She flinched.
“Good?” I asked her, turning around to look at her in person, but she was already disappearing behind the door again.
“Yeah, good,” she said, muffled. “I’m going to pack up. I’ll be ready to go in a minute.”
I turned back to my reflection in the mirror and practiced smiling. Then I stopped. It felt strange to be smiling alone.
13
Robin
We were obsessed with the car, a ’78 Pinto, painted what I called in my head Nineteen-Seventies Orange, straight off the muddy color palette of the decade, so that only a few years into my parents’ marriage it started to look dusty next to the ’80s models on the road, whose yellows and reds had been calibrated for television commercials instead of magazine ads. The interiors were cognac leather, same as my father’s briefcase. It was his commuter car; I imagined him speeding off to work, cradled in his Pinto like an important file.
Mostly we loved the back windshield, which stretched from roof to license plate in a single sheet of reinforced glass as big as a picture window. Had we ever been rear-ended we would have been ribboned, which never occurred to us as we stood backward on the seat to look out at the billboards and gas stations disappearing in our wake. They shrank almost faster than I could fix my eye on them, the way things did when you tried to remember them on purpose.
Before the Grand Canyon we had ridden in the Pinto only a few times each—four times for me, six for Leslie, an injustice—and never on the highway. At sixty miles per hour I thought I might grow wings. That was the year I was four and Leslie was eight; whatever I was, she was double it. I regretted my babyishness bitterly, feeling that I was letting her down. Had I been even two years older I could have been everything to her, as she was everything to me; but as it stood I knew I was too shallow a receptacle for her secret thoughts. It was torture to be aware of these separate chambers of her personality yet too short to access them.
Later, Leslie would say, Do you remember our vacation? and I’d pretend I did, nod along as she told her favorite story from it: Daddy in the Hawaiian shirt and rolled-up khakis, beltless, deck-shoed, as if the edge of the canyon were a prow; his bare ankles were as white as the skin under a cast. Next to him my mother, just after she’d cut her hair, wearing her old shirtdress with the wooden buttons. Let me have your camera, Warren, she said to my father. I want to take a picture of this—motioning at the sunset, whose striations echoed the layers of sediment. He handed it over and she stood on the bars of the lookout point for half an hour getting tan, pointing the camera this way and that, while Leslie and I complained. At last the light faded and she agreed it was time for dinner and held the camera out to Daddy, who didn’t grasp it quickly enough; it cracked to the ground and skittered under the safety fence, slipping over the edge of the canyon with an anticlimactic chhup!
Leslie and I went survivalistically silent. My mother began to apologize. His expensive camera! But he was bare-ankled, in high spirits. Who cares about the camera, he said, and took her in his arms. He bent her over backward, like a ballroom dancer, kissing her against the magic backdrop. Like all good vacations, it convinced us that these versions of ourselves were truer than the others, that the workaday shell of my mother could at any moment spring open to reveal her more buoyant, romantic insides.
I didn’t remember any of that. Leslie could have made it up and I would have believed her. I don’t think she did; she clung to it for years after, never bothering to change it out for a better story. For her it represented a kind of perfect happiness. I wanted to share her happiness, so I lied: Yes, I remember! When my only memory of the trip was of Leslie gifting me her Honey Bun, which I ate facing the enormous picture window, smearing sugar grease on my father’s beloved briefcase seats, licking my fingers one by one as the Pinto lifted off like a plane. Leslie beside me, my mother in front of her, Daddy in the driver’s seat, cameraless: each of us experiencing exactly as much happiness as we could successfully contain.
14
Leslie
Even with stops for gas, a new phone for Mary, and brown-sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts (traditional on road trips, she told me), the trip home seemed half as long as my drive to Vegas. I kept swallowing nervous spit as we crossed into Albuquerque. “Birthdate,” I said.
“May…twenty-second?” Mary said. “Um, 1992,” she added, more confidently.
“Good,” I said. “What’s your father’s name?”
“Walter Voigt.”
“Warren.” I gripped the steering wheel.
“Warren. That’s right.” She leaned down to unzip her duffel and took out a tube of strawberry Chapstick. “Want some?” she asked as she rubbed it over her lower lip.
I shook my head. “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”
“You didn’t tell me that.” She capped the Chapstick and put it back in the bag.
“It’s Stetson,” I said, feeling sick.
“Like the hats?”
I smiled perfunctorily.
It was the worst time to drive. The sun blinded me in one eye as we entered the foothills. Every so often it gained the perfect angle and turned the dust on the windshield totally opaque.
“What have you been doing in Vegas?” I asked.
She looked blank. “Waitressing. You know that.”
“No—Robin-you. Dave will ask.”
Mary shrugged. “She could be waitressing too.”
“I guess that’s true.”
Mary turned her head to stare out at the trickle of the Embudo arroyo. “I’m good, you know. I’m not going to freak out.”
“Okay.” I blew out a breath. “I guess we’ll see when we get there.”
She gave me that smile she’d practiced in the mirror, the Robin smile, then turned back to the window.
I turned the radio on. “You Light Up My Life” immediately oppressed the car.
Every time I glanced over to check on Mary, the color of her hair startled me a little—that and the slight pink fleshiness of her arm resting against the divider. She was real, meaty in a way that Robin’s body hadn’t been. With her hair lighter, closer to the color I remembered from childhood, she seemed more like my sister than my sister had.
“What’s that?”
“Lynnewood? Just a park.”
“It looks like it was air-dropped in from Connecticut.”
We went slowly north, following the mountains, the sun sinking over the tops of the adobe roofs.
“You live way out here, huh?” Mary asked.