Greetings from Sunny L.A.! Wish you were here!
I’m parked on the shoulder, almost clear of Montgomery.
I just needed to stop a minute.
I stare at the postcard, palm trees lining its front.
I turn it over slowly.
Be my good girl, Mats.
The night before Mom left, I was sleeping on the couch. I can’t remember why I wasn’t in my bed, but I wasn’t, and I couldn’t have been waiting up for her because I never did. I was just there, stretched out all wrong, my feet hanging over the arm, my head sunk in the middle of the cushions. She’d been out with one of those men she liked to keep in her back pocket, the kind she could get a drink or a dime from, but didn’t necessarily have to bring home. I woke up to the feel of her fingers lightly petting my hair and I felt so small, like I never did, like I imagine Mattie must have often felt having always been Mom’s favorite.
She reached for the remote and turned the TV on low, going through the channels until she finally gave up. She bent her head close to mine and twisted a strand of my hair around her finger, tucking it absently behind my ear. I remember my muscles tensing at her touch, giving me away, and being so afraid she would stop because of it. She didn’t; we continued the charade. Me, pretending to sleep. Her hands against my forehead, then the soothing carefulness of her fingers combing through my hair. We stayed like that for … it must have been an hour, maybe a little less.
I thought, this is what it feels like to be a daughter.
I thought, God, no wonder Mattie loves Mom.
Then she brought her face close to mine and whispered, “I made you,” in my ear.
That’s when I realized she was sober. My mother wasted was the default. Her sobriety was like a punch in the stomach in the rare event I witnessed it. I wanted her sober all the time, even if she didn’t like me better for it. We stayed like that until I fell asleep for real and in the morning she was gone and I knew. I knew it was forever and I knew there was no way I could explain it to Mattie. She almost didn’t survive it.
But then this … I trace the edges of the postcard.
Just delayed the inevitable.
I was sixteen. I dropped out of high school, which was a lot less complicated than I thought it would be. I remember standing outside of Parkdale, waiting for someone to stop me, to tell me I was throwing my future away, but I didn’t live in a place that possessed that kind of imagination. For some people, the future ahead is opportunity. For others, it’s only time you haven’t met and where I lived, it was only time. You don’t waste your breath trying to protect it. You just try to survive it until one day, you don’t.
I rest my head against the seat and breathe. I slip out of my shirt and the air turns my skin to gooseflesh. The front of my shirt looks like a crime scene. I grab a bottle of water from my bag and wet the clean back of the shirt. I use it to wipe off my face, my beat-up elbows. I go through my things again, grab the cleanest shirt I can find and put it on. I shove the bloodstained one under the backseat so I don’t have to look at it and check my face in the mirror. The scrape on my chin looks ugly. My nose is swollen, achy and tender to the touch. I don’t know if it’s broken. I don’t know what I’d do if it was.
At least I have somewhere new to go, so it wasn’t for nothing. I drag my hand across my face and it fucking hurts, and it feels … heavy. I’m so tired. I need to really stop. I need to get farther away before I think about doing that. I lean forward, peering out the windshield. The sky has gone gray, a thunderstorm on the horizon. It’s already raining by the time I pull away from the shoulder. I watch the road disappear under the car. I feel like I’m teetering on some kind of edge I can’t see over.
451 Twining Street. Langford.
If I had a phone, I could figure out where the fuck that is and how far away. Next town … next town I’ll find another library. I glance at the gas gauge. Half empty. My eyes close. No. I rub them open, blinking against the flare of oncoming headlights.
Javi. I make myself think of him because thinking of him makes my blood burn hot enough to wake me up a little. I was weak about Javi, too desperate for a taste of some other life. Too hungry and too tired to think it through clearly. I tried, I tell myself. At least I tried. As if it counts for anything when Silas Baker is still out there, still alive. Fuck you, Javi. I squeeze my eyes shut briefly and what I found in that house—
My knife against Silas Baker’s abdomen.
I tried.
What good is trying when you fail.
I push it all from my mind and ease the car to a stop because there’s a red light in front of me. I stare at it, watch as it blurs around the edges before turning green. A moment later, I finally pass the YOU ARE NOW LEAVING MONTGOMERY sign.
It rains harder and the rain turns the world into a gloomy watercolor. Every so often, sheet lightning flashes across the sky. It’s just the start of the weather, I can feel it. There’s an electricity in the air and it’s making my skin hum, tells me it’s going to get worse. The highway stretches endlessly nowhere, but then—a shape of someone on the side of the road. I squint past the rain. They have their thumb out. I didn’t know people still did that. I slow as I pass, so I can get a look at them. It’s hard to see clearly but …
A girl.
I pull over carefully. It takes her a full minute to register it, like she can’t believe someone actually stopped for her and it makes my heart hurt a little. But just because I can be soft doesn’t mean I’m stupid. I roll the passenger’s side window down. She leans in. She’s wearing a jacket with a hood that’s done little to protect her from the elements. She could be blond or brunette. I won’t know until her hair dries. Her white skin looks irritated from the rain, blotchy and red, but that still leaves it looking a sight better than mine.
“Y-you’re n-not a psycho, are you?”
She blinks against the rain. “Not last time I checked. You?” I can’t get a sense of her voice over the car’s idling engine and the weather.
“M-maybe. W-where you headed?”
“Markette.” She points ahead. “It’s about forty miles that way. Straight through.”
“D-do you know where L-Langford is? I n-need to g-get there.”
“Nope, but I could probably look it up on my phone.”
“Then I could p-probably give you a r-ride.”
“I’d sure appreciate it.”
She waits for me to let her in. I hesitate.
“I’ve never d-done th-this before.”
“I can pay you,” she says. “Cash or gas, next station.”
I unlock the door.
* * *
The girl hasn’t stopped apologizing to me since she climbed in the car because, thanks to her, the seat got all wet. She peels out of her jacket and reveals a slightly drier tank top underneath. Her jeans look like they’ve been painted on. It’s got to be uncomfortable and I feel bad for her but I don’t know what I could do to make it better.
She squishes back against the seat, stretching out her legs and wrangles her wallet from her pocket. She opens it to show me the bills and credit cards inside. I can’t imagine her doing something so stupid if a guy had picked her up. It’s vaguely insulting.
I’m dangerous, I want to tell her.
But after today, I believe it less and less.
“Just so you know I’m good for it,” she tells me and now that I can hear her, her words kind of run together, sort of the way actresses talked in old movies, and I think if I sounded like that, I’d talk all the time.
“Okay.”
Then, she gets her phone out and asks me what’s the name of the place I’m looking for again. 451 Twining Street, Langford. She taps it out and a moment later informs me it’s four hundred miles away. I tell her to get a pen and a piece of paper out of the glove box and write all the directions down, exactly how to get there. It goes quiet while she scribbles. The scratch of the pen and her breathing lulls me into that hazy space again. I turn the radio on. The sound of some man’s voice fills the car.
“This is West McCray with WNRK and I’m here today with…”
The voice is distractingly clean and gentle, sort of smooth in the exact same way Silas Baker’s was and the way my stomach lurches tells me I don’t want to hear any man’s voice right now. I turn the radio off. The girl gives me a crooked smile and finishes writing the directions, handing them over. I half-glance at the paper before setting it on the dash.
“W-what’s your name?”
“Cat.”
“S-Sadie.”
I close my eyes briefly. That wasn’t the name I meant to give her.
“Thanks for the lift, Sadie.”
“No p-problem, Cat.”
“Looks like we were both leaving Montgomery,” she tells me. “And I’ve been on the road for … I don’t know. But I’m telling you, it’s always the nicest places that are the worst. They got all there probably is to give and they won’t. You can’t bleed ’em, not even a little.”
“You b-bleed p-people a lot?”
She rolls her head toward me and some of her hair is starting to dry into ratty blond tangles. All she does is smile, then asks me, “So what happened to your face?”
I sniff and immediately regret it. “F-fell on it.”
“Ouch.”
“A l-little.”
“You mind if I change my jeans? They feel gross.”
I shrug and she grabs at her soaking wet bag and rummages through it. Doesn’t look like much inside it escaped the rain either, judging by all the muttered cursing that follows. After a long minute, she triumphantly declares, “Ah-ha!” and pulls out a pair of black leggings, which are so knotted up in her bag, as soon as they come out, the rest of everything else she’s got does too, spilling all over the car.
“Oh, fuck.”
She spends the next few minutes feeling around, between and under the seats, to make sure she has everything and she does it in a way that tells me she can’t afford to lose anything.
Once she’s done that and she’s satisfied, she peels out of her stiff jeans and underwear—leaving her naked from the waist down—and gets into the dry pants.
After she’s redressed, she sighs contentedly. “Better.”
This is survival, what she’s doing right now. I recognize it. A girl who bulldozes a person by being ten times herself in front of them. I want to tell Cat she doesn’t have to do this in front of me, but there’s no point.
“So what are you doing?” she asks and I tell her I’m driving. She laughs. “I mean, why are you headed to 451 Twining Street, Langford, Colorado?” It’s startling, hearing it repeated so perfectly by a perfect stranger, but I guess after writing it all down, it would be stuck in her head.
“Road t-trip,” I say. “W-with my s-sister.”
“Cool.” She looks around the car, the empty backseat. “Where is she?”
“P-picking h-her up there.”
“At 451 Twining Street, Langford?”
“Th-that’s the p-plan.”
“But you didn’t know how to get there?” she asks. I swallow, but I don’t know what to say. I feel her studying me. She lets it slide. “I don’t have any siblings. I think I like it better that way, though. How old is she?” She taps her fingers along the door handle and that’s when I realize I’ve made her nervous. “Younger or older?”
“Thirteen. I’m n-I’m nineteen.”
She whistles. “Man. Thirteen. That was nearly a decade ago for me. You remember that age? You just think you know everything.”
“Y-yeah.”
“God,” she murmurs, but I have a feeling whatever she’s remembering about thirteen is probably different from what I’m remembering about thirteen. Mom was still around with some guy, Arthur … lasted about half a year. Arthur something. I don’t remember him so well. Everything after Keith felt like a dream but Arthur had … slick black hair, a big nose. His voice was off-puttingly high. I couldn’t understand what Mom saw in him until I realized he always had money and he always had drugs. He was a dealer. Mom broke him in the end, got him dipping into his own supply. By the time they were done, he had nothing.
Then he was gone.
Mattie was eight and that was about the time she started figuring out something was wrong with Mom. She was making friends with kids at school at that point and it was hard not to notice that the other kids’ mothers didn’t medicate at the breakfast table, didn’t lose the ability to string a sentence together by noon and weren’t blacked out by dinner. I remember sitting outside the trailer with her and reciting May Beth’s greatest hits because May Beth told me I had to look out for Mattie that way, make sure Mattie loved the mother she had instead of wasting her life wishing for another, like me. And I love May Beth, but I hate that she did that to me. To this day, she still acts like it was my idea.
Mom’s sick, Mattie, do you understand? It’s not her fault. You wouldn’t blame someone for getting cancer.
“… I was such a bitch.” Cat’s midsentence. She’s been talking this whole time. “I couldn’t even imagine twenty, but I thought I had it all figured out, you know? I wanted to be like…” She pauses. “Like this, actually, I wanted to do whatever the fuck I wanted. Hitching on the side of the road.” She laughs. “It was a lot less ugly in my head.” Before I can ask her how ugly it’s been, she asks, “What about you?”
“—” She stares at me while I block. After the moment passes, I feel a heat in my face and do something I never do. I apologize for it. “S-sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“It h-happens when I’m t-tired.” I scratch my forehead and I wish I hadn’t said that either. “Uh. I d-don’t know. I had to l-look after my sister a lot. My mom w-wasn’t really…” I wave a hand feebly. “A mom.”
“That’s rough. What’s her name?”
“M-Mattie.”
It’s unbearable, saying her name out loud to someone else. I didn’t even say it to Javi. It’s the first time I’ve let another person hear me say it in a long, long time. There was a point with May Beth, where Mattie became her. She. Because I couldn’t—
I couldn’t.
“What’s wrong?” Cat asks because it’s all over my face.
“Nothing.”
“Sorry if I…”
“It’s nothing. I j-just h-haven’t seen her in a while.”
I exhale shakily. I don’t feel well, I guess. I feel like I’m surfacing from some sort of fever dream. I think of myself in Silas’s driveway. The blood I only just cleaned off my body. It feels like years ago now, but when I look at the clock, it hasn’t been hours.
“What’s she like?”
“Who?”
“Your sister.”
I stare out at the road, trying to see at what point the rain might end but, if anything, it’s gotten worse. What little visibility there was has gone all to shit. The sky is almost black now. I’m just thinking how maybe we should pull over when the Chevy starts hydroplaning.
I lose control.
Cat’s hand flies to the door handle as my car swerves into the opposite lane. I hear her whisper oh shit as I jerk the wheel in the opposite direction, which is the wrong thing to do. I try, frantically, to remember what the right thing is. I slam my foot on the brakes. Not the right thing. By the time the car stops spinning, we’re sideways in the middle of the road and I feel like I’m dying. A car in the oncoming lane blares its horn and swerves around us, somehow managing not to skid across the water itself. And then it’s silent, except for the sounds of both of us panting with the shock and relief of a near miss.
After an eternity, Cat says, “Maybe we should stop for a while.”
“Y-yeah,” I say, when I can finally unclench my teeth. I straighten the car and get us back on the right side of the road, facing the right direction.
We find a place to park about ten miles away and even if I don’t know how to handle a car when it skids, I’m at least smart enough to know not to park on the shoulder with my lights off. We end up next to a field that’s turning into a lake. Cat’s calmed some and she’s trying to explain to me what to do if I ever find myself in that kind of situation again and it’s pissing me off because I know. I know about easing on the brakes and turning with the swerve. I just didn’t remember it in the moment because it’s different in the moment. I close my eyes to her and she finally senses she’s pushing it because she says so: “I’m not helping.”
I open my eyes. “Yeah.”
She leans into her window, nose to glass.
“I wonder when it’ll stop.”
“D-dunno.”
“You can let go of the wheel, you know.”
I flush and uncurl my fingers from their death grip on the wheel and then I try to rub some life back into them. Cat leans forward and grabs her bag from the floor. She pulls out some of her things—a wet map, a roll of plastic bags and a swollen notebook and sets them on the dash. Says, “Might as well dry some of my shit out.”
I point at the notebook. “What’s th-that?”
“Journal.” She flashes a smile at me and then grabs it, flips it open and offers me the briefest glimpse. All I see is ink, a lot of it bleeding now. Some of the pages have scrap paper, tickets and other things taped to them.
“I keep records. Places I’ve been, people I’ve met. What I think of them.”
“What are y-you g-gonna p-put in there for me?”
“Haven’t decided yet.” She opens the book and lays it out on the dash, cover side up. “I’m a runaway, I guess. Been one for a couple of years now.”
“I can s-see it.”
“What’s it look like?”
I shrug. “Y-you.”
She smiles a small smile. She turns back to the window, looking out at the field. There’s a barn in the distance. It looks like it’s dissolving. I blink heavily, shake my head.
I say, “M-my sister ran away once.”
“Yeah?”
“J-just once.”
The skin prickles on the back of my neck and I glance over my shoulder just to make sure the backseat is empty.
“Little hell-raiser, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Teenagers.”
“She w-was an ingrate, actually,” I say. “Sh-she always p-pulled all k-kinds of shit. Never once c-cut me a break. She was always t-trying to get away from m-me.”
Being tired is worse than being drunk. Things you never wanted to say coming out of your mouth and you can’t stop it and by the time you realize you shouldn’t have said it, it’s too late. It feels like a betrayal. I want to take every word of it back, even if it’s true because I don’t talk about Mattie like this to anyone else. I might think it but you don’t talk about your family like that to anyone. I would die for Mattie, I want to say, because that’s the part I want Cat to know, if she has to know anything. Not all the times Mattie pissed me off because she was thirteen years old and that’s what thirteen-year-olds are supposed to do.
“Maybe you two can talk it out.”
“Don’t y-you have anyone?” I ask her, because I want something from her for everything of mine I didn’t mean to give her.
“What do you mean?”
“P-parents?”
“Well, yeah.”
“You like th-them?”
“They’re fine.”
“Th-then why r-run away?”
“Because it was the right thing to do.”
“Why?”
“My dad’s an asshole.”
“Y-you j-just said they were fine.”
“Yeah, well.” She laughs. “I don’t owe everybody my life’s story … then again, what are you gonna do with it? My dad’s a corporate asshole and I got tired of being his punching bag, that’s all. It got ugly. My mom picked the wrong side. Blah, blah.”
“Th-that’s sad,” I say and she shrugs. “I d-don’t have a dad.”
“No?”
“My m-mom had a lot of sh-shitty boyfriends.”
“At least that way you get breaks in between ’em.”
“N-not the way she slept around.”
“Respect, Sadie’s mom. A woman’s got needs.” Cat cackles. I don’t. She searches my face. “How many boyfriends? Who was the worst?”
I shrug.
“Come on.”
“—” I don’t owe anybody my life’s story but like she said, what’s she going to do with it? I keep one hand on the wheel and lift my hair from the back of my neck with the other, trying to feel out the cigarette scar. Once I have it, I tell Cat to look. I say, “Th-that one.”
“Shit. He just put it on you?”
“S-something l-like that.”
She reaches over, running her fingertip on the raised, puckered skin and leaves it there a long time. I shiver at that pinprick of warmth. It’s the only time I’ll ever like the way that scar feels.
“What happened?”
Look at me when I’m talking to you.
It’s not a memory worth chasing, here in this car.
I push it away.
“I d-don’t want to t-talk about it.”
“Okay,” she says.
“W-what’s it like? D-doing th-this?”
She shrugs. “When I get in a car with most men, they just wanna fuck. When I get in a car with women, they just wanna talk. Not always, though. Sometimes it’s the opposite.”
“You’re p-pretty,” I say, like that’s a reason. I feel my face turn a deep, deep shade of red and try to redeem myself. “I mean, it’s easy t-to talk to a p-pretty f-face. I don’t know.”
She turns to me. “How long you had that stutter, anyway?”
“All my l-life.”
“It’s kinda cute.”
I look at the car ceiling because there’s something about it that’s vaguely insulting and weirdly flattering at the same time. My stutter is not cute unless I say it is, and I’ll never say it is. Mostly, it’s exhausting. Still, there’s something nice about being worth the effort of Cat’s lie. It’s nice enough it makes me feel everything that’s hurting a little less. Mattie once asked me … she’d just come home flush from a crush on Jonah Sweeten and asked me how you know when you like someone, and if I liked any boys like she did, and I didn’t know what to tell her. That I tried not to think about that kind of stuff, because it was painful, because I thought I could never have it, but when I did end up liking someone, it always made me ache right down to my core. I realized pretty early on that the who didn’t really matter so much.
That anybody who listens to me, I end up loving them just a little.
I turn my head to Cat and she stares at me and I stare back until I can’t take it anymore and look away. I turn the radio on and a song is playing. It’s the one that played at the bar yesterday night. That was only yesterday … my eyes drift closed and I don’t know how long they stay that way when I jerk back awake. Breathe in.
“S-sorry,” I say, embarrassed.
“You look beat,” she says. “Literally and figuratively.”
I look in the mirror, and the side of my nose, underneath my eye, is a little more swollen and bruised than it was before. The tired, dark circles I have are just enhancing the damage.
“Does it hurt?”
I shrug, but yes, it hurts. It hurts worse than it did before I got in the car and it’ll hurt worse than that tomorrow, but more than that I’m just—tired.
She reaches over, her hand skimming my face and I flinch back away from her and she says, “Sorry, I don’t know why I did that.” And I want to say, sorry, I don’t know how to let you. Why don’t I know how to let her? I think of Javi in the backseat of my car, and everything I didn’t let myself do in there with him, and for what? So maybe it’s not a love story, but why can’t I let myself be worth a moment’s tenderness?
Why?
“It’s o-okay,” I say and then, gathering all my courage: “Y-you could … it’s okay if y-you want t-to d-do that.”
She reaches over and cups my face softly in her hands and gives me a sad sort of smile that tells me I’ve given even more of myself away. I’ve put my weak, wanting heart into the universe. I close my eyes and let myself feel it, the heat of her palms against my cheeks. Then she kisses me. Her lips are soft and unexpected and right. I open my eyes.
“Thanks for picking me up,” she says.
“I d-didn’t d-do it for that.”
“I know. I just wanted to thank you.”
I lean my head against the steering wheel and wait for the rain to let up, and my eyes slip closed and I open them again. I’m fucked. I know if I close them one more time, that’ll be it. Every good thing her kiss made me feel is fading, my sad reality kicking back in. I pinch the bridge of my nose and hiss, and the pain doesn’t even sharpen the dullest parts of me.
“If you want to sleep you can.”
I lower my hand.
“I d-don’t,” I say stubbornly.
“Doesn’t seem like you got a choice,” she returns. Then, “It’s okay, Sadie.”
But it isn’t.
I stare out the window and think of my mother’s fingertips pressed lightly against my forehead. I made you. I wonder if she knows about Mattie, wherever she is.
I wonder if she knows I’m all that’s left.