The house, all bricks and windows, had dwindled until it was the size of the Lego coffin I built for my Nancy Drew doll and then buried (and now abandoned) in that same house's front yard, forever hidden from my brother’s scorn. As we pulled onto the freeway, the house ducked from view as I sat in the back seat of Momma's dusty, green, Oldsmobile sedan, knees tucked under me, facing the rear window, my arms crossed in the hollow of the rear deck, chin cradled by my crossed arms. As our house blinked away, I turned, placing my feet on the armrest between the driver and passenger seats, squeezed between my sister Cheryl, her body tucked into a ball and her Raggedy Ann doll held between her head and the passenger window to soften the rocking of the car, Ann defiantly above ground. Doug sat on my left, his head lolled back on the rear seat and his eyes staring absently at the bubble in the roof where the felt had come undone and drooped as if it were full of water and about to burst, black hair rustled by the wind from Momma’s open window in the driver seat, arm resting on the sill so her elbow cut through the darkness like a black onion and then pulled back, out of the layered flesh, to occasionally wipe the resulting tears from her eyes.
"Why are we leaving, Momma?" Mitchell asked from the front seat -- his "right" as the oldest. The headlights behind us flashed briefly, throwing his reflection onto the front windshield so I could see his strong jaw and defiant eyes flashing fear as he asked "What did we do this time? Where are you taking us?"
"Ya didn't do anything, honey. It wasn't you," she said, her eyes holding mine. "Daddy and I just need some time away from each other." As her voice trailed off so did her gaze, returning to the white reflectors dividing the lanes like landing strips, the Oldsmobile ornament landing our approach to our old and familiar home and away from Dad.
I was only seven and the youngest, but I knew it wasn't about them this time, them being my two brothers, although they were the reason we moved to Kentucky and the reason we built the brick house one Lego at a time trying to build with it a new future while burying the used one. We were like two sets of children, Mitchell and Doug, then Cheryl and me -- a six-year gap creating a crack in our world that we would never be able to cross. Drugs and alcohol and the wrong friends were left behind in Louisiana along with the unused boxes and packing paper now abandoned in a coffin-house made of wood. I had overheard enough to understand if not articulate that my family's move to Kentucky was one last effort to save my brothers from the future that was written as darkly on their skin as the tattoos they had drawn on each other's arms with ink and a sewing needle. Even at seven, I recognized their power, pulling us all away from everything for a chance to give them something, but this current dash into the darkness wasn't about them. It was about my father, a shadow of a man shrouded in a house built mostly by his hands.
I thought about my bedroom in that house, my first (and last) to call my own, a lamp in the shape of a drum sitting in the corner near a vent in the floor through which my sister and I would whisper to each other at night. Her room the color of sunflowers. My brothers' as far from us as possible, in the basement, unfinished, left for last. I oddly remember my mother admonishing them for the condition of their own bathroom, focusing specifically on the urine that had splashed around the bowl, streaking the cabinet, markings that I remember tracing with my finger and shamefully licking to try and taste their freedom.
Earlier, Momma had gathered us kids around her, our eyes still filled with sleep and hers as red as my father's, but for different reasons I didn't yet comprehend. They had launched missiles at each other as we all sat in the den, Momma's voice cracking, my father's chin jutting out at us from the thick arm chair he sat in like a man comfortable to be on trial. Mitchell and Doug together on the couch, a tectonic plate moving imperceptibly away from my sister and I. I don't remember any words, just the smell of the ashes in the fireplace weighing down the air like the exhaust of two continents moving away from one another.
Then, it was time to say good-bye, my sister already crying out of not understanding more than understanding, holding my mother's hand, Ann in the other, red curls of yarn dragging the floor. With his hug, Dad's coarse shadow tickled my cheek, and I breathed in the sickly smell of his sentencing.
From my left in the rear seat, Doug joined in the questions, my mother weakening. The questions circled the interior of the car, hungry, as I peered into the cold, wet night that stretched ahead of us with the texture of black licorice. As I watched cars speeding past us, I tried to imagine the lives inside by searching for clues in quick glances, spotting toys in the back window; a bike sticking out of a trunk, a canoe tied to the luggage rack on someone's roof. I'd catch faces halo-ed by the head-lamps of the car behind them and tried to imagine their lives, where they were going, where they had been and what lay buried in the front yard of the home they were fleeing? Or were they returning? I think now that I must have hoped for a glimpse of another boy's eyes that would tell me things are better just up ahead, around the next curve, past the next town, and the one after that.
I never saw him, that other kid, for I felt the car slow down and the wheels throw up sand and rocks as we pulled to the shoulder. Mitchell and Doug were leaning forward toward Momma who slumped in her seat, the fight in her eyes driven away, running ahead of us until it too ducked out of sight behind the black candy of night.
"Do ya want to go back? Is that what ya want? To go back?" She looked at each of us in turn: Mitchel, Doug, Cheryl, her cheek wrinkled and red from the print of Ann's dress, and finally landing on me as my brothers sang "Yes!" and Cheryl nodded agreement. Cars passed us in a whoosh of a whisper, speeding off to something different and Momma held my eyes in the rearview mirror like a sleeping child. She then laid me gently back into my crib, averting her gaze, knowing that I was awake but hoping I wouldn't fuss.
I didn't have the words then that I do now. I had yet to feel the ease of slipping into my car like a favorite pair of jeans stained with life and frayed by despair. There's never anything shiny and new about the cars I've owned; they creak and thump and hiccup toward my destination. But I love to drive them, the many of them. I know nothing of cars; how to change the oil, why you'd rotate the tires, or why the mechanic laughed when I told him my father told me that I needed my Cadillac convertible checked while leaning confidently on my two-door Chevy Scooter. It wasn't important, like the red light that flashed at me from the console of the Ford Diesel as I sped from Louisiana as a college freshman. Three hundred miles covered until it gave its last gasp and blew a rod just as I was entering Dallas Texas's city limits. Like my Nancy Drew, the car abandoned, forgotten in the rush of my next leaving.
My car is and always has been filled with the detritus of my life, my favorite hiking stick, bricks from a burned down building kept for their sentimental value. Change of clothes, both clean and dirty, where the spare should be. An old box of Tide used for filing never opened bills. A beach towel still smelling of tanning oil. They are like stickers on a suitcase, proof that I'm just passing through. I don't clean out my cars until passengers have to wriggle their feet through Burger King bags and cigarette cellophane to find uncertain purchase on the floor, soft with filth, declaring they won't ride with me anymore. Only then do I scoop out the trash with a sense of remorse, not for allowing the mess to accumulate to that level, but for the clean seats and spotless windows that will feel like someone had ironed my favorite jeans, all creases, stiff with starch, no comfort.
No, it's when, like now, the trash is piled high in the back seat and the driver side is like a hole that I bury myself in, as I turn onto I-80 and the Sacramento skyline fills the rearview mirror, the window rolled down to hear the night wind sing to me that I'm no longer where I was just moments before, that all is going to be alright because I have everything I need near me. Like Momma in our green sedan, I rest my elbow on the sill, it fits perfectly in the crook of the two bony knobs of my elbow, my wrist slightly folded and thumb pressed gently against the leather of the steering wheel conveying my thoughts to the tires with each turn of the axel as we drive outward, onward, awayward. It's not the destination that matters. It's the getting there, the thump thump of the tires over the asphalt causing the car to rock me like Momma would, the radio her small voice whispering "Everything's going to be fine."
I didn't have the words then when her eyes seemed to plead with me to understand before being sucked out that open window by the suction of others' leaving. If I had been capable then, I would have said that we need to keep going. That we need to get back on the freeway and just drive. That it's the going that matters. That when you stop, every decision you've ever made wraps itself around you like a plastic bag, cinched and tight. That the house we had built on the hill, that my father serving time in his chair, that my brothers with their failing grades, wrong kinds of friends, and blossoming addictions, that my sister's fear of people and my urgent need to be visible were black lines of type on a page, scripted out, waiting for us to spend the next decades speaking the words into existence. That when you're driving you're not connected to anyone or anything, that pages are as blank as the faces that sped past us there on the side of the road, my family lit by the street lamps like flashes from a Polaroid camera, our escape captured in this memory, clearly hidden behind the clear cellophane of my mind's album.
But I didn't have the words. And I felt a tightening in my throat as she took my silence as consent, turning the car back onto the freeway and taking the off ramp that looped its way back around to steer us home. My mother rolled up the window and the air inside filled with the breaths of my family. She seemed resigned, assured by the fact that something she knew waited. I too knew what was waiting, and it was the known that I sucked in, smelling of plastic, desperate for the taste of the night wind but finding only my stale breath as I felt the cinching of the bag.
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