1. Sun

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SueDonna feels the invitation of the cornfield, lets her eyes slide to the neat rows of green, the tassels glittering in the sunlight. But she doesn’t need to see it to know it intimately: she’s an Iowa girl, returning home from Vermont in ignominy and a sputtering yellow station wagon full of kids. Plus a cat.

       They’ve made it all the way to Ohio since leaving near dawn the day before, but SueDonna knows that if she were alone, she could already be home. She’s seen her own death in her star chart, and it’s still five years and a handful of months away. Why not drive through the night without stopping? Why not press the gas pedal all the way to the floor? It’s written in the stars: she’s not going to die on this drive.

       But the children could.

       So she’s trying to control herself, eyes on the road while she sticks her hand in the box of Quisp Cereal and roots around, surprised to find it nearly empty. She scrapes along the bottom, digging into the cellophane corners for crumbled pieces, acutely aware that her oldest daughter, Mary, is watching her side-eyed from the other end of the station wagon’s bench seat, only pretending to read the book in her hands. Behind them, her youngest daughter, Holly, clicks something noisily, repetitively, the sound, somehow, aggressive. Hugo, her youngest son, is silent. SueDonna pulls her hand out of the cereal box and adjusts the rear-view mirror. Hugo is asleep. Which makes him, of the three of SueDonna’s four children currently in the car, her favorite.

       Not that she has favorites, not really. Good mothers don’t prefer one child over another. Good mothers don’t momentarily despise their children. Good mothers don’t for a moment imagine pulling their cars over in the middle of Nowhere Ohio and jumping out, leaving the engine running while they sprint into a cornfield and let the stalks close behind them so conclusively that even their bones will never be found.

       Holly stops clicking. “I’m hot,” she announces. “Can I roll down the window, please? I’m sweating back here.”

In the rearview, Hugo startles awake.

       “No,” Mary says, before SueDonna can muster the same answer to the same question Holly’s been asking, constantly, since they’ve been on the road. “Gremblin could jump out. And you’re too young to sweat.”

       SueDonna can’t help but admire Mary’s tactics. Holly is ten—no, eleven. Old enough to sweat, but young enough to be infuriated by the comment.

       “I am not.” Holly has played right into her sister’s trap. “Smell me!”

       Mary claps her book shut in triumph and turns to respond, but SueDonna has stopped paying attention. There’s a truck ahead of her she needs to pass, and it’s hard to get a clear view of the oncoming traffic on this curvy stretch of road. She reaches again for the box of cereal before remembering it’s empty.

       Holly shrieks, the sound punctuated by an object lobbed over Mary’s head that bangs off the dashboard. A Rubik’s Cube, each face dotted with multiple colors. Mary snatches it up, wailing. “I almost had this solved! You little imbecile.”

       “Stop it,” SueDonna says. But she says it with a sigh, because it’s barely worth even saying aloud. If they stop this, something else will start. If she tells Mary not to call her sister names, Mary will remind SueDonna of any time SueDonna called someone a name. If she tells Holly not to throw things in the car, Holly will throw something out of the car.

       SueDonna noses out to pass, only to encounter another station wagon speeding towards them.

       For a moment, she imagines it: the impact. The debris over the road. A book. A shoe. The litter box. She pulls back in behind the truck.

       Holly is right, it’s hot and getting hotter. It’s late July in Ohio, which is nothing like late July in Vermont. SueDonna’s neck and upper arm are already pink from yesterday’s drive from Burlington through New York and down into Pennsylvania. At this rate, she’ll be beet-red by Iowa.

       If they make it to Iowa.

       Another round of tears pools and spills, splatting the rims of SueDonna’s glasses. It’s just the sun, she nearly says aloud, because saying things can sometimes make them so. Her mother had been a Christian Scientist, a stern and proud woman whose strongest belief was in the power of denial. You’re not sick. And if you are, get over it.

       SueDonna tries, but she’s weak. Her body is a constant betrayal: sloppy, flabby, vulnerable to migraines and acid reflux. It no longer even houses a womb, Hugo having effectively destroyed what the first three children had battered and torn. When she turned to astrology after his birth, the charts and graphs mimicked the comfort of math, and validated her growing belief that nearly everything, fundamentally, is out of her control. Like her death. SueDonna is a year past forty now; according to her chart, she’ll be dead by 47. Why not take an aspirin or two? Or twelve?

       SueDonna glances at Mary, suddenly aware that the car has gone silent. Mary has her book up near her face, as though she’s having trouble seeing the print. In the rearview, Hugo gazes back at SueDonna, blue eyes wide.

       SueDonna shifts the mirror to take in Holly, who isn’t there.

       “Mom, the truck!” Mary’s voice is shrill.

       SueDonna instinctively hits the brake before she shifts her focus back to the road, but as is usually the case, Mary’s being an alarmist. There’s plenty of room between them and the back of the Sunbeam Bread truck and its huge and taunting depiction of a piece of buttered toast.

       “Where’s Mary?” SueDonna asks.

       “Um, I’m right here,” Mary says.

       “I meant Hugo,” SueDonna says, knowing it’s wrong, mentally cycling through names, any names, until the right one comes out. “Holly!”

       “What?” Holly answers, her voice pinched, irritated.

       “Where are you?” The entire back of the station wagon is filled with boxes and suitcases and baskets of clothes, and while Gremblin, the cat, has spent the trip burrowing in and out of the space, there isn’t enough room for a pre-teen, even one as small as Holly, to slip in.

       “She’s on the litter box,” Hugo says.

       “Shut up, fuckbrain,” Holly says. “I’m next to it. I’m not on it.”

       SueDonna hits the brake again, hard, and Mary slams forward, her book dropping to the floor. “Jesus Christ!” Mary says.

       “Jesus Christ!” Hugo echoes.

       SueDonna yanks the wheel and pulls the car off the road, fishtailing in the weeds until she can bring it to a stop. A car horn flares beside them, lingers, dies away.

 

2. Moon

 

In the silence, SueDonna stares straight ahead, hands quivering on the steering wheel. She speaks slowly, acid churning up her esophagus. “You. Have. To stop.”

       She steels herself for Mary’s righteous denial (I didn’t do anything!), for Hugo’s anxious and misplaced apology (I’m sorry! I won’t do it again!), for Holly’s retaliatory wrath (No, YOU have to stop!). But the car is so quiet she can hear the engine sputtering.

       It’s been sputtering since long before they left Burlington, even though Miles, her oldest son, had changed the oil, cleaned the spark plugs, and replaced the voltage regulator on the alternator the day before they left, spending hours in the driveway bent over the engine or stretched out on a tarp he’d slid under the car. “It should make it,” he said, finally, wiping his oil-blackened hands on a rag, “but it might not. Fifty-fifty.”

       “It’ll be fine,” she told him, though in truth, she had no idea. “There’s nothing about car trouble in my horoscope this week.”

       “Mom,” Miles said, sharply.

       “I’m joking,” SueDonna said, though she wasn’t.

       “I should go with you,” Miles said. “I can still pack up.”

       But SueDonna was adamant that Miles stay with his father for the summer, even though good mothers don’t leave children behind. He has a job as a boat boy at the Boat Club through August, and has already paid the entrance fees for all the races—sailboat, bicycle, motorcycle—he’s planned to race. More important, his coming along would mean renting two motel rooms each night, and adding the appetite of a 17-year-old boy to the cost of every roadside meal. Not to mention a deeper voice to the constant bickering, an extra, lanky body to the already-cramped car.

       But at least she’d have someone to spell her at the wheel. Even though she’s 15 and has her learner’s permit, Mary is useless. SueDonna can’t rest with Mary weaving over the road, taking curves too quickly and merging too slowly and panicking over the appearance of a truck—even the smallest truck—in the sideview mirror. And without the distraction of navigation, of jockeying for position, of governance over something, SueDonna would be forced to think about all the things she can’t control.

       Like what becomes of them when they get to Iowa and run out of money.

       “We’re sorry,” Hugo says, because this is who he is, even at seven: the family peacemaker; the squeaky voice of reason. “We’ll stop.”

       SueDonna tries to speak, but acid flames up her throat again because she eats too much, because she is fat, so ungovernably, unloveably fat. “I can’t take it,” she says, finally. “If you can’t get along, you can get out.”

       “I don’t want to get out,” Hugo cries.

       “Mother,” Mary says, emphasizing the first syllable so that SueDonna can fully grasp the extent of her shock, her dismay. Sometimes Mary is her least favorite of all.

       And then there’s Holly, whispering something SueDonna can barely make out as she pulls back onto the highway. “Why don’t you get out, you—?”

 

3. Phase

 

Witch?

 

4. Planet

 

“Mom,” Holly says. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

       Mary groans. “We just pulled over. You could have gone then.”

       “It’s number two. And you’re not Mom, imbecile.”

       “What’s an imbecile?” Hugo asks.

       “Holly is,” Mary says.

       “Mary is,” says Holly. “And you. You’re an imbecile too.”

       “No I’m not!” Hugo says. “You are.”

       “You’re a big, fat imbecile.”

       “Mo-om!” Hugo says.

       SueDonna hates them.

       Hates them all.

       Hate buffets her like a wind. She shivers against it, tears welling, the sun shimmering luridly off the rear window of a small car just yards ahead. The golden tassels of the cornstalks rising on each side of the road ripple like sheets of flame.

 

5. Aspect

 

During a harvest long ago, their neighbors had found Ollie, SueDonna’s black lab puppy who’d been missing for more than a year, in their corn field. The thin pink belt SueDonna had taken from her favorite dress to make a collar had disintegrated, its ragged pieces mixed in with the puppy’s little bones.

       SueDonna’s mother shook her head while SueDonna sobbed, her hand on SueDonna’s shoulder. “He’s been gone a long time,” she said. “You’re just going to have to get over it.”

       When SueDonna asked for another puppy to replace him, her mother said no. “Your father hasn’t sent any money this month,” she said. “We can’t afford another mouth to feed.”

 

6. Sign

 

A half hour down the road, SueDonna spots the tell-tale markers of approaching civilization: a church spire; a Shell gas sign; the double arches of a McDonald’s. She takes the exit and signals a turn into the McDonald’s, but Holly protests. She hates McDonald’s. She’s sick of McDonald’s. Can they please go to the Big Boy across the street? She wants pancakes.

       “Ick,” Mary says. But she says this about most food these days.

       Hugo says nothing, focusing on the Rubik’s Cube now in his possession.

       SueDonna is about to remind Holly that it’s just a bathroom stop, that they’ve budgeted for only two restaurant meals per day and they’d already gone to a diner for breakfast, but honestly, food would do them all some good. Even Mary. Even if she just pukes it all up afterwards.

       SueDonna wishes she could do the same, but she has a terror of vomiting. Especially after the pills.

Not that it would even work. After they’d pumped the entire contents of her stomach last month, she’d lost only three measly pounds.

       It was a ridiculous thing to have done, anyway, given what SueDonna has seen in her own chart. She’s still not sure why she thought she could move things up.

       “The cat,” SueDonna reminds them all when she turns off the car.

       “I’ve got him,” Holly says. “You guys go first.”

       This is such uncharacteristic generosity from Holly that SueDonna doesn’t trust it.

       Neither does Mary. “Give him to me,” she says.

       “Just get out,” Holly says.

       Gremblin squirms in Holly’s arms as SueDonna, Mary, and Hugo slide out of the car and slam their doors. Mary stands vigilant by Holly’s door, ready to catch Gremblin if he tries to escape, but Holly scoots the cat onto the seat and jumps out without incident, her bright blue t-shirt covered in Gremblin’s orange hair.

       In the Big Boy, everyone orders pancakes except Mary, who orders cottage cheese with pineapple, and a Tab. Then, because Holly’s pancakes come with a side of bacon—even though Holly specifically told the waitress to hold the bacon—and because the bacon touches the edge of Holly’s pancake stack, SueDonna winds up eating two orders of pancakes and bacon. And because the waitress refuses to acknowledge the mistake, SueDonna ends up paying for the extra meal.

       At least she has enough self-restraint to avoid finishing Mary’s cottage cheese, which is, Mary claims, too runny.

       “It’s because of the pinewater,” Hugo says. “From the pineapple.”

       “Pinewater!” Mary says, delighted.

       Even Holly seems amused. “Get in fast, Pinewater,” she says to Hugo when they reach the car, and Hugo obligingly dives in, throwing himself over Gremblin so the rest of them can safely open their doors.

 

7. House

 

The car sputters as SueDonna reverses out of the parking spot, the engine nearly stalling, but recovering swiftly. She steers it into the Shell station and then watches with surprise while Holly, unbidden, climbs out of the car with the box of kitty litter in her arms. She dumps it into the trashcan next to the pump as SueDonna gasses up. Holly is tiny and her aim is poor, so half the contents spill to the ground, but SueDonna is still so touched by Holly’s effort that she decides to treat them all one more time before they hit the road again.

       “Shakes or sodas,” she announces, pulling the car into the McDonald’s parking lot. “But everyone needs to use the bathroom now. We’re not stopping again before the next motel.” At this point, they’ve lost a full two hours of the drive time SueDonna budgeted for the day. And they’ve used up nearly all the food money.

       Shockingly, all three children troop obediently into the restaurant and take turns using the restroom while SueDonna gets the drinks, so by the time SueDonna finally noses back onto the highway, she feels her mood lifting.

Even Gremblin seems happier. He steps daintily over SueDonna’s lap before settling on the bench seat between her and Mary, purring, coiled around himself so the burnished stripes on his golden coat make him look like a big, buttery croissant.

       The late-afternoon sun should be more intense, but thing-shaped clouds have appeared in the sky, and the children take turns naming them. Two Gross People Kissing. Farrah Fawcett’s Hair. Mr. Snuffleupagus.

       Mary turns on the radio and, after several bursts of country songs and sports programs that crackle with static, finds a station playing Beatles’ tunes. Ed had taken most of their albums (along with the stereo) when he’d moved out, on the theory that it was his money that had bought them, but the kids used to play them as much as he did, and the girls know many of the songs by heart. Now, they harmonize on “Let it Be,” Mary straining to hit the notes Holly reaches effortlessly, her voice clear and strong.

       Even Hugo hums along, piping up now and then with what he believes are the lyrics: There will be a man, sir, let it be.

       Her children are beautiful. People tell her this all the time, but SueDonna would know it even if no one ever said a word. Holly and Hugo are cherubic, their lips full and divotted, their eyes a blue so pale it borders on lavender, their curls lit with gold. Mary and Miles look more like adults than children now, their foreheads high, their cheeks hollowing out, and their coloring is SueDonna’s—light brown hair, hazel eyes—but their faces are all, unmistakably, the same: a combination of Ed’s lips, SueDonna’s down-turning, Scottish eyes, Ed’s strong nose, and SueDonna’s thick, arching brows. 

       For years, SueDonna took a quiet comfort in seeing Ed, or parts of Ed, in their faces. Their beauty meant that she had chosen well, if only aesthetically. But sometimes too much of him appeared. In profile now, Ed’s nose is arrogant on Mary’s face, his lips stretched into an angry grimace as she sings.

       The deejay cuts to a commercial before the song ends, and Mary searches for another station. The static roars, sending Gremblin leaping into the back seat in a flash of orange.

       “Turn it down!” Hugo shouts. “You’re scaring Gremblin.”

       “Your face is scaring Gremblin,” Mary mutters, fumbling with the radio’s knobs. She lowers the volume and, when all she can find is static, snaps the radio off.

       In the silence, SueDonna can feel Mary’s gaze trained on SueDonna’s face.

       “What?” SueDonna asks.

       “Why are you doing that?”

       “Why am I doing what?”

       “That, with your mouth. Your top lip. It’s moving funny.”

       “Ewww,” Holly says, as the stink of Gremblin’s fresh excrement rises in the car.

       SueDonna runs a finger along her lips. “No it’s not,” she says.

       “It is,” Mary insists, scooting closer. “Look.” Mary tugs the rearview mirror so that part of SueDonna’s reflection appears. “See?” She puts her finger on SueDonna’s upper lip.

       “I have to drive,” SueDonna says, swatting her hand away. Even so, she adjusts the mirror to frame the lower half of her face, letting her eyes flick back and forth to the road. “There’s nothing wrong with my mouth.”

       “It’s twitching,” Mary says.

       Behind them, Holly makes a gagging noise. “Gross, Gremblin,” she says. “I think I’m gonna throw up.”

       “It’s not his fault, it’s yours,” Hugo says.

       “How is it my fault? I’m not the one pooping!”

       “You forgot to put new litter in the box!”

       “I didn’t forget,” Holly says. “We’re out of litter, imbecile.”

 

8. Longitude

 

According to data from The American Ephemeris 1980 to 1989, SueDonna’s death will occur somewhere in the middle of September, 1983. She has studied the longitude and latitude and declination of the planets; she has calculated the aspects and transits. It’s there as plain as Ed’s nose on Mary’s face. If it isn’t SueDonna’s death, then it’s something equally terrible, or arguably worse—worse, even, then what’s happening right now. Worse than getting no spousal support, despite her testimony to Ed’s many affairs, his frequent beatings. Worse than getting half a house, but all four of her kids. Worse than being awarded only $25 a month in child support, and knowing that it will never be sent. Worse than having to find a job at 41, when, despite her shiny new MBA, she has held exactly two jobs in her entire life: as a graduate teaching assistant, and as a clerk at the cosmetics counter at Yonkers in college, back when she was pretty and thin. Worse than traveling halfway across the country in a car that’s trying to die, with all the money she has left in the world—$1,274, the remainder of the $3,000 life insurance policy she’d cashed in to make the move—destined to run out long before she’ll see any from her share of the house, which has yet to be sold.

       Worse than traveling through Nowhere Ohio in what is now, effectively, a giant box of shit.

       As usual, Mary beats SueDonna to the motherly admonition. “You dumped out the litter box but didn’t refill it?” she asks, swiveling in her seat to give Holly a look of horror.

       “I just said we’re out of litter. What don’t you understand? That’s not my fault, and you’re not my fucking mother, so turn around and shut the fuck up.”

 

9. Latitude

 

Her fucking mother can feel the car shivering, awaiting her response.

 

10. Transit

 

In the sideview mirror, a giant, silver-barreled truck bears down on them, from what appears to be just feet away. The driver, bearded and bespectacled, his wiry hair spilling from a green baseball cap, blasts his horn.

       Instinctively, SueDonna steps on the brake. She hasn’t meant it as an act of aggression, and immediately speeds back up, but the truck fishtails behind her and the driver again sounds his horn. He yanks his hat from his head and waves it wildly in the cab of the truck, banging it on the dashboard.

       SueDonna taps the brake again, this time on purpose, holding it just a second or two longer, locking eyes with the truck driver in the rearview.

       A grin stretches open in the truck driver’s bushy beard; he thinks they’re playing a game.

       He revs the truck’s engine, closing the ever-decreasing distance between them.

       He thinks he can scare SueDonna.

       He thinks he can push her around.

       “Seriously?” Mary asks. “You’re just going to ignore that? What Holly just said?”

       SueDonna feels it now, her lip. It’s barely perceptible; a tiny, in-and-out movement that beats like a pulse.

       Behind her, Hugo slurps his drink noisily, the straw sucking on air and ice.

       “Stop it, fuckbrain!” Holly says.

       In the front seat, Mary’s outrage is palpable. SueDonna has read Mary’s chart, and knows that hers won’t be an easy life, either. “Holly Donna Josowitz,” Mary says. “If you can’t get along—”

       There is a muffled protest, then a louder one, as a plastic drink cup flies over the back seat, raining soda and ice over Mary’s head.

       This time, when SueDonna hits the brake, she presses it to the floorboard. The truck swerves, nearly clipping the car as it barrels into the opposite lane. As he roars past them, the driver leans on his horn, holding it so long that the sound takes on weight, mass.

       The children scream.

       SueDonna yanks the car off the road.

 

11. Declination

 

Gremblin slithers out from beneath her seat when SueDonna pulls back onto the highway, climbing on her lap to press his nose to the window, his tufted paws to the glass.

       Somewhere between the McDonald’s and this stretch of highway, a wind has picked up; the field of corn on the side of the road ripples in nauseating waves of green.

       Holly is small against them, her golden curls and bright blue t-shirt growing smaller and smaller as SueDonna drives away.

 

12. Divination

 

As it happens, SueDonna has misunderstood the drastic alignments she’s seen in her chart: the death that will occur in mid-September, 1983, is not hers but her oldest son’s, a result of Miles’ motorcycle intersecting with a very old man’s Oldsmobile at the bend of a blind curve.

       But in a way, she isn’t wrong. When a mother loses a child, she will often feel as though she, too, has ceased to live.

       What she’ll never understand, even by the time of her actual death, in early 2001, is that events equally consequential and catastrophic might not even appear in a chart. Perhaps because, though predictable, they aren’t strictly inevitable.

       But they are unalterable.

       Even if you deny them.

       Even if you deny them so convincingly that you come to believe they never happened at all.

       Even if, eventually, you heed the cries of your remaining two children, and turn the car around and go back.