never having flown by herself (though also excited, as it would be the most compelling proof yet that she was, in fact, extremely grown up). Her dad was there to see her off, of course, but he still had not shaved and his voice was quiet and he was blinking an awful lot. He hugged her tightly when it was time for her to get on the plane and stood watching her walk down the corridor until she had to turn the corner and couldn’t see him any more. A kind-looking old lady with long grey hair told her not to worry, she’d see him again soon. Hannah didn’t think it was any of the lady’s business, but said thank you anyway.
She didn’t like to think of her dad driving back over the hill to their house and walking into the silence all by himself. So she did not, and read her book instead.
The flight passed, as they all do, eventually.
The first person she saw when she walked out of arrivals in Seattle was Granddad, standing with his hands in his corduroy trousers, chubby and pink-faced and irrevocably bald. His face lit up when he saw her, and she ran over and buried her face in his sizable stomach.
‘It’s OK,’ he said, putting his arms around her, smelling as always of peppermint. ‘Everything will be OK.’
Half an hour later they were in Granddad’s car on their way out of Tacoma. It was, Hannah believed, the same car he’d had when he came to visit in Santa Cruz – though it was hard to be certain. He seemed to delight in changing them regularly, and in picking vehicles in colours that had no name, somewhere on the spectrum between brown and green and sludge, hues of which it was impossible to imagine someone ever thinking: Ooh, yes, let’s make it look like that. Their shape was also hard to describe beyond that they looked like cars, the kind a small boy might draw. The sole constant – and this is what made it tough to tell if this was a new one or the same old one – was that the inside would be flamboyantly, outrageously untidy.
When Granddad opened the trunk to stow Hannah’s bag he had to move a birdcage, two bags of old alarm clocks, a broken DVD player, quite a lot of shoes, a length of green hosepipe, two large metal springs made of copper, and a stuffed raccoon. Hannah wasn’t sure whether she was allowed by law to ride in the front of the car with him, but there wasn’t any choice as the back seat was full of too many things to list unless you had a piece of paper ten feet long, a pencil, and a sharpener.
From time to time Granddad would make odd sculptures, one of which – apparently fashioned from the insides of a small television, some watches, a toy mouse, and other things she didn’t have names for – graced the bookshelf in Hannah’s bedroom. She had no idea what it was supposed to be but she liked it anyway. He had given her parents several such works in the past, too, but Hannah’s mother had evidently decided they would be seen to their best advantage in the garage.
When she sat in the passenger seat Hannah had to angle her legs because there was an ancient suitcase in the footwell. It was made of leather and had a dusty dial on the front. She asked, politely, if it was possible to move it.
‘I’m afraid not,’ Granddad said. ‘It has to be there or the car won’t go.’
As often, Hannah wasn’t sure whether this was true or not, but managed to get her legs comfortable. ‘So where are you living now, Granddad? Where on earth?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘Will it take long?’
‘Quite a while. I’m going to take the scenic route.’
‘Should I chatter senselessly the entire way, or gaze quietly out the window instead?’
He looked at her and smiled, putting deep, kind lines in the skin around his eyes. ‘That, my dear, is entirely up to you.’
As he pulled out of the parking lot, Hannah settled back into her seat and took a bite of the sandwich he’d brought for her, knowing she’d probably do a bit of both.
Hannah had learned early in life that the thing about her grandfather was he didn’t live anywhere in particular. He did not fail to live anywhere in the way most people did, like the ones who sat on street corners in Santa Cruz, displaced or unplaced, submissive or cranky, overly tan and wary of passers-by, the people her mom and dad had taken pains to explain deserved as much politeness and goodwill as everyone else, possibly more. Those people didn’t have homes because they couldn’t afford them, or due to being unwell in body or mind.
Granddad was different. He didn’t have a house because that was the way he liked it. For a long time – before Hannah was born – he’d had a home. He lived with Grandma, whom she never met, in a house in Colorado. Even then he would have preferred a more itinerant life, but his wife felt differently and they had children to bring up – Dad and Aunt Zo – and so he’d consented to being shackled to one particular house, one particular road, one set of grocery stores and local news stations and weather patterns and group of people and ways of being, and a ludicrous little dog belonging to a neighbour who’d barked the whole damned time for years and years, a memory which evidently still rankled.
Once he’d got over the death of Grandma, however, he’d done what he’d always wanted. He sold the house and everything in it, and went on the road. That was twenty years ago. Now he was a quantum elder, and there was almost no means of predicting his whereabouts at any given moment – where on earth, as Mom and Dad always put it, rolling their eyes, the old man might be. He rattled around the United States (and occasionally other countries, like Russia and Mozambique, but mainly he stayed in America) in a succession of battered cars (or perhaps one car, of surprising longevity, no one was sure). Sometimes he’d hole up for several months, renting an apartment or cottage or shed. At other times he’d pause for only a few days, lodging in a hotel or motel or even, Hannah’s mom speculated darkly, somewhere so far off the beaten track that there were no places to stay, which meant he was presumably sleeping in his car.
Hannah thought this was an exaggeration. Having seen Granddad’s car/s, she was confident there would simply never be enough room for him to stretch out.
They drove for a few hours. At first it was busy city streets and highways, and Hannah kept quiet because her grandfather was concentrating. He drove at a consistent, sedate pace, which from time to time provoked irritation in other road users, manifested by honking and the waving of fists. Unlike her father, who responded to this style of criticism in kind, Granddad hummed serenely – before suddenly stepping on the gas and leaving the other cars for dust, out-smarting them with deft multi-lane manoeuvres. Just occasionally you might feel inclined to close your eyes during one of these dogfights, but you rarely believed there was a genuine chance of dying.
Soon they were out of the city and driving around the Olympic Peninsula. For a while he played music on the car stereo, the kind of quiet, complicated music he liked, which he said was called ‘baroque’, but when it ran out he didn’t put on any more. At times he took them close to the woods and at others he drove along the cold, craggy coast, flicker-lit by sun glinting off the ocean between stands of silver and paper birch. Sometimes they talked, about school and stuff, and where Granddad had lived recently (he’d been lodging at their destination for several weeks now, a long stay by his standards: before that he’d tried a spell in the hills of somewhere she’d never heard of, called Syria, but hadn’t liked it much, too dusty and hot).
For much of the time, as the afternoon wore on, they drove in equable silence. Something she liked about her grandfather was that if you wanted to talk then he’d listen, but if you didn’t want to talk, he’d listen to that too. His mind wouldn’t immediately fly away to work and emails or all the things that seemed to have Mom and Dad in their tractor beams. With them you had to talk all the time to keep their attention, to remind them you were there. Not with Granddad.
And sometimes, when a lot has happened in your life, much of it inexplicable, silence is what you need to say the most.
After a while she fell asleep.
It was almost dark when she woke, stirred by a sudden decrease in the car’s speed. Hannah pulled herself upright, blinking, as her grandfather turned off the highway and on to a narrow two-lane road leading into the hills.