by Sara Taylor
I crossed into Virginia without knowing that I had, only realized it when I got into the mountains and things started looking familiar. I began to pass through places I’d been before, places I’d once known, that, callous to the time I’d been away, had refused to change. I had been gone so long, gone so far; everything should have been different. The truest marker that I had been gone, that I hadn’t dreamed it all, was that the trees were just beginning to change their color, there was a snap of fall in the air.
There were little things, new stoplights, some shops closed and different ones open, but for the most part the place had been caught in amber, frozen since I’d left. I walked down streets and along the shoulders of highways, cut through woods and backyards and schoolyards and places where I probably shouldn’t have been, found the long winding backwoods road with my home past the point along it where you expected to still find homes, looking just the same as when we’d left in the middle of a chilly spring night.
Except someone else lived there.
I walked up the gravel drive slowly, turned over the hide-a-key under the porch steps: it was empty. Maybe Ma had taken the key when we left, maybe Dad had moved it. So I knocked on the door, rang the bell, and felt shock explode fizzily in my chest as a woman I’d never met before, a young woman with a toddler on her hip, answered the door. She was polite, but she didn’t know where my dad had moved to, clearly wanted me to go away, so I apologized and walked quickly back down the driveway towards the main road, listened for her to close the front door over the sound of my feet crunching the gravel.
I went a little ways back along the main road, then cut off into the woods, circled round and found the fort that Dad and I had built just across the property line on national parkland, that the new people didn’t appear to have found yet, and slept off my disappointment.
Our old neighbors still lived in their house, still remembered me and remembered liking me, but couldn’t tell me where Dad had moved to, just that he had left perhaps a year, a year and a half, before. They fed me dinner, and lent me a phone book, let me copy down the three possible addresses, and I was thankful that I’d always had a less common last name. They offered to let me use their phone, but I didn’t take them up on it—I had developed a bit of my mother’s aversion to phones over the course of my trip.
Instead I went myself to the addresses I had found, knocked on doors because that seemed like the right way to do it. Two, of course, were strikes. The third was an apartment block where he had lived but didn’t anymore, and this time the superintendent knew where the occasional piece of mail was being forwarded, and I was thankful for the dinner I had been given as I walked across town to yet another apartment block. I was tired, in the body and in the head; I’d been keyed up for too long for a reunion, I couldn’t maintain the excitement anymore. Which was why, when no one answered his door, I settled down with my back against it and fell asleep.
I was woken up by a shoe gently nudging my ribs, a voice I recognized saying, “Hey, kid, you OK? You can’t sleep here.”
When I looked up I got to watch the shift in his expression as he recognized me, the realization like a glass falling from a countertop, shattering on the floor. Then he held me so tightly I couldn’t breathe, like he would never let me go.
He had gotten my letters and postcards and wanted to write back but hadn’t known where to send the reply; had been kept up to date on my health and well-being by semi-regular phone calls and occasional emails from my mother and had always meant to talk to me, to ask her to let him talk to me, but never had. For a while he’d managed to hang onto the house, but had to let it go when he lost his job.
For the first week whenever he wasn’t at work, morning and night, I filled him in, told him the stories of where we’d gone, what we’d done. There were parts I left out, parts I couldn’t tell him about, but not many of them, and he was good at listening, good at letting me spin it all out the way I wanted to.
I was sleeping on the sofa in his apartment, borrowing his clothes the way I’d borrowed my mother’s, spending the days while he was at work reacquainting myself with the town I had left. We talked about me quitting school to get a GED, finding a job, possibly getting a bigger apartment so that I could have a bedroom, and for a few days I looked forward to settling back into a life like the one I had known, to habits and rhythms and weekends that were distinguishable from weekdays. But then I came to the end of my stories, and as the words began to run out a tingle grew in my spine, an itching at the back of my brain.
I interrogated it while I lay awake in the dark, listening to his breathing on the other side of the apartment. I’d sent a postcard to Ma and Laura to let them know I had gotten back in one piece, had received one in return to let me know that they were still where I had left them, and at first I thought that it was the missing of my mother that made me itch on the inside.
It wasn’t until I spent a day in the mountains, wandering for the sake of forward motion alone, that I realized that what I felt was a sort of anti-homesickness, a sick-of-home homesickness, that home for me was a place I was going to, rather than a place I could occupy. Nature or nurture, something I had been born with or something that had grown with every step and mile, it didn’t matter which. I had my mother’s restlessness.
For a month or so I studied for the exam that would get me out of school forever, tried to sleep at night and went out to the mountains with my dad every spare moment we had, trying to kill the growing urge that felt like it would make me lose my mind. He was amused that, after so much traveling, I still wanted to spend my weekends on my feet, and I couldn’t tell him why, didn’t want to tell him why, tried instead to settle to the life I had come back to. But he had lived with my mother for fifteen years before she left him, and he knew the signs that Laura had described: the way I could not settle, the way I couldn’t stand the confine of walls, of roads, of anything smaller than earth and sky.
He walked with me to the center where the exam would be given, and I expected that once it was over I would feel light, freed from the requirement of public education for the first time in my life, and that the ability to go forth and find work and live as an adult would calm me, that being formally allowed to do what I wanted would lead to my not wanting so much. It turned out that the reverse was true: with nothing making demands on my time besides searching for work, which took up considerably less time than studying had, my unease only increased.
He watched me pace and rock and scratch absently at my arms until the skin was raw, growing more agitated as the days went by, but he said nothing. Maybe I wanted him to tell me that he wanted me to stay, wanted him to try to fix me there, to remind me of the parts of myself that I got from him, the ability to be happy wherever I was, the passiveness that had gotten me through the journey from east to west in the first place. But he never tried to stop my mother when she left, whether it was for hours or days, and when the time came that I could no longer hold still, didn’t think I’d last another day, he did not try to stop me. I could see it in the way he moved that he knew that I would be leaving, that he didn’t want me to leave, but he wouldn’t give voice to it, wouldn’t try and lay claim to me. I don’t know if I hated or loved him for that.
I lasted a week of sleeplessness and pacing. It was four in the morning when I broke, began rolling my clothes into the backpack I had brought with me from California, picking out my thickest socks. Dad came out of his room and watched me stuff things into pockets, didn’t speak until I zipped them closed and set the bag upright, then said, “Wait a minute,” went into the kitchen and made a half-dozen bologna sandwiches, pulled me into a hug when he handed them to me.
We stood for long moments, him on the inside, me on the outside, neither of us willing to close the front door. He left it, stepped back and then turned and went into his room, so that I had to close the door after myself, pull it to make sure that the lock caught. It hurt to walk down the stairs of the apartment block, and I wondered i
f I was screwing up, if I should go back inside and get ready for a normal day. But when my feet hit the pavement the tingle up my spine, the itch inside my head, stopped.
As I walked away I probed for the uncertainty I had felt when I was first alone, on the ferry from Canada, but all I felt was peace. I was on my own, could go and find my mother, or see if Simon would have me, or winter in Florida before I made up my mind. I didn’t know where I was going, and I didn’t have to know. The road was beckoning; all I had to do, all that I could do, was follow where it led.
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Epub ISBN: 9781473536975
Version 1.0
Published by William Heinemann 2016
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Copyright © Sara Taylor 2016
Cover design © Suzanne Dean
Sara Taylor has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
The line “myself three selves at least” is reprinted from “I Am Myself Three Selves at Least” copyright © 2009 by Jennifer K. Sweeney from How to Live on Bread and Music, with the permission of Perugia Press, Florence, MA (www.perugiapress.com).
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by William Heinemann
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781785150777