CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER TEN
T heir father had made pancakes for Tom and Rooster. When the other siblings arrived at the cabin, Tom was helping cut the pancakes into little pieces for his new brother, feeding him with a fork. Rooster, to his credit, was amenable to anything. Maybe having four parents and being the heir to a vast fortune and living on a plot of land the size of a small country meant you accepted most things because you never lacked for anything. Four siblings? The more the merrier. Rooster held up the soggiest piece of a pancake, his hands sticky with syrup, and offered it to Mad. She could not have refused an offering more quickly, but then she recanted, leaned forward, and Rooster placed the bite of pancake in her mouth. After the instantaneous sensation of revulsion, a child’s hand in her mouth, passed, she watched her little brother observing her, smiling. She chewed the pancake. It was so sweet. She loved it.
“Very good,” she said, smiling, and Rooster cackled.
She had thought about Rooster that morning. Of course, he was their brother, another sibling, but he had not been left. She would not wish that on a toddler, and it’s not like any of them had known their father would abandon them at some point. And then she realized that even if their father wouldn’t leave him for another family, he would die. Rooster would lose his father, though perhaps it would be more certain, a finality none of them had received. But when their father was gone, left this world for whatever was next, Mad would hold on to Rooster. That’s when he would need all of them.
“Hey,” Tom said.
“Did you have a good night?” Mad asked him, and he nodded.
“We worked on the film,” he said, “this morning.”
“Oh, is it finished?” Rube asked.
“Oh, no, not at all,” Tom said. “It’ll take a lot longer to finish it. And, you know, I have to edit it. Score it. Add the credits. Design the poster.”
It made sense to Mad. Why would Tom ever finish the movie if it meant he could stay close to their father?
“And I talked to my mom last night,” Tom continued. “And she talked to Dad. For a little while. It was a little weird, but I think they’re going to let me come back when school’s out and stay here for the summer. I told her I needed it for my film.”
Rube looked to his father. “And you worked it out? Tom can stay?”
Their father, who was putting more pancakes onto a platter, looked over at them and nodded. “I guess I’ll need to work out the logistics and talk to Lucky, but it’s fine.”
Mad thought about their father’s health, what Rube had told them last night. He looked fine, but what she’d previously chalked up to simple age, the shock of seeing him after so many years, did suggest a slowing down. Maybe it was just his own body failing him that forced his mind, always churning, to finally accept the fact that he couldn’t start over again. Maybe reconciliation was just about exhaustion.
There was no good way to bring up his health problems now. Maybe she’d never have to bring it up. But if Rube and Tom were already planning an extended relationship with their father, perhaps she needed to think about it, too. It was too much, at the moment. She would eat the pancakes, go home, and then she’d figure out what to do. She’d never wanted a relationship with her father. She’d wanted answers. But now she realized the answers were so vague that there was no real way to understand what had happened. Maybe if she saw him again, later, it would help.
“We’re going to leave after breakfast,” Mad informed Tom, who instantly regarded her with suspicion.
“Already?” he asked. “We just got here. That was a long time to spend in the wagon just to turn right back around.”
“You have school. Pep has school. I have work. You’ll be back pretty soon.”
“What about Rube?”
“He’s going to stick around and sort things out,” Pep offered.
“I’ll just stay with him,” Tom explained to them, as if he’d solved a problem that they had been incapable of figuring out.
“Tom,” Pep said, leaning closer to him. “We have to go.”
Tom looked down at his plate of pancakes. “I feel like I might never see him again,” he finally said. “It’s not fair.”
“He can stay,” their father said, walking over to the table with more pancakes. “If his mom lets him, he can stay a little longer.”
Tom looked up at his father, nearly crying. “She will say it’s okay, I promise.”
“But you’ll have to go home eventually,” Pep informed him.
Rube looked at his dad and then back at Tom. “I’ll bring you back to Salt Lake City when it’s time,” he said. “Is that good?”
Tom nodded, and Mad was about to mention that it was more than twelve hours back to Tom’s house, but it wouldn’t be her problem. Rube seemed to have accepted that driving thousands of miles was just his life now.
“Wait, so just me and Mad are leaving? The rest of the family is staying here?” Pep asked.
“You can stay,” Tom said.
“We can’t!” Pep said. “I just thought we’d all leave together.”
“You can come back,” their father said. “Anytime.”
“Okay,” Pep said, not quite satisfied. “I guess so.”
“Wait,” Rube interjected, “I’m so confused. Who is staying here and who is leaving?”
“Rube!” Pep said. “Mad and I are leaving. And you and Tom and Rooster are staying.”
Tom said: “And Dad is staying.”
“Okay, that’s settled,” Mad said. “Let’s just eat pancakes.” She wasn’t used to all this conversation in the morning. She wasn’t used to waking up without a specific set of tasks. Even away from the farm, this quest, every morning she knew what she was doing. She was gathering up heretofore unknown siblings. She was driving through empty highways of the western United States. She was searching for her missing father. What was there now? Home, she supposed. She was going home.
SHE HATED TO LEAVE RUBE BEHIND, BUT SHE COULDN’T STAY. HE SAT ON THE bed as she packed her bag, both of them finding it hard to talk.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Mad finally asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “Not forever, but for right now.”
“We went so long without knowing the other existed. And then we were together for such an intense time. And now I won’t see you again for a while.”
“We can talk. We can email.”
“I feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz .”
“I think all of us feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz .”
“Well, for me, you’re kind of the Scarecrow.”
“Oh, okay, yes. I mean, in my mind, I’m Dorothy, and you’re the Scarecrow.”
“And Dad’s the Wizard,” Mad realized.
“Oh, and you’re going back to your farm,” Rube said. “Yeah, I think you are Dorothy.”
“Who would the Witch be?”
“I think it’s best not to think of it as a direct one-to-one relationship.”
“The PT Cruiser was the tornado.”
“Wait, what the hell. Were Dorothy’s parents dead?” Rube suddenly asked.
“Oh, yeah, she was living with her aunt and uncle. Yeah, they were probably dead.”
“Or disappeared. They ran off to become basketball coaches.”
“I never read the book,” Mad admitted.
“I’m going to miss you so much, Mad.”
Mad observed her brother, who was smiling but also about to cry. It was how she would best remember him, always on the verge of these competing emotions. “I’m going to miss you, too. If it wasn’t for you, none of this would have happened.”
“Well, no, if it wasn’t for you , none of this would have happened. If you hadn’t come with me, it would have been so much worse. I definitely would have done something stupid and ruined everything. You made this happen. I’ll always be grateful that you did this with me. You didn’t have to.”
“Come see me, please,” she said.
“I will,” he told her. “I’ll keep you updated, too. Who knows what else might happen?”
“I do want to know about the Horse Sisters. Keep Tom safe, okay? Help him.”
“I will. I’ll do my best.”
“Okay.”
“Can I say that I love you?”
“Yes, of course. You already have.”
“Can I hug you?”
“Yes, sure.”
He stood up and they hugged. She held on to him. “You’re my sister,” he told her.
“We’re family,” she said. “You’ll always have me. Anything else that happens, you’ll always have me. And Pep. And Tom. You have us now, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Truly. If Dad leaves again. If something happens between you. You will always have us. You’re not alone.”
“Okay.”
He hefted her bag and they walked back to their father’s cabin, where Pep was waiting with Tom. It was so strange, this feeling of leaving. She worried that the moment she was no longer tethered to Rube, both of them would be ruined, something bad would happen. But she trusted that it would work out. He had found her once. If anything happened, she’d find him. They were not lost to each other.
HER FATHER TOLD HER NOT TO BE A STRANGER. THERE WAS NO PLATITUDE that worked, nothing that a father could say to the child he had abandoned that didn’t cause a twinge of psychological pain. And yet they had to exist within these phrases because they didn’t really know each other. And probably never would. They would say “have a safe trip” and “keep in touch” and “give my regards to your mother” and “take care of yourself” and after they had exhausted them, there was nothing else to do but leave, to separate. She did not hug her father, and he, to his credit, did not try. Maybe she had wanted that when the trip started, that kind of intimacy, to be held by the person who made her, but she didn’t actually want it. She nodded, and he returned the nod, and it was enough, the acknowledgment: I know that you exist and you know that I exist. How sad that a father and daughter might come to this, but for Mad, after so many years of nothing, it was enough.
Tom felt no sense of finality. He was so young. For him, the story had only just begun, and he had no concerns that this was the end of anything. Although, she reminded herself, he had already been left behind once without any sense of why. He had been scarred like them. The difference was the distance between being lost and being found. “Thank you for playing the slot machine for me in Nevada,” he finally said. “When you did what I asked and it worked out, I knew we would be okay.”
“’Bye, Tom,” she said.
“’Bye, Mad.”
SHE AND PEP GOT INTO THE CHEVROLET HHR AND THEIR FAMILY WAVED goodbye. Tom, of course, filmed it, their wagon driving down this road, leaving them behind. This was the way a normal family worked, she reminded herself. It came together and broke apart over and over again, all the amorphous ways it accommodated expansion and contraction. But they were not a normal family, and so it felt like an ending. It wasn’t long before they couldn’t see their siblings, their father. It was only Pep and Mad now.
“I’m hungry,” Pep announced. “We should get some snacks.”
AND EVEN THOUGH THE QUEST HAD FELT LIKE A DREAM, IT NOW SEEMED SO concrete and tangible, all of them in the car, the accumulation of experience. It was the most solid thing that had ever happened to Mad. The return to her old life, this is what now felt like a dream.
And that was the sensation for those days, a sense that she was in between experiences, and this feeling continued across the interstates as they headed east. It continued in Oklahoma, when Mad pulled the HHR up to Pep’s dorm and Pep walked back onto the campus of her university, so emphatically returned to her life. It continued as Mad drove across the Mississippi, as she stopped in diners and coffee shops, everything so quiet.
It continued for the rest of the trip, even as she drove down the dirt road that led to her farm, the place she had always lived. It continued as she turned off the car and sat there, in the driver’s seat, this little bubble of time where nothing was real and nothing mattered. And it continued when she stepped out of the car and walked along the familiar paths of the farm. And maybe it would never end, this feeling. But she was home now. She had come back. It was so strange, how time gets away from us. She could live in this moment forever, maybe, but then she walked to the chickens, shuffling along the fields, and she saw her mother. And she decided that she would enter back into her life.
She closed her eyes and she centered herself. She was Madeline Hill. She was the sister of Reuben Hill and Pepper Hill and Theron Goudy and Reuben Chelmsford. She was the daughter of Rachel Daggett. She was the daughter of Charles Hill. These things anchored her to the earth and she could feel her body take up space in this world, insisting upon itself. She listened to the sounds of the farm, and when she opened her eyes, she knew where she was. She was home.