That’s when I see the police lights pulsing in the side mirror.
“Damn,” Ivy says, and for a moment she just looks ahead and doesn’t slow down, like she’s thinking about just driving until she finds a cliff to fly off of, and she would do it without thinking about me, without even asking if I want to go down with her.
But then she sighs and slows the car down, pulls over to the side of the road. “Shit,” she says. “Shit, shit, shit.” I pick her purse up off the floor and hand it to her. Then we sit in silence and wait.
After a couple minutes of him doing whatever he’s doing in his car, the trooper gets out and walks slowly toward us. Ivy rolls down her window when he arrives and hands him her ID before he even asks. He inspects it for a moment, then crouches down for a better look at her face, and his eyes light up.
“You’re Ivy Avila!” he says.
“Yes, sir.”
“Quite a car you have here. Haven’t seen one in person yet.”
“Thank you.”
“Did you know you were speeding, darling?”
I cringe at “darling,” but Ivy is all smiles.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I guess I forgot to turn on the speed limit sensor. I always turn it on. I don’t know what happened.” She is playing dumb and cute.
“Well,” he says, putting his hand on her arm, which I am positive is against protocol. “Promise me you’ll be more careful next time, okay?”
“Yes, officer.”
“And one more thing.” He hands Ivy his little notebook and pen. “An autograph. For my daughter.”
“Of course.”
Before he walks away, the officer takes one last lingering glance, peering into the car and resting for a moment on Ivy’s lap, at the place where her thighs meet the fabric of her short skirt. We are out here in the middle of nowhere, two girls alone on the road, and he has all the power. You hear stories about things like this. Stories about his word against hers.
“Be good” is the last thing he says, his voice low, hungry.
He is walking away. He is feet crunching on gravel, the ghost of a lingering stare, his eyes going places no one invited him to.
As we drive away, Ivy says, “Middle-aged men love me,” with a hardness that makes me lose my breath, and for a split second I see her turn into stone, into something impermeable and solid and forged by fire, flying through the sky at 73 mph, capable of doing serious damage and not caring who it touches.
I realize I am breathing fast and shallow, that fear has lodged itself in my chest. Not fear of getting arrested for speeding, not fear of crashing, but something else that I cannot name. I look at Ivy and she is holding some other kind of feeling. Maybe I’m afraid because she is not.
I look out the window, at the trees lining the road, one after another after another, creating a kind of rhythm as we pass by. It’s a hypnotic pulse of green and brown, but then occasionally a flash of some other color deep inside the layers, the weathered blue or red or orange of a tent or tarp of the people living out here in the forest because they have nowhere else to go.
“Ah!” Ivy says after a few more minutes of driving. A carved wooden sign on the side of the road reads “Shoji Japanese Spa.” The car turns into a heavily guarded driveway and Ivy scans her wrist under a sensor that opens the locked gate. Two armed security guards nod as we pass through. “Here we are.” Her voice is light now, as if forcing cheerfulness will make it real.
We drive along a river for a while, then turn uphill on a windy road surrounded by rhododendron bushes and towering evergreens until we get to a small wooden building that resembles a Japanese pagoda, with bamboo and ornamental maples and flowers all around. A pretty blond woman with thick-lined eyes wearing a black kimono-like dress comes out to greet us. “Nice to see you again, Miss Avila,” she says, and leads us inside.
“What is that smell?” I whisper to Ivy.
“Sulfur,” she says. “From the hot springs. You’ll get used to it.”
The waiting room is all tatami mats and cushions and watercolor paintings of cherry blossoms. Soft flute music plays behind the gentle trickle of an indoor fountain. A wall of shelves displays merchandise for sale. At first I think the place is old, maybe a preserved relic from the turn of the last century when pockets of Japanese settlers dotted the areas around Seattle. But on closer inspection, I realize everything is brand-new, freshly painted and then distressed with meticulous detail to look authentic. If Lily were here, she’d say something like, “How is this a Japanese spa if there are no Japanese people running it?” then she’d give me a speech about cultural appropriation and I’d tune it out even though I know she’s right. Lily’s always right about everything.
Ivy picks up a tiny porcelain teacup from a shelf. “All these tea sets are imported. My mom bought like five and they’re sitting in boxes she’ll never open.”
After we change into slippers and robes, the woman leads us down a wooden boardwalk along the side of the mountain hundreds of feet above the river rushing below, which periodically splits off to other trails that lead to small bamboo huts. Cloudy, steaming streams flow under the boardwalk, the rocks and soil beneath them multicolored from various minerals. Our guide tells us a rehearsed speech in hushed tones about how there are seven natural hot springs of varying temperatures and sizes, and how we have the largest one on top of the hill. I don’t know how much Ivy’s paying for this, but I’m guessing it’s not cheap.
“Apparently all these pools used to be just out here wild in the middle of the forest, free for anyone to use,” Ivy says. “Can you imagine? It must have been a mess.”
I’m used to seeing security guards everywhere, but they seem particularly out of place here, in the middle of this oasis that’s supposed to be so peaceful. They are scattered around the property, patrolling with guns strapped to their backs.
“Why does a spa need security guards with guns?” I whisper.
“There’s so many people living in the forest. There was a problem with people jumping the fence at night and using the pools.”
“So they need to be shot?” I say.
“People do all kinds of crazy shit when they don’t want to share.”
The woman leads us to our own little hut, and another woman brings a tray with tea. The door closes behind them, and I am left alone with Ivy, surrounded by three thin bamboo walls and an open view off the side of the mountain. Birds chirp and the river rushes below. To the side is our hot spring—a pool the size of a couple extra-large hot tubs stuck together, in the earth, surrounded by large rocks. Steam rises off the opaque chalky water, and the smell of rotten eggs is overpowering. It’s beautiful, but something feels off. Like we are not supposed to be here. Like we’re intruding.