A week later, Dad came to his first Clod show. Backstage afterward, I caught him staring at me—and not with his usual sad-scared look, either. In its place was this dreamy expression I recognized from times when I’d done something to make him proud. The next morning he told me I could go on tour—provided, among other things, I called him every day to check in. Our tour conversations were much better than our Red Rock calls were. Dad asked about the details of every show, and he even told me stories from when he was a roadie, a part of his life he hadn’t mentioned in years.
Mom. Well, she’s a different story. I went to see her and Grandma a few weeks after I left Red Rock, and she was, frankly, a mess. When she wasn’t rambling on about radio signals being beamed in through her cavity fillings, she was staring into space. She didn’t seem to know who I was, either. I paid her a second visit the day we played in Spokane. Jed insisted on coming along. Thankfully, there were no paranoid rants this time. Mom was sort of quiet and childlike; she smiled and even held my hand. After we left, part of me wanted to ask Jed if he was scared I might end up like my mom. But later at the show, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirrored wall and finally realized that maybe the only way to answer that question was to stop asking it.
It probably sounds like a plot for some cinematic moment of musical closure, but the last stop on Clod’s tour was Cafenomica, and not because of me. The cafe’s booker had been after us for an encore ever since our gig in March. It was as if the entire under-twenty-five population of St. George came out to hear us play our second Cafenomica show. Beth and Ansley were there, jumping around like crazy. We rocked the place so hard that the windows vibrated.
The next day the rest of the band drove back to Oregon, and Ansley and Beth drove me out to Red Rock. I don’t know why I wanted to see it again. For closure? To stare down my monsters once and for all? But when I stood in what had been the quarry, with tumbleweeds and cinder blocks all around me, all I felt was…..over it. The place held no power over me anymore.
I thought about the rest of the Sisters. It was like we’d all slain our dragons. Martha, now a healthy size 14, had taught her parents to accept her as is and was planning on competing in a plus-size beauty contest. Cassie started a gay-straight-bi alliance at her school (though she still claimed to be undecided on where she fell in that spectrum). And cynical, why-settle-for-a-boyfriend Bebe had fallen head over heels in love with some guy at her new co-ed boarding school. Even V, who’d barricaded herself in a Utah hellhole just to feel safe, was planning on traveling around the world solo. V liked to joke that we were the brochure girls now. Except Red Rock hadn’t helped us. We’d helped us.
Ansley and Beth dropped me at the bus station, where I caught a sputtering Greyhound to Grand Canyon Village. As I walked down the path toward our agreed-upon meeting point, I got lost in the view: layer upon layer of brown, red, and pink-hued cliffs leading down the gaping canyon to the jade ribbon of the Colorado River. It beat anything I’d seen in pictures, and I felt goose bumps tickle my arms. It was then that I spotted them at one of the lookouts, silhouetted by the afternoon sun: Amazonian V, surveying the grounds as if she owned the place. Stylish Bebe, leaning up against the rail like she was on a photo shoot. Smiling Cassie, pointing out something down in the canyon. And wide-eyed Martha, camera in hand, taking in all the sights. I paused for a second to watch my Sisters there on the precipice. And then I joined them.