3. Marisol at Eighteen

The Camry was Hannah’s mother’s — a hundred and forty-two thousand miles on it, a CD player that sometimes ate CDs, a COEXIST bumper sticker in the alphabets of every faith Hannah’s mother had decided to respect — and they loaded it at six in the morning in front of the Mesa Hills house with the easy graceless efficiency of four girls who had been packing for each other’s sleepovers since middle school. Hannah’s duffel went in first because Hannah’s duffel was always the largest. Then Cami’s smaller, neater one, which contained, Marisol knew without looking, three books she would not read on the trip. Then Jess’s backpack, with the trail map of Canyonlands paper-clipped to the outside as if Jess were a person who paper-clipped things, which she was. Then Marisol’s, on top, because she had been the last to pull in, in her father’s truck, which she had driven by herself on the freeway for the first time because her mother had been at work and there had been no one else to give her a ride.

She was wearing a green tank top from Target, cutoffs, and the brown leather sandals her mother had bought her at the Cielo Vista mall as a graduation present, when the salesclerk had said those are going to last her ten years and her mother had said good, because I am not buying her another pair until then. Her hair was in two braids because braids meant she did not have to think about her hair, and she had recently come to understand that the time she had spent in the last four years thinking about her hair was time she would, going forward, be spending on other things.

In the front pocket of her bag was a brand-new iPod nano, the small white one that had come out in the spring, which her uncle in Las Cruces had sent her for graduation in a flat brown box with a card that said for the road, underlined twice. Beside it lay the Razr she had had since April, which had, since six that morning, vibrated twice — once with her mother saying call me when you get to Albuquerque, and once with her mother saying I love you mija call me when you get to Albuquerque. Her mother was bad at the phone, and worse at the not-being-with-her, and had been visibly bad at it for the last two weeks in a way Marisol had decided to be patient with, because she was eighteen now and one of the things eighteen meant was that you decided what you were going to be patient with.

Hannah drove the first leg. Cami had shotgun because Cami got carsick if she sat in the back, a fact established in tenth grade on the field trip to White Sands. Marisol took the seat behind Cami, Jess behind Hannah, and Marisol pulled the seatbelt across her chest and felt, briefly and not for the first time that summer, the small physical surprise of being inside her own body — a body that, somewhere in the last year, had become its full adult shape and started to behave like a thing with opinions. Her own shoulder, where the seatbelt crossed it, felt like a shoulder she had been issued.

“All right,” Hannah said, twisting the key. The Camry caught on the second try. “Moab by nightfall.”

“Moab by nightfall,” they said, in the ragged unison of friends who had been quoting things to each other so long that the quoting had become the thing.

—

The first day was I-25 to Albuquerque, I-40 west to Gallup, north on the 491 to Cortez, a state road across the southwestern Colorado scrub into Utah, Moab. Twelve hours, give or take. Hannah had MapQuest printouts in a folder in the seat-back pocket, Jess had a road atlas open on her knees, Cami had somehow memorized the exits, and Marisol had her job, which was the music.

The iPod was new and she had not yet learned its etiquette. She passed it forward to Cami around Las Cruces and Cami plugged it into the cassette adapter, which crackled, and the speakers came on in the middle of “Hey Ya,” which Marisol had loaded because everyone had loaded “Hey Ya,” and they sang it in the unembarrassed way of girls who had spent four years deciding which embarrassments they were willing to share. Then “Such Great Heights.” Then “Float On.” Then, around Truth or Consequences, “Mr. Brightside,” and at the third bar something in Marisol locked into place around the song the way it had been locking, that whole spring, around songs and rooms and faces, and she put her head against the warm glass and watched the Caballo Mountains move past and thought that is what I am going to remember. The song would stay with her, she could feel it deciding. She did not know yet that it would be in her head, on and off, for the next three weeks, including the moments when she was in no position to know what was in her head at all.

Pop called at noon. She had been waiting for it. Pop did not text; the dialing of a cell phone number was, for him, a small ceremony he completed at the kitchen counter with his reading glasses on. The Razr buzzed and the screen said POP in the capital letters her father had programmed in, and she said hold on, it’s Pop, and Cami turned the music down, and Marisol flipped the phone open and put it to her ear.

“Mija.”

“Hi, Pop.”

“Where are you?”

“Coming up on Socorro.”

“Driving safe?”

“Hannah’s driving. She’s driving safe. We’re all wearing seatbelts.”

“Good. Mija. Listen.” There was a pause, the kind of pause that meant Pop had thought about what he was going to say and was now deciding whether to say it. “You have a good time. You have a good time, mija. You hear me? You’re eighteen one time.”

She said, “I hear you, Pop.”

He said, “Send me a postcard if you find one with a stupid picture.”

She said, “I will.”

He said, “I love you.”

She said, “I love you, Pop.”

He hung up. He always hung up first. She closed the Razr and Cami turned the music up again and Jess, without looking up from the atlas, reached over and put her hand on Marisol’s knee for a second, because Jess knew about Pop the way Jess knew about everything, by paying very calm attention, and then Jess took her hand back, and Marisol thought, with the small clarity she had been having more of lately, these are my people.

—

They got to Moab a little after nine. The sky was still doing the long blue thing skies did in July in the desert. They had reserved a room at a motel on the highway whose name involved either canyon or country, she would not, afterward, remember which, and the woman at the desk handed Hannah a key on a plastic diamond and said no boys after eleven, and Cami said we know, in the voice Cami used to deflect.

Hannah and Jess in one bed, Marisol and Cami in the other, air conditioner clattering, bedspread the color of an old bruise, Marisol lay on her back and listened to the three of them breathe and thought about the dorm room in Fort Collins. Cinder block walls painted off-white. A loft bed. Someone else’s name on the assignment letter: KAITLYN HAUSER, ROCKFORD IL. She had Googled her and found a fifty-year-old realtor with bangs and a different Kaitlyn whose MySpace top eight was all boys named Brandon, and she had closed the browser and decided she would meet the person when she met the person.

Eighteen days from now. The chest-tightness arrived on schedule and she breathed through it the way her mother had taught her to breathe through anything in the months after the divorce: in for four, hold for four, out for four, and try not to be dramatic about it. She had become good at not being dramatic about it. Almost too good, she sometimes thought. There were things she could feel arriving at the edge of her — the leaving, the dorm, the new state, the new self she would be in the new state — and she met them mostly by going slightly flat against the wall, like a person who had heard a noise in another room. She slept.

—

In the morning, the Devils Garden trail at Arches, in heat that made a sound — a high whine in the ear that was not actually a sound but the brain trying to render the heat as one. They climbed onto the slickrock and stood in the column of dry wind between two fins of sandstone and Hannah took a photograph on her disposable Kodak that would, when developed, show the four of them squinting and grinning and Cami holding her water bottle like a trophy. Marisol had three Clif Bars in her pocket and gave one to Jess, who had not brought enough food, because Jess never brought enough food because Jess had never been hungry in a way that taught her about food. Marisol had not been hungry that way either, exactly. But her mother had, in the bad year after the divorce, and you learned things from watching.

At Mesa Arch in the afternoon, Marisol stood at the edge of the drop and looked out at the basin and could not, for a second, find herself in her own body. Not unpleasant. Just the moment of looking down at your hand and registering that is mine — the small administrative click of inhabitance. The basin was huge and her hand was hers and she was eighteen and she was going to Colorado in eighteen days. Cami took a picture of her from behind, which Marisol would later print at the Walgreens by her dorm and keep in a frame for the next four years.

That night they camped in the BLM land off the road to Needles, in a clearing under a juniper, in sleeping bags they had bought at the Sam’s Club outside Las Cruces. Hannah had brought a portable speaker and they played the iPod at low volume and made a small fire that was mostly for the look of fire because the night was still warm, and they passed around a flask of something Hannah had taken from her mother’s cabinet that turned out to be coffee liqueur, which was disgusting and which they drank anyway, because at eighteen one of the things you did was pretend to enjoy what you had taken.

Jess, lying on her back, said, “What if we just kept going.”

Hannah said, “Where.”

Jess said, “I don’t know. Oregon.”

Cami said, “I have an orientation on the twelfth.”

Marisol did not say anything. She was looking up at the sky, which had more stars in it than she remembered the sky in El Paso having, and somewhere up there, low and steady and white, was Venus, because Pop had told her that the bright low one in the west was almost always Venus, and she had retained it. She thought about telling them. She didn’t. To share Pop’s stars was, she was beginning to understand, to give a piece of him away, and she was not ready for that yet.

The chest-tightness came and went. Jess fell asleep first, Cami second. Hannah, propped up on an elbow, said, very quietly, “You okay, Mari?” and Marisol said, “Yeah, Han, I’m good,” and Hannah lay back down, and Marisol watched the sky until she stopped being awake, and her last thought before sleep was that the song stuck in her head was still “Mr. Brightside,” which was a stupid song to have stuck in your head while looking at the actual Milky Way, and she was at peace with it.

—

The next morning they drove south on the 191 toward Blanding because Cami had read in a guidebook that there were petroglyphs at Edge of the Cedars. The road from Monticello was empty and the radio was bad and Marisol had given up on the iPod for a while and was leaning her head against the glass and watching the country go by — open sage flats, small far buttes, the occasional fence with a hawk on it, the Navajo Nation a smudge of darker color on the horizon to the south.

A sign in English and what she would later understand had not been Spanish at all but a transliteration of a Navajo phrase made her try, briefly, to translate from her four years of Mrs. Aguilar’s high school Spanish, and she got two syllables in before she realized her error and laughed at herself, quietly, in a way none of the others noticed, and she thought, with the small private wryness that was newly hers, Mari, you absolute idiot. She filed it. She would tell Pop at Thanksgiving. He would laugh.

They got to Blanding around eleven. They stopped for gas at a Texaco off the highway that smelled, the way every Texaco off every highway smelled, of unleaded gas and overheated rubber and the very faint sweetness of the air freshener inside the cashier’s booth. Cami went in to pay. Hannah went in to use the bathroom. Jess sat on the curb in the shade of the pump island and untied and retied her shoe. Marisol stood with one hand on the Camry, looking at the small town past the gas station — the low buildings, the Edge of the Cedars sign on a brown post, the cottonwoods along what must have been a creek bed. The clock on her Razr said 11:08.

She felt, briefly, the way she had felt at Mesa Arch — the small click of that is my hand. She looked at her hand on the white roof. The roof was hot. She moved her hand.

What happened next she would, much later, not be able to reconstruct, even though what happened next was, by the strict accounting, nothing. She got back in the car. Hannah came out of the gas station. Cami came out a second after. They drove the half mile into town and parked at Edge of the Cedars and walked the loop. The petroglyphs were small and very old and a ranger named Karen with a long gray ponytail explained the spiral motif while Jess took notes in the small notebook she had been carrying since ninth grade. Then they came back to the car and kept driving south toward Mexican Hat, and at some point Hannah, looking at the clock on the dashboard, said, “Why is it twelve thirty-eight.”

Cami said, “Because it’s twelve thirty-eight.”

Hannah said, “How is it twelve thirty-eight. We left the gas station at, like, eleven.”

Jess said, “We were at Edge of the Cedars for forty minutes.”

Hannah said, “Right. So it should be like eleven fifty.”

There was a pause. Marisol looked at her Razr. The Razr said 12:38. She looked at the dashboard clock. The dashboard clock also said 12:38. She had a flicker of something — not a thought, exactly, more like the way the room sometimes felt when you walked into it expecting your mother to be there and she wasn’t — and then the flicker resolved itself into nothing. They had spent longer at the petroglyphs than Jess remembered. Or the ranger had talked longer than they realized. Or Hannah’s sense of time was off because Hannah’s sense of time was famously off; in eleventh grade Hannah had insisted a movie they had all seen together had been two hours when it had been three.

Cami said, “Han, you’re bad at time.”

Hannah said, “I’m not bad at time.“

Jess said, “You are sort of bad at time.”

Hannah said, “Okay but ninety minutes.”

Marisol said, “We probably just lost track. The ranger talked for a while. I think I went to the bathroom too.”

She had not, that she could remember, gone to the bathroom. But she said it, because it was the kind of thing one of them might have done, and Hannah said, “Maybe,” and turned the radio up, and Cami passed Marisol the iPod and Marisol scrolled to “Mr. Brightside,” because it was still in her head and she figured she might as well infect the others with it, and they drove south toward Mexican Hat with the song going, and Marisol pressed her forehead to the warm glass and watched the country open out and felt, briefly and not unpleasantly, that she had left something behind at the gas station, and then she did not feel that anymore.

Her right nostril itched, very faintly, for about a mile. She rubbed it with the back of her wrist and stopped noticing.

—

Mexican Hat. Then Monument Valley. Then back to Moab for the second night, and then home the long way, because Hannah wanted to see Mesa Verde. They stopped at a gas station in Cortez and Marisol bought a postcard from a wire rack with a picture of a jackalope on it that was, by any reasonable standard, stupid. She wrote on the back, Pop — you said one with a stupid picture. Mission accomplished. Love, Mari, and she dropped it in the blue box outside the gas station, and she watched the box for a second the way you watched a box you had put something into that mattered, and then she got back in the Camry.

The chest-tightness came back on and off, the whole way home. She breathed through it. She did not, on the drive back, talk much. The other three didn’t push her; they knew the difference between Marisol-quiet-because-something-is-wrong and Marisol-quiet-because-she-is-thinking.

She thought about Fort Collins. About Kaitlyn Hauser, Rockford IL. About the loft bed and the cinder block walls and whether she would be the kind of person who put posters up, and what posters. About her mother, who would cry at the airport, and her father, who would not, and Pop, who had told her in Socorro to have a good time, and whom she would call on Sunday because Pop on Sundays was the rule.

She did not think about the ninety minutes, except in the small way you think about the place a tooth used to be after it has been pulled. She filed it under Hannah is bad at time. She was good at filing things, that summer; she had been getting better at it for a while.

—

Hannah dropped her off at her father’s house in the late afternoon on a Sunday, and her father came out and hugged her with one arm because he had a wrench in the other, and her mother, who had come over for the homecoming, stood on the porch with her hands clasped at her sternum and did not, in front of Hannah, cry, which Marisol noted and was grateful for. She carried her duffel up to her room — the room she had grown up in, pale yellow her mother had painted in 1996, the corkboard above the bed with the photo of her and Pop at the diner in Alamogordo the summer she had been eleven, the one where Dee the waitress had given her the cherry. She looked at the photo for a second and then she sat on the edge of the bed and opened her Razr and scrolled to Pop’s number and pressed call.

Pop answered on the second ring. He said, “Mija.”

She said, “Hi, Pop. I’m home.”

He said, “Good trip?”

She said, “Yeah. Yeah, Pop, it was a good trip.”

He said, “Tell me one thing.”

She thought about it for a second. She thought about Mesa Arch, and the night under the juniper, and Venus, and “Mr. Brightside” in the speakers in the Camry, and Hannah saying ninety minutes, and the small itch in her right nostril for one mile of road south of Blanding, and her own hand on the white hot roof of the Camry at 11:08, and she chose carefully, the way you chose when you were the person calling Pop on a Sunday from the room you had grown up in, eighteen days from going somewhere you had never been.

She said, “The sky had more stars than I remembered. I saw Venus.”

He was quiet for a second on the other end. Then he said, “That’s my girl.”

She said, “I love you, Pop.”

He said, “I love you, mija. Eighteen days.”

She said, “Eighteen days.”

He hung up first. He always did. Marisol sat on the edge of her bed in the yellow light of the late afternoon and put the phone in her lap and looked at the corkboard and thought, with the small private fierceness of a person who had been loved correctly, that she was ready, that she was almost ready, that she would be ready by the time the plane was ready for her, which was the most a person could ask of any readiness, and that whatever she had left behind at the gas station in Blanding was not, today, hers to go back for.