Run for the Hills

CHAPTER NINE #4

“We were there at the rides in the amusement park and you’d eaten all this cotton candy and corn dogs and popcorn and so we said you couldn’t do the roller coaster or spinning things for thirty minutes. So you went into this ball pit, and you were playing in there. And I was supposed to be watching you. And I was! But it’s kind of a blur of activity. Anyways, after a while, I realized that I couldn’t see you. So I thought you’d left.”

“Oh, my god,” Pep said, nodding. “I’d forgotten this.”

“You were so little. And I looked around and you weren’t anywhere. And I was calling for you. And I talked to the guy running the ball pit, but he was high as a kite and so bored. And I was pretty upset because your mom was going to kill me. And then I could barely hear your voice, so squeaky, in the ball pit. So I jumped in and kind of waded around, sweeping my hands around, until I found you. You had fallen backward into the balls, and then got covered over and I guess you were so full of junk food that you couldn’t get back up.”

“I used to have nightmares about that,” Pep said.

“And when I got you, you said to never tell your mom, because you were so embarrassed.”

“I never told her,” Pep said.

“Well, neither did I,” their father replied.

“Do Mad next!” Tom yelled.

“Oh, god, give me a second,” their father said, taking a deep breath. “This is like opening Al Capone’s vault,” he told them. “It’s not easy.”

“There wasn’t anything in Al Capone’s vault,” Mad said.

“I’m not good with similes,” he said, and Mad replied, “You were a writer.”

“Not a good one,” he admitted. “And not with you.” It took her breath away a bit, to realize that he still kept the versions of himself separate, that the father with her had been a farmer of few words, whereas the father with Rube was a writer.

“Okay, do you remember when I won that barbecue competition? At that water park in Nashville?”

“I was telling Rube about this,” Mad said, shocked to feel the echoes of her memories actually rebounding off of another person. It was so rare for the signal of her own life to reach a receiver.

“Oh, yes, I won a huge trophy, with the gold pig on top of it. And you were fascinated with it. I think you used it for a lot of make believe, like you won a beauty contest and you’d have this princess dress on and you’d be holding the pig trophy and waving to the audience.”

“I don’t remember that,” she said.

“But the thing I remember is that sometimes you didn’t like to get up in the morning. It was a bit of a chore getting you to wake up, and we had early, early mornings on the farm. And so, if I ever came into your room to wake you and you were already up, I would run out of the room and get the trophy and bring it into your bedroom and cheer and give it to you, like you’d won a big competition.”

“Oh, yes, yes. I do remember that.”

“And I think that’s why you became an early riser over time. Because you had this sensation that waking up, another day, was an achievement.”

“Well, thanks.”

“Do Rube!” Tom said.

It was strange, how their father had to stare at Pep, Rube, and Mad for a moment, as if his eyes had to refocus, to see them as they had been as children, because he didn’t quite recognize them. He couldn’t place them in the life he currently lived and so it took a moment to shuffle things around. But then he nodded.

“We found this game at a garage sale. Escalado. It was a horse- racing game, with these lead ponies with jockeys on them, and you put them on this board and turned a little crank or something, and the vibrations made the horses move toward the finish line. It was kind of jittery and unpredictable, and we’d pick our horses and cheer for them to win. And your friends loved it, and you started having races where kids bet a dime or something and then the winner would get the pile of coins. And you kids got so loud and animated, and you were screaming at these horses. Rube, you always picked the same horse. I don’t remember the color of the horse.”

“I don’t, either,” Rube replied, smiling.

“Anyway, one of the kids had this dad who owned two or three grocery stores and they were pretty rich and I think he thought you were trying to scam them out of their fortune, because he called me and said that you were running an illegal gambling operation and that he was going to talk to a friend of his in the city government.”

“That was Jimmy Asta! His dad did that? I didn’t know any of this.”

“Well, it’s not something you tell your kid, I guess. He said I needed to return the money, something ridiculous like forty cents, and that the kid was not allowed over to our apartment again.”

“Wow.”

“And I wrote him into one of the books, but I called him Tony Astor, who was this shop owner who ran over a gangster’s poodle and then got killed in retaliation.”

Rube was nodding, remembering the moment in the book.

“Was that good?” their father asked, and Rube said that it was.

Rooster got fidgety and their father pulled him onto his knee, bouncing him gently.

“If you’d stayed with us,” Pep finally said, “there would be so many of these memories that you’d remember.”

“If he’d stayed with us,” Rube said, “he’d only have memories of me.”

“If he’d just stayed longer with us each time,” Mad offered. “Waited until we were in college.”

“I don’t know if I’d even be born yet, then,” Tom said, a little indignant. “You’d all have more time with him and I wouldn’t exist.”

“There was no good way to do it,” their father admitted. “I messed up every single time.”

“They were good memories, though,” Mad said, trying to make all of them feel better.

“They were,” their father said. He looked so tired now, so old. After Rube had appeared at the farm and told her about their father, the people he’d left behind, the changing identities, she’d thought of him as selfish, narcissistic. But the way he talked about his obsessions, the lengths he went to in order to escape himself, she realized he had a mental illness. It had diminished him. She felt sorry for him, for maybe the first time since he’d disappeared.

It was quiet for a moment. They were done with dinner. It was hard to think of what to do next. If they had that horse-racing game, maybe they could have done that. But their father didn’t take it with him when he left. It was stuck there, in Boston, in that memory. And Mad sat there with this sadness. But, strangely, she also felt content. If this was all there was, only these few memories, it was more than what she had before.

“Rooster needs a bath,” their father finally told them. During the course of the storytelling, Rooster had rubbed a ton of polenta into his hair. If the siblings had ever raised children or had been a part of their younger siblings’ lives, they would have noticed how quiet and amenable this toddler had been during long stretches of storytelling, all of them strangers in his house, and they would have known how rare it was for a toddler to not be the center of attention. If a toddler is quiet, they are rubbing polenta into their hair, and Mad filed this away for the future.

Rube and Mad gathered up the plates and silverware, while Pep and Tom slouched over to the sofa to avoid dealing with the plates and silverware. But Mad called to them, like she was their mother, and told them to come help clean up, and Pep and Tom both rolled their eyes but followed after their siblings. Tom scraped the dishes, then handed them to Rube, who washed the dishes, who handed them to Pep, who dried the dishes, who handed them to Mad, who put the dishes away. Mad turned toward their father and noticed that he was watching them. She wondered what he was thinking, this little team, so efficient, that he had put together. Maybe he was feeling the shame that he’d never let them know about each other before now, how much they could have done if they had each other. Or maybe he was thinking that Mad was putting the dishes in the wrong place and how he’d have to fix it later. Who knew? Who knew what her father was thinking, but at least now the mystery had a physical presence to hold that uncertainty. She nodded to him, and he nodded back. That was all family had to be, at the most basic level, someone seeing you, even if you didn’t know what they saw.

PEP AND MAD MADE UP THE BED IN THE OTHER CABIN. IT WAS STRANGE HOW each sibling had grown up an only child and yet here they were, sharing rooms, sleeping in the same beds, navigating the space another body took up. Maybe, she reasoned, it wasn’t as strange to Pep, who lived an athlete’s life, locker rooms and showers and team buses and dorms and hotel rooms. Mad, on the other hand, could not remember the last time, before this strange journey began, when she had spent more than four hours in the same room with someone. But that was part of the pleasure of the trip, how much of a dream it felt like, how you knew it was temporary, perhaps not even real, and so you and your younger sister put fresh sheets on a bed that, in a few hours, you would both be sleeping in.

Tom was getting to spend the night sleeping in the cabin with their father and Rooster, and he would have the morning to continue working on their film. Rube was playing Solitaire on his computer, waiting for this evening, when he and their father would meet on the porch of the cabin and have a drink and talk, and Rube would get to ask all of his questions in the moonlight while Pep and Mad tried not to spy on them.

There was a TV, but it only had four channels, though one of them would be playing the NCAA basketball tournament. “Do you want to watch a game?” Mad asked her sister, who shook her head.

“I don’t even know who is left,” she admitted. “I know my mom wanted to tell me, and I’ve been getting a ton of emails and calls from my teammates, but I’m not checking them.” Mad hadn’t considered this. She and Rube had phones that basically were to be used only when they drove their PT Cruiser off the highway in some nameless town in the Southwest. But Pep, she had an actual social life. She had friends. She had a phone that, under normal circumstances, she would be using to talk to people that wanted to talk to her. She did not want to think about Tom, who maybe even had pen pals in other countries, children who were also low-budget independent filmmakers. She could not blame her loneliness entirely on her father disappearing, on the farm that he had left her, the genetics he had passed on. Some of it, maybe a lot of it, was just that she was a weird person.

“Do you think we’ll leave tomorrow?” Pep asked her. Mad had honestly not fully understood the timeline of things, where they went from here. She did not look forward to the drive back across the country to Tennessee, all those miles in reverse, without the manic energy of seeking vengeance upon the father who abandoned you. That’s the thing with quests, she realized. You had to get back to where you started. And then you had to keep living. The danger of a quest, of getting eaten by a dragon or stabbed by an orc, was tolerable because you at least wouldn’t have to ride a Greyhound back home, weighed down with all the emotional trauma of what you’d done.

“I don’t know,” Mad admitted. “Maybe? I definitely don’t want to meet Lucky and her sisters.”

“The ‘Horse Sisters’ are what I’m calling them,” Pep told her. “And, you know, I kind of need to get back to school. I have to graduate.”

“Oh yeah. You have school.”

“And you have … chickens? You have chickens that are laying tons of eggs, right?”

“We could fly back home,” Mad said. “We could fly out of San Francisco and we wouldn’t have to drive that whole way back.”

“I don’t have an ID!” Pep told her.

“Oh, maybe you could still fly,” Mad offered, but she had no idea. She wasn’t a seasoned traveler, rarely even got on a plane. But even living on a farm in the middle of nowhere, the airline industry had done a good job of making her aware of the fact that you had to have proof of your existence to board an airplane.

“You’re an All-American women’s college basketball star. They might recognize you.”

Pep stared at her. “That is not going to get me on a plane, Mad.”

“Can your mom mail it to you?”

“I don’t want to ask my mom to mail my photo ID to this place, in care of the Horse Sisters. It would be a nightmare.”

“Oh, wait! We have Tom, too. We can’t take some kid who doesn’t have our last name and no identification on a flight.”

“I’m not sure Tom will even let us take him home. He kind of hates his mom’s new boyfriend. I think this was his great escape.”

“I guess we’ll have to drive.”

“We’re stuck in that supersize PT Cruiser for all of eternity.”

“We will get back,” Mad assured her. “We’ll find our way back home.”

“Do you think we’ll see each other again?”

Mad felt shocked by the question. She had been living in the present, the absurd present that required her to block out the rest of her life. But now she had to imagine a future where her siblings existed but they weren’t in some car, being conveyed to their father. But, yes, she wanted to see them again. Maybe she only ever wanted to see them and no one else. She was too nervous to answer, afraid that Pep would be embarrassed by her need.

“What do you think?” she asked Pep.

“Yes,” Pep said, not looking at Mad, though the statement was firm.

“Me, too,” Mad said. “I hope so.”

“You can come to my graduation,” Pep offered.

“You can … come to the farm.”

“If Atlanta drafts me,” Pep offered, “I’d be pretty close to you.”

“Is there a team in Boston or Utah?” Mad asked, and Pep shook her head. “Not one in San Francisco, either. Los Angeles, though.”

“Dad could get season tickets.”

“I don’t think Dad is ever going to leave this place,” Pep said. She was quiet for a moment. “And I probably won’t play in the WNBA. I’ll probably be in Russia or Spain or, like, Turkey. If I even keep playing.”

“You’ll keep playing,” Mad assured her.

“Well, someday I won’t.”

“You can come work on the farm with me when you retire.”

“I actually will, Mad. I would do it. For you.”

Mad so badly wanted to hug her sister, but she was not the kind of person who hugged people. And Pep, she was certain, was not the kind of person who received hugs from people. But she still said, “Can I hug you?”

Pep nodded. “Yeah, sure.” She hugged her sister.

“It’s weird to ask, but I’m also glad you asked,” Pep said.

Their father, his absence, had shaped her life in ways both visible and invisible. He had left all of them. But he had helped make them. He had given them to each other. They were so unique, so strange, and they would now know each other for the rest of their lives, beyond their father, long after their father. It was, Mad realized, a gift she had never expected. She was a gift to someone else. She had never felt like that before in her entire life. Not once. She hugged her sister again. In this strange world, who else did they have?

MAD AWOKE TO RUBE STANDING OVER THE BED. “ARE YOU AWAKE?” RUBE asked them. Mad struggled to acclimatize herself to her reality. It was now a constant necessity since she’d embarked on this quest, to take a few seconds to realize, oh, these are my siblings , and oh, this is a tiny cabin in the woods of Northern California, and oh, I have left my farm and my mom and have found my delinquent father and oh, thank god, I am wearing clothes, and oh, thank god, I am not spooning with my newly discovered sister and now best friend, and oh, this guy weirdly standing over me is my brother, and he probably has something devastating to tell me that will upend my sense of self .

“Yes,” Mad finally said.

“Good,” Rube said. Mad looked over at Pep, who could sleep through anything. Mad calculated the amount of time since Pep had played basketball, had run sprints, had exercised at all. Why was her sister still sleeping this much?

Rube pointed to the copy of his third novel that was lying open on her chest. “My book put you to sleep?” he asked.

She and Pep had both finished his second book, which they liked even more than the first, and had bought this one in Utah. She had been reading it aloud to her sister that night before they fell asleep.

“Rube, what time is it?”

“Late,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

“Do you need me to get up? Do I have to go somewhere? Is this a secret?”

“Just, god, Mad, just scooch over a little and let me sit down. I need to tell you something.”

“Let me wake up Pep,” Mad said, trying to delay the inevitable weirdness.

She shook Pep until her sister groaned. “Are we leaving?” Pep asked. “What’s happening?”

“Rube needs to tell us something,” Mad told her, and Pep groaned again, then awkwardly sat up, trying and failing to focus on Rube in the dark. Mad reached for the lamp and saw that Rube, of course, had been crying.

“Was it bad?” Mad asked.

Rube sat down. “Yeah, of course. I pretty much just talked uninterrupted for about thirty minutes, and I kind of alternated between trying to tell him that he ruined my life but then also trying to tell him that I am doing great and am very successful and he missed out on so many great things about me and my development. Sometimes I got mixed up and said that good things about me were bad things and vice versa. I’m never going to get what I wanted. He knows he did something that hurt us. But I don’t think it’s possible to make him understand what he did exactly.”

“What about his own dad? His uncle?” Mad asked. “He understands absence.”

“He doesn’t have a memory of his dad before he left them. And both of them died. They weren’t somewhere in the larger world, still living. I don’t think he understands how we feel, and I don’t know how to make him understand. And he’s so old now. It feels like he’s a different person.”

“Well, duh,” Pep said. “That’s his thing.”

“No, I just mean it’s hard to summon the anger I felt toward the father who left me and my mom when I look at him now. I just wish I’d found him sooner.”

“But what happened? Why are you waking us up?” Pep asked.

Rube took a breath. “He’s sick.”

Both sisters sat up straight. “What the hell, Rube?” Pep shouted, “What are you talking about?”

“Why didn’t he tell us?” Mad asked.

“So after I did that monologue that I’ve basically spent my entire life preparing to deliver, he looked at me and ruefully shook his head and apologized and then just said, ‘I’m dying, Rube,’ and I felt like a jerk.”

“Oh, god,” Mad replied.

“It’s early stages,” Rube continued. “He found out after Rooster was born. It’s like Parkinson’s, but it’s not exactly that. And he kept saying that it’s not genetic, or it’s not proven to be genetic, because I think he was worried I’d be mad if I got it later in life.”

“Oh, god,” Pep said.

“I mean, whether he left us or not, my genes are partly his. That’s science. Can’t get mad about that. He apologized for getting sick more than he did for leaving us.”

“What’s happening, though?” Mad asked. “He didn’t seem sick.”

“It’s early, like I said. It could be a year or two before it gets worse. It could be sooner. It could be ten years. But it’s muscular and his brain. He’ll get unsteady, have trouble walking and also breathing, maybe issues with his heart rate. It’s basically anything that your body does without having to think about it.”

“And he’s just out here in the woods by himself?” Pep asked, angry. “Taking care of a baby?”

“Well, he’s got Lucky. And Moon. And Haze.”

“The Horse Sisters,” Pep said.

“Ooh, that is good. But, yeah, he’s got all their money. Medical care won’t be a problem. It’s not immediate. He’s not going to die tomorrow. Honestly, I think he said it like that to deflect my intense emotional outburst. You saw him. I think he’s okay at the moment.”

“But sooner rather than later,” Pep said, and Mad wanted to mention that their father was old. He was an old man. He had lived multiple lives, too, which she felt added even more years to his timeline. He was not going to live forever. But it still hurt to know that it was even more likely that if they’d waited, if Rube had not searched for all of them, they’d have never found him. Or each other.

“He doesn’t want us to tell Tom,” he told them. “Not yet.”

“I feel like I want to tell Tom,” Pep said. “He’s our brother. He should know, right? I’m kind of mad he didn’t tell me. Or Mad.”

“I think we should let him tell who he wants to tell. I think he knew I’d tell you guys.”

The three of them sat in the bed, imagining their own futures, where their lives would touch up against the death of their father, the time that would come after. And Mad thought of Tom, in the cabin with his father and Rooster, still so young, who thought he’d finally gotten his father back.

“I need to tell you something,” Mad then said. “Tom? His mom took me aside before we left.”

“You were convincing her to let us take Tom,” Rube said.

“Kind of? Not really. She was convincing me. But the point is, she told me something and swore me to secrecy.”

“That’s not good,” Pep said. “She barely knew you. You didn’t know her.”

“Dad isn’t actually Tom’s father.”

“What?” her siblings both asked.

“Yeah, she got pregnant by some famous Utah news anchor, and he wanted her to get rid of the baby, and so Dad stepped in and raised Tom as his son.”

“That’s so insane,” Pep said. “Is this what aging did to him? He swooped in after leaving me and took somebody else’s kid? That’s so strange.”

“But Tom doesn’t know. No one knows but us.”

“This is the second secret we’re keeping from Tom,” Pep said. “That’s so messed up. He’s going to be so angry.”

“Not with us,” Rube said. “Why with us?”

“I haven’t had brothers and sisters long, but you should tell your brother … well, okay, now I guess it’s more complicated.”

“Right,” Mad said. “He’s eleven. I’m not going to tell him. I’m not sure anyone was ever going to tell him. But now, with Dad back in the picture and his mom letting him spend time here, maybe he’ll find out.”

“He’s still our brother,” Rube said. “That doesn’t matter. He’s one of us. He got left behind. And then he came with us. He’s our family.”

“Of course,” Mad said. “Of course he is. But I wanted you to know. So much has been going on, it was hard to remember all the secrets we had uncovered and who knew them.”

“Maybe his mom will tell him when we all take him back to Utah,” Pep said.

It was quiet for a moment, and Mad considered that conversation, how Tom had even more he had to learn than the rest of them. But maybe he also had more time to live with it and figure it out. Maybe none of them were ruined. That was what she wanted to believe.

“I’m staying,” Rube finally said.

“Here?” Pep asked. “In the bed?”

“With Dad,” Rube replied. “I’m going to stay here.”

“Why?” Mad asked. “Do you feel like you have to stay here? Because he’s sick?”

“I don’t have anything else, really. My mom died, Mad.”

“You have us,” Mad told him.

“Pep has to go back to Oklahoma or she won’t graduate. She’s going to be a basketball player. You have the farm and the … chickens? All those chickens.” Mad did not like how much her siblings thought her life was entirely devoted to a bunch of chickens, no matter how true it might be.

“So you’ll stay here?” Pep asked.

“I want to be with him a little longer,” he told them. “I don’t have a real job. I write detective novels. I can do that here. I could help Dad with getting the artist colony set up. I could help with Rooster. I could just be around him. I want to know what it’s like, and maybe if I’m here for long enough, he’ll slip up and reveal something important.”

“Okay,” Mad said. She didn’t feel betrayed that Rube wanted to stay. But she also knew she could not manage it, had no desire to prolong the trip. This trip was the thing that would push her into the next part of her life. It was not the next part of her life.

“And … never mind,” Rube said. They pressed him and he kept going. “It’s just, after all this time when he was out of my life, and I had no idea where he was, and he had forgotten us … if my presence occasionally makes him have to remember what he did, if I sometimes make him feel regret, I wouldn’t mind it.”

It was better than killing him, Mad decided. If this was what Rube needed, he could have it. She wouldn’t stop him.

“When should me and Mad and Tom leave?” Pep then asked.

“Whenever you want,” Rube replied. “Whenever you need to.”

“We probably need to get Tom back to his mother,” Mad admitted.

“You guys could come back this summer.”

“The WNBA season goes all summer,” Pep informed them. “If I even get drafted. Euroleague is the fall, though.”

“It’s always busy,” Mad said. “There’s no slow season in farming. But okay.”

“You’re staying,” Pep said to her brother, as if convincing herself that this was true. Rube nodded.

“The HHR is in both of our names,” he reminded Mad, “so you won’t have any problem getting it back to Tennessee.”

“It’s late,” Mad told them. “I need to sleep. It’s two in the morning. This is a lot.”

“It’s been a lot for a while,” Pep admitted.

“Maybe I should have waited for the morning,” Rube said, but Mad simply touched his shoulder because she could not handle him spinning himself into another monologue. “We’ll see you in the morning,” she said.

“Good night, Mad,” Rube said.

“Good night, Rube,” Mad replied.

He stood up.

“Good night, Pep,” he said.

“Yeah, good night, Rube.”

He walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him. It was quiet for a moment.

“Good night, Mad,” Pep then said, and Mad was grateful to hear her voice.

“Good night, Pep.” Mad lay there, eyes closed, the silence so lovely, just her and her sister breathing almost in unison, the most hypnotic sound in the world. And then she was asleep.