He Started It

‘Oh.’

‘I’m sure she’ll be awake tomorrow when we call,’ I said.

‘I hope so.’

I wanted to blurt out everything, to tell them what had happened. To tell them about Nikki being pregnant. And I almost did, except Grandpa grabbed the phone out of my hand. ‘You know how teenagers are – they sleep like the dead. Portia really wants to talk to you, though.’ He held the phone against Portia’s ear, always ready to grab it away.

‘Mommy!’ Portia yelled. She did this every night.

Grandpa continued to glare at me, and it was a lot scarier now that Nikki was gone. More like a monster than a man.

My fault, my fault, my fault.

Every time I found myself getting mad at Nikki for running away, I remembered it was me who helped her. I also couldn’t blame her. If someone were keeping me tied up, I’d run, too.

‘Everything’s fun,’ Portia said into the phone, just as she was coached to do. Grandpa took the phone as she yelled, ‘Bye-bye!’

Grandpa took the phone from me. ‘See, everyone’s fine. The kids are safe and sound and having the time of their lives … Well, of course not. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt these kids. You know how much I love my grandchildren … Have some faith in your old dad, for goodness’ sake … All right, yes, I will call tomorrow. As always.’

He hung up the phone gently, like he was handling a kitten. He gave me one final glare before walking back across the parking lot to our room.

‘Go,’ Eddie said, pushing me in the same direction. He had become Grandpa’s little guard.

No one is pushing me around now, though.

I’m out here by myself, standing by this old bank of phones, and they’re covered in so much graffiti I can’t see the original paint. The phones make me want to call someone, but I have no idea who. There’s no one left.

Last Day

Everyone is alive in the morning, including me, and we still have Grandpa’s ashes. An auspicious start to our final day. On the downside, Portia overslept and looks hung over.

Breakfast is at Starbucks, which really does exist everywhere. As we sit down at a table in the corner, Eddie brings up today like he’s not afraid to jinx it.

‘You think Grandpa planned something for the end?’ he says.

Portia adds a single raw sugar to her almond milk latte and turns up her nose at Eddie’s artificial sweetener, which is funny, given how much soda she drank on this trip. Portia doesn’t look at Eddie when she speaks, even though she’s sort of answering his question. ‘There better be a good reason we had to do this all over again. Because all other things aside, who wants their ashes scattered in the desert? And why couldn’t we just fly them out here?’

I take a bite of my chocolate croissant, because who starts a day like this with bran? ‘Nikki,’ I say.

‘Nikki?’ Eddie says. ‘You really think Nikki is waiting for us in the desert?’

Absolutely.

‘Nikki would never be that subtle,’ Portia says. ‘It’s not her.’

‘I agree,’ Eddie says.

I say nothing.

‘Maybe the lawyer will be there with stacks of cash,’ Portia says.

I try to imagine this. I’ve never met Morton J. Barrie, but I see him as a short man with thick glasses and a bow tie. A younger, dumber-looking version of the Monopoly man. He’s surrounded by stacks of cash, bound together and all shiny and new, looking so clean against all the sand and dirt.

Behind the lawyer is a large hill of dirt no one would look at twice. We made sure of that before we left.

‘Final guesses?’ Eddie says. He crumples up the wax paper from his breakfast sandwich and tosses it into the garbage. ‘Before we head out, make your prediction.’

‘We end up rich and happy,’ Portia says. ‘Or at least rich.’

I don’t disagree. They’ll see soon enough. ‘Sounds good,’ I say.

‘All right, then. Let’s go get some money,’ Eddie says.

Portia and I walk out behind him. She rolls her eyes at his back.

Three hours. That’s the approximate length of this final drive. Who knows how long it would have been if Calvin hadn’t followed us. He didn’t even try to hide it.

Eddie sat in the middle seat with me, keeping watch to make sure I didn’t do anything wrong. He had become my permanent guard, and an annoying one. No sister wanted that much attention from her older brother.

Portia was in the way back, either sleeping or playing by herself, and that left Grandpa alone in the front with an empty passenger’s seat. He kept talking, though it was mostly mumbling and mostly to himself.

‘Is that asshole still following us? He is, isn’t he? … Yes, yes … There he is … I’m going to slow down and see what he does, then I’ll know for sure … I’ll just ease off the gas and bring my speed down by … Oh look, there it is. He’s slowing down, too.’

Every once in a while, Grandpa would turn and speak to us. ‘You see that? He’s still following us.’

He always glared at me as he said it, like it was my fault, but I didn’t even know who the man was. Grandpa just blamed me because I had sided with Nikki, because everything was about Nikki. As it should be.

Grandpa looked back to the road and started mumbling to himself again. This went on for an hour, then another, and we were deep into hour three when Grandpa saw the sign.

Alamo

No, not the Alamo in Texas. The tiny town of Alamo in Nevada, right off I-93 South.

‘We’ll end all this right here,’ Grandpa said, taking the exit. I didn’t appreciate his flair for the dramatic until I became an adult.

‘End what?’ I said. He didn’t hear me, he just kept talking.

‘This asshole,’ he said. ‘The private investigator.’

‘What?’ I said. Louder this time.

‘Private investigator. Haven’t you been paying attention?’

I shook my head, partly out of confusion, and partly to answer him. No, I obviously hadn’t been paying attention because no one told me Calvin was a private investigator.

‘Why do you think he’s following us?’ Grandpa said. ‘And looking for Nikki?’

‘Yeah, why?’ Eddie said.

I was still shaking my head, trying to put the pieces together. ‘But who hired –’

‘Your parents, obviously,’ Grandpa said. ‘I bet he’s been following us the whole damn trip.’

Relief swept over me like it had been dumped on my head. I should’ve known our parents were looking out for us. They had been the whole time.

And I bet Eddie was just as relieved. He looked as surprised as I was to learn Calvin was a private investigator, but that didn’t stop him from throwing a jab at me.

‘Duh,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t see him.’

Grandpa didn’t stop for another thirty minutes or so – long enough for us to get far away from any interstate, business, or even another human being. Calvin was right behind us, not even trying to hide that he was following us. By the time Grandpa pulled over, it felt like we were at the end of the earth.