energy rush back into my body, the dull headache that had lingered for so long it had become a normal state of being, gone. How lucky I was to be here.
We asked for another and brought it to Daisy, who ate it delicately like she could hardly be bothered with hunger. Her scars agonized under the bright light of the parking lot, but she was still beautiful, and I thought, What pain. Life was pain and this was mine. Was it more or less than anyone else’s?
“I don’t want your hopes to be way up here,” Daisy said to me, tapping the roof of the car. “Because who knows what your mother’s gonna want to do.”
Daisy rolled down her window and poured yellow liquid onto the street from an old paper cup. She’d peed in the car. We didn’t say anything about it.
“I’m her daughter,” I said. “That has to mean something.”
Daisy turned the key in the ignition and soon we were back into the between space of the highway, where life was paused. I had never been on a road trip and I liked this feeling of floating.
“You know,” she said, turning down the affirmations CD. “You might not believe in past lives, but you and your mother have been traveling together for a long time.”
“Here we go,” Florin said. “She’s been dying to tell you this.”
I leaned forward in my seat.
“Once I met you I saw it all come together.” Daisy tapped her forehead. “In your other lives, though, you’ve been sisters mainly, and you’ve even been her mother.”
“Maybe,” I said, not sure if I believed her but wanting to hear more anyhow.
“I only tell you because I don’t want you to put so much pressure on this one life. Your mother’s on a journey all her own. If this one doesn’t work out, all I’m saying is that maybe the next one will.”
“So I have to wait for the next lifetime to have a normal mom? Seems like a long wait.”
“It means,” Florin said. “Don’t get super sad and desperate over your mom, ’cause your mom’s batshit crazy and you can’t fix batshit.”
“Florin, manifest destiny,” Daisy said, as simply as if she was asking her to put on her seat belt. “No one needs your low vibes.” It seemed leaving the red house had invigorated Daisy into some new age version of a traveling preacher, enthusiastic and struck blind by potential miracles. Her usual sardonic tone had been replaced by this wellspring of hopeful talk and powers moving beyond awareness.
I sat back in my seat. Closed my eyes. “No snow can defeat me! No wind, rain, or ice! Unshakable I am!”
“She needs to hear it,” I heard Florin whisper.
“No one needs to hear it,” Daisy snapped at her.
I took myself away then, to swim in my unknown ocean, the water cool and biting with salt.
IN THE DARK of a night that still wouldn’t show signs of morning for hours, we crossed into Reno and I rolled my window down to breathe my mother’s air and the chill choked me. There was a dust of white powder on the ground. Snow, my mind told me. I wanted to touch it. We stopped in front of a McDonald’s.
“You have to eat, Mom,” Florin said. She held Daisy’s hand. “There’s no one in there. This is a good first practice. No one will hurt you.”
I saw then that this trip was not so much about me for them as it was about Daisy finally changing course—leaving the house, then potentially leaving the life in Peaches that Florin so hated. I harbored a small dream that after collecting my mother we would just keep driving east. No more California, no more of this place called Nevada. Somewhere else entirely that none of my mother’s boyfriends had ruined yet, and we would live together and change our names. We could become new this way. I would never ask my mother about this past life of Peaches again.
Daisy took a deep breath. “I’ll go in the bathroom first, and come out when I’m ready.”
I had never been to a McDonald’s, let alone a 24-hour one. In the bathroom, I wiped myself clean with damp paper towels and I watched them in front of the mirror fixing each other, smoothing hair and cooing over Daisy’s dissipating fear. “It’s just McDonald’s,” Florin kept saying, like she was rehearsing the punch line of an inside joke, as Daisy tried to recite her affirmations but kept breaking