When the desire came to score, the best place to be was the middle of nowhere. She would be on guard every hour of each day. I’m a friend of Bill, she thought, but I would never marry the guy. Booze is also my friend. The routine of staying clean could also kill. She looked across the table at the glass full of vodka.

Irresistible urges pass.

She sat still until this one did. It became a ghost someplace in the room and left her more exhausted than ever. God, she wanted to sleep.

She hit the dial button. She punched in the number she knew by heart, the one she had never forgotten except maybe on her worst days. And worst years.

She listened to the void, to a signal making its way up north. Or not, she thought. She still had hope. She was almost happy as she listened to the phone ring.

And ring. Until it stopped. “Number out of service,” a robot voice said.

It was time to go. She didn’t know if it was time to go someplace or just to go, hit the road, go for the sake of going. Life didn’t feel like much fun anymore. But it wasn’t time for it to end. Just go.

PART FOUR

Tulsa

Build Me a House

Serena couldn’t wait to get to Tulsa, to know the place, feel its vibe, walk the downtown neighborhoods where massacres had occurred but would never take place again. She could honor the dead, her own and theirs; explore museums that celebrated Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan; gyrate at the famous club, Cain’s, still in business after all these years, more than a century old but by all reports still going strong. She would stare at the downtown Art Deco architecture while eating the wonderful fried okra a friend told her was the best thing she ever tasted. “Fried okra?” she had replied, bemused.

The old Greenwood neighborhood, where the massacre happened so long ago, was now one of many enclaves downtown, an area with an actual police force populated by men and women of all races who actually protected and served. The city was self-contained, she understood, had groceries and drugstores and a hospital and a school and all the mom-and-pop businesses needed to find work. The Marauders were kept at bay. The Militias respected the boundaries. There was festivity, fantasy, lives well lived. It was paradise compared to Fargo or almost anyplace else.

So she had heard.

That was the myth anyway, one she took to heart. And she decided to believe it, come hell or high water, because it made spiritual sense and gave her the push needed to hit the road. She had given up on finding her mother—Ava, she thought, Ava, the palindrome, same from the back or the front. Now she yearned to find her place and stay in it until her itchy feet calmed down.

She endured the long journey over bad roads still passable but no longer maintained in the back of a van with worn shocks and no windows, reluctantly accepting the lack of a view in return for the cheap ride. The van belonged to Wander, a self-described and bumptious nomad, a round-cheeked woman with thick-lensed black-framed eyeglasses and cloudy eyes who was too old for the dyed black hair and pigtails she wore. The van traveled in a caravan with a dozen other vehicles: trucks and trailers, ancient RVs hobbling along, a sedan or two outfitted with sufficient care to call home. Wander was ancient too, with those cataracts she claimed made it difficult to drive, but she allowed nobody else behind the wheel, even though two others, impulsive exiles like Serena, though younger, sat in front with Wander babbling to one another about boys and trinkets. They were sisters, Wander had said, relatives she was bound by blood to help. “Nobody knows the roads or how to drive ’em like me,” she said, “but the potholes are murder, aren’t they? Upkeep ain’t what it used to be.”

Serena half listened, sometimes dozing, through a small open rectangle with a sliding plastic window in the steel partition that separated cabin from living quarters. Two old people, probably in their eighties, who told Serena they were called Man and Woman, were dressed in multiple layers of clothing even when the caravan left the upper Midwest and temperatures climbed. They slept and snored beside her on a narrow mattress and woke only to warm thin gruel in a charred pot on a butane stove that Serena expected might explode any minute. The woman, her eyes slits, nodded to Serena and lay back down to doze again. “We’re nomads!” she shouted, sitting up, eyes glassy with wonder, possibly talking while asleep. “Broke from the nursing home where they put us like meat to spoil and die. Free as birds.” A snore escaped. “Free as birds,” she murmured. And rolled over against her partner.

“Good for you,” Serena said, wondering how they would make do in Tulsa. If they can do it, she thought, I can too. She had left everything behind except a small duffel of clothes and a one-person tent, a backpack with her pistol in it, and some keepsakes in the duffel to help remember Nana.

Good riddance to Fargo, she thought. So long, been good to know you. She said it with spite and venom, but her heart ached with desolation. Her stomach growled. The gruel disgusted her. Like eating warm toothpaste from a tube. She could smell manure, lots of it—was it the gruel?—and one of the girls up front made a yuck-yuck shout. She couldn’t see much through the small opening, but it didn’t take good eyes to understand thousands of heads of cattle crowded together in conditions that made her retch.

A concentration camp for cows, she thought. What would Nana say?

The stockyards were well guarded. The girls commented on the many rifles pointed their way as they drove past under dark skies. The caravan drivers kept in touch with phones and old walkie-talkies; there was lots of chatter until they passed the Militias. “Smell that shit? Whoo-ee!” “Keep your weapons cocked and loaded, everybody. Just in case. Easy does it.” “Militia standing down by the roadside. Easy does it, folks.”

The fecal odor receded. Wander and the other drivers relaxed. The sun came out. Quiet returned, just the sounds of the road, the tires kalump-ing, the wind finding its way into the van. Everybody carried a sheen of perspiration in the humidity like a second layer of skin until the air filled with dust, dry enough to tickle her nose and make her sneeze. Three times. She heard Nana. “Always sneeze three times. Twice for the saints and once for good luck.”

She remembered The Grapes of Wrath, a book Nana had owned. Tom Joad, she thought. The Dust Bowl. California, here we come. If Tulsa doesn’t work out. Where are you today, Tom Joad? “Among us, among us, among us,” she heard Nana say, a chant Serena had long forgotten. She had traveled endless highways it seemed like forever with Nana, but they had never left the Dakotas or Minnesota.

The clouds, she remembered. Like mountains.

A sadness like a cold in the middle of summer; she could feel tears on one cheek. The van had bad shocks. Her stomach grumbled again. For some reason she imagined a boat tumbling about on high water. Please, Stomach, don’t give me trouble, she pleaded, road weary, exhausted with anxiety when she thought about Tulsa, that bright dream of paradise fading into fog. Possible trouble in Tulsa—finding a room, finding work, staying safe, always the same shit—braided with images of Nana in hospice, dying in striped flannel jammies, sipping water, one sip at a time, sucking on slivers of ice, slipping into some other universe beyond Serena’s ken, coming back alert to grip her hand in fright.

“Are you there?” she would say, eyes open but something wrong with her sight. The hospice workers, kind, professional, told her what to expect; it didn’t help Nana. “Just be with her,” one said, stroking Serena’s hair, tied with a braid in back. “It matters.”

The kind words didn’t soften the blow when it came. It was a bright day. A hopeful day, Serena had thought, walking just after dawn to the hospice. Lots of light in the room. The stale, medicinal smells had been scrubbed away. A flicker of shadow on the white walls. No drama. The aroma of a bouquet of flowers she had brought with her. A spear of sunlight flashed into and through a pitcher of drinking water. Low-cadenced voices in the hall. The clink of dishes and silverware. Strings of music someplace, a kind of waltz. Outside a big truck braked. Somebody shouted, irritated. The music stopped.

Nana breathed out, a sigh. Serena squeezed her hand with skin like rice paper and blue, collapsed veins. “The clouds are mountains,” she said. A rasp. Serena stroked the still hand, a breath in. “Let’s climb the clouds,” she said. A moan, though barely audible. A rasp. Another breath out. A great sigh. Nana’s face relaxed. And relaxed.

And didn’t breathe back in.

Serena waited, holding her own breath. “Nana?”

She squeezed, hard. “Nana!”

***

Ava, in Tulsa, was in rehab. A minor mishap with heroin. Almost over now. The sweats gone, the pukes faded, the craving under control with methadone, though she promised herself she would kick that too, and soon. A few more days. Back on the wagon, once again a dear friend of Bill. Tess, her counselor, a woman with perpetually tangled ginger hair and a rigorous method but a tender smile, had helped her pull through.

The two of them shared a slice of chocolate cake.

“Sugar’s good,” Tess said.

“S-u-g-a-r,” Ava said. Five letters. On a keyboard, four typed with the left hand, one with the right: That puts me ahead, 4–1. She did the math and pictured her fingers typing without really thinking about it. It was mild OCD, a strange new tic that came with sobriety—the number of letters, the keyboard, the contest between left and right hand, a winning hand announced in her head. If the left hand won, the goddess was placated; if the right, she felt bound to count another word. “Damn straight,” she said, putting aside the mind clamor. “I had a diet once. No sugar. No carbohydrates.”

Tess laughed, a pretty sound, and touched the dangling turquoise earring on one ear with slender fingers. “What kind of diet is that? And how did it go?”

“The wrong kind,” Ava said. “It went bad. Believe you me. Supposed to clean me out.”

“Ah,” Tess said. “All kinds of crazy out there. You’re too bony for that kind of diet. You need a diet that puts meat on your butt. Get yourself one of those Brazilian butt lifts.”

They joked like that until Ava grew quiet. A thought struck her. “I came here,” she said, “to find my daughter. Serena.” This was an old story by now to Tess. “But you know what? Been so long I don’t think I’d know her if I saw her.”

Tess thought about that, chewed on cake. Ava wanted those earrings. E-a-r-r-i-n-g-s. Would Tess make them a gift to her if she asked? “She might know you.” It was the kind of thing Tess said.

Ava didn’t think it made sense. The first time they had this conversation, the withdrawal fogging everything, she had argued. “How the hell would you know? And why would she know me if I don’t know her?” Tess had shrugged. Reassurance was the biscuit she offered. Now Ava had wised up, didn’t argue, just nodded. “Maybe.”

“Sure,” Tess said. “Why don’t you put some fliers around town with your phone number? Looking for my daughter Serena. Information appreciated. Call this number. Can’t hurt. Include a picture. You can draw it yourself. From memory. Extrapolate. Make her look the way she might. Fliers help. And Craigslist. Can’t go wrong there.”

Was that a sarcasm? Ava acknowledged the attempt to help with a shrug. Therapy included painting, but not representational art. Would she be able to draw a face that looked real? She thought about it. Maybe. It had been a long time since she painted figures but, good or bad, it would fill the time until they gave her walking papers and helped her find a halfway house. Halfway room more like it, Ava thought, rueful. H-a-l-f-w-a-y. She would have to draw a self-portrait, though. How could she draw a young woman she hadn’t seen for so many years?

***

The trailer park where Wander stopped was inside Tulsa, on the Arkansas River south of downtown. They were tested for the latest virus before the Police allowed them inside the city, but it would be a long walk to those Art Deco buildings she imagined she could see in the distance like the magic city of Oz. Wander checked into the park at a booth and backed into an open spot small enough for large vans, close to the public toilets and showers. Serena had just enough space outside the van to set up her tiny tent for the night. Wander didn’t mind. The park manager—a wiry woman in khaki with a thousand smoker’s wrinkles and short, cropped hair—folded her arms and squinted her eyes fiercely, as if affronted, at the tent when making the rounds but let it be when she spied Serena standing woebegone beside it.

Serena could only imagine what she looked like after days on the road without hygiene or decent rest. Her lower back ached when she tried to stand straight. She begged a few ibuprofen from Wander, who had a giant jar of pain pills that she dispersed like candy to her passengers. “All you have to do is ask,” she said. Wander had lived on the road for years. It was her way of life. Serena felt sorry, though, for Man and Woman in the back of the van, though Wander was in no hurry to send them packing. There was room enough for Wander to sleep with the two of them, skinny as rails, sleeping to regather whatever strength they had left after eating the last of the thin gruel.

Goodbye to all that, Serena thought, what she thought too often when her Nana came to mind. She decided to thank Wander with a walk to the convenience store located at the park entrance to purchase a pack of hot dogs and some buns and a large cardboard urn of coffee.

***

Ava left the halfway house and stayed for weeks with Tess, in a storeroom attached to her garage that had a mattress on the floor. Tess helped her put an ad in Craigslist: Hi. I’m looking for a room by the month to rent. Friend of Bill. Prefer female landlord. Can’t go wrong with Craigslist. Tess had meant it, although Ava also saw the effort as a message from Tess: Don’t get too comfortable here. Tess also put her in touch with a recovery group. “Tulsa’s not an expensive town,” Tess said, pouring the two of them cups of boiling water over English Breakfast tea, “so long as you stay away from posh.”

“But posh is my middle name,” Ava said, tilting her head and blinking fast while pouting her lips.