He Started It

First thing in the morning, Eddie is at the car and rummaging through it again. This must be the tenth time.

‘Find anything?’ I say.

‘No.’

‘This feels like the Arctic,’ Portia says. She walks up behind me, wrapped up in layers and a hoodie pulled tight around her head.

‘Have you been to the Arctic?’ I say.

‘I have now.’ She calls out to Eddie. ‘Find anything?’

‘No.’

‘I can’t believe we lost Grandpa,’ she says.

‘Nobody lost him. He was stolen,’ Eddie shoots back.

She whispers in my ear. ‘Nobody stole Grandpa.’

‘No?’ I say.

‘Why would anyone steal ashes?’

I shrug.

‘Hey,’ Eddie says to me. ‘Why did you ask about that button?’

Eddie is in the middle row, where Felix and I usually sit, and he appears to be looking under it. ‘I don’t know, I was just thinking about it,’ I say.

We’re interrupted by Felix. He’s rolling his bag across the cement and the wheels are so loud they probably wake up whoever is still asleep. ‘Chilly out here,’ he says.

I nod. The rest of us have already had that conversation.

Felix lifts his bag into the back. ‘Find anything?’ he says.

‘Not yet,’ I say.

‘Screw this,’ Eddie says. ‘It’s not here.’

We could’ve told him that yesterday, after the first search, but he had to come to this conclusion on his own. Sometimes that’s the only way.

Once our bags are in the back, we’ve checked our rooms one last time, and we turn in our keys, all of us pile into the car and get in our usual seats. Portia buries herself in the back. Felix and I sit side by side; he’s already on his laptop and I’m avoiding mine. Eddie cranks the heat up high and starts to drive out of the parking lot.

That’s when I realize the passenger’s seat is empty. ‘Wait, you forgot Krista.’

‘No, I didn’t.’ Eddie keeps driving.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Portia lift her head.

‘Where is she?’ I say.

‘She left,’ Eddie says.

‘Left?’ I say.

‘Left. She called an Uber and went to Casper. She’s flying home today.’

Silence.

It goes on so long that Eddie speaks again. ‘We had a huge fight. She was pissed off and didn’t want to be here anymore. End of story.’

I turn around to look at Portia. She shrugs and lies back down.

‘You mind if I get in the front?’ Felix says.

‘Nope.’

Eddie stops the car and Felix looks at me. I wave him off, and he gets in the front. I have the middle row to myself.

I’m not upset she’s gone, and I know Portia isn’t either. If it had been Tracy, who I knew a lot better, things would be different. Eddie is the one who should be upset, considering Krista’s his wife. He should be the one chasing her down to the airport and begging her to stay. In theory, anyway.

In reality, he will do no such thing. Neither would I. Ashes or no ashes, we have to keep going if we’re going to finish this trip the way we’re supposed to.

We stop for food and gas before heading toward our next stop in northern Wyoming. When we have a second alone, I ask Eddie if he’s okay. He shrugs me off, insisting he’s fine.

‘Krista can be … difficult,’ he says.

I choose my words with care. ‘She’s a little emotional.’

‘More than a little.’

We both smile.

‘Is there more to the story?’ I say.

Another shrug. ‘She might have looked at my phone. Maybe she saw Tracy called.’

Tracy. The girlfriend he blew off to marry Krista. ‘Jesus Christ.’

‘She called me,’ he says. ‘I can’t control that.’

I walk away, refraining from calling him an asshole. Again.

An hour or so later, our new arrangement feels normal. Almost like Krista was never here.

Any idea what you would like to be when you grow up?

Not a parent. Seriously, what a pain in the ass. Everybody’s bored and hungry and someone always has to go to the bathroom.

Grandpa’s still pretty out of it, because the only water he gets is the kind with pills in it. On our last stop, I also bought some NyQuil, so if he gets extra thirsty he can have some of that.

Once or maybe twice I’ve looked at him and wondered if I’m doing the right thing. Then I think of when Grandma told me about Christmas a couple of years ago. She got mad about how much he spent on presents, and he got mad because she was telling him what to do. And physically, he was the stronger one.

She didn’t win that argument.

The way I remember that Christmas is different. Mom and Dad always had a big Christmas thing with a bunch of food and presents, and Grandma and Grandpa always came over for it. I didn’t even run away during the holidays. But two years ago, Grandma and Grandpa didn’t come because she was sick. The flu, they said. It wasn’t that. She just had too many bruises to show up.

When she told me the real story, I asked her why she stayed, because that’s what didn’t make sense to me. Who stays for that? Who doesn’t hit back? It was crazy.

She said she knew that. Grandma also said she had no idea why she stayed, she just did.

That made me hate him so much more. It’s the whole reason why I agreed to come on this trip, because from the start I knew it was all about him.

Except now I’ve got a new problem. One I don’t want to fucking deal with and I sure as hell don’t want to write about.

Part Two

* * *

It seems we’ve reached the middle of this story, and given the recent fight between Eddie and Krista, this seems like a perfect time to tell you about my parents.

I’ll start by saying my father is dead. We don’t talk about him and we don’t talk about our mother either, because she’s the one who killed him.

When it happened, I was going to school in Florida, Eddie had already graduated from Duke, and Portia finished high school a year early. She left for New Orleans before her first semester at Tulane even started – that’s how badly she wanted to get away from home. My parents were living alone together for the first time since Nikki was born.

The story, as Mom told it, goes like this:

They were in the kitchen, making dinner, when Dad brought up Nikki. My parents had been searching for her ever since she disappeared. They had hired private investigators to hunt down every lead, and they even paid a computer specialist to create pictures of how she might look today. Every year. They had a new picture made every single year.

If you met them, you wouldn’t know this. You wouldn’t know that all their money was gone, their house was mortgaged, and they had nothing for retirement. You wouldn’t notice anything unusual about them at all.

Nikki’s room upstairs was left intact, right down to the nineties rock band posters she had plastered all over her walls.

The evening our mother killed our father, he’d had enough. He walked into the kitchen and said, Honey, we have to stop. We’ve spent years looking for her, we’ve spent everything we have trying to find her, and we can’t keep doing this.