July 20, 2003
Palm Springs, California
"Thanks for the ride." Daffodil waved to the trucker who had dropped them off on a side street in Palm Springs. The two young women hurried away from the truck and down another street, giving no evidence of where they had gotten their latest ride.
For the past week, they had slowly been making their way north, sometimes walking, at other times hitching short rides with families and truckers. Rose had learned first-hand the dangers of hitchhiking when a man who was a little too friendly had tried to pick them up. Daffodil had waved him away, but he hadn’t been put off. Pulling over to the side of the road and reversing direction, he had followed them, persisting until he had nearly hit another car. Rose and Daffodil had finally slipped through a broken place in the barbed wire fence and set off across an open field dotted with creosote bush to avoid him.
This incident, however, had not soured them on hitchhiking. Rose had been ready to give up on begging rides from people, but Daffodil was of the opinion that most people were harmless, and it was easier to hitchhike than to walk in the desert heat. She had spent a lot of time hitchhiking around the country in the past, and a few dangerous people weren’t going to stop her.
Rose wasn’t sure that hitchhiking was a good idea, but she stubbornly pushed away her reservations and followed Daffodil’s lead, even when her mind told her that she was walking a fine line, and trouble was just a moment’s bad judgment away.
The trucker they had hitched a ride with had picked them up near the Salton Sea, driving them up to Palm Springs before dropping them off. Daffodil was familiar with the area and knew where they were, but Rose looked around, wondering what town they had wound up in this time. Not that it mattered; they had no particular place to be, so any place was good enough, but she still liked to know where she was.
"Where are we?" she asked Daffodil, as they emerged from the side street into the business district.
"Palm Springs," Daffodil replied, surprised that Rose wasn’t more familiar with the area. Palm Springs was still a popular tourist attraction.
"Really?" Rose had only been there a few times, on the way to visit her grandmother, so she wasn’t as familiar with the area.
"Yep—Palm Springs—Touristville." Daffodil looked around, her eyes focusing on something, then abruptly grinned and made a rude gesture at it.
"What was that for?"
"The business people here are so paranoid about crime that they have cameras watching our every move. Very Orwellian. Big Brother is watching you, and all that."
"We haven’t committed any crimes."
"No, but we’re scruffy enough to be suspect. I’ll bet that if anyone is watching, they’re wanting to get rid of us right now. Well, up theirs!" She made another rude gesture.
"Daffodil..." Rose hissed. "I don’t think you’re helping matters."
Daffodil just shrugged and started down the street, making childish faces at every camera she saw. Rose laughed, in spite of her uneasiness.
"You’re like a little kid with those cameras."
"I’m getting in touch with my inner child."
"My mother always said that if you make faces like that, your face will freeze that way."
"So did mine. It hasn’t happened yet." She made another face, sticking out her tongue.
"Daffodil..." Rose couldn’t resist. Daffodil was having too much fun. Quickly, trying to be discreet, she raised her middle finger at a traffic camera, then looked around sheepishly as people stopped to stare at her.
Daffodil noticed. "Now who’s not helping matters?" she asked, putting on a prim, innocent expression, as though she had never done a rude thing in her life.
Rose giggled, a high-pitched, carefree sound she hadn’t made in a long time, laughing at the ridiculousness of their situation.
"Let’s get out of here, before we get into trouble."
*****
That night, Rose and Daffodil camped out in a deserted alley, sheltered by recently emptied dumpsters on either side. They’d wrinkled their noses at the smell, but quickly forgot about it as they settled down for the night, eating packaged food that was still edible but beyond the selling point that they had fished out of a trash can behind a supermarket.
"I don’t see why people are so against eating this kind of food," Rose commented, opening a dented can of green beans. "It’s perfectly good."
"Some stores actually sell this stuff," Daffodil pointed out. "Sometimes the only problem is that it doesn’t sell very well, and they want to open the shelves for better-selling items. Grocery outlets, places like Big Lots—they get this stuff."
"Unless it’s thrown away."
"Well, that’s their loss." She opened a bag of day-old bread. "If it’s in the trash, it’s public property."
"Sometimes I wonder how I got into this," Rose commented. "A few months ago, I would have rejected this as being not good enough. Now, it’s perfectly good. A few dents in the cans don’t hurt anything, and day-old bread tastes no different from fresh bread."
"I got some opened packages, too," Daffodil remarked, opening her backpack. "Let’s see...corn nuts, chips, cookies, candy bars, raisins, cereal...they must have been doing inventory or something."
"I got some oranges with dried-out rinds," Rose added, "and some open packages, too. And I found some bruised apples and potatoes, and two partly squashed cardboard cans of mixed nuts. Plus all these dented cans. We got some good stuff, but it sure is heavy to carry."
"Let’s eat the heaviest stuff first, and the stuff that’ll go bad the fastest, like this bread."
"And use the stuff we had to pay for sparingly." Rose nodded. They’d collected aluminum cans around town again and turned them in for money, then bought some items that weren’t likely to wind up in the trash in an edible condition.
"Except for this fried chicken and potatoes." Daffodil opened the bags. "I know they cost a lot, but we can indulge ourselves once in a while."
They ate in amiable silence for a while, wiping their greasy fingers on discarded newspapers. Finally, Daffodil looked up at Rose.
"So, where do you want to go next? I don’t think we should stay in Palm Springs too long. This place spells trouble for drifters like us."
Rose thought about it, taking the question seriously for a change. Usually, it didn’t matter where they went—anywhere would do—but this time she knew there was a choice to be made. Just a few miles down the freeway was Palm Desert, where her maternal grandmother and step-grandfather lived. If she went there, she knew that she would be welcomed, with relief no doubt, since she was presumed dead—unless her use of the ATM in Cuyamaca had tipped them off that she was alive, or at least that someone was using her ATM card—but they would be honor-bound to inform her mother of Rose’s whereabouts, whether Rose wanted her to know or not. Even after two and a half months, Rose didn’t feel ready to see Ruth again. Not after that last night.
She was hesitant to tell Daffodil about her nearby relatives. Daffodil believed strongly in freedom and self-determination, but she was also insatiably curious, always wanting to know more about people. Undoubtedly, she would be more than happy to visit Rose’s family, and would keep pestering her about seeing them until she gave in. If she knew that Rose’s grandmother was a psychologist, and her step-grandfather a substance abuse counselor, she would be even more interested. Those subjects fascinated her.
Of course, they didn’t have to go to Palm Desert. The California desert was vast, with towns scattered throughout it. They could as easily head north or south, or they could head west and leave the desert behind.
Rose leaned against the wall, considering. The desert was an interesting place, of that there was no doubt, but it was also extremely hot and dry in the summer. Going there had seemed like a good idea at first, but now that she had experienced the extreme heat, she was ready for cooler temperatures. The desert, however, was not likely to start cooling down for a good two months yet—longer than Rose wanted to wait. If they went west, it would be cooler and greener, if only a little.
"Let’s head back west," she suggested, polishing off the last of her chicken. "I’m tired of this desert heat."
"It’ll still be pretty warm," Daffodil pointed out.
"Yes, but not as hot as here. Besides, maybe we could go to the mountains, or go all the way west to the ocean. That would be nice."
"I thought you didn’t want to go west, because you wanted avoid Masline."
"We’re pretty far north of Masline now. I don’t think I have to worry."
"Well, I guess we can head west tomorrow. Tonight, I need some rest. We’ve been traveling a long time."
"Yeah, we smell like it, too."
Daffodil laughed. "I know of an area near here where they water three times a day—including before sunrise. We could go run through the sprinklers."
"And be soaking wet."
"It’s hot enough. We’ll dry out quickly. But we should turn in for the night if we’re going to get up that early."
"Sure." Rose gathered up the remains of their dinners and threw them into one of the dumpsters. Spreading out some newspapers for a mattress, she spread out her blankets and lay down, pulling one of the blankets up to partially cover herself. It was too hot for any other covering.
Daffodil spoke up just as Rose was drifting off. "Oh, when it comes to going west, we can do it, but there’s some places to avoid. According to a newspaper headline I saw, the towns of Hemet and Menifee are still disaster areas, following the collapse of the Diamond Valley Lake dam in the earthquake. We’ll have to avoid them."
"No problem." Rose yawned, settling back on the crackling newspapers. They had been traveling a long time, and she was tired. Relaxing, she closed her eyes.
She felt a little guilty about her decision to go west, instead of letting her relatives in Palm Desert know she was alive, but she just wasn’t ready to face her old life yet. She’d let them know she was alive eventually, but not yet. Not until she was fully healed inside from the traumatic events that had driven her to leave home in the first place.