Collapsed Histories
The Way Home
My face burned. A pebble flew off the road and cracked against the windshield. The sound lingered in my ears, a high whine that distanced Sarah, who was saying, “I trust you, Rachel. I couldn’t tell Jake. I couldn’t—I couldn’t look at him without being afraid that he would find out.” From her throat came a noise half-obstructed.
When my brother was in the hospital after a car crash last year, I saw my mother perform concern for him for the first time since middle school. Not even through the parade of counselors, therapists, and doctors, had she shown a gravitation towards the kind of worry tinged with affection that I’d always seen played in television family dramas. But standing beside his hospital bed, gripping the railing beside his bruised, cut face, she had wept like a chunk of her body had been torn away. I watched her from his feet, disgusted.
Illinois Forks
When we were roommates in college, Sarah used to wake earlier than I did, and I remembered many mornings squinting sleepy-eyed at her while she dressed, sun from the dorm room window tracing the curve of her waist with diffused light. I used to watch the girls I brought back for the night like this too, but sunshine never quite cloaked them right, their movements too jerky, their faces angled with embarrassment. The window in the motel room wasn’t directly behind Sarah, but still the light from the open bathroom door drew an orange outline around her elbow as she gathered up her hair and said, “Let’s go.”
Highway, again. Lake Michigan passed without a word. Illinois startled us with its abruptness, the exits falling back to low numbers. The radio stations Sarah put on spiraled into static every half hour, and sometime between the end of one song and the beginning of another, I fell asleep. When I awoke, my head was fuzzy and my mouth dry. I reached for the water bottle in the cup holder only to startle at its lighter than expected weight.
Rubberneck
At some point in Indiana, the questions that pooled in my mouth settled so heavily on my lips that Sarah turned on the radio in a flick of irritation. The car brimmed with one static-fringed country song. Then two.
I pushed my hand towards the radio, and with the same movement that turned it off, my mouth overflowed.
Into Indiana
From what I understood—from helping Sarah clean out the fridge after the condolence casseroles friends and neighbors had brought had spoiled, from helping Jake carry some of Isaac’s things down to the basement, from watching them talk to each other like a tremendous wind roped all their words away—I was less surprised that Sarah had asked me to take this trip with her than I was with where she said the trip would be taking us. I asked if she had talked to Jake about this.
“He has his work,” she said. We were sitting at her kitchen table with two untouched glasses of iced tea. Sarah dragged a finger through the water pooled under them. “He won’t miss me.”
Across Ohio
It was when we were driving through the flats of Ohio, brushing up against Lake Erie, that Sarah said, “Let’s pull over. I remember this place. ”
She didn’t have to tell me—her hands were slick against the steering wheel as she maneuvered the car onto a lip of gravel by the interstate. I took my elbow off the window. Late August bloomed like a rising horizon of dust, grass brittle under the white sky, the asphalt that yawned before us shimmering. What looked like a tree from this distance blinked in and out of view.