Her voice gets more calm now.
“One last thing, Daddy. And as you see, I’ve lowered my voice now, because I’m tired of yelling, and it’s not right to yell at your daddy anyway. I just need to ask you this one thing. You really think God wants you to never see your daughter again? Didn’t Jesus hang out with the sinners? Even if I am a sinner, and I don’t think I am, I think I deserve that much from a man who follows Jesus. I believe he would want that.
“Love always, your baby girl, Aisha.”
She looks up at me, and I reach over and hug her tight and bury my face in her frizzy hair. It smells like olives.
“That’s awesome,” I say, inhaling the scent. “You’re awesome.”
“Thanks,” she says in my ear. “So I should hit Send?”
I pull back and look her in the eye and nod. “Hit it,” I say.
She takes a deep breath, and then she taps a button and puts the phone in her pocket.
We drive in silence. My heart feels new. It doesn’t feel good, because it hurts still. For Aisha and what she’s going through. For my dad and what he’s going through. But it feels new.
“Walking wounded no more,” she says, and all I can do is grab her hand and hope that’s true. For both of us.
We sail through western Utah. There are no exits, no homes, no nothing. The Great Salt Lake seems to go on for hundreds of miles to our right, and to our left is a sandy wasteland. We don’t talk much. I think I fall asleep again.
When I wake up, we are driving into water. The road ahead is covered in shimmering blue. We’re going to skid into it and die, and Aisha doesn’t seem to see it. “Look out!” I scream, closing my eyes and putting my hands in front of my face.
She doesn’t stop driving or slow down, but we don’t skid into water either. I lower my hands. The water in front of us recedes. As we drive, it keeps receding. It is always twenty feet ahead.
“Is that a …?”
She smiles. “A mirage. Cool, huh?”
I study it. “Can you stop the car?”
Aisha decelerates, pulls over, and stops the car. We get out. The same water we’ve been seeing ahead of us is to our right, and I’m not sure if it’s the lake or more of the mirage. We step toward it, onto the sparkly white salt flats. They give a little under our feet, like damp sand might, and it appears there’s a lake about twenty feet ahead. But there are also track marks, like someone drove across the flats and right into the water.
“You see what I see?” I ask.
“Yep.”
We slowly walk out. The salt continues to give, and ten feet in, I exhale dramatically. The water keeps receding.
“It really is a mirage,” I say.
“Yup.”
“I could have sworn — I could have sworn that was actually water.”
“Me too,” she says.
“Maybe we can’t trust our senses all the time?”
“I don’t know.”
I take a deep breath. “I always have felt like, if I can sense it, it exists. And if I can’t, it doesn’t. But what if my senses, like, don’t give me all the information? And what if that means that there actually could be, you know, something? Like —” I can’t even say it.
“So now God exists?” she asks me, her voice funny.
I don’t respond. It’s just … I don’t know.
We get back in the car and drive farther, and my attention stays on the side of the road. Even though I know it’s a mirage, it feels impossible for me to believe it’s not actually water. But it isn’t. My mind spins with new possibilities.
“Stop!” I say again. It looks real, but it’s not. I need to take a picture.
We get out and walk on the salt flats again. This time, my sneakers come away wet.
So the mirage is real? Sometimes? I can’t even figure out what that means. And the salt. So mesmerizing in its shimmering whiteness.
“I wonder what it tastes like,” I say.
“Try some.”
“It’s probably the world’s most poisonous salt.”
“Only one way to know,” Aisha says, teasing.
I bend down and scrape my finger across the ground. When I stand up again, we study the salt crystals.
“You’re like Willy Wonka,” I say. “Tempting me to eat something, and I’ll probably turn into a saltshaker and roll away, and the Oompa Loompas will come out and sing about my personality flaws.”
We stand there, both lost in thought. And then it comes to us at the same exact moment.
“Veruca Salt!” we yell, and then we point at each other and laugh.
Back in the car, Nevada can’t come quickly enough. And then, at Exit 4, as if they know Utah won’t last for much longer, the salt flats end. Four miles later, we cross the state line, and we woo-hoo and high-five.
We immediately notice that the drivers go faster and veer into the wrong lane far more often than they did in Utah. “Pick a lane,” Aisha yells to the cars in front of us.
“Nevada: We take the second ‘M’ out of Mormon,” I say, and Aisha laughs.
WE’RE BOTH FAMISHED when we get to the Reno city limits, as we’ve eaten only ice cream since breakfast at the Baileys’. We choose fast food based on our existential budget. Aisha pulls off the highway at a gas station with a Subway, and we each get five-dollar footlongs.
It’s not great when a fast-food dinner costs, drinks included, one-fifth of your entire net worth. As I fill up the tank again, I try to decide whether I should tell Aisha just how low we are on cash. After paying for gas, we’re down to sixteen bucks.
Google tells us we have 219 miles, or three hours and thirty-two minutes, left on our trip. It’s seven fifteen at night, and eleven p.m. seems late to show up at a stranger’s house. But we have no other way of finding Turk Braverman; I’ve called the number I have for him five times now with no answer. As we get back in the car, I’m all buzzy inside, imagining ringing the doorbell on his colorful Victorian in the heart of San Francisco. I have to hope we’ll have better luck than with the Clancys. That maybe, just maybe, Turk will answer, and know my grandfather, and where he is, and why he left.
Aisha starts up the car.
And then she starts up the car.
And again.
“Shit,” she says.
“What?” I ask. “Not …”
“Yeah,” she says. “This is not great.”
“Oh, come on,” I say to the universe.
She keeps turning the key, and it makes that wheezing engine sound, like it’s trying to find some momentum, but it never catches. The gauge on the left struggles to rise, and then the noise stops, the gauge collapses to zero, and the engine turns off.
“Has this ever happened before?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“Come on,” I repeat, thinking that if there is a God, he obviously thinks he’s hilarious.
“Well, I guess we can forget San Fran for the night,” Aisha sighs. “I might have triple A. I might not. I have no idea if my dad canceled it. I guess we’re about to find out.”
She gets out of the car and makes a call, and I get out too and listen, having no clue what it would mean if she does have it, and what it would mean if she doesn’t.
“Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news,” Aisha says once she’s off the phone.
“Just tell me,” I say.
“I’m still a member, so that’s good. They’ll tow us for free to the nearest repair place. Also, I get a discount on parts and labor, like ten percent off.”
“Okay,” I say.
“If it’s just the battery, they’ll give us a jump for free and we should be fine. The bad news is that if there’s actually something wrong with the car, we’ll need to pay to have it fixed.”