Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part III: The Third Key
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
A Book Club Guide
A Letter from the Author
Themes and Discussion Questions
About the Author
_147507097_
Dedicated to my three keys: Jake, Eliana, Michael
and to heroine explorers everywhere
PART I THE FIRST KEY STARS AND BIRDS
CHAPTER 1
How quickly she’d become animal. How fast feral had descended. The upkeep of the body seemed beyond her—hair tangled, teeth filmy, a real need to shower. It was absurd how fast a foggy lonely had descended too. How, exactly, was she to occupy herself for the next three months, not to mention the rest of her empty, empty life?
Ammalie ate a pear with one hand, her driving hand, and combed her hair with the fingers of the other as she drove past the dried grass outside Cheyenne. Empty, empty, empty. She jerked her fingers through graying tangles—dry as the grass outside—which she’d done for most of the entire circuitous drive from Chicago. Finger-combing was simply not the same as with a brush, which she had forgotten to pack, and then subsequently forgot to buy on each of her stops. She’d had the seemingly brilliant idea to grab an extra plastic fork from the café in Chadron, Nebraska, but it broke nearly immediately after trying to use it in her unruly hair somewhere right on the Wyoming-Nebraska border in a town called Ditch Creek, which was as absurd as the fork. Was it a ditch or was it a creek? How could its status be so poorly defined?
She was acting kind of crazy and she knew it. Self-awareness was not reserved for the highly educated white-collars of the world, though she suspected they thought otherwise. Anyone with half a plastic fork tangled in her hair should get some help. Anyone who’d left her humble-but-comfortable home in a rush in order not to lose momentum or let reason seep in, and anyone who likely hadn’t brushed her hair fully in a week or a month before that, well, that person was. not. well.
She didn’t care. She could care less. She could care less than caring because she’d hit rock bottom, end of a rope, the place where maxims or axioms—or whatever one called phrases about phrases—no longer applied because the world no longer made sense. Bits of sweetly-worded wisdoms simply did not apply to chaos. Last night, prone in her sleeping bag in her car, she’d listened to a podcast about people who’d experienced a recent breakup or death of a partner, and how they had reduced executive functioning. She snort-laughed at the truth of that. Yes, her neural and behavioral changes were wildly evident. No MRI images needed here. Husband dead, son launched, job she liked gone, a world running amok, a planet lurching through space and being mistreated all the way.
Without a doubt, her brain was not working right. But the real mystery was: How did others continue to pierce the fog with clear and focused thoughts? And why couldn’t she be one of them?
She spit the half-chewed pear pieces into a plastic cup containing the remains of sunflower seed shells. The pear was underripe, it was going to give her a stomachache, she should listen to nature. Then she reached for her water bottle, and, in doing so, spilled the pear bits and sunflower seed shells all over her cupholder and floorboard and her mail, which is when she acknowledged once again how very wide was the gap between the goal of “Be Interesting!” and the “Being Interesting Is Fucking Difficult!” truth.
It was a chasm, really.
She blamed it on the people who made videos on van-living and strong-women-solo-traveling. She blamed it on Frances McDormand. How delightful it would be to put them in jail for misleading the public. Living on the road was not as easy as it looked, and she ticked off the missing essentials in her mind:
The frequent need for a pair of scissors, tape, fingernail clippers.
The frequent need to pee.
Ice to keep food cold.
Heat source to keep feet warm.
Something to do during long dark hours.
Room to move around, to stretch legs, to bend at the waist. She was not born a hunchback, after all, and she felt a pang of sorrow for those who were, and then felt a zing of shame, since she should be grateful for a straight spine that required bending when living in the back of a car.
