Home I’ll Never Be

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BEEP

"Hey, it’s me. I just wanted to let you know, um. Well. I’m gonna be away for a while. I decided to go out of town for a bit, just a little road trip, you know. Maybe visit my parents, I don’t know. Anyway, I’ll call you before I come back. Call me if you need to. I’ll see you."

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She surfaces from sleep like floating to the top of a pool of quicksand, defying the laws of nature. It could suck her back down any second. She lays there blinking for a minute. Beside her, Pete is still deep under, his arm flung across her waist and a leg thrown over hers. He’s clinging like a bad one night stand; he’s a little too close. It’s too hot. The damn ceiling fan still isn’t working properly. They’ll have to look at it tomorrow. With any luck, they won’t need to buy a new one. Neither of them is skilled at installing things, though Pete likes to pretend, and it would be such a pain in the ass.

Oh God, and why is she thinking of ceiling fans now? There are only three hours before she has to get up for work, and this damn fan is keeping her awake. And since when is she the kind of person to worry about ceiling fans, anyway? She huffs out an annoyed breath. This whole situation has her too riled to sleep for at least the next little while. So, she figures, might as well get up.

She disentangles herself from Pete as gently as possible, shifting her limbs away from his until she’s free. She sits up slowly, lifts her hair away from her shoulders, rubs at the sweat on the back of neck, at her temples. Her nightgown is a small white lump on the floor by the bed, and she stretches an arm out to grab it. It’s the nicest cotton she’s ever felt, airy and soft. Pete gave it to her last month, his apology for accidentally washing her old nightgown with his darks. She slips it on, squirming a little to feel the fabric brush against her skin. The hem falls to float around her knees when she stands and pads quietly out of the room.

Beneath the bright array of area rugs, the floorboards throughout the apartment are worn and creaky, so she steps lightly to the door and down the hall to avoid waking Pete. She lingers briefly in the shadows and muted greys of the moonlit living room because it’s brighter there than anywhere else, and thinks vaguely that in the dead of night, darkness is relative. And that’s just silly enough to send her rolling her eyes into the kitchen.

She doesn’t bother hitting the lights, knows where to get what she wants. The bottle is all the way at the back of the freezer, wedged in behind the casserole Pete’s mom gave them last weekend. Her skin stings when she wraps her fingers around the icy glass. She slides the bottle out carefully. She’s been drinking rye lately, liking its mellow vanilla and oak burn. Last month it was tequila, like smoke and pepper on the rocks. She’s been considering switching to gin after this bottle or the next. Pete used to tease her about this – “Real commitment-phobes don’t even want a drink of choice, right babe?” – and it occurs to her suddenly that he hasn’t brought it up in a while.

And hell, she thinks around another gulp of freezing liquor, maybe that’s the problem. She’s become just that predictable, routine settling over and around her so gently that she would only have seen it if she’d been looking for it. She remembers moving in with Pete, thinking it was nothing. And then she blinked, and now two years have gone by, and that’s twice as long as she’s lived anywhere else in a long time. There are signs of her presence everywhere in these rooms; she can see her fingerprints smudged with Pete’s on every surface, like the way she wakes up practically fused to him in the heat. Stuck there.

She never could stand being immobilized. When she was young, no more than four or five and still living in the city where she was born, she had this recurring nightmare. It started in the car, Dad at the wheel, Mom beside him, with the kids – Dean and Sarah and her – in the back. The car was one of those big old beasts like the Cadillacs her grandfather used to drive, a sleek machine that turned heads when it prowled down the street.

She was sitting by the driver’s side window, looking up and up at the tall buildings that flashed endlessly by, glinting yellow in the sunlight. But then they stopped. There was an intersection, a red light or a stop sign or something that brought them to a halt, made them pause, gave her parents the chance to slip out of the car. Without a word, they left, closing their doors behind them. And she and Dean and Sarah waited, and waited. But she, for one, knew, with the unshakeable certainty of a dream, that they weren’t coming back. Her sibling must have started to catch on, too, because they burst into tears, choking sobs and wails like sirens. But she didn’t, she couldn’t, she had to find their parents, she was the only one. So she scrambled into the driver’s seat, stretched her legs down and her arms up until she could reach both the pedal and the wheel. And she drove.

Not once did she find her parents.

When she thinks about it now, the thing she remembers the most vividly beyond the weight of being left behind is an irrepressible urge to catch up. When she told her parents about the dream, they sat her down and reminded her of the safety rules, that if she and her parents ever got separated, ever, that she was to sit still and they would come find her. But that wasn’t how it worked in the dream. If she slowed down for a minute, just paused to catch her breath and get her bearings, she’d be lost forever. She’d lose them forever. She’d never get what she was after. And now, sometime between sticking her own magnets on the fridge and picking out curtains for the living room that actually match each other, she froze here, no longer going anywhere. A full stop.

The aftermath of that thought is quiet, her breath slow and even and her grip loose around the bottle. There is no shock, and the walls don’t close in to trap her in a prison of her own making. She simply knows that this is not the end of the road. She doesn’t want this.

She puts the bottle away, and drifts back down the hall on tiptoe to slide back into the bedroom. Pete is still asleep, flat on his back with his limbs splayed out, the sheet twisted around his left leg and hanging mostly off the bed. He’s never really snored. And he’s still and silent now in the fuzzy dark, his edges blurred. She turns away. There’s a small overnight bag on the high shelf in the closet, and she pulls it down trying not to dislodge anything else. She moves around the room collecting the things she’ll need: the book from her nightstand, clothing that she can identify by touch so she doesn’t have to turn on the light, her sandals, a hairbrush. She slips off her nightgown and drops it into the bag as well, pulls on jeans and a t-shirt. Pete makes a sleepy snuffling noise as she steps from the bedroom, and she smiles softly to herself. She’ll call him from the road.

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