It was impossible to understand back then that getting out wouldn’t be an event in a pickup truck but a ten-year process of excision. Miles and years, slowly padding the distance. Not to mention Tyler never left Cooley Ridge. Daniel never graduated. And our mother wouldn’t have lived to see it, anyway.
If my life were a ladder, then Cooley Ridge was the bottom—an unassuming town tucked into the edge of the Smoky Mountains, the very definition of Small Town, America, but without the charm. Everywhere else—anywhere else—was a higher rung that I’d reach steadily with time. College two hundred miles to the east, grad school one state north, an internship in a city where I planted my feet and refused to leave. An apartment in my own name and a nameplate on my own desk and Cooley Ridge, always the thing I was moving farther away from.
But here’s the thing I’ve learned about leaving—you can’t really go back. I don’t know what to do with Cooley Ridge anymore, and Cooley Ridge doesn’t know what to do with me, either. The distance only increases with the years.
Most times, if I tried to shift it back into focus—Tell me about home, tell me about growing up, tell me about your family, Everett would say—all I’d see was a caricature of it in my mind: a miniature town set up on entryway tables around the holidays, everything frozen in time. So I gave him surface answers, flat and nonspecific: My mom died when I was sixteen; it’s a small town at the edge of the forest; I have an older brother.
Even to me, even as I answered, it looked like nothing. A Polaroid fading from the edges in, the colors bled out; the outline of a ghost town full of ghosts.
But one call from Daniel—“We have to sell the house”—and I felt the give of the floorboards beneath my feet. “I’m coming home,” I said, and the edges rippled, the colors burned: My mother pressed her cheek against my forehead; Corinne rocked our cart gently back and forth at the top of the Ferris wheel; Tyler balanced on the fallen tree angled across the river, stretching between us.
That girl, my dad wrote, and her laughter rattled my heart.
* * *
I NEED TO TALK to you. That girl. I saw that girl.
An hour later, a moment later, and he’d probably forgotten—-setting aside the sealed envelope until someone found it abandoned on his dresser or under his pillow and pulled my address from his file. But there must’ve been a trigger. A memory. An idea lost in the synapses of his brain; the firing of a thought with nowhere else to go.
The torn page, the slanted print, my name on the envelope—
And now something sharp and wild had been set loose inside my head. Her name, bouncing around like an echo.
Corinne Prescott.
Dad’s letter had been folded up inside my purse for the last few weeks, lingering just under the surface of my mind. I’d be reaching for my wallet or the car keys and feel a sliver of the edge, the jab of the corner, and there she would be all over again: long bronze hair falling over her shoulders, the scent of spearmint gum, her whisper in my ear.
That girl. She was always that girl. What other girl could it be?
The last time I’d driven home was a little over a year ago—when Daniel called and said we had to get Dad into a facility, and I couldn’t justify the cost of a last-minute flight. It had rained almost the entire trip, both ways.
Today, on the other hand, was the perfect driving day. No rain, overcast but not dark. Light but not bright. I’d made it through three states without stopping, towns and exits blurring by as I sped past—the embodiment of everything I loved about living up north. I loved the pace, how you could fill the day with a to-do list, take charge of the hours and bend them to your will. And the impatience of the clerk inside the convenience store on the corner near my apartment, the way he never looked up from his crossword, never made eye contact. I loved the anonymity of it all. Of a sidewalk full of strangers and endless possibilities.
Driving through these states was like that, too. But the beginning of the drive always goes much faster than the end. Farther south, the exits grow sparser, the landscape just sameness, filled with things you’re sure you’ve passed a thousand times.
I was somewhere in Virginia when my phone rang from its spot in the cup holder. I fumbled for the hands-free device in my purse, keeping one hand steady on the wheel, but eventually gave up and hit speaker to answer the call. “Hello?” I called.
“Hey, can you hear me?” Everett’s voice crackled, and I wasn’t sure if it was the speakerphone or the reception.
“Yes, what’s up?”
He said something indecipherable, his words cutting in and out.
“Sorry, you’re breaking up. What?” I was practically shouting.
“Grabbing a quick bite,” he said through the static. “Just checking in. How are the tires holding up this time?” I heard the smile in his voice.
“Better than the cell reception,” I said.
He laughed. “I’ll probably be in meetings the rest of the day, but call me when you get there so I know you made it.”
I thought about stopping for lunch, but there was nothing except pavement and field for miles and miles and miles.
* * *
I’D MET EVERETT A year ago, the night after moving my dad. I’d driven home, tense and uneasy, gotten a flat tire five hours into the drive, and had to change it myself underneath a steady drizzle.
By the time I’d gotten to my apartment, I was hovering on the edge of tears. I had come home with my bag slung over my shoulder, my hand shaking as I tried to jam the key into the door. Eventually, I’d rested my head against the solid wooden door to steady myself. To make matters worse, the guy in 4A had gotten off the elevator at the same time, and I’d felt him staring at me, possibly waiting for the impending meltdown.
Apartment 4A. This was all I’d known of him: He played his music too loud, and he had too many guests, and he kept nontraditional hours. There was a man beside him—polished, where he was not. Smooth, where he was rough. Sober, where he was drunk.
The guy in 4A sometimes smiled at me as we passed in the hall in the evening, and one time he held the elevator for me, but this was a city. People came and went. Faces blurred.
“Hey, 4C,” he’d slurred, unsteady on his feet.
“Nicolette,” I said.
“Nicolette,” he repeated. “Trevor.” The man beside him looked embarrassed on his behalf. “And this is Everett. You look like you need a drink. Come on, be neighborly.”
I thought the neighborly thing would’ve been to learn my name a year ago, when I moved in, but I wanted that drink. I wanted to feel the distance between there and here; I needed space from the nine-hour car ride home.