Free Road to Paradise by Paullina Simons Page A

know what to say. And Gina interestingly didn’t say anything. What do you say? What did Gina say to her mother when her “sister” Shelby had disappeared as if vaporized? I didn’t like Gina’s silence on the subject. She was usually so chirpy. But both her mouth and hands had tensed. She seemed to be almost actively not responding to her sister’s question. We just stopped being friends, that’s all, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Things change, you know? You’ll find out soon enough, Molly. Don’t forget your extra layer of black eyeliner.
    Finally! Two hours later, Delaware Memorial Bridge and a wide rushing river; it was the first pretty we’d seen.
    “Did you know that the Hudson becomes the Delaware?” asked Gina. “It flows from St. Lawrence in Canada, and then turns into this river.”
    “Really?” She was so geographical, this Gina.
    “Are we there yet?”
    We were there an hour and a half later, at almost eleven.
    Aunt Flo, hectored by Gina’s mother, had called the police, alerting them of a mysterious disappearance of a bright yellow Mustang, three “children” inside it (this is how a frantic Mrs. Reed described us to the police officer who came to retrieve us from the Maryland phone booth from which we called for directions) and two small, “ very expensive” dogs. While Gina was on thephone with her mother (telling her to calm down or “the trip will be ruined for sure, Mom!”), Aunt Flo could not understand why it took me so long to go two hundred miles. The Maryland state trooper who helped us find the house was nonchalant. “Hit some traffic, did you?” he said.
    “Yes, and it hit back.” I poked Gina’s arm, still holding on to maternal telecommunication. “I hope it’s not a harbinger of things to come, going 200 miles in fourteen hours on the road.”
    Barely listening, she poked me back. “We weren’t on the road fourteen hours, and you know it damn well is a harbinger of things to come. Mom, I have to go.” Pause. “Yes, of course, we’ll be careful. No, of course, I haven’t pumped any gas. No, of course we haven’t picked up any hitchhikers.” She winked at me.
    Aunt Flo, who looked like a carbon copy of Gina’s grandmother Scottie, to whom she was not remotely related, kept berating before salutations. “There was nothing we could do,” Gina endlessly repeated. “We. Were. Stuck. In. Traffic. Remember Shelby, Aunt Flo? Say hello, Shelby.”
    “Hello, Shelby,” I said.
    Aunt Flo barely nodded my way. “Where are my cannolis, Shelby?” and then without a breath, “But why would you go through New York City? That’s your number one mistake right there.”
    So after eleven hours of driving, before being fed or shown our rooms, or given a drink, we parried another fifteen minutes of post-mortem critique about all the wrong roads we took to get to Glen Burnie, Maryland.
    I lay in bed that night, my hands under my head, staring at the ceiling. If Marc were here, he wouldn’t stop taunting until Wyoming. He’d say it was definitely my fault. What was I doing in a car with a girl who made my hands anxious and my brain malfunction, a girl who brought her odd sister to be a buffer between us, a girl who could not drive? I hoped Gina could read a map. I missed my comfy pink-roses bed.
    Lorna Moor .
    My mother’s name filled my insides with an ache like freezing, but all around that aching was a peculiar sort of heat. Emma was related to me. Emma was my aunt . By blood. I was her niece by blood. I had a connection to her. She had a connection to my father. That’s why she didn’t leave, and in Glen Burnie, Maryland, with the planes sounding like they were landing on the roof of our house, that knowledge made me feel better.
    Still, my first day of travel had turned out to have in it nothing I wanted, or had prepared for, or planned. I took out my spiral notebook from my duffel and looked over my schedule. We weren’t in Ohio. We weren’t west. We hadn’t