3
The roadside stand ahead on the highway had been promising fresh fruit, peach cider, and cinnamon pecans for miles. They had passed at least six signs for the stand, each hand-lettered and littered with exclamation points. Kate found herself looking forward to seeing the next sign, a tension building in her body that only the truly lost can feel, starting in her stomach and spreading to her shoulders and fingertips, where her hands clutched the steering wheel. In twelve more miles, there would be fruit. Ten. Eight.
Kate and Devin began to yell with each sign, the closer they got.
Six more miles!
Four!
Two!
Finally, like magic, the stand appeared, and Kate pulled to a stop in front of the gray shack on a dead circle of gravel just off the highway. Dust, gnats, and wavy heat surrounded the place like a bubble, as if it could float up at any moment and travel to another spot of land on another stretch of rural highway somewhere.
She cut the engine of the Outback, and the sudden lack of vibration made her limbs feel heavy. Devin jumped out and ran to the tiny front porch of the shack, which was covered with rusty advertising signs for RC Cola and Pink Lady apples. This reminded Kate so much of hot, sticky road trips with her parents when she was young. Her father would fill the tank with gas and drive until the gauge went down to half, then they would drive back. They’d scoured back roads all around Georgia, finding motels with pools, highway junk shops, and old fruit stands.
Kate had been thirteen when her father died. No more weekend road trips. No more hours spent after school in her father’s video store, watching movie after movie. Her mother had gone a little crazy after that, like she’d pulled the IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY switch that the women in her family told her to pull if her husband ever died, and this was what happened. She wouldn’t come out of her room for months. Kate had lived on bagels, sandwich meat, and microwaved popcorn for most of eighth grade. She had hidden when well-meaning neighbors knocked on the door, after the first time she’d let them in and they’d worried why her mother wouldn’t see them.
There was still a place inside Kate that resented her mother’s grief when her father died. She still remembered what her mother had said to her on the day Kate and Matt went to the courthouse to get married. I hope you never lose him. It had felt like a portent. Kate hadn’t been as obvious about it as her mother, but, sure enough, she had still pulled that same switch. And she should have known that Devin had caught on. Children always know when their mothers are crazy—they just never admit it, not out loud, to anyone.
The summer afternoon was loud with the drone of insects. It throbbed through the trees like a pulse as Kate got out. The thick wet coastal-plain heat was trapped between sandy soil and low-hanging clouds, and it felt foreign and tight and new.
Once she met Devin on the porch, Kate opened the screen door and they both stepped inside. Box fans were roaring, moving the hot sweet air around and not letting the bees land on the bins of fruit. There were four customers talking with the loud voices of tourists. Kate had parked beside their cars. One was from Florida, the other from North Carolina.
The tourists turned and stared at Devin when the screen door slammed shut. She was dressed in cowboy boots, green lederhosen from last year’s school play, Heidi, and fairy wings that were crushed from hours spent in the car. And she was now wearing her favorite zebra-striped glasses. She looked like an escaped summer-stock extra. When she had emerged from her bedroom wearing all these things that Cricket had told her to leave behind, Kate had smiled. But then she’d realized what it meant. Devin was treating this like it was her last chance to wear what she wanted, so she was going to wear everything. She didn’t think Kate was going to sway Cricket on the matter.
Kate went to the ancient cola cooler. She took out a can of Pepsi for herself and a Cheerwine for Devin. There was a display of cinnamon pecans in paper cones beside the register, and she picked up two cones.
“Will that be all?” the old woman behind the register asked. She had small green gooseberry eyes.
“Yes. I mean, no,” Kate said, taking the money out of her pocket. “I mean, could you tell me if I’m on the right road to Suley?”
“Yep,” the woman said, making change. “Suley is about an hour south if you keep on the highway. But you’re probably wanting to go to the water park in Suley. Fastest way there is to get back on the interstate.”
Water park? She didn’t remember a water park in Suley. “I’m looking for a place called Lost Lake.”
The old woman shrugged. “Never heard of it.”
“It might not be there anymore. It was sort of a camp, with cabin rentals.”
“Oh. Well, camping would be in the old part of Suley. The old highway will take you there. Just keep heading south.”
“Thanks.”
Kate called to Devin, who had been talking to the tourists, and she and Devin walked back outside. Kate stood by the Outback and drank her Pepsi and ate cinnamon pecans while Devin ran as fast as she could back and forth across the gravel lot, trying to straighten her wings out with the wind. After about five minutes of this, breathless and sweaty, she joined Kate by the car and downed her Cheerwine and ate her pecans in record time.
Devin burped and Kate laughed, and they climbed back in the car and headed south.
Over the next hour, Kate grew more and more tense, though she kept telling herself to calm down. This was an adventure. She was alive and awake and in charge, and Devin needed to see that. A kaleidoscope of landscapes passed like a slide show—farmland, sandy pine barrens, cypress ponds. This is what Kate’s mother had referred to as the “Wet South,” as they’d made their way to Lost Lake the last time. She’d made it sound unexplored and exotic, something untoward and almost fearful. Someplace only Eby would choose.
But mile after mile, there was no Lost Lake. There was no camp.
Kate squeezed her tired eyes shut, trying to create moisture. She opened them quickly when Devin yelled, “Look out!”
Kate gasped and jerked the steering wheel sharply to the left to avoid hitting what looked like a large alligator, which had suddenly appeared on the gritty ribbon of highway in front of them. A car coming in the opposite direction honked, and she swerved back into her lane, skidding to a stop on the shoulder.
The blood had rushed from her face, and her skin had tightened from the near miss. She quickly turned in her seat to see the other car disappearing into the distance.
But there was no alligator there.
Devin was looking behind them also. “Where did it go?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. They sat for a moment in silence. Kate finally took a deep breath and smiled encouragingly at her daughter. “How about we drive into Suley and try to find that water park? That sounds like fun.” They’d come this far. She couldn’t leave without giving her daughter something good to remember.
“No,” Devin said, suddenly panicked. “I have to go to Lost Lake and have the last best summer, like you had!”
Kate reached over and touched Devin’s fine hair. She could feel the warmth of her scalp through it, the delicate shape of her head. “Oh, Devin. I had plenty of good summers after that one. And so will you. But it’s been years since I’ve been to this place. I’ve forgotten where it is. GPS doesn’t even know. It’s probably not there anymore.”
“Mom,” Devin said, confused, “we’re here.” She pointed straight ahead. Kate followed her finger to the small wooden sign in front of the car on the side of the road. Hand-soldered onto it were the words LOST LAKE—TURN LEFT.
Stunned, Kate looked across the highway.
There was the old gravel road, just a tiny break in the dense trees, leading to their destination.