It was a dark and stormy night....
But that's skipping ahead. The day had actually been quite pleasant. The Wilder family's station wagon was parked on the side of the road, and Howard took a knee by the passenger-side wheel. "Yep," he said. "Definitely a flat."
"Howard, we're in the middle of nowhere," his wife Donna said, leaning her head out the window.
"Forget that," said Jane, their youngest daughter, who leaned against the hood of the car on the driver's side. "If we were in the middle, at least we'd have some idea where we are." Typical teenage attitude. Howard told himself that he'd become jaded to it, but the girl had just turned eighteen, and the sass had been cranked up to eleven.
"Oh, now, don't you worry about a thing," he said. "In fact, I brought along a full-size spare. You never know, on trips like this. Hon, why don't you take the kids and go set up the picnic here while I get this fixed. Should only be a moment."
"A picnic? Here?" Jane asked.
"Sure!" Howard said. "Why not? I mean look at the view!" He stood and gestured widely to the expanse of lush forest stretching to the horizon.
Donna gazed out into the forest and noticed a sapphire blue glimmer. "And maybe we can find a way down to that lake and go swimming later."
Jane looked out on the same expanse. She knew her parents were former 'flower children,' whatever that meant, but she had serious concerns that they might still be a bit off. When she looked out over the landscape, all she saw was a mass of snarled trees, burned like matchsticks. The lake her mother mentioned, opaque and greenish-brown, had more in common with a pustulant boil than a pristine swimming hole. "Yeah," she said. "It's... uh... super." She walked off to join her siblings, who had gathered at the edge of what turned out to be a witheringly steep incline. She had never been good with heights, and looking down made her stomach turn.
"Are we stopping?" asked her brother, Dan, who had developed a weird zen-like personality that shielded him from the kind of breathtaking weirdness involved in having two sisters. His calm demeanor was reflected in his loose-fitting, natural colored clothes. His hair wasn't overly long, and was actually the kind of bed-head look that Jane liked on boys, but it was less a style and more a staunch refusal to comb it with anything but his fingers.
"Uh huh," Jane said.
"Here?" Tina, her older sister asked. Tina was, for a lack of a better description, mousy. To Jane, the rebel sibling, her older sister was the quintessential bookworm. Thin and with long legs and arms, she could be cast as a librarian in a sitcom, and, in fact, had taken a job at her college's library the day she had set foot on campus. She had nice, slightly wavy brown hair, but she never did anything interesting with it. Granted, Jane's idea of interesting involved dying her own hair candy-apple red, which drove their mother mad.
To the older girl, Jane had always seemed so at ease in her own body. She never was particularly athletic in any organized sense, but throughout their childhood, Tina regularly glimpsed her climbing a tree or fence, usually on the way to cause trouble somewhere. While Tina hid her thin figure under baggy sweaters and jeans or long, flowing skirts, Jane wore dangerously short cut-offs and a t-shirt that, while not skin tight, made the most of her young curves. Too many times for comfort, Tina had caught herself tracing the younger girl's round edges with her eyes. There was something about the girl's overt sexuality that gave the older sister a funny feeling in her belly, but she dismissed it as jealousy. "We're going to eat here?" Tina asked.
"So you see it, too?" Jane said.
"It's a wasteland," Dan said.
"Like out of a book," Tina said.
"I know," Jane said. "Dad seemed to think it looks like paradise."
"Well," Dan said, "just try not to bring it up, ok?"
"Well..."
"Please?" Tina said. "We're on vacation. Can we not fight? I just want everyone to be happy."
"Fine," Jane said. "But as soon as we get home, I'm asking them what they're on."
"Who's on what?" Donna said, walking up behind them with the picnic basket.
"Uh..." Tina said, trying to cover for her sister.
"What road we're on," Jane said seamlessly.
"Oh," Donna said. "The same one we've been on for the last few hours, I suppose. Why?"
"No reason," Jane said. "Just wondering where we actually are."
"I'm sure your father has it all on the map."
"Nice view, huh?" asked Dan.
"Sure is!" their mother said. Dan gave his sisters a knowing look, but then shrugged it off. As Howard replaced the car tire, the rest of the Wilder family spread out the blanket and drew their picnic out of the wicker basket Donna had brought. Jane began to dig in, but her mother stopped her. "Wait for your father, Jane."
For a second, mother and daughter locked eyes, and Tina felt her heart begin to race, but then Jane said, "Fine," and leaned back on her elbows and looked out into the smoking wasteland. Tina felt a wave of relief hit her. As much as he hated the friction between her little sister and their parents, she secretly admired the girl and her blazing, demonically red hair. Jane may have been a constant source of bad noise in their house, but Tina wished that she herself had the willpower to break out of her shell.
Dan, on the other hand, thought the whole dynamic was humorous, and took pleasure every day in witnessing the fallout from whatever misadventure Jane had embarked on. He never wasted a moment worrying about his little sister, though. Whatever happened, however many times her plans crashed and burned, he had the sense that she would somehow stagger away from the wreckage a little singed, but none the worse for wear. What did worry him at this very moment was his parents inability to recognize the hell pit that sprawled below them—or, even more discouragingly, the distinct possibility that it was he and his sisters who were unable to recognize what they saw.
When Howard finally joined his family, he found them sitting silently, all looking out over the picture perfect landscape. He knew Jane was a city girl through and through, and figured her sassiness was just her way of expressing her displeasure with having to brave the outdoors for a week during her summer vacation. Dan and Tina seemed unhappy, too, which bothered him. Typically, Tina would be off cataloging flora and fauna with a pencil and notebook, and Dan would be out scouting with the bowie knife Howard's grandfather had given him when he'd entered the Scouts. Perhaps scouting wasn't the best term for his son's hikes. A year ago, the boy's personality had shifted. Initially, Howard had attributed this to the death of Howard's father, the man who had been Dan's mentor, but there was something about the change that didn't fit—something Howard couldn't put a finger on. On his solitary walks, Dan would wander the wilderness with the knife unsheathed, but calm, like some sort of warrior monk. Although it was certainly odd, at least the interest was still there. But not today. None of the kids seemed interested at all in the natural beauty spread out before them. Thankfully, the longer he looked out onto the expanse, the less he seemed to mind.
Jane finally dug into the pile of sandwiches, calming her grumbling stomach. Nothing, however, could calm her mind. The feeling was an itch she couldn't scratch, and she saw the same expression of anxiety and dread on the faces of her siblings. And the longer she sat looking out into the festering wasteland, the more she wanted to leave and never, ever come back. To this effect, she ate as much as she could, as quickly as she could, noticing that Dan and Tina were doing the same.
