Three hours in a 1993 Ford Probe, white with a rusty a bumper and two months expired tabs, knees folded neatly between the seat and the steering wheel. The blood, which steadily circulates her legs, has slowed its current. Her limbs weigh heavy, they have begun to tingle and cramp. She is only to LA.

Lexi Radcliff is a second born. Her pursuits to be superior in her ambitions are superfluous. She is doomed to be mediocre, and secretly she knows it. She continues to kid herself into thinking it is only a matter of time before she stumbles upon success. Lexi is opinionated. She is critical; an elitist and a hypocrite. She is a vegan who eats frozen yogurt in private. She is a self-proclaimed socialist who climbs over other people on the way up the latter. She eats organic and only smokes natural tobacco.

Scanning the green exits, the street names memorized, she designs herself a dilemma. Fast Food or gas station? She needs a bathroom and a place to stretch her legs.

She hates Los Angeles.

The electro-tones in the trite song on the shifty fm radio she keeps on the passenger seat echo the mega-tone ring of her cell phone, a ring claiming the day in history, like OK Computer has its sticky grasp on each particular of the London Underground and Pinback with its flag staked smugly to an entire race of bike rides through Paris. The default ring of her cell phone, like this music, is forever stuck to a memory. Like a buoy in an ocean of time, it marks the would-be forgotten; pinning every complexity of the memory in assurance of the reality it maintains, helping to navigate this vast ocean. She pivots from buoy to buoy, from song to smell to cell phone ring, the colors and shapes of each marker, designating the shipwreck or deep sea cave that lies beneath and the distance in buoyed meter to land

"Hello?" She answered the mega-tone ring in a morning rasp of muddle. It was her Dad, her dear Dad. Concerned, but steady as always, still and symmetrical as evergreen. It was never his intention, in his soft and sturdy nature so akin to the northwest of which he was raised and still abides, to stir her up, his daughter, the second born whom he likens to a glistening ocean, each rolling wave sparkling diamond and precious stone. He knows her well, and she him. He knows her shifting tides and violent swell. He knows when he raises his voice, or carries a cutting tone, these are just the winds to toss her wild waves. So he refrained from the panic the call warranted, he employed his skilled shaping of temper and relayed to her the news, concerned but in the most nonchalant of ways, eager yet still casual. None might be more capable of such subtle precision in the delivery of so heavy a matter.

She left immediately upon this phone call and she is now in LA, filing down the freeway in a graph of streaming vehicles. She sees the perfect rhythm of the world in the dashing lines of the multi-laned freeway. The steady pieces, once set in motion become a perfect jet of macaroni yellow, leading to some ambiguous destination. She is Vesuveda, she is the seamless stream, she is the lane dash, a part of the moving line that divides and guides the freeway somewhere final. The 5 runs the whole of the west.

Several times, already she has found herself, driving, entranced by the dashes, by their symmetry and blend. All awareness of the road and the traffic lost. And of course, for this she feels guilty. Guilty for the danger, but more guilty that her mind is lost in such futility; lost in the hopeless vanity of her washy consciousness. A mind always interrogating the mundane, from lane dashes to outlets, hers is also a mind that endlessly evaluates the self, judging human tendency, and contriving guilt to satiate a mad conscience.

Right now Lexi would love to cry, and she will. But for this she also feels guilty. For she would love to cry for certain things, things less real than the things she cries for; things more worthy of tears. But in the end she cries for lost love, for forgotten time, for the old days; good and bad. She cries for fictional cats that died in books she read when she was young, she cries for poetry, for music, for art and for her own deficiency. She often cries for hope.

She is reminded of the day her little brother was born. A bitter day—a valley in the geography of her memory. It was spent in the hospital. Her Mom, Anne had to have a c-section, a risky procedure for both her and the baby. After hours of waiting Lexi, her sister Dani and Dave, her dad were finally allowed in the hospital room to see both baby and mother. She remembers the room vividly; sterile, white, florescent lights, shabby brown chairs, and stacks of magazines. The room was full of metal. The bed was made of metal, the trays were metal, the tables, the shelves and cupboards and the IV stand.

The IV is perhaps the buoy which marks this memory. It's not a smell or a sound or a song, but a material form, which in her ocean of time is out of the ordinary. The thought or sight of an IV always takes her back to this day in the hospital. She was 4 ½ years old. The IV was dripping a clear liquid. A thin tube ran from the plastic bag into her mom's hand, the two were connected by a needle. The memory is void of faces, although she was surrounded by many of them, all that exists, even of her dilapidated mom is her limp hand, stuck with a needle.

Upon entering the room she immediately began crying. Her dad held her in his lap, she sucked her finger, and she wouldn't look at her Mom or the baby. She cried for the duration of the visit, the car ride home, and she cried herself to sleep. Any mention of her mom or the baby over the next day inspired tears.

That night in the hospital room, the family was consoling. She remembers faint voices, but only their intentions are clear, not their words. They understood her tears to be the result of missing her mom, of seeing her mom sick in a hospital room with a needle stuck in her. And perhaps she reconciled herself to this assumption. But her tears were far vainer, and they remain so even now. She was in truth crying over the loss the birth of a baby brother ensued. She was no longer the baby of the family, and she knew it. This being her only defining characteristic, the only significant role she could play in the shadow of an older sister, she felt stripped not only of her identity, at 4 years old, but also of her right to attention, to consolation, and even to love. She had always been the baby, the deficient and needy youngest, it's the role she had become accustomed to. This was the honest truth of her tears; they had nothing to do with the condition of her mom.

And so her tears: now vain, even narcissistic. They lace her cheeks and sodden her conscience as she contemplates her character and the integrity of her love for her Anne, her mother.

Anne has held different jobs throughout the years. When the kids were in grade school she was the teller at City American, the local bank. She moved up to become a construction manager as they expanded. She worked for Immunicorp, a medicinal research center after that. But she had back problems, and had to quit.

In her youth, she was a skier. Her friends were guys and gay women. She kept her hair short, it was more convenient. Although she exercised, she took poor care of herself in general. She never stretched, didn't eat right. Her adult life has been plagued with health problems. First it was clinical depression, after the birth of Jordan, the third born. The family uprooted Christmas of 92, and ended up in western Washington, damp and alone. Things changed for the family.

In Anne’s therapy much was dragged up from her childhood. The ugly secrets of a wealthy family. Sexual abuse, suicide, alcohol.

Then it was her back. She ruptured several discs. She went through several surgeries. She spent many months in bed. She gained weight.

Things were looking up after that though. Lexi and Dani, her two oldest daughters were off at college, Dani was even engaged. Anne and the rest of the family moved to the Bainbridge Island, a small community in the Puget Sound. Dave could still commute downtown with all the perks of small town life. Anne took up golf. She made some new friends.

A few years ago she had a minor stroke, and then another. The doctors didn’t know what to do. After months of tests they found out she had a heart defect, something she was born with that hadn’t manifested itself till now.

They did experimental surgery. They sent a tube with a camera and little umbrella through her groin and patched up her heart. Again, things were looking up. Anne started working out. She shed some weight; she was playing golf every weekend. But then another stroke. Turns out the surgery hadn’t worked.

She was forced to undergo the same surgery again. This was about a year ago.

Lexi had gotten tired of worrying about her Mom. She had gotten sick of the phone calls, the ones where her Mom begged for her sympathy. It was pathetic. Lexi would never call it that out loud, or even admit that she was thinking it. She wanted to care, but she couldn’t.

Lexi had always been more like Dave, her dad. She had found comfort in this tendency. But over the years, through the death of several relationships and many friendships she has been struck with behaviors which so closely echo those of her mother. She is nagging, needy, insecure. She talks too much, she feels sorry for herself. She doesn’t like to think about it.

But here she is driving to northern California. Anne, perhaps on her death bed under the care of a heart specialist at UC Berkley. The patchwork they had done on her heart last year had opened. But this time the small whole in her heart had been torn. Anne was in a coma. She had suffered a major stroke. They didn’t know if she’d live.

As Lexi walked into the gas station in Valencia, she felt the stares of men and women alike. Perhaps it was just her imagination. She liked to think they were jealous of her. She liked to think that her confidence radiated. That they were all intimidated by her original style, her almost arrogant composure. These are the things she considered with her mother on her death bed, still a five hour drive away.

She used the bathroom, bought a bottled water and a pack of cigarettes. She liked to smoke when she drove, it kept her busy. She took a sip of her water. Medicinal, it had a strange taste. She lit a Lucky Strike, shifted into first and she was on her way.

She didn’t like to take these long drives alone. She thought too much, and the more she thought the more she became consumed by guilt. She turned up the radio. She was searching for NPR when she swerved into the other lane, nearly side swiping and Explorer. They honked, and flipped her off.

Lexi began to cry.

When she arrived at the hospital Dave was standing in the lobby. He was solemn, Dani was crying, Nate, her husband was holding her hand. Jordan was slouching in the waiting room chair. His eyes were closed. He looked expressionless.

“You just missed her babe,� choked Dave, quietly.