom. You made fun of their cuisine,” Perry whispered.
“Thank you,” Alicia said out the window. “We’re just very tired.”
“Ayuh,” said the lady.
Before pulling out of the parking lot, they idled for a second. “When in Maine,” Alicia said before the three of them took simultaneous bites from their whoopie pies.
“Cheers,” giggled Perry. She held up her chocolate milk carton, and they clonked them together. A sudden breeze blew, rocking their little car and parting the underbrush to reveal a gravelly path.
“That must be it,” said Alicia. She maneuvered the car around the Dunkin’ Dumpster and plunged Cumulus in through the bushes. After about a quarter mile, the trees opened up to reveal the most beautiful (as even Cam had to admit) hidden cove of Penobscot Bay.
The sheer authenticity of it blew Cam away. She had never been to a place that was not trying to be someplace else. It wasn’t pretending to be Maine. It wasn’t Maine-like or Maine-ish. It wasn’t McMaine, or MaineWorld, or MaineLand. There wasn’t even a giant lobster billboard welcoming them to town. It was just Maine.
The gray wooden shanty buildings near the docks provided a splintery buffer against the wavy blue harbor. As buildings moved up the slope away from the water, they became sturdier and more permanent. The brick buildings of Main Street housed a fire station, complete with a jumpy Dalmatian pacing back and forth in front of it; a hardware store; and some art galleries in what used to be the gristmill. The big waterwheel, still in operation, provided entertainment for the toddlers who watched it from behind a fence while they ate their ice cream cones from the parlor across the street. At the end of the street the sharp white needle of the church’s steeple poked into the sky as if heaven were a big balloon that needed to be popped.
Cam rolled down her window and pulled the earbuds from her ears. The sound of the buoys clanging in the distance harmonized with the sloshing of the waves against the dock and the squawking of the gulls. The bright light of the setting sun was tempered just enough by the mist so that you didn’t need to squint. The air was not too cold or too hot, not too dry and not too wet. It was perfect, and it felt like climbing into a bed with fresh, clean sheets.
“I forgive you,” she told her sister, still focusing on the view. And because they were sisters, Perry understood exactly what she was talking about.
“I won’t feel better until you’re in a good mood.”
“That’s going to take a while.”
“Maybe we should have gotten rid of his cage,” said Perry, and they both looked at it, still strapped to the back seat with a seat belt. Tweety’s little swing creaked back and forth with the swaying of the car.
“No. I want to keep it,” said Cam.
“Keep your eyes peeled for a hotel or something,” said Alicia as they drove down the main street past a bookstore, café, post office, and lobster pound.
Every time they turned off the main road, they seemed to get lost and have a hard time getting back to it. And when they did get back to the main road, each time it looked a little different. The bookstore seemed to have morphed into a pub with a hand-painted, golden beer mug sign swinging on its hinges. The post office seemed to have become the bakery. It seemed to Cam like the barbershop pole she had seen on the far corner had now become an upside-down blue tuna fish sign advertising the fishmonger’s. On their third pass, Cam finally saw a real estate office, but it was closed for the evening. They tried to find the gravel path that brought them into town from the Dunkin’ Donuts, but it seemed to have completely disappeared. There was no place in town to stay and no way to get out.
Alicia was starting to sweat a bit. She sat slumped over the steering wheel as she drove, and she couldn’t stop cracking her gum. Cam could tell she was having one of those single-mother moments where she felt totally alone with no one to turn to. She was doubting herself, wondering what she had gotten them into. It reminded Cam of the time she took them to Sanibel Island with every penny of her savings, and it rained the entire time.
Cam hated how she could feel her mother’s emotions, her desperation, as if she were still symbiotically connected to her with some kind of tortuous emotional umbilical cord, while Perry sat happily in the back seat licking the cream out of her whoopie pie. Cam hated being the oldest.
“It’s okay, Mom,” she said. “We’ll figure something out.”
“Thanks, hon,” said her mom. “Why don’t we take a break at the lobster pound?” It was the only building that seemed to stay put.
Cam didn’t get why it was called a lobster “pound” except for the fact that this was where lobsters went to die. Like a dog pound. Were they bad, vagrant, stray lobsters? Or just law-abiding crustaceans minding their own business at the bottom of the ocean? “Lobster pound” was just a misnomer and an unappetizing name for a place to eat.
It was a gray-shingled shack on pilings jutting out over the ocean. Someone had nail-gunned plastic lobsters to the outside wall and then trapped them cruelly in an old fishing net. It had a red roof and a little cupola topped with a brass lobster weathervane. Inside were a bunch of picnic tables with red-and-white checkered tablecloths.
The door slammed behind them, jingling the leather strap of sleigh bells tied to the handle.
“We’re about to close up,” said a handsome boy with broad shoulders. He had wavy shoulder-length hair that started out brown, but got more and more golden toward the ends that haphazardly looped in all directions as if they were trying to grow toward the sun.
“I’m Asher,” he said. “You guys new to town?”
“What gave it away?” asked Cam. “The U-Haul?”
Asher looked up and seemed confused. She was trying to be funny, but she realized how abrupt it sounded.
“I mean, yes, we are new to town, and we have a U-Haul because it has all of our stuff from the old place and we wanted to take it with us to this place. A town . . . to which . . . we are new,” Cam said, her cheeks reddening with every bumbling syllable.
Asher grinned. He must have thought she was autistic or something and looked as if he felt sorry for her. He kindly held out his hand and said, “Welcome to Promise.”
“Thank you,” said Cam. “I’d like to adopt a lobster.” That probably did nothing to dissuade him from his autism diagnosis, but she was determined to rescue one. Especially when she saw the crowded conditions in their tank.
“Adopt?” Asher wore a faded blue Red Sox cap to hold down the hair and a gray sweatshirt with three little holes in the elbow. Cam liked that. She didn’t trust men who were too neat and put together. His five o’clock shadow caught the sunlight and glinted with golden specks. He wore a leather apron and white terrycloth wristbands. Wrangling lobsters must be hard work, thought Cam. Like shoeing horses or wrestling gators.
“Yes. Is this a lobster pound?” she asked.
“It is. Yes,” he said, taking off his cap and scratching his head. A little serious for my taste, she thought.
“Well, I’d like a lobster for a pet. Can I rescue one of them, please?”
Asher smiled a little, revealing a dimple in his left cheek. “Sure. I guess. They’re ten bucks a pound.”
“We’ve had a long trip,” Alicia said, ignoring them. “Is it really too late to get dinner?”
“Let me check in the back and see what we can do,” he said, and he went into the kitchen, where, after a moment, Cam heard someone angrily tossing about some pots and pans.
“Have a seat,” said Asher as he came back to the front with some bendy laminated menus.
“Are you sure?” Alicia asked. They heard some more clanging from the kitchen.
“He’ll get over it,” said Asher with a smirk. “Let me know when you’re ready to or
der.”
Cam, Alicia, and Perry settled into a booth and ordered from the menu. They had been in town for almost an hour, and the sun was still setting. Stripes of orangey peach and purple hung like a backdrop behind the lighthouse, which stood on its own little island about ten feet away from the peninsula that shouldered the bay. Seagulls and pelicans dive-bombed for their dinner and pecked at the mussels glued to the sharp black rocks silhouetted by the waning half-light. The scene evoked in Cam some words she had never actually used in conversation. Words like craggy, shoal, and cockles. It was a barnacly, salty place. An entirely new ecosystem.
“Is it weird to anyone that the sun has been setting for like two hours now?” Cam asked after Asher had delivered their piles of fried shellfish in paper boats. Vespertine, she thought, of or related to twilight: gloaming. Another SAT word she had never used in conversation. Then she noticed the white dot of the evening star slowly materialize above the lighthouse. Normally she wouldn’t think of making a wish, but tonight she actually had one. I wish Lily would call, she said to the star. She couldn’t imagine going through the end of this disease without her.
“It’s a miracle!” Perry exclaimed. She opened up the damn notebook and wrote Everlasting sunsets with a flourish of her pencil.
Alicia was finished with her fried clams, and she talked to Izanagi, the phone in one ear and her fingers covering the other. “We’re okay,” she said. “Everything will be okay. Here, say hello to the girls.”
Her mom held the phone out to Cam, who curled her lip, stuck out her tongue, and swept it away with Lily’s hand-broom trick.
“Cam!” her mom insisted, covering up the phone. “He just wants to know you’re all right.” Cam had never been expected to talk to any of the other creeps her mom had dragged home from Epcot. This was a first.
Cam grabbed the phone and made scratching interference noises with her throat. “Hi,” she said, then made some more noises. “I think we’re breaking up. Here, talk to Perry.”
“Oh, Cam,” Alicia said with a sigh.