Gloria, page 7
School ended, oddly, on a Thursday instead of a Friday, and since Gloria had quit her job, they all had the next day free. It was a strange sensation, not having to go to work, and on impulse, she got out the suitcases and announced to the boys that they were going on vacation. They looked at each other, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, like characters in a movie, and the sight made her laugh.
“Where are we going?” Bradley asked excitedly.
“The Grand Canyon?” It was the only vacation Lucas could remember taking.
“You’ll see,” she told them. “Let’s pack some clothes, then maybe some books or games or things for you to do in the car.”
“Is it far away?” Bradley asked.
“You’ll see.” She had no destination in mind, but she packed enough clothes for a week, made sure the boys had a similar amount of clothing, and brought along an ice chest filled with Sparklett’s water bottles, and a grocery bag filled with Pringles and other snacks. Prinkles, Lucas always called the potato chips, and Gloria had stopped correcting him because she knew that she would miss his cute mispronunciation once he started saying the word right.
She drove first to the bank, where she got $200 out of the ATM, then to the cheapo gas station Benjamin preferred, where she filled up the car’s tank. Driving past the park then past Brea Mall, she pulled onto the Orange Freeway, northbound. She still had no idea where she was headed, but in the middle of withdrawing money from the ATM, Gloria had decided that she and the boys were going to start over with a new life in a new town, and while she said nothing to them about it, she intended to drive up to Northern California or maybe Oregon or Washington, until she found a place where there would be no more mothers or high school crushes come back to life, a small town far away from the city, far away from the dead.
The rush hour was over, but the freeway was still crowded—Southern California freeways were always crowded—and it was nearly two hours later before they were able to leave the metropolitan area behind. Gloria had brought no maps and had not looked up where to go on her phone because she did not know where they were going. Living and working in Orange County, she was not that familiar with the L.A. freeway system, but she just kept going north, and eventually they were on a highway heading through the mountains into the desert. Suburbs gave way to small towns, until somewhere along the line, the traffic thinned out so much that the only vehicles on the road ahead of them were two pickups, one old, one new.
Several hours into her escape, Gloria began having second thoughts. Was she really willing to completely disrupt her children’s lives and make them start over in a new city at a new school where they knew no one? She hadn’t done any of the things you were supposed to do when you moved. She hadn’t had her mail stopped or cancelled her newspaper or had her water and electricity shut off. She hadn’t even bothered to clean out the refrigerator, which meant that if they were gone for any length of time, the food in there would spoil. What was she thinking? A person couldn’t just go off willy nilly and abandon her life without making proper preparations.
But she had, and the truth was that she did not feel bad about it. Oh, logically, she might be able to dissect the ways in which she was behaving foolishly and irresponsibly, but in her heart Gloria did not honestly believe that she was doing anything wrong. To the contrary, this felt more right than anything in a long time. Besides, she told herself, there were plenty of people who pulled up stakes and started over again because they were unemployed and evicted. Somehow they were able to move west or east or north or south, find jobs and, practically penniless, begin new lives in a fresh location. Certainly she could do the same with half a million dollars in the bank.
Bradley and Lucas had gone through the gamut of emotions since getting into the car this morning: excitement at going somewhere new, frustration at being stuck in traffic, anger with each other over the usual brotherly disagreements, happiness that she let them play games on her phone, boredom over how long the trip was taking. They stopped for lunch at a Subway in smog-shrouded Bakersfield, a city much uglier than she’d expected it to be, and before starting off again, went into a Barnes and Noble across the street from the eatery, where she allowed each of them to pick out something to read in the car. Bradley chose the two Lemony Snicket books he did not yet have, Lucas a trio of Goosebumps, and they were both quiet and happy for at least the first half of the afternoon.
They spent the night at a Days Inn outside of Sacramento. Gloria still did not feel they had gotten far enough away, so tomorrow they were going to continue onward. Bradley and Lucas were in good spirits—they’d gotten a chance to swim in the hotel’s pool, and the room’s cable TV had both Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon—but she knew they would not be happy spending another day in the car (Lucas had already asked when they were going home), so, in bed, she scrolled through her phone, looking for touristy things to do that were in the general direction they were headed. Fortunately, there were lakes and redwoods and historic forts, spaced roughly an hour apart, so, hopefully, tomorrow would be a little easier.
All three of them fell asleep early, the TV still on, and when Gloria awoke, she heard the Good Morning America theme, and saw that the boys were wide awake, staring at her.
“Bradley said we should let you sleep,” Lucas explained. “But we wanted you to wake up.”
“What’s the checkout time?” Bradley asked.
“I don’t know,” she told him, “but we’re leaving after breakfast anyway.”
Bradley and Lucas looked at each other.
“What is it?”
“Can we swim before we go?” Bradley asked. “It’s a heated pool.”
“Please?” Lucas begged.
Gloria smiled. She glanced over at the clock on the nightstand between the two beds. It was five after seven. “Okay. We’ll go down and have breakfast, then you can swim for a half-hour, then you come back and take a shower, and we’ll pack and go.”
“An hour?” Bradley pressed.
“A half-hour.”
“What if we eat fast?”
“A half-hour. We have a lot of places to go today.” She saw their faces fall. “You want to see the redwoods, don’t you?” They brightened up. “Put on your bathing suits and a shirt, and we’ll go straight to the pool after we eat.”
The hotel offered a free continental breakfast. When Gloria was growing up, that meant coffee, orange juice and a Danish from some table in the lobby, but here they had an entire breakfast room with steam trays filled with bacon, sausage and scrambled eggs, as well as a variety of hot and cold cereals, and bread and bagels that could be toasted. There was even fresh fruit and a hot chocolate machine. The room was big enough for several round tables, but only two of them were occupied at the moment: one by a boisterous family of four, their platters piled high with food, the other by a sullen-looking teenage girl sitting alone with a paper cup of coffee in front of her. It was seven-twenty in the morning, and the girl was on her phone, texting, oblivious to everyone else around her. How did people spend so much time on their phones? Gloria wondered. When she was a teenager, in the days before cellphones, her mom used to lecture her about tying up the line when she gossiped with her friends about school or boys or music or whatever. And that had only been in the afternoons or during prime time. Back then, it had been considered rude to call anyone before ten in the morning, and if a telephone ever rang after nine at night, it could only be some sort of emergency. Yet here this girl was, typing a message to someone at a time when many people were still asleep. Were the thoughts of this teenager really so important that sharing them couldn’t wait until a reasonable hour?
Gloria ushered Bradley and Lucas over to the food, helping them pick out what to eat, then walked with them over to a table, where she sat them down before getting her own breakfast. On a television mounted to the wall, the Today show was on. Gloria had not seen it in several years, and realized as she bit into her multi-grain toast that she did not recognize either of the two hosts. Everything changes, she thought again, and usually not for the better. She remembered, as a student at Cal State Fullerton, learning from a professor that one of her father’s favorite musicians, Tim Weisberg, was a graduate of the school. Her dad had been excited when she told him, and he broke out a bunch of old albums, the covers featuring various versions of a happy hippie with a big bushy mustache holding a flute. A couple of years ago, vacationing in Morro Bay, Lucas so young that Benjamin was carrying him as they walked from store to store in the quaint downtown, Gloria had seen a more recent Tim Weisberg CD in a small book and music shop. On the cover was a short-haired, clean-shaven man with a tight smile and a pinched narrow face, not the loose, long-haired guy with the broad easy grin that she remembered, and she’d put the CD back, feeling sad.
Thinking about her father made her wonder what he would have thought about what had happened to her mother. What would he have done? How would he have reacted?
She wished he was still alive.
Did she wish he would come back?
No, Gloria decided quickly. She did not.
She allowed the boys to swim after breakfast, ignoring the advice her mother had always given her that you shouldn’t swim until an hour after eating. They were the only ones in the pool this early, and they were having such a good time that she let them stay a little longer than originally intended. It was after nine-thirty before they were finally on the road, and mentally she scratched off a couple of planned stops. Not a problem, as it turned out, because the pool time had put both boys in a good mood that lasted through the rest of the morning.
Farmland gave way to forest. The tenor of the land was different today. Maybe it was her mood, maybe these smaller towns had genuinely escaped the influence of the bigger cities to the south, but she finally felt that she was getting closer to what she was seeking. Acting on instinct, she pulled off the highway onto a side road, where a green sign informed her that ten miles ahead was the town of Glad. She drove through Glad, which was little more than a gas station, café and a handful of houses, and continued on, the route passing through low hills and then taller mountains.
Either they drove through the mountains or came back out on the same side further north—the road was so winding it was hard to tell—but they were soon in a rolling landscape where hilly towns were separated by swaths of alternating woods and fields. An hour after what would have ordinarily been their lunchtime, Gloria saw a road sign announcing two towns up ahead: the comically named Hicksville, 16 miles away, and Longbranch, 45 miles.
“I’m hungry!” Lucas whined. “When are we going to eat?”
“And when are we going to the redwoods?” Bradley asked. “You said we were going to the redwoods!”
“I told you, we decided to go a different way. The redwoods were on the other highway. And we’ll eat as soon as we find someplace.”
Gloria was getting hungry herself, and Hicksville, as it happened, was much bigger than she’d expected. For the past few hours, the communities they’d passed through had been more hamlets or villages than towns, but Hicksville had an honest-to-God main street (called, of course, Main Street), and not only were there three gas stations, a small shopping center, two grocery stores and a motel, but several eating establishments, ranging from a burger stand to what looked like a pretty nice Italian restaurant.
“Lunch!” Lucas called out. “It’s about time!”
Gloria laughed. “Okay, who wants what?”
They settled, as they often did, on Mexican food. La Cocina was a small eatery located next to a laundromat, and since it was nearly one-thirty and the lunch hour was over, they were the only customers. The chef was also the waiter and, Gloria assumed, the owner. He brought over a basket of chips and a bowl of salsa, then three glasses of water, before passing out menus. “My name’s Ricardo,” he said in friendly, lightly accented English. “I haven’t seen you here before.”
“We’re from California!” Lucas announced.
“We’re still in California,” Gloria told him.
“We’re from Brea!”
“Oh?” Ricardo said, smiling. “Where’s that?”
“It’s close to Disneyland,” Bradley offered, and Gloria was surprised at how mature he sounded.
“We came up here for the redwoods!” Lucas said.
Ricardo chuckled. “That’s the only reason anyone comes up this way.” He turned to Gloria. “Are you heading to the state park?”
“We have no specific plans,” she admitted. “Beyond finally eating lunch.”
“Well, I may be biased, but as far as I’m concerned, everything here is good.” He started back toward the kitchen. “Give me a shout when you decide what you want.”
Gloria liked Ricardo, and she liked his restaurant. And after they ate their lunch and walked back outside, and she looked around the town and saw an exposed section of granite cliff on the otherwise wooded hillside that sat at the end of Main Street, saw a red brick fire station next to a log cabin beauty salon, she decided that she liked Hicksville, too.
Here, she decided. They would stop here.
Holding the boys’ hands, Gloria walked up the sidewalk to the next intersection. But where would they live? She did not want to stay in a motel. That was fine for a night or two, but if they were going to relocate, they would have to find a real place to live. In old movies, arrivals in an unfamiliar town usually stayed at a boarding house. But she didn’t know if boarding houses even existed anymore. If they did, they probably didn’t allow children. Not that she would want to room with a bunch of strangers anyway. No, they needed their own place. An apartment, maybe.
Were there apartments in Hicksville?
A rental house, then.
“The car’s back there,” Lucas said, pulling on her arm.
“I know,” she told him, “but let’s stroll around a little bit, walk off our chub.” The phrase always made her boys laugh, which was why she used it. Sure enough, they started giggling. Bradley pushed his stomach out as they turned the corner, and Lucas patted it. He then patted her stomach, and Gloria smiled, pushing his hand away.
Beyond Main Street, Hicksville deteriorated quickly. They passed a tire shop that was little more than a dirt lot on which stacks of used tires were piled, the whole operation surrounded by dull chainlink. A hyperactive Pit bull came running up from somewhere, barking angrily and following them along the other side of the fence. Across the street, a dark gnarled man was burning trash in a metal barrel set in his weedy front yard. In the center of the roadway, a boy about Bradley’s age walked past with his dad. Both were wearing camouflage and both were carrying rifles.
Who was she kidding? Gloria thought. They didn’t belong here. Bradley and Lucas would be eaten alive in a school filled with kids like these. Her entire idea had been stupid, a shallow fantasy based on a faulty premise. Despite the way they were depicted in movies, small towns weren’t quaint communities populated by engagingly eccentric people all happily tolerant of each others’ quirky differences. More often than not, they were economically disadvantaged regions whose hard-living residents were being devastated by the opioid crisis.
She suddenly felt tired, the only thought on her mind the endless hours of driving ahead of her as she returned them to Southern California.
“Mommy.” Bradley was pulling on her sleeve.
She looked down at him. “What?”
“That man.”
They had moved past the tire yard and were walking in front of an unfenced vacant lot. At the rear of the lot was a line of tall trees, and in front of the trees stood a small wooden shed only slightly larger than an outhouse. A man was walking toward them on a dirt pathway leading to the sidewalk from the shed, waving. It looked as though he was trying to flag them down.
“I think he wants to talk to us,” Bradley whispered.
Gloria stopped, still holding on to her boys’ hands. Indeed, the man was approaching rapidly, a purposeful look on his face. An older white man with short salt-and-pepper hair and a gray Sam Elliott mustache, he was dressed incongruously in a blue business suit. Instinct told her to get away from here as quickly as possible, but the man clearly wanted to speak with her, and she waited as he walked up.
“Mommy…” Bradley said worriedly.
“It’s okay,” she assured him.
The man stepped onto the sidewalk. He was not smiling, but neither did he appear angry or upset. His expression was blandly neutral. “Gloria Jaymes?” he asked.
She was too shocked at hearing her name to even respond.
He offered her his hand. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
TWO
ONE
We’ve been waiting for you.
What did that mean?
Who was we?
Gloria held tightly on to Bradley and Lucas, refusing to take the man’s extended hand. She was more frightened than she could ever remember being, but instead of leaving, instead of running away, instead of hurrying quickly back to the car and taking off, she remained rooted in place. She was vaguely aware that the street was more crowded than it had been, that a small group of residents had walked up, but it was as if she had been hypnotized into immobility. She simply stood there, saying nothing, staring at the man before her.
How did he know her name? Had she met him before? Gloria looked at him more closely. Perhaps he did look familiar. His distinguishing feature was the mustache, and she could not remember meeting someone with one so full, but she thought that the large nose above that gray hair and the thin mouth below it looked somewhat recognizable.
Or not.
She was probably just looking for a logical reason to explain something that might not have one.
“Come,” the man said.
She should have said, “No,” and walked away, but, inexplicably, Gloria found herself following him back up the narrow dirt path toward the shed at the rear of the vacant lot, still holding her sons’ hands. She had no idea why she was being so compliant, especially in a strange area of a strange town so far away from home, but somehow she felt in no physical danger, and, in truth, she wanted to know how it was possible that this man and whoever else was with him—
