Girl Out of Water(75)

“Anise?”

“Take a right after the next light.”

“Anise? I do have the power to get back on the highway if you don’t answer me.”

Lincoln knows the basics about my mom—terrible mother, runaway, abandoner. But he doesn’t know exactly how much all of that has eaten away at me over the years.

Lincoln doesn’t have his birth mom either, but it’s different. For whatever reasons, she left his life for good. He’s not haunted by the possibility that she’ll crash back into his world at any moment…or that she’ll never crash into his world again. He might not understand this magnetic pull I’m feeling toward this place solely because she might be there, or at least was once there.

My instinct is to lie, like how I always hide thoughts of my mom from my friends. But no lie comes. And even if one did, would I really tell it to Lincoln? Lincoln who has been nothing but honest with me since the day we met and he called my eyes seaweed green.

I stare out the window. “My mom sent me a postcard from there earlier this summer, so I…you know…”

I’m waiting for the onslaught of questions. Why do you care? Why does it matter? What’s the point? What do you expect to find?

An onslaught of all the questions I’m asking myself.

But all he says is, “Okay.” And then. “A right up here, yeah?”

My throat feels even tighter than my chest. I manage to say, “Yeah.”

It’s barely six in the evening, but the Reno strip is already lit up. Huge billboards, flashing lights, an illuminated sign arching over the street that reads, “The Biggest Little City in the World.” It’s like a miniature version of Vegas—or what I assume Vegas looks like from the movies. Casinos and clubs line the roads. We pass a 24/7 marriage chapel, and Lincoln turns to me and asks, “Want to get married?”

“I’m going to have to take a pass on that,” I say, but I wonder what it’d be like to marry Lincoln. I envision us twenty years down the road, raising a brood of surfers, the fifth generation in my Santa Cruz house. But then that image blurs and sparks. Because Lincoln isn’t the type to settle in Santa Cruz. He’s the type to take twenty-four-hour road trips halfway across the country because it sounds like a fun idea. The type to hike the PCT for months. The type to fly—okay sail—around the world.

Lincoln has grown up on the road. I would never ask him to go sedentary for me.

“Where next?” Lincoln asks.

I continue to direct him, past the main strip and down a few side streets to an alarmingly darker and more abandoned side of Reno. The lights here flicker accidentally instead of on purpose, and no crowds of tourists snap pictures. My stomach clenches uneasily.

“There it is!” Lincoln lurches the car to the right and pulls into a gravel drive-thru. A wooden sign with the word “Parking” in red paint directs us toward an unpaved parking lot. The lot is surprisingly full considering the early hour. But then again, this seems like a city that appreciates a bar at all times of day.

I bite my lip as I watch a man and a woman step inside, leaving their large motorcycles in the lot. Both of them are dressed in jeans and black leather. Both of them look at least twice my age and twice my size. “Maybe this was a bad idea,” I say.

Not just a bad idea. A pointless idea.

What am I trying to achieve anyway?

Do I think I’ll find my mother sitting at one of the barstools, sipping on a pi?a colada, twirling the toothpick umbrella? Do I think she wrote that postcard and never left? Just sat and sipped one fruity drink after another? This isn’t a Detective Dana novel. She didn’t leave me clues. She doesn’t want to be found.

For all I know she’s in Santa Cruz. Or on the East Coast. Or in another country entirely.

For all I know she hasn’t thought of me once since she wrote that fucking postcard. “Let’s go back to the highway,” I tell Lincoln.

“Oh no,” he says. “That sign there clearly states ‘country’s best burger and fries for five dollars.’ We’re not going to pass up an opportunity like that.”

I know if I really wanted him to, he’d turn the car around. But at this point, we’re here, right here, and later I’ll be mad at myself if I don’t at least look inside.

“Fine,” I say. “Let’s go.”

? ? ?

No bouncer checks ID or bans us from coming in. Neon beer signs pierce the dim interior, creating an almost alien atmosphere of shadowed faces and disjointed movements. I search for a slim figure with wild hair—but there are about a dozen people in the bar, and in less than a minute, I know none of them are my mom.

I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s been months since that postcard, and since when has my mom ever stuck around anywhere for that long? I hate the bitter disappointment washing through me because it says I was actually holding on to some kind of twisted hope.

“Come on.” Lincoln tugs on my hand. “Seats by the bar.”

I want to leave. This was a terrible idea. But it was my idea, and Lincoln might as well get his hamburger. We sit down on two tall, vinyl stools, the kind that spin round and round. Tess would love it here. She’d twirl in her seat and make friends with the guy with the shaved head and Mickey Mouse tattoo in the corner slinging back shots.

A bartender comes over to us. Her hair is teased with hairspray, her face bare of makeup, save dark red lipstick. She looks like she’s been working here as long as I’ve been alive.