It starts like this: she wakes me in the middle of the night and I feel the warmth of her hand on my forehead, hear the sound of her feathery voice. I see the silhouette of her body at the side of my bed. She says it’s time to go, James. It’s time. It’s time. And I know she hasn’t slept and we’re leaving, again, going somewhere, to another town, to make another start down the road. It happens like this with her, for years, until her final breakdown and I’m sent away to live with her sister. It’s time, James, my mother says, and we pack our things in the trunk and I crawl into the backseat and fall asleep to the hum of the Chevy. Goodbye Houma, goodbye Gilchrest, goodbye Fairhope, Atchafalaya, Galveston, Pensacola and all the rest. On to the next town, the next life, the next school and job and lies I’ll tell about who we really are.
It was like the unwinding of a spool. We’d stay in a town a few weeks, a month maybe, sometimes three or four months, never longer, and then we’re gone. The last time we were in Texas and followed the coastline east, once ending up as far south as Tarpon Springs, until the spool drew us back to Corpus Christi where the storm caught us.
We’d lived in Chicago for awhile, renting a studio in Roger’s Park. She worked at a diner, taking any shift she could get until winter when they stopped giving her hours and she decided we had to leave the city. I remember watching the tall buildings disappear, the expressway gleaming white with cold and salt and the eerie yellow glow cast by the street lights.
•
-Where are we going?
-South, she said. Maybe for good. It’ll be warm and sunny. We’ll make a new start. Make a new start, she said, mouthing the words, softly, for hours, smoking cigarette after cigarette. A rosary dangled from the rearview mirror, rocking to and fro. She cracked the window, letting the smoke trail out and the whistle of the wind was like something from another world. Make a new start. Make a new start. We’re always on the move. Before Chicago, it was Milwaukee. Before Milwaukee, some other place. They all blend together now. But when we went south to Texas, that’s when I thought things would change. That’s when she met Cody.
•
I’d lay in the backseat, lulled by the road, and read my favorite comic book, Kamandi: The Last Boy On Earth, about a kid, one of the last survivors of the Great Disaster, who lived in a world beset by savage mutant animals that could walk and talk and think like humans. Kamandi’s uncle was killed by a wolf and now he must avenge his murder. I’d read for hours, lost, imagining myself as the lone survivor in a post-apocalyptic world, and when I looked out the window I’d see miles of empty road, and boarded up strip malls, and run-of-the-mill towns.
•
I lived in a lot of places, different states, by the time I was twelve. Whenever we moved, I gave myself a reason, told a story about it, lied. We were always escaping. She wanted to get away from a man, a place, an emotion, we left, often in the dead of night, leaving hardly a trace in our wake. I told people my father worked for the CIA, foreign governments needed his secrets, wanted to kidnap us. Or we’d won the lottery and with our newfound riches had purchased a mansion in Miami. Or a rich businessman, in love with my mother, gave us a farm in Wyoming. I told people that I’d survived cancer at the age of five, that my mother was a famous writer of romance novels, that I was skilled in the martial arts and knew survival techniques and when disaster struck, I would be ready. I lied to everyone. I even began to believe my lies.
•
She fell in love so easily. She loved to love, the crush, the dance. She fell for a guy named George and we followed him to Tarpon Springs where he found work on the docks. We’d go there with him, to the pier. One time we stopped and talked with an old Greek man, Rocco, who used to be a sponge diver. Spidery wrinkles lined his face. His hands were thick, like stones. He owned a boat, but now his two sons dove for sponges. They made a good living. Rocco sat on the bow, pulling wide nets filled with sponges, his treasure from the deep, while his sons mopped and cleaned. They’d just come in. He told us that when he was young no one used equipment. No need for it. He would free dive. When you’re young, you have strong lungs, he said, but now I’m too old. I let them do all the work. He’d been a sponge diver his whole life. His eyes were clear as glass. Down there, he said, pointing at the water, you are alone and free, even your body slips away. There are many bones under the sea, many memories. He looked up at the sky. But up there is nothing, and so you must have faith. Come for Epiphany, he said, the archbishop blesses the boats for protection, for luck. There’s music and food. They throw a wooden cross in the water and all the kids dive for it. If you catch it, you’re lucky the rest of the year. He looked at me and said, you like the water, I can see it. You’d be a good diver.
•
-Where’s my father? I asked her that question all the time. Once, at a drugstore in Corpus, she bought me a small leather wallet.
-Here, she said, put this in there, save it. And she reached into her purse and handed me a black-and-white photograph. The man in the picture had bright teeth and dark wavy hair. He looked like a movie star on a poster you’d see tacked up in front of a theater.
-That man, she said, in a way that made me think she hardly believed it herself, that man is your father!
-Where is he? And she shrugged and her face turned down as if to say she didn’t know, that even if he were standing right beside us, in flesh and blood, she wouldn’t know if he was really there or not. His photo was blurred, as if he’d been caught in motion, in the act of disappearing, like smoke. At diners, on street corners, in bus stations, I’d slip the photo from my wallet and hold it up in front of me, comparing all the men I saw with the stranger in the photo, hoping one day the image would find its mirror. It never happened.
•
The Starlight Motel. The Seashell Inn. The Beachcomber. These are the names of a few places we lived. We checked into The Swan because it sounded so fine, so regal, but when we flipped the lights huge cockroaches scattered into the corners and we found dried blood dotting the bathtub. We moved on from there, quickly.
We’d tape a map of the world to the wall and place red pins on all the places we would go. Exotic cities. Istanbul. Marrakesh. Venice. Beijing. The names, like music. We’d visit Everest, the Sahara, Machu Picchu. We’d travel by train and watch the world slip past our window. At night, laying in bed, staring at the map illuminated by the faintest light, I’d wonder what would remain, if anything, when the great disaster struck. I knew it was coming.
•
Every motel had a small pool in a weedy courtyard. That’s how I got to be such a good swimmer. When my mother had a shift at work, I’d fake sickness, read comics in bed and swim the rest of the day. She’d pay the manager a few extra bucks to keep an eye on me. I’d sink to the bottom of the pool and open my eyes and look up and the world was soundless and far away. I liked that. Cloud shadows drifted over the water and I’d hold my breath until my lungs ached, imagining that’s how drowning felt, chest on fire, eyes and ears popping, bones heavy, and then sinking into the dark.
•
My mother spent her days off at the pool, drinking, reading romance novels. Some guy, her latest, some man from where she worked or where she drank, would flop down in a chair next to her and talk and flirt and from behind her dark sunglasses my mother looked at him, her face set, waiting to be enchanted. I swam for hours, as the sun drifted across the sky and the shadows grew long, and usually, late in the day, there’d be a fight, who knows why, it always happened, and when I surfaced from a dive I’d see their bodies sagging, like the way a balloon loses air, and a sourness hung between them and I’d hold my breath and drift to the bottom of the pool for as long as I could stand it, looking up at the shifting colors of the water and sky and clouds, and when I felt my lungs about to burst and my eyes burned with chlorine, I’d float back to the world, hoping calm and order had returned.
•
Their names flash across my mind like images flickering on a movie screen. Jack, a wiry jittery guy who fixed our car would always take us out for pancake breakfasts. He loved pancakes. He had a tattoo of an Indian chief on his bicep and would flex his muscle so it did what he called a “rain dance.” Ray-Ray talked too much. He never stopped, his words looping around the room, jumping from thought to thought for hours. One time we fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV and I remember drifting off to the sound of his voice and when I awoke at dawn, he was still there, still talking. We left town just to get away from him. Mom found Cody in Corpus Christi. He was supposed to save us.
***
In Corpus, my mother got a job as a cocktail waitress in a bar, the Jellyfish Grill. She served drinks to the locals, and after her shift she drank with the locals. We lived in a motel called The Pier, though we liked to call it The Pierre because it sounded foreign and fancy. The motel sat high on a bluff overlooking the gulf, down the road a mile from where she worked, so a lot of times she and I walked home late down the empty road, the pavement still warm from the heat of the day. Across the road from the bar there was an arcade with pinball machines and video games and a putt-putt golf course, and that’s where I spent my time. At each hole of the mini-golf course plastic life-size replicas of dinosaurs towered over everything. T-rex. Stegosaurus. Triceratops. The whole dino deal. The guy who owned the place was obsessed with them. His name was James, like mine. He took great pride in his arcade, his dinos, so much that he refused to abandon the place when the storm hit. He sat in a small wooden booth, selling tickets, spitting tobacco juice on the floor. He always wore a brown cap lined with old fishing lures. I was there so much he let me play pinball and mini-golf for free. My mother gave him drinks on the house when he showed up at the bar.
-Always approach life with one eyebrow raised, James told me.
-My mother and I are rich, I said. And we’re gonna live in France.
I said all kinds of things.
•
That’s where I met Isabel, at the arcade. Her hair was sleek, a river of oil trailing down the length of her back. The first time I saw her she was slamming her body against the side of a pinball machine.
-It’s a ripoff, she shouted. Damn ball is stuck! Her hair shimmered in the fluorescent light. She was older than me, by a few years maybe. Her face was shocked-looking, like she’d seen something that frightened her permanently. She was long and thin, all angles, no curves.
I gave her one of my tokens, but she shook her head. I see you around here a lot, she said. Let’s play putt-putt golf. And she marched off without looking back, as if she expected me to follow, which I did. We played and she won, and she was very happy about it.
She was from Oklahoma, or at least her mom was, but her father worked the rigs in Corpus and she spent the summers with him. He was across the highway, at the bar, drinking and flirting with my mother, probably.
We sat down at a picnic table next to the arcade and shared a cold bottle of soda pop. Even at night, the heat was almost too much to breathe.
I told her I was from Chicago.
-You seen snow?
-Sure.
-For real? I never seen it. What’s it taste like?
-What?
-Snow.
-Snow?
-Yeah. I seen a movie with my dad and one of the kids in the story was eatin’ snow with maple syrup on it, like ice-cream.
I shook my head. Never tasted it, I said. And I felt like a fool for never tasting snow. We lived in a neighborhood that was full of gangs, I said. We heard gunfights all the time.
-Really? Is that true?
-Yeah, I said. She seemed impressed.
-My dad takes me shooting all the time. For ducks and geese. He’s got a .22 rifle.
We met most every night at the arcade and I told her stories about my mother and I. We’re just passing through until her million dollar book contract comes through. I’d survived cancer. My father lived the secret life of a spy. I told such good lies, I thought, and needed to because where would we be with the truth? I was holding us down, my mother and I, on Earth, tethered to something that made sense. Isabel believed me. That’s what I told myself anyway.
•
One night my mother stayed at the bar later than usual, and I waited across the road, in darkness, after the arcade closed up. I knew better than to show up at the bar. I knew to wait. I could picture it, my mother sitting on a high stool, flirting, a gin-and-tonic in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Through the open door, I heard soft music and the sharp laughter of men. I heard them, circling. And underneath all of this, my mother’s chiming voice drew them close, and I knew there’d be another man in our life tonight and the dance and fall was starting again. I looked away, down the empty road, and listened as the voices changed pitch, took on a harder edge, and there were shouts, something crashing to the floor, breaking glass, and I watched as she stumbled out of the bar and fell to the ground, laughing, and men’s faces gathered in the window and they were laughing too, and then a man, a tall shadow wearing a baseball cap, came out and helped her up and walked her to the car and she sort of balanced there, between him and the car while he lit a cigarette, and she burst into laughter and leaned into his chest, looking up at him, and he gave her a puff from the cigarette and she wrapped her arms around his waist and squeezed him, like he was going to vanish if she didn’t hold on. This was Cody.
Cody worked the oil rigs and lived out of the back of his Econoline. Mom felt bad, she let him stay with us. He worked the rigs a week, had three days off, then back for a week. Cody was whisper thin, his hands mangled, all bent at the knuckles, and he always wore a dirty baseball cap. He said he could hold his breath underwater for more than three minutes. Said he practiced in case something happened on the rigs and he was thrown into the Gulf. He read a lot, detective novels, spy novels. He always had a book. That’s how they met. Cody was at the bar, drinking and reading. My mother took notice of this and saw his jacked up fingers holding the book and gingerly turning the pages and she thought it was just about the most interesting thing she’d seen, one of these tough sum-bitchy rig workers reading, in a bar, by himself. That night they talked books, and he made her laugh so hard she fell off her stool and cracked her head on the floor.
We used to go to the beach, collect seashells, stop for boiled shrimp at roadside shacks. He’d cook us big breakfasts on Sundays and my mother and I would sleep late and wake up to eggs and bacon and toast and Cody. We found a drive-in movie theatre. That’s where I saw The Fog and Night of the Demon and The Unseen. Me and Cody liked horror flicks, but she hated them. They’d snuggle in the front seat and I’d peer around them to watch the screen. I’d never seen her so happy.
When he was with us, she bloomed, and while he was away on the rig, she wilted, retreating back into herself. I’d wake in the middle of the night and see her sitting in a chair pulled into the doorway, looking at the Gulf, smoking, a book on her lap. If the night were clear, from the high vantage point of our motel, you could just make out the glistening lights of the oil rig against the dark horizon and I’d lay in bed and watch her, wondering how long we’d stay in Corpus, if Cody would live with us, if it would last, this feeling I had of what life was supposed to be like. Would my mother decide we had to leave again and run away? Would she let this life settle inside her? Would she let it take root? After awhile she’d go back to reading, but I knew it wasn’t the book she was lost in. It was Cody.
•
I never told any lies to Cody. Not sure why. He was just one of those guys you couldn’t lie to, like he’d know as soon as you started talking that you were lying, and that he’d be real hurt by it. He had these weird eyes, light and dark at the same time, that never focused on you for long, but when they did, he looked into you, not at you.
He loved his van, took us everywhere in that thing, country music turned up loud, his elbow on the window, a wrist slung over the wheel, singing and grinning.
-You’re trouble, my mother would say, sitting next to him, sharing a cigarette. Just a load of trouble. She’d laugh. She laughed a lot with Cody. He was fun to be around, a good-time kinda guy.
He took us to Sizzler, for steaks. It’s payday, he said, it’s on me. We had ourselves some onion rings and steaks and fries and a chocolate sundae, and afterwards as we walked to the van, I trailed behind and watched as she reached for his hand and took hold of it. I’d never seen her do that. Sure, she’d held hands with guys, but they always took her hand. It was never the other way around.
Another night we camped out on the beach. We curled up in sleeping bags around the fire. Mom slipped off to sleep, her breathing calm, peaceful.
-I was in the war, you know? Cody said, after we were quiet for a long time. He said it in such a way that I couldn’t tell if he was asking a question. His eyes had a dark look, something far away in them. I’d overheard him mention the names of strange places to my mother, but they seemed passing remarks, not something connected to him.
-Vietnam. You heard of that place, right?
I told him yes, I had. And now the tattoo on his right arm made sense. It read NAM 67-68. I had thought it was a secret code.
-I was there two years, two tours, Cody said. Had me on patrol. Long range stuff. They’d drop us off behind the lines, parachute in, with a map, a flashlight, nothin’ else. Me and three or four other guys. We drop in and just walk back toward our own lines. You make it back, means you didn’t find an enemy on the way. They never hear from you again, means you got caught, shot, killed, eaten by lions. You had to move quick and fast in those jungles.
I wondered if he had any reason to lie to me. Would he do that? Did he know I was a liar?
-Sometimes, he said, they’d call in an airstrike right on top of you, fire from the heavens, and the jungle’d be all ash and smoke and completely quiet, nothin’ alive for miles. You’d just bury deep and pray, if it did any good I don’t know. You gotta learn quick out there. That’s what saved me. I’m a quick learner. Had to learn to be there one minute, gone the next. You got anybody to teach you, James?
I told him I wasn’t sure, but if I had a superpower of my own, it would be like his, the art of vanishing, like smoke, there one moment, gone the next. I don’t know why Cody told me that story, or if it was even true. He liked to talk. Maybe that’s why I liked him.
•
A few days later, Isabel appeared at the arcade. She hadn’t been around in a week or more and I thought maybe she’d gone back to Oklahoma to be with her mom, but there she was, playing pinball and the way she went at it, glaring at the machine, throwing her hips into it, slapping the glass and cursing, well, I’d never seen her like that. There were bruises on her upper arm, in the shape of someone’s hand. Her face was puffy, welling with tears. The lights of the pinball machine flared up. Game over. And she stood there looking at it, gritting her teeth.
-I hate this place, she said. No, I don’t. I mean, I do. But, it’s like all the wrong people are here.
-Like who?
-Like my father, that’s who. I hate him. And his girlfriend, the dirtbag. I listen to them talk. Jesus.
-What happened?
-It doesn’t matter. Are we friends?
-Yes, I said.
-Good. I hate liars. Would you lie to a friend?
-No, I said. She looked at me and I couldn’t tell what she saw.
We walked along the water. I watched the waves curl around her toes. I was at a loss for words, so little did I trust myself. What could I tell her? That my mother and I were wanderers, that we’d never stayed anywhere long enough to know anyone? That we were broke and lived on food stamps? That I’d never been in the same school longer than six months? That my mother was on meds, and needed to be, or she’d go crazy? That I knew our future would be more of the same, another town, another man, another job, one disaster after another? What would she think then? Why did the truth have to be so hard, so ornery, so present?
We stood at the water’s edge. The dark outlines of oil tankers glided across the horizon.
-Whatever happens, let’s be friends, she said.
-Okay, I said, friends. But I knew I’d already betrayed her.
•
One day, my mother came home early from her shift and found me at the pool. She had this look. Said something about a storm. We watched the news on TV. A storm was coming. A hurricane. They gave it a name. Hurricane Allen. We heard about it everywhere, on the TV, the radio. It was on everyone’s lips. The great storm was coming. The great disaster. It was going to hit Corpus Christi hard. They told everyone to leave town, get away from the coast. The eye of the storm would pass right over us. Everything in its path would be destroyed.
My mother said Cody would help us. He’d take us away. By the time the storm hit, we’d be miles from the coast, starting a new life.
The air along the beach vibrated. The sky disappeared in green swirling clouds. The strength of the wind grew by the hour. It was amazing, the sudden shift, the power. A part of me wanted to stay and see it through, but Cody said we had to leave.
Two days before the hurricane, I met Isabel at the arcade. A fine mist fell. You could feel the change coming. The arcade was closing up. The old man wasn’t bothering to leave. Nothing could be saved. He wasn’t going anywhere, he told us. The highway was a steady stream of cars and trucks, some packed to the gills, and soon we’d join them. Me and Isabel played a game of pinball, but there wasn’t any fun in it. We stood under the yellow light of the arcade and looked out at the Gulf.
-The water’s gonna be so high, everything’ll be gone, she said. This’ll be the last time anyone does this.
-Does what?
-Stands here in this spot, lookin’ at the Gulf.
-What’s gonna happen to the old man?
-Who knows? Maybe he’ll be okay. He’s been through worse.
Her father was moving back to Oklahoma, and taking her with him. He wouldn’t come back after the storm. She’d live with her mom full-time until she could get away to college, hopefully.
Soon it’ll rain for days, I thought. Soon the rain will be hard. I decided I’d find her, somehow, after the storm, even if it took years, but I didn’t tell her that. I took her by the hand. Her skin was smooth, soft. This was the first time I’d touched her.
-Isabel, I said. Isabel.
She looked at me funny, her eyes wide and shocked-looking.
-What?
And I confessed it all, everything. I told her about the lies and then I told her the truth. She listened close, like she was tuned in to something in the air, the wind. She didn’t say anything. Just stared out at the Gulf. Finally, she said…
-It’s okay, James. It doesn’t matter.
-Why? What do you mean?
-I understand. We’re okay, you and I.
-Why?
-We’re from the same place, James. We just are. You didn’t lie to hurt anyone.
-Promise? For real?
-Yes, she said.
We played a few more games of pinball, silence between us. Then she had to go. It was late. She hugged me, kissed my cheek. You take care, she said, bye now.
***
Cody said he would save us. He’d get us out of harm’s way. I’ll be by in my truck at 3pm, he said. Be ready. Pack your things. And we packed up what we had, which wasn’t much, and gathered it by the door because we knew he’d arrive in a rush, like always, and we wouldn’t have much time ahead of the storm. Then the three of us would vanish, make our escape. That’s what would happen when Cody appeared.
He did.
He didn’t.
He showed up in his pickup truck hours late, the rain falling in white curtains. There was still time to get out of town ahead of the storm. Trees were bent near even with the ground because of the wind. His truck idled as we shuttled everything into the back and lashed it with tarp. We crammed into the front seat and took off. It’s then we saw the cut on Cody’s lip, the swollen left eye, the blood dried on his neck. A fight at the bar, he said. Was he drunk? He’d stopped in for one last beer, before everyone fled, and one of the rig workers, some guy named Carl, said something about my mother and Cody had fought for her, defended her honor, because he loved her and would be with her forever and no one could say or do anything to harm her, ever, and he would take care of her, of us, and we’d be together, a family, always. That’s what he said as the rain fell across the world. I pictured it. We’d make it out, and drive north, then east, for hours and reach Florida and settle in Tampa and live there, all three of us, in a comfortable little apartment a mile from the beach, and Cody would find work as a roofer, and my mother as a waitress. I’d stay in school longer than I ever had. A year later, they’d marry. A year after that, my mother would have a daughter. And we’d name her Alexandra. We’d travel the states on vacation, camping out, hiking, fishing. We’d photograph these memories and collect them in an album, one for every year, labeling every adventure, and it’d be simple and loving and harmonious. That is how I wanted the world to be.
If only it were true.
But he didn’t show up.
He never did.
As the eye of the storm hovered offshore, I watched the realization wash across her face.
We were stuck. We weren’t going anywhere. It was too late. This was her greatest fear, this lack of escape. She couldn’t outrun this one. For a moment, it looked like she was going to lose it, scream, let it all out, the pain, the fear, the rage. She shuddered. Closed her eyes. Slammed her palm on the table, hard, and then ordered me to move our stuff away from the door, to the far wall, where we built a kind of fort with blankets and chairs and our boxes. We packed towels against the door. The rain trailing down the glass cube windows made strange shapes. You could only imagine what the hurricane was doing to the town. We had a jug of water, a few cans of soup, crackers, candles. We followed the news on the radio until the battery ran out. Then it was just my mother and I and the storm, trapped.
We were sealed up in that room for two straight days. We played scrabble. We played cards. We made up funny stories. She read her romance novels. I read my comic books. We tried to sleep, but the wind was too loud and we were afraid the door might burst open, the roof blow off, a tree come crashing through the wall. We laid side by side, listening, holding hands. Her body trembled. I knew she was terrified, that her worst fear had evolved into a nightmare, and there was nothing I could do to save her. She couldn’t drink it away, or smoke it away or run away. It worked into her bones.
I’d never seen anyone so weak, so brave.
She fought as hard as she could, but it ate her up, until late in the second day when she gave in and became calm, beautifully, exquisitely calm. Her face shone. Something came over her, beyond words, and she let it in. She wouldn’t fight anymore. Finally, she fell asleep, in some kind of peace. I watched her for awhile, then drifted off.
When I woke up, hours later, silence was everywhere. My mother slept, curled into a tight ball. Sunlight illuminated the windows. I slipped out the door, into the new world, imagining myself as the last boy on earth, like Komandi. The sun sat high, looking down at what the storm left behind.
The town was gone. The shells of houses lay cracked open, a clump of bones. Our cinder block motel, high on a bluff above it all, was the only building still standing. The pier. The bar. The arcade. Gone. A bright sterling quiet hung in the air.
I walked down the bluff and crossed the road. On the beach, the sun beat down. Waves licked the shoreline, as if resting. I didn’t know what I was looking for. The cry of seagulls filled the sky. I wandered the beach a long time. A strange burning ran through my body. Everything felt empty.
I saw a dark clump on the sand not far from the shoreline. A giant squid, flung from water, baked on the sand, tentacles reaching out like monstrous tongues, searching. Was it breathing? Did it have a heartbeat? I looked into its single immense eye, star-deep. What did it know of this world? What did it see of me?
A tremor rippled the squid’s silky skin. Flies darted across its body. It was alive. And suffering, but harmless. I looked around for a piece of wood, something sharp, and found a tree branch buried in the sand. I touched the sharp point of the branch. I could leave the thing be, or drive the tip into its heart and end its pain. Wouldn’t that be the right thing to do? Everything unknowable about life pulsed inside that creature’s heart.
I raised the stick above me and took aim at the center of the monster’s body, but I heard shouts from somewhere up the beach. A group of strangers roamed the width of the sand, heading towards me. They wore bright orange vests. It was strange to see other people. I thought the earth belonged only to me now. I dropped the stick and ran away. Their shouts fell away behind me. I didn’t see anyone else on the way back to the motel. I found my mother, awake now, quickly loading our things into the trunk of the Chevy.
-It’s time to get out of here, kid, she said. Her voice was whispery, like she didn’t want to disturb the remains of the town. Go now, she said. Grab your stuff. Hurry!
-The car, I said. It’s gonna break down on us.
-We’ll see. We’ll take it as far as we can.
We pulled branches off the hood of the car. The windshield was cracked, the tires buried in sand, but we managed to get it free and running and she quietly eased the car down the road, and I watched it all disappear through the back window.
***
My mother got sick a year later, and died in Tampa. I lived with her sister, my Aunt Jo, until I graduated high school. Sometimes, when I’m asleep, my mother comes back to me. Dream or real, I don’t know, but I feel her hand on my forehead and I hear her voice saying, It’s okay, James. It’s okay.
One memory lingers: before the storm, the drought was terrible. It was over a hundred degrees, for weeks. Everything green turned brown and dead. After the rain there was a startling burst of new growth. As the sun beat down once more and we drove away from the coast towards the hill country, the fields lining the highway were filled with bright colorful wildflowers reaching up, like hands, from earth to sky.
Doug Whippo is an Adjunct Faculty member in the Department of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. He has previously been published in Hair Trigger, F Magazine, and Cell Stories. His work has been featured on radio for WBEZ’s news program 848 and on stage for Theater Seven’s Jeff-nominated production of We Live Here. In the past, he has worked with 2nd Story, Lifeline Theater, and New York’s Bohemian Archeology.