Summary
All through Montana, Sal is hyperaware of the hairpin turns and loose, gravelly mountain roads. She distracts herself by telling the story of Phoebe Winterbottom to her grandmother, who is eager to hear the conclusion. Phoebe and Sal form a plan to find where the "lunatic" lives in hopes that he will lead them to Phoebe's mother, Norma. So, Phoebe and Sal call every Bickle in the phonebook and ask for Sergeant Bickle, and after several wrong numbers, they finally reach the sergeant's household. He's at work when they call, so Sal calls back in the early evening. Sergeant Bickle answers, and she disguises her voice and asks for his son. She tells the sergeant that she met his son in the library. He loaned her a book, she's lost it, and she needs his address so he can send it back to him. Bickle seems a bit confused by the request, but he accommodates it nonetheless. He calls through his house to his wife, asking for "Mike's" address; this is how Sal learns the "lunatic's" name. Then, Bickle gives her his son's address at his university in Chanting Falls.
The next day, Sal and Phoebe go to the bus stop in Euclid. When they arrive, Ben is already standing there, waiting for the bus. He's taking the same route they are, but instead of going to the university, he's going to the hospital a few blocks over. He tells them he's going to visit someone, but he doesn't elaborate further or provide any specifics. Sal, Phoebe, and Ben sit on one bench seat in the back of the bus with Sal in the middle, and the whole time, she and Ben's arms are touching. Her proximity to Ben makes Sal a bit nervous and flustered. When they finally get to Chanting Falls, Ben breaks off and goes a separate way.
Sal and Phoebe walk to the address of a freshman dorm. They're immediately intimidated by the size of the building and the hundreds of windows representing all the people who live there. Right away, they're discouraged and figure they'll never find Mike, but they try anyway. They walk up to the desk in the building lobby manned by a student, and Sal tells him she's looking for her cousin, Mike Bickle. The student smiles and tells her she's in the right place, that Mike lives in 209 and they can go right up. But once Phoebe and Sal get the okay, they balk. They're scared that he'll pull them into the room and kill them both, if he's truly the lunatic they've made him out to be. So, they turn around, defeated, and walk back out to the quad. But there, Sal spots Phoebe's mom sitting next to Mike on a bench. She's kissing Mike on the cheek. She can't look; they're both in shock. Norma and Mike don't notice them. Sal is so overwhelmed that she runs away. She runs back toward the bus stop, but she overshoots it and ends up in front of the hospital instead. She walks inside and, on a hunch, asks for Mrs. Finney. The person at the desk tells her Mrs. Finney is in the psychiatric ward and only family visitors are allowed, but that she might be out in the courtyard with her son.
Sal finds Ben sitting with his mother, who is dressed in a pink robe. Ben introduces Sal; his mother never looks up, just continues quietly fussing with the ribbon of her robe. She wanders off, and Ben and Sal follow her around the lawn, talking. Ben's mom reminds Sal of her mother after the miscarriage. They walk around for a while until Sal says she has to head back to Euclid. When she says that, she and Ben have the same thought, and they finally manage to kiss each other at the same time. Sal notices that the kiss does not taste like chicken, as one of their classmates suggested kisses taste like. Ben says, "Did it taste a little like blackberries to you?" (238).
Sal meets Phoebe back at the bus station, where Phoebe is seething over her mom's behavior with Mike Bickle. She didn't confront them, she just watched from a distance as her mother had fun with her so-called lunatic. Phoebe can hardly believe her eyes. Her mother cut her hair short, was wearing jeans and spitting on the ground, and definitely not acting like her usual "respectable" self. When Phoebe and Sal get back to the Winterbottoms', Phoebe's sister Prudence is ecstatic; Norma called and said she's returning tomorrow, but she's bringing someone with her. Mr. Winterbottom wants to know more details; who is this mystery man Norma's bringing back home with her? Prudence doesn't have more details, but she doesn't seem bothered by the omission. Phoebe on the other hand has a pretty good idea of who Norma is bringing, as does Sal. Phoebe is totally unenthused by the prospect of her mother's return. Sal is very uncomfortable having more knowledge about Mr. Winterbottom's marriage than he does. She doesn't understand why Phoebe isn't telling her father about Mike, but she figures it's none of her business and walks back to her house.
The next day, Phoebe asks Sal to be at her house when Norma returns because she insists that she needs a "witness" to the chaos she expects to unfold. Sal begrudgingly agrees because she feels guilty for abandoning Phoebe at the university. When Sal arrives, the Winterbottom house is spotless. Phoebe explains that Prudence and her father have been furiously cleaning in anticipation of Norma's return. Mr. Winterbottom is so nervous that he even undoes some of his cleaning, afraid that Norma would thing the place was too clean and thus figure they could function without her. When Norma arrives with Mike, the tension shoots to an all-time high. The Winterbottoms can't figure out how Norma would know Mike; the assumption is that he's a much younger lover.
Norma launches into an explanation of her absence that concludes with her revealing that Mike is actually her son; she had him shortly before she and Mr. Winterbottom met, and she never told him because she was worried about how Mr. Winterbottom would perceive her, she suspected, as less-than-respectable. The Winterbottoms are all shocked. Mike starts to stand up, certain that he won't be welcomed into the family, but once Mr. Winterbottom recovers from the initial shock of information, he shakes Mike's hand and tells him how he always thought the family could use a son. Sal announces that she's leaving; she feels the moment is a bit too intimate and that she should let the family be on their own. Phoebe leaves with Sal, though. She's angry with her mother for keeping such a huge secret for so long.
As the Hiddles cross into Idaho, Gram's breathing is growing shallow, and her skin is turning grey, and Sal and Gramps can hear a rattling from her chest when she speaks. Sal suggests stopping before Coeur d'Alene, but Gram insists on continuing. She wants to stop in Coeur d'Alene because Chanhassen stopped there on her bus tour. Gram prompts Sal to continue with her story, so Sal explains that after Norma's big reveal to her family, outside of the Winterbottom house, Phoebe and Sal catch Mrs. Partridge in the middle of leaving an envelope on the porch. They confront her about it, and Mrs. Partridge simply tells them that the messages were clippings from a newspaper that she liked, and she thought they would make for pleasant surprises, like little fortune cookies.
When Sal returns to her own house, Ben is waiting for her on the front steps. He's brought her a present and leads her to the backyard to show her; it is a chicken, just like one of her chickens in Bybanks. Ben tells her that he's named the chicken, but if she doesn't like the name, she could always change it. They kiss, and he tells her that he's named the chicken Blackberry. Sal loves her present. That night, Sal also finally speaks to Margaret Cadaver and learns about how she knows her father. It is a very emotional conversation, and Sal cries, but she doesn't elaborate on what they talked about. Gram is quite pleased with the conclusion of the Winterbottom saga. Sal explains in narration that the story of the Winterbottoms continues to unfold as they adjust to their new lives. They've since welcomed Mike into their family, and Norma is no longer quietly living what she feels to be a "tiny" life. When Gram dozes off, Sal expresses her concern to her grandfather, who concurs that Gram does not look well. They speed towards Coeur d'Alene, headed straight for the emergency room.
At the emergency room, the doctors discover that Gram has had a stroke, likely as a result of the snake venom. She's unconscious in a hospital bed, attached to various tubes. Gramps insists on staying by her side, even when hospital staff try to get him to stay in the waiting area. That night, Gramps gives Sal the keys to his truck and some cash. He tells her it's just in case she needs something from the car, but Sal knows that Gramps is giving her permission to drive the last hundred miles of the trip by herself so that she makes it to Lewiston in time for her mother's birthday. Sal whispers her goodbyes in Gram's ear and sets off for Lewiston. The drive is treacherous, especially at night. Around one of the curves into Lewiston, Sal pulls off onto an overlook. There, she speaks to a local man who works for Pullman. He tells her about a terrible bus crash that happened a year ago, right off the overlook they're standing on. Apparently, there was only one survivor. Unfortunately, Sal already knows all about the bus crash.
Sal climbs down from the overlook, slipping and scratching her knees on the brambles and rocks, until she reaches the mangled bus below. She inspects the bus, looking for some evidence of her mother, but finds nothing. It is almost as if the bus has been integrated into the landscape, with vines and grass growing all around it, engulfing it. When she climbs back up to the overlook covered in dirt and scratches, she finds a sheriff and a deputy parked behind Gramps's truck. The sheriff lowers his radio just as she approaches the truck. He asks her why she was down there and where the others are. She tells him she's alone, and he demands to know how a thirteen-year-old girl managed to travel by truck to this spot on the road. Sal tells the sheriff the whole story of her grandmother being bitten by a snake and why she's made the journey from Euclid in the first place. The sheriff tells her to get in his cruiser.
She expects to be taken to jail, but the sheriff actually takes her to the Lewiston cemetery, where she visits her mother's gravesite for the first time. It's here where Sal is finally able to accept that Chanhassen isn't coming home. On Chanhassen's gravestone, there is engraved a maple tree. Sal sits in front of it and tries to imprint the sensory experience of the cemetery on her memory. Afterward, the sheriff and his deputy drive her back to Coeur d'Alene with her grandfather's truck in tow. When they arrive at the hospital in Coeur d'Alene, Sal is given a note from her Gramps telling her that sadly, Gram died in the very early hours of the morning that day. The note also includes the address of the motel where he's staying. The sheriff and the deputy bring Sal to the motel. They offer their condolences to Gramps and spare him the full lecture on not allowing his thirteen-year-old granddaughter to drive his truck. Gramps makes the arrangements for Gram's body to be flown back to Bybanks, and she's buried in the aspen grove where she and Gramps were wed.
After Gram dies, Sal and John move back to their farm in Bybanks. Sal is happier among her familiar spots—the hayloft, the swimming hole, and the shade under the maple trees, for example. She writes to Phoebe and Ben often; they are even meant to visit a month after the conclusion of the novel. Sal is excited to show them around her home and even hopes for "some blackberry kisses" from Ben, who has pledged to be her Valentine in the course of their letter writing. Gramps has a beagle puppy named Huzza Huzza, and he and Sal pass the time on the farm driving his truck around and play the moccasin game, a game they made up where they imagine walking in other people's moccasins and try to guess why they might do what they do or act the way they act. Sal even keeps in touch with Tom Fleet, the young man who was there when Gram was bitten by a water moccasin. In the end, the Hiddles are on a path toward healing and grieving together in the place where they belong and the place they've longed to be since they moved to Euclid: their farm in Bybanks, Kentucky.
Analysis
A first-time reader of Walk Two Moons may be surprised to learn, in these final chapters, that Sal's mother, Chanhassen, died in a bus crash during her cross-country tour; that she's been dead the whole time Sal and her grandparents are traveling to Idaho; and that her death was the impetus for John and Sal's move to Euclid. This "twist" is made possible through Creech's application of an "unreliable narrator," a literary term coined by Wayne C. Booth in his book, The Rhetoric of Fiction. Sal is an unusual unreliable narrator in the sense that her unreliability stems not from an inherent desire to deceive or manipulate the reader into seeing things her way, nor does it stem from her being mentally unsound in some way, like suffering from amnesia (a common unreliable narrator trope). She isn't a trickster, a clown, or a liar. Her unreliability stems from her own grief and denial about her mother's death.
The omission of Chanhassen's death and the subsequent revelation contribute heavily to the emotional content of the novel's climax, when Sal drives the final hundred miles to Lewiston, stops at an overlook, and climbs down to the abandoned, destroyed bus. When she emerges and is taken to her mother's gravesite, it is as if Creech has set up the novel to allow the reader to feel the full impact of Chanhassen's death; because the reader has learned about Chanhassen under the assumption that she is living her life somewhere in Idaho, the revelation of her death at this late point in the novel can be experienced as fresh grief. The revelation also forces the reader to recontextualize their perception of Sal's thought process throughout the novel. It is a twist that invites and almost necessitates a rereading in order to understand the nuances of characters' behavior.
For instance, the basic premise of Sal's desire to reach Lewiston on Chanhassen's birthday in order to bring her back doesn't seem, at first glance, like a hopeless endeavor. When John tells Sal on numerous occasions that she's trying to "catch fish in the air" by hoping Chanhassen returns to them, it seems like the source of his hopelessness stems from an adult cynicism—the reader doesn't, at this point, understand that Sal's hope of her mother coming back, or her idea that she can somehow convince her mother to come back, is a literal impossibility. When we learn this, Sal's actions are suddenly retroactively determined by grief, denial, and desperation.
The climax also reveals the novel to be a masterclass in foreshadowing; Creech has written somewhat of a mystery, but the mystery asks a subtler question than a typical whodunnit murder mystery asks. The mystery of Walk Two Moons is why Chanhassen won't return to her family. Like any mystery, there are practical questions that defy logic and point to an extreme conclusion, like, for example, that she's dead. For instance, one might ask why Sal doesn't just call her mother, why it seems like she's not only left Bybanks, but cut off all communication with her family. And if that's the case, then how are they able to simply pop in for a visit? But the framed nature of the novel creates a difficult terrain, and the reader might be disoriented enough by the frequent temporal shifts to set questions like this, that pertain to the "rules" of the novel, aside.
Having said that, there are countless clues that might lead a reader to believe Chanhassen has died before her death is explicitly revealed in the Lewiston cemetery. For instance, there is Sal's intense fear of cars and car accidents, particularly bus accidents (7), spelled out very early in the novel. John often tries to comfort Sal by saying that her mother didn't intend to never return, which implies some sort of accident or unexpected turn of events. Sal's behavior, like the way she reacts to the theme of death in "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls" in Mr. Birkway's class, suggests that she may have recently experienced a loss. Then there is the matter of Margaret Cadaver, whose surname casts a grim, mortal shadow over the events of the novel. Phoebe and Sal accuse Margaret of hiding a body in her backyard when, ironically, it is Sal's own way of framing the narrative that is actually "hiding a body"—for Sal, it's too unbearable to think of her mother as a cadaver, so she simply rejects the reality of the situation. The climax of the novel begins to resolve this rejection; Sal finally accepts that her mother isn't coming back: "It was only then, when I saw the stone and her name—Chanhassen 'Sugar' Pickford Hiddle—and the engraving of the tree, that I knew, by myself and for myself, that she was not coming back" (268). In this way, Creech's construction allows Sal and the reader to accept Chanhassen's death simultaneously. From this point of acceptance, Sal can finally begin to heal, and this process of healing is ongoing and outlined in the dénouement, the final chapter entitled "Bybanks."
