She looks up and gives me this quirky little lips-pressed-together smile, and I can’t help but smile back, which makes her laugh through her nose.
And for one second I am actually enjoying myself, even though my back is paralyzed from sleeping on the hard ground and I am standing in the middle of an illegal campsite, grinning at a paranoid schizophrenic. She actually seems halfway normal. Nice, even. The thought rockets through my mind and ricochets around once or twice before I catch it and twist the life out of it. This girl is a means to an end, I tell myself. All that should matter to you is getting her to California. And forcing the smile off my face, I start the car.
Juneau throws the tent bag in the back and jumps in beside me. With a squawk, the bird flies in too and settles on the backseat and stares at me, daring me to react.
“What’s that?” I ask, gesturing at the bird as Juneau pulls her door shut.
“The raven’s coming with us,” she says.
My eyes widen in disbelief, and I try to control my voice, reminding myself that she’s the crazy one, not me. “And why, may I ask, is the raven coming with us?”
“Because if the guy who sent him to spy on us calls him back, it won’t be very hard for them to find us.”
My brain starts hurting again. I stare at the bird incredulously. It just eyes me for a second and then casually begins picking something out of its wing. I look back at Juneau, and the star-decorated contact lens makes me shudder from its weirdness. I don’t think she even took it out last night.
I can’t believe I thought she was normal for even a second—I must have Stockholm syndrome or something. I put the car into gear, turn it around, and head back down the dirt road we drove in on.
“So where to?” I ask in what I hope is a calm tone as we pull up to the paved road. She has me trained now. I watch her check the position of the sun and glance up and down the road in both directions.
“This road runs north-south,” she says. “Do you think there’s a way for us to get onto something heading southeast?”
“Well, if you can jump-start my iPhone, I could use the GPS to find the way,” I say. She stares at me like I’m speaking Chinese. I remember the L.A. mix-up and ask, “What part of what I just said did you not understand?”
“Jump-start. iPhone. GPS,” she responds.
I pick one. “Global Positioning System,” I explain. She shakes her head. I can tell by this tiny muscle that clenches in her jaw that it’s costing her to admit she doesn’t know what something is. “Where are you from that doesn’t have GPS?” I ask, hoping she’ll say something about Alaska, or tell me more about who she is.
“No time to talk,” she says. “Take that road. I’ll explain on the way.”
Joy. I pull the car out onto the pavement and begin driving south. “I guess that means you can’t jump-start my iPhone,” I prod after a few minutes.
She doesn’t look at me but stares straight out the window and then down at the speedometer, looking anxious. I step on the gas and she relaxes slightly. “Alaska,” she replies.
It takes me a second to realize that she’s one conversation back, but I catch up and say, “They’ve got to have GPS in Alaska. With all that wide-open wilderness and . . . tundra, or whatever they have there.”
She considers that for a second. “I’ve been living in a tiny community outside the major cities. When you described me as ‘back to nature’ before, you pretty much hit it on the head. It was just nature and us.”
“But I bet you’ve seen on TV—” I begin to say.
“We didn’t have TV,” she cuts in. “Or electricity, for that matter.”
“And you lived there for . . .”
“My whole life,” she replies.
While I try to wrap my brain around this, it occurs to me that, in this light, she suddenly doesn’t seem quite as crazy. If she was raised in some kind of hippie commune out in the middle of nowhere, no wonder she was freaking out in Seattle. I see her fiddle with the window, trying to fit her fingernails through the top of the glass as if she thinks she can push it down with sheer force.
“It’s the button next to the door handle,” I say, and she wiggles the control back and forth for a second until her window goes down and she leans her head to the side so the cold morning air hits her in the face.
“What? You don’t have cars either?” I ask, remembering the way that she leaped out while the car was still moving yesterday and forgot to close the door after she got back in.
She shakes her head.
I look at her incredulously. “How did you get around?”