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Chapter 1
Chapter One: Camping
My mother stole us on a Saturday morning in September 1987, and she did it with a cooler full of ham sandwiches and a tent she never meant to put up.
I was fifteen. My sister Amy was nine. We lived with our father in a brick house in Clear Lake, Texas, about ten minutes from the space center, where Dad worked as a systems engineer for a company that built test equipment for NASA. Our street had sprinklers that came on at six every evening and a basketball hoop over every second garage. It was the kind of place where nothing ever happened, and I had stopped minding that.
Mom got two weeks a year. That was what the judge had decided in the spring of 1986, after a long morning in a cold courtroom in Houston that I still remember mostly as the smell of floor polish. Two weeks a year, one phone call every Sunday, and she was to hand over our passports to the court clerk. She told the clerk she had lost them in the move. The clerk wrote that down and said she would need to file a form. I don't think anyone ever checked.
Before all that, my mother had been the best engineer at the scientific balloon facility up in Palestine, Texas. People said so even when they didn't like her, and a lot of people didn't like her. She launched balloons as tall as office towers, thin plastic bags that rose twenty miles up carrying telescopes and cosmic ray detectors to the edge of space. When I was little she used to drive me out to the launch field before dawn. I would sit on the hood of our car with a thermos of cocoa and watch the long white balloon stand up off the grass like something waking. Then it would rise and keep rising, and Mom would stand next to me with her headset around her neck and say, "There it goes, Luke. Nobody can touch it now."
Then, three years ago, a gondola she launched broke loose from its balloon at four hundred feet and came down on the launch field. A technician named Rudy Salcedo was underneath it. He had two daughters and a bass boat he was very proud of. I had met him twice.
There was an inquiry. Mom told me the weather office had given her bad wind numbers and the managers needed someone to blame, and since she was the one who signed the launch sheet, it was her. I believed her. She lost her job before Christmas. By the next summer she and Dad had separated, and for a year Amy and I lived with her in a rented house in Palestine while Dad moved down to Clear Lake for the new job. She told me he had left us. She told me he never called. I remember waiting by the phone on my birthday and the phone not ringing.
That year was when the radio arrived.
It was a big Japanese shortwave set with a silver dial, and she put it on the kitchen table and ran a wire antenna out the window and across the yard to the pecan tree. At night she sat up with it and a yellow legal pad, writing down what she heard. BBC World Service. Radio Moscow in English. Voice of America. She logged missile tests and troop movements and the names of Soviet submarines. She bought canned food by the case and stacked it in the hall closet until the door would not close. She stopped sleeping much.
"The world is a lit fuse, Luke," she told me one night when I came down for a glass of water and found her still at the table at three in the morning. "Everybody can see it burning. Nobody wants to look."
"So what do we do?"
She tapped the map she had pinned to the wall, a road atlas of Texas covered in her pencil marks. "Roads," she said. "Roads are how it reaches you. Food trucks stop, gas stops, and then everybody on every road comes looking for what you have. You want to be safe, you go where the roads don't go."
I was fourteen. I thought it was the smartest thing I had ever heard.
That spring a social worker came to the house. She looked in the hall closet and at the radio and at the dark circles under Mom's eyes, and she asked me if I felt safe. I said yes, because I did. Two months later the judge gave Dad custody, and Amy and I moved into the brick house in Clear Lake with the sprinklers.
Dad was quiet and careful, and he tried hard. He made pancakes on Sundays and came to my track meets and asked me about school in a way that made me feel like a project he was working on. I wasn't cruel to him, but I wasn't kind either. I had decided, without ever saying so, that I was on my mother's side.
So when the Saturday of her fortnight came, I was packed by seven and sitting on the front step.
Amy came out in her purple windbreaker with her backpack on both shoulders and a stuffed armadillo named Pickett under one arm. She sat beside me and leaned against my shoulder.
"Do you think she'll let us cook marshmallows?" she asked.
"She'll probably make us build the fire from scratch," I said. "With two sticks."
"I can do that."
"You cannot."
"I could learn."
Mom's car turned the corner at a quarter past seven. It was the same green Ford station wagon she'd had for years, with a cracked dashboard and a roof rack. A rolled tent and two sleeping bags were tied on top under a tarp. She parked at the curb and got out, and for a moment she just stood there looking at us. She had cut her hair short since Easter. She looked thinner and very awake, the way she always looked at the launch field.
Amy ran to her. I walked, because I was fifteen.
Dad came out with his coffee. He and Mom looked at each other across the lawn the way people look at weather they can't do anything about.
"Where are you headed?" he asked.
"Big Thicket," she said. "Then maybe up to Lake Livingston. I'll have them back on the twentieth."
"Amy needs her inhaler if it gets dusty."
"I know what Amy needs, David."
He nodded slowly. Then he crouched and hugged Amy, and he put his hand on my shoulder, and I let him leave it there for about a second before I stepped away toward the car. I have thought about that second a great deal since.
We drove north on Highway 3, Amy in the back singing along to the radio, Mom with both hands on the wheel. I watched the gas stations and the shopping centers go by. Near the Beltway she reached over and turned the radio down.
"Luke," she said. "I need you to listen to me for a few minutes without saying anything. Can you do that?"
"Sure."
She took the ramp for the Beltway, and then, instead of heading east toward the forest, she followed the signs for Houston Intercontinental Airport.
I sat up. "Mom."
"You said you'd listen."
She drove into long-term parking, took a ticket from the machine, and parked under a concrete roof that smelled of oil. Then she turned off the engine, opened the glove box, and took out three dark blue passports held together with a rubber band. She slid mine off and put it in my hand. It had my photograph from when I was twelve, with my ears sticking out.
"We are not going camping," she said. "We're going somewhere safe. Somewhere I've been planning for a long time. I've built a place for us, or I'm going to, and it's beautiful, Luke. It's beyond the end of every road. Nobody can reach it. Nothing can reach it."
In the back seat, Amy had stopped singing.
"Dad's expecting us back on the twentieth," I said.
"Your father has lawyers and a nice house and a whole system on his side. We have each other." She turned in her seat so she could see both of us. "I'm not asking you to understand everything right now. I'm asking you to trust me for one more day. Then one more after that. That's all."
I knew it was wrong. I want to be clear about that. I knew it in my stomach and in my hands, which had gone cold around the passport. I knew there was a judge and a piece of paper and a man in Clear Lake who would be standing in the driveway on the twentieth, looking up the street.
But when my mother explained a plan, it sounded like the only sane idea on earth. She had a way of laying things out, step by step, so that every step followed from the one before, and by the end you could not remember where you might have said no.
"Where?" I asked.
She smiled, and it was the smile from the launch field, the one that said nobody could touch it now.
"Borneo," she said.
Amy leaned forward between the seats. "Is that camping?"
"It's the biggest camping trip in the world, Bug."
Amy squealed. And I got out of the car and took my backpack from the trunk and followed my mother across the parking garage toward the terminal, and I did not look back once, because I knew that if I looked back I would stop.
