Road to Paradise. Paullina Simons

them, but why is it, whenever she gets mad, this hurtful thing comes out of her mouth?

      I started watching Emma while she dusted, started wanting to ask her things. I’d mumble I really didn’t need such a present.

      Marc thought it was hilarious.

      “You’re eighteen, and she’s telling you like a stewardess at the end of a very long flight: Take your stuff and get the hell out.”

      I regretted ever having had a crush on him, him and his thick mop of chocolate curly hair and his questions about his sexuality—just a fantastic trick for getting girls. Thank God, I was smart enough to stay almost completely away. I don’t count the night his mother was out and we drank her beer, too much of it, and he said, “I think I might be gay.” I fell for it for five minutes, let him test his possible gayness out on me, then his mother came home, so the result remained inconclusive, that is to say unconsummated, at least with me.

      In that early June week, when I should have been dreaming about the prom and graduation, limos and dresses and flowers, I had fevered dreams instead about a tiger ripping apart a much larger lion with his teeth. In my other, even more frightening dream I ran into Emma at the local dollar store. She said, Shelby, I can’t talk too long because I’ve got a lot to do. I don’t have time to get into it with you. And then she went about her dollar-store business, cold, unfriendly, cut off.

      After that dream I couldn’t talk to her about anything. I was overthinking it. That had always been my problem. I was an over-thinker and an underdoer. So convenient, that. Didn’t someone say that no decision was worse than a bad decision? Not me. I’d never say that.

      The radius of my life up to this point had been only a few miles, and I was terrified by what lay beyond my open window, its deep and abiding mystery.

      One night I decided to test Emma. We were done with our work and were sitting on the couch between commercials. It was a weeknight, and I was staying in. I said, “Emma, where did you say my mother lives?”

      “Your what?” That got her attention.

      “My mother,” I said calmly. “Didn’t you once tell me she lived in a town in California? Montecito? Manzanita? Monte Carlo?”

      “I never said,” Emma said slowly, “your mother went to California.”

      “You did. What was it? Mesa Vista? Mokelumme? Monte Cristo? When I was five, you said she was sick and she went to some town in California to get better.”

      “I don’t remember saying that. How do you remember this?”

      “It’s just the kind of stuff you remember.” Montesano? Minnesota? Mira Loma?

      “I don’t think I said it.” Emma shook her head. “It’s possible I said it, but, Shelby, I was talking to a five-year-old. You asked me when your mother was coming back. What was I supposed to say? I just said something to make you feel better. Like she was far away and couldn’t leave. But honestly …”

      Commercial ended; we went back to watching “Dynasty”.

      That night, I pulled out a map of the United States. After thirty minutes of carefully combing the fourth largest state in the union, I gave up. Maricopa? Mission Viejo? Mira Flores?

      “I don’t think it’s a town,” Emma continued the next day, as if she knew I’d been looking, thinking about it. “I thought she went to have a rest at a mental hospital. Like Bellevue. Or Menninger in Kansas.”

      “What was the name of the mental hospital?”

      “Shel, I don’t know. I wasn’t serious.”

      “You know she went somewhere.”

      “I don’t know.”

      “You told me a name back then. I know you did. Did she have family from there? Why am I so sure it begins with an M? That it has four syllables?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “Mariposa? Minnelusa? Miramonte?”

      She rubbed her eyes, as if she were tired of me. The commercial ended, “Dallas” came back on, and Emma had no time to respond. Nor did she respond during the next commercial. And then “Dallas” was over and she got up and said, “I’m going to bed. Goodnight.”

      “I thought maybe that’s why you got me a car,” I said after her. “So I could go visit my sick mother at the Montezuma mental hospital.”

      Emma turned around. “I got you a car,” she said, “so you could be free. You kept saying you wanted to be. So now you are. I don’t know where your mother is. I never knew.”

      “I’m not going to be gone long,” I said. “Just a few weeks. Maybe two.”

      “Two weeks? Takes longer than that to drive there and back.”

      “Nah. I’ll be quick. Maybe two and a half. I’ll be back by the middle of July. You’ll be okay for a couple of weeks, won’t you?”

      “I’ll be okay,” said Emma. “But two and a half weeks to where? And starting when?”

      I bought a map of California from the Rand McNally store in New York City. I put my finger on the letter M in the town index, and went down, mouthing the names to myself one by one, from Mabel to Mystic, and then back again from Mystic to Mabel.

      The third time through, at two in the morning, I found it.

      Mendocino.

      Men-doh-SEE-no.

      Mendocino!

      I couldn’t sleep until Emma woke up at five.

      “Mendocino!” I exclaimed later, like an operatic clap.

      She gazed at me through bleary, blinking eyes, as if she’d just woken up. “You have your notebooks, your running stuff?”

      “Emma, Mendocino! Isn’t that right?”

      “I think so,” she said. “That sounds almost right. Do you have your lunch, or are you going to buy one in school?”

      “I’ll buy one in school. It is, it is right. It feels right.”

      “Good. You want some eggs before you go?”

      I had eggs. I had orange juice.

      Mendocino=Missing Mother.

      Emma! I wanted to yell. But yelling’s not our style, unless I’m angry. But how could I be angry? Marc told me Emma could have spent as much as $5000 (though I told him that was impossible) on my car so I could go find my mother. It had been so long since I’d seen her. She might be wondering how I’d been.

      I laid out the map of the United States on the floor of my room and studied it like the periodic table. I measured my route with a ruler as I used to in Miss Keller’s class, with an X-axis and a Y-axis and plot points along the way. I measured the miles in days and inches. I used physics (time and distance), geometry (points along the X-axis) and earth science (weather conditions in July) to determine my course. I used my seventh-grade social studies to help me with geography. My trouble was: seventh grade was a really long time ago. I thought after Pennsylvania came Kansas, then Nevada, then California. I took earth science in ninth grade, and geometry in tenth, but physics was a senior year subject, and afraid of flunking I opted out of the physics program, and so was stuck with the most rudimentary knowledge of the space-time continuum. As in: how long does it take to travel 3000 miles? Oh, but the Shelby Mustang can fly at 136.7 mph! The Kitty Hawk didn’t go that fast. Twenty-two hours. I could be there and back in two days. Sweet. Three if I dogged it.

      Utah’s time and distance didn’t even make it into my calculations. I don’t have to go through Utah to get to California, I said to myself, and dismissed it. I lost interest in geometry and physics somewhere before crossing the Mississippi.

      What became clear