Our nerves were so frazzled that none of us were sleeping. Roman had moved permanently into my bed after three straight nights of me lying on the floor beside the toddler bed, holding his hand. If we had a giant mattress that would hold us all, and we could lock it in a vault at night, maybe then we would sleep. In a cruel twist, having the dangerous men out of sight, where we couldn’t make believe we’d catch a sign of whatever set them off, we were stuck in a state of hypervigilance, waiting for one to appear. Waiting for the next strike, one we’d never see coming.
On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving break, I spent the day packing for a secret getaway. Not only had I kept the idea a secret from the kids, I’d been careful not to write down the address of the cabin I’d rented a couple of hours north of us in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. It would have been a prettier spot a few weeks ago, before the leaves dropped, but even stark landscapes would be an improvement over the view from my kitchen window.
“What happened?” Hope said when she walked through the door and saw the line of suitcases. Then she repeated it with a panicked squeal, “What happened?” The rattle in her voice made it sound raspy and old. “Did he do something? Did he come here?”
I ran down the stairs and nearly slid the last four when I saw how white she’d gone. “Nothing. It’s okay.” But I was flustered enough that she wasn’t convinced. I held both palms up. A surrender. A promise. “We just need to get out of here for a couple days or we’re going to lose our minds. No one came here. Nothing happened.”
She nodded.
Drew kicked his duffel bag. To him, this would feel like running away, and he wouldn’t like that. “Where?” he asked.
How long had it been since he’d put two words together? “I’ll tell you in the car.” I made a sweeping gesture with my hands. “You’ve got twenty minutes to grab entertainment for a quiet weekend. I packed your clothes and the basics.”
More like forty minutes later and after we’d gone down the driveway and back up again for Jada’s shoes—how a kid can get in the car and not notice they aren’t wearing any shoes, I will never know—we finally drove north, away from our house that wasn’t home. The kids sat straight in their seats, looking forward with their eyes and backward with their minds.
When had we forgotten how to take a road trip? When had we forgotten how to laugh?
Jada livened things up when she paired her phone with the radio and tortured us with a playlist of pop songs remixed by the Chipmunks. Nothing screams road trip like kids complaining about the tunes. It was a start, anyhow. I decided not to save my emergency mom-trick for later; it looked like we were one big catastrophe right from the start. “Cheese Doritos?” I asked, pulling the crinkly bag from the floorboard on the front passenger side, where Hope was tucked in with three bags that wouldn’t fit in my Accord’s trunk.
It was the closest to happy I’d seen them in a while. Doritos were a rare treat. Years ago, Adam had forbade them in the house because he couldn’t stand the smell. Even after he had gone, I let the smell remind me of him. No more. We were letting go of stupid, imaginary boundaries. The car filled with cheesy corn-chip breath. I smiled.
When the kids were full of Doritos and empty of complaints, they started dozing off in the standard pattern of youngest to oldest. Drew was kind enough to kill Jada’s music before he slipped into dreamland. It wasn’t until Hope’s head went slack against a pillow she’d jammed between her seat belt and her cheek that I realized I’d forgotten to tell them where we were going. It was beyond bizarre that none of them had remembered to ask. It made me smile for a second to feel their absolute trust, but then I realized something deeper and sadder was behind their silence. They hadn’t asked because it didn’t matter. We were going away from the life where bad things had happened, and as far as they were concerned the coordinates of the place we landed were irrelevant.
The road turned hilly and shadowed as we headed toward the mountains. The early sunset in fall and winter used to make me sad, eating away my productive daylight hours inch by inch. But I had become a creature of the night, a shadow who felt safest when no one could see. I crept around the house with the lights off, memorizing how many steps would take me to the staircase and dragging my hand along walls to stay oriented. I’d taken to reading under the covers, sometimes even pulling my laptop under with me to write in a warm bubble that smelled of melting ozone. It was a silly habit for a grown woman, but like it had when I was six, the blanket bubble felt like an impenetrable shield.
The sun was only peeking through on high spots by the time we reached Dover, Arkansas. I started seeing evidence of the tornado that had skipped through the hills in the spring. Oaks that had seen the Civil War were taking their final bow in groves of thinner, more pliable species that had weathered just fine. Small houses with mismatched roof patches and freshly installed storm shelters lined the beast’s path. A fireplace that once warmed a family now towered alone at one end of a long concrete pad, swept clean enough for dancing.
Just around a sharp curve, at the top of a small hill, I spotted my dream home. It was two stories with warm brown bricks and dark chocolate shutters. Tall columns on the front porch made it look regal and very Southern. Large flower beds lined the sidewalk, with varying shades of green perennials that looked alive in every season.
I pulled into the drive, and let my mouth hang open. Odds were pretty good no one was home, since the tornado had peeled much of the roof away and the windows had only small, jagged bits of glass hanging stubbornly in the frames. I wondered if the pressure had blown them out or if the local teens and a case of Budweiser had done the job on a Saturday night.
In one of the upstairs windows, a red curtain hung outside, about a foot under the bottom sill, motionless despite the breeze. It was like something out of a postapocalyptic movie, or a stark black-and-white photo shoot where a single focal point had been colored in. The sun lit the edges of everything, blurring the details in the center and making the whole scene muted and surreal.
Nothing could have convinced me not to get out for a closer look. I felt suddenly very strong, bulletproof—even strawproof. The kids would carry on with their naps as long as I left the car running.