It isn't yet dawn as I ransack my apartment for things I can't leave behind. The list is surprisingly short.
Handfuls of clothing stuffed into a duffel bag. My laptop. An awkwardly-sized cardboard box full of nostalgia, the only things I'd allowed myself to take from my parents' house after my mother died. I wrap both arms around it, hefting it onto my hip as I cast my eyes in nervous darting circles, contemplating what doesn't make the cut. The futon. The microwave. Sheets and towels and curtains. I leave it all.
Everything fits quite easily in my mini-cooper, the box and the duffel bag smooshed together on the backseat like sleepy children apprehensive of the spontaneous road trip. I go back to lock up, remembering to take a pale blue scarf from the hook just inside the door. I drape it over my fleece, which I zip up to my chin on the way back to the car. I slide into the front seat and turn the key. It starts right up – nothing like nightmares and old movies, where people can never leave in a hurry when they need to. Everything goes smoothly. Leaving is easy. As I pull out of the lot, and my apartment building gets smaller in the rearview, my breathing slows. I'm certain I won't miss any of it. I wonder why I never thought of this before.
I feel no attachment to material things. I take some degree of pride in that. Near the end of her life, my mother asked me to take her antique furniture. She had an oak dresser and nightstand that were a set and she didn't want them separated. She was dying and she was worried about keeping the furniture together.
After the funeral, there'd been an estate sale. I don't believe in an afterlife so I don't believe my mother is upset with me or proud of me or looking out for me.
Dead is dead.
The cardboard box contains twelve file folders that hold report cards and artwork and essays from every year I went to school. If I looked closely, I'm sure I'd find my SAT scores. I haven't looked closely, though. I saved a shoebox full of loose photos, but I haven't looked closely at those either. When I first lifted the lid in the basement, my throat started closing. I replaced the lid and set it aside. For later. Whenever that is.
My mother died five years ago, six months after being diagnosed with lung cancer. She'd never smoked. My father had smoked, though he quit before I was born. He'd died before her diagnosis. A heart attack we hadn't seen coming. She'd just begun to shake off the most crippling parts of her widowhood when she got the news that she wouldn't need to get used to living without him after all.
My father's death was sudden and shocking and devoid of the opportunity to say goodbye. It was terrifyingly fast: the fear in his eyes, his twisted face, the ambulance sirens too late. My mother's death was miserably slow, an endless terror with a million goodbyes until there was nothing left to say and nothing left to do but wait for the guilty relief when it was over.
Tucked into a corner of that box, wrapped in a checkered kitchen towel, are their wedding rings and her quarter carat diamond in yellow gold, the only jewelry my mother owned.
As I wait at the intersection on the way to the highway, remembering my favorite frying pan with grooves in it that made burgers look like they'd been grilled, I see a police cruiser in my rearview mirror. It turns into the parking lot of my apartment complex and I take a right on red.
You're having a panic attack.
This is what I say to myself in an attempt to be reassuring. It doesn't actually seem like that should be a comforting thought, but it is, because at least I'm not dying. It certainly feels like my heart is about to burst and I'm sure the oxygen has been sucked from the room, leaving me wheezing. But it's just a panic attack. It's horrible and terrifying, but, hey, it could be worse. I'll be fine. Eventually.
There's a knock on the door and my heart rate goes up even more. I'm sitting on a toilet in the family/disabled bathroom at Target with neither a family nor a disability. I'm holding my clammy head in my hands, talking to myself about breathing and other supposedly involuntary mechanics of the human body.
Count to ten. They'll just have to wait.
Another knock.
"Just a minute?" My voice is squeaky and high. I'm dizzy from the sacrifice of breath that comes from speaking.
Count to ten. Rushing just makes it worse. Breathe.
I reach for the toilet paper but my hands are numb so I paw at the roll until it spins.
I flush, go to the sink, run the water, look up.
It's not so bad.
I take a baseball cap out of my bag. It's not mine; I look stupid in hats. But the visor shades the deepening purple around my eye and when I suck in my lower lip, you can't even see that it's split.
I turn off the faucet and look myself in the eyes. It's all there: the disgust and self-pity and blame. My heartbeat has slowed.
Get out of here. Now.
The young mother on the other side of the door is so relieved when I exit, she hardly gives me the stink eye I deserve as she pulls her desperate five-year-old inside and I slip past, keeping my head down.
I leave Target empty-handed. I was going to get supplies for the trip, but I'd left my cart in the make-up aisle after catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror. The bruises were darkening fast and I was sweating. Trying to keep from having a panic attack in public feels like that movie, Teen Wolf, like you don't want everyone to find out you're really an animal.
Once when we were making up after a fight, Marty told me he felt like an animal sometimes. I tamed him. We'd been together for three tumultuous years. Loving him felt like a calling. He needed me. He said once that he knew I was good for him, but he wasn't sure he was good for me. I held him tighter and told him not to be so silly.
I should have listened to him then.
My car is parked close; the store wasn't open when I arrived. The plan was to load up on juice and power bars so I wouldn't be tempted by fast food chains.
I sit behind the wheel and take several deep breaths. I make a new plan.
I'll stop for snacks once I've passed a state line or two, once I've put some distance between me and the damage that's been done. There are consequences to sticking around.
The first night, I find a dirt road in the woods and I sleep in my car. It's too cold to crack the windows after dark, but with them up, I feel like I might suffocate. I crawl into the backseat and try to sleep curled up on my side since there isn't room to stretch out. The middle of nowhere is noisier than you think it will be and the night is such a disaster, I vow to splurge on a motel room the next night.
On the road, I listen to my music. Not his. Marty was a music theory major and had very pretentious ideas about music. I am of the opinion that musical taste is entirely subjective, like with literature or food. If you like lima beans, it isn't because you're stupid or wrong – you just have different taste buds.
Marty thought my music was bad – like, in an absolute, definitive way. And his music was good. So I got used to Bishop Allen and the Avett Brothers and The Smiths. Turns out, all the good music is by men.
I find a motel in Missouri for forty-five dollars. I pay cash and curse my cheapness the moment I let myself into the room. I'm afraid to sleep in the bed, convinced that it's infested with bed bugs, so I dress in long pants with my socks pulled over the cuffs and a hoodie with the strings cinched under my chin.
The parking lot is full and the walls are thin. The security lock on my door feels as secure as a paperclip holding together two sheets of notebook paper. I felt safer in my car.
I lie in bed unable to sleep until I'm so tired I don't care if someone breaks in to murder me.
When I wake, the parking lot is nearly empty. It doesn't make me feel safer; now there are just fewer people to hear me scream. Still, I force myself to take a shower, quickly, and take a complimentary cup of coffee from the lobby before I go.
Marty was thirty-seven when we met; he just turned forty last month. We celebrated with three of his buddies at the bar where they'd played gigs when they were in their twenties. The owner let them do a set in between two other acts. The audience was small and bored, but they cheered politely and no one was drunk or ornery enough to boo.
Not that they were horrible, just rusty. Marty's band consisted of aging musicians who once thought they might get famous doing this. Now they were still scrambling to find other ways to make a living, most of them drinking too much. On our first date, Marty had described his relationship with alcohol in a way that sounded like an active alcoholic. His theory was that the cold-turkey approach wasn't really necessary. He knew he was unable to stop after two beers, so his solution was that he didn't keep alcohol in the house. That way, he only drank on weekends.
As I listened to his story, I thought to myself that this was a red flag. In fact, I reasoned, this meant I could not date him. The disappointment of that realization struck me. We'd been having such a good time. He was easy to talk to, told good stories, made me laugh.
And I thought: What do I know about alcoholism? Nothing. Maybe he was right.
He wasn't. But by the time I'd figured that out, I was already in love with him.
I sleep in my car again on the third night, in a parking lot near Albuquerque, expecting to be woken by a police officer or a mugger pounding on the window. Instead, it's just the sunrise warming my face, hinting at the afternoon temperatures it's capable of.
That morning, I have to face facts. I spread the map across the counter at a Waffle House and give up the pretense that I've just been headed aimlessly "out west". Everything is west of the coastal town I started from, that smidgeon of New Hampshire that touches the Atlantic. It isn't until Albuquerque that I admit to myself that I have a destination. I'll need to take the dip south on I-10 to get there.
I don't call first. What would I say?
I have his address from the last Christmas card and the GPS system I borrowed from Marty a week ago. Mine now.
I'm so in my head I don't notice exactly when the landscape changes. The mountains in the distance hadn't been visible in the dark the night before. The saguaros are a kind of cactus I've read about. It takes fifty years for them to grow an appendage, though I'm suddenly skeptical of my data. There are many scattered along the foothills with five or seven "limbs" jutting in awkward angles from the main trunk. I prefer the ones with only two. They stand along the side of the road like men with their arms up, as if they're being held at gunpoint or perhaps warning me to slow down, beware.
The sun is setting as I park in front of his house. It's white stucco and there are low bushes with yellow flowers along the walk. I have no idea what any of the plants here are called, besides the cactus. But I don't see any of those in the manicured front yard. No grass either though, just pink pebbles.
I check out my shiner in the rearview. It's faded, but I reach for the baseball cap anyway. Just in case.
The garage door is closed and no one answers the bell. I sit on the front step and smooth my skirt over my knees. If I was in New England, I'd be reaching for a sweater now, but this is Tucson. After a day trapped in the car with recycled air, it feels nice to sit out in the breeze.
I imagine how it will be when he drives up and sees me here. Will he recognize me? It's been years and I'll be out of context, having never ventured this far from my home. It'll be confusing and dramatic, but he'll surely be happy to see me. We may not be what other people call close, but I've always felt we had a special connection. "Delilah!" he'll say. "What a surprise!"
He's the only person who calls me Delilah. It's my name, true, but even my parents called me Lilah. Kids at school mostly called me Dee, especially out on the soccer field. More efficient for shouting directions. Marty always called me Li, pronounced like the telling of a falsehood or like what you do on a bed before fucking.
So, pretty much the same thing.
When David calls me "Delilah", it makes my stomach clench, the way it did when I was little and in trouble. It was "Delilah Jane" on those occasions. He'd know that if he spent any amount of time in New Hampshire while I was growing up. He hadn't. By the time I was born, he'd already moved away.
The last time I'd seen him was five years ago, at our mother's funeral.
Nothing ever happens the way I imagine it. I spend forty-five minutes sitting on that step, slouching against the front door with my legs splayed out in front of me when a truck pulls up in front of the house and a teenage girl climbs out. The driver waits as she approaches me slowly.
I jump up and she steps back.
"Sadie!"
She scowls at the sound of her name.
"It's Lilah," I say, pressing my palm to my chest. "Delilah. Your aunt?"
She's still pouting, uncertainly. She wears every thought bare on her face.
"I haven't seen you since you were a tiny thing." She was a baby and wouldn't remember. David came home that Thanksgiving with his pretty wife and new daughter. That was so long ago, before the divorce. I'd seen photos since then but even those were outdated: pigtails and missing teeth. Here she is grown taller, long dark hair falling around her shoulders and dark eyes narrowed at me.
"I'm your dad's little sister," I say and she sighs, turns to the truck and waves them off.
"I think I've seen a picture of you," she says and she walks past me to unlock the door.