The Way Home
It isn’t running away if you’re running towards something.
Matt didn’t know his precise destination - no name had materialised in his numb consciousness as he drove, coasting on adrenaline, bathing in sunlight and ignoring the familiar voice lodged deep in his psyche that implored him to turn around. He couldn’t have marked the end point on a map. But he knew that there was one - he could feel it - and sometimes that was enough.
The window, a relic from a time when manual was the norm rather than ‘vintage,’ creaked indignantly before jamming half-way down. Through the windshield, the sky’s virgin blue promised him things he’d never thought possible. Promises of fresh starts and endless horizons; promises it could never keep. Clouds rushed across the blue canvas, and Matt eased the accelerator down to chase them. One by one, his cares drifted away on the baking summer breeze, until he could breathe without guilt flooding his lungs for the first time since crossing the town boundary. The determined hum of the ancient engine drowned out his thoughts as it sped down the freeway, carrying him towards a freedom that, all his life, had been just a few miles out of reach. Perhaps it always would be. That was the very nature of it, after all; if you could capture it, it would no longer be freedom.
His day had started the same way every day had begun for the last nineteen years – with the angry scream of metal on metal followed by the splutter of a flighty ignition. Night after night, his father sat out on the porch, rocking himself into the small hours of the morning, a bottle glued to his hand and a look of intense thoughtfulness clouding his eyes. As a boy, Matt had harboured doubts as to whether his father slept at all. This theory, which later evolved to involve vampires, had not yet been disproven. These nocturnal sightings, combined with the daily alarm call of his father’s clattering tools, had cemented this idea in his young head and, despite the onset of logic and common sense, such notions as are sculpted in one’s early childhood are seldom truly dispelled.
Once, awakened in the velvet hours by a particularly vivid dream monster, Matt had pulled back the shutter and seen something far more haunting than the folds of any nightmare; his father, crying silently in his chair, perfectly still as tears carved slick ravines into his weathered face.
This morning’s breakfast, already acquiring the blurred lines where memory melts into myth, had been the usual nondescript toast. As usual, he’d started work at 7 a.m., pulling his overalls on with groggy resignation as he’d waited for his first dose of caffeine to take effect. The most ordinary morning imaginable, and yet here he was, flying down the freeway in a car that wasn’t his, chasing a dream built on the rubble of everyone else’s that wavered like a mirage no matter how far he drove.
The front wheel lurched over a pothole, shattering his reverie and rattling tacky plastic dice that dangled from the rear-view mirror. He had won Lisa a similar knick-knack at the carnival last summer.
Lisa.
His heart contracted, and the guilt he thought he’d abandoned at the Creston junction clogged his airways once more. In that moment, he believed with the startling conviction that only comes when you experience something first-hand, that loss was as much a physical affliction as an emotional one.
Three years is an eternity when you’re nineteen years old, and Matt had spent his brief forever with Lisa, the girl he’d worshipped since he was old enough to know the meaning of the word “crush.” Her father’s prominent position as Granger Baptist Reverend had never been much of a deterrent, despite the occasional octogenarian approaching him in the street to enquire after his “young lady” and express their hopes that he be “treating her right.”
It was best that Reverend Martin and his geriatric disciples didn’t know everything about Lisa. Whatever her pious Sunday exterior would have you believe, she had never been one for practicing what her father preached. Matt loved her; he knew that for sure. But sometimes he feared that he loved her with an intensity that bordered on hatred. She was, after all, one of the links in the chain that shackled him to Elloree, the most suffocating hamlet under the sun.
He remembered the first time he’d tried to tell her how he felt. He’d scooped all five-foot-three of her up in his arms as gold-fringed clouds skittered across the pearly sky above them, bleeding trails of amber. Time had slowed to a crawl as he’d looked into those knowing brown eyes and seen a question written there, the answer to which he knew in the darkest corners of his soul, the way you know that rivers flow to the sea or that the sun will continue to greet you morning upon morning. The tip of Lisa’s nose had taken on a pink hue that echoed the sky’s wintry palette. The air had been crisp and raw, promising snow and a magnificent sunset, but where her body touched his, warmth soaked through him. Her face had been earnest, eyes trained on his, awaiting his response. Teetering on the edge of a cliff, she was holding out her hand and asking him to jump.
He’d released a shaky breath, watching it drift into the air. Their freezing noses inches apart, he’d whispered one last thing before he jumped, a smile of defeat and utter devotion playing on his lips. “Lisa, I…”
Knowing exactly what he couldn’t say, she’d returned his grin, one side hitched up slightly higher than the other in that familiar expression that made him feel he was finally coming home. “I love you too, Matt.”
He had closed the distance between them, their pulses merging to form one syncopated rhythm. Breathless, she’d eventually pulled away, and they became two individuals once again, though their breath continued to mist, mingle and disappear. They’d stared into each other’s eyes, no questions, only answers, before he set her down on the frosted grass again. As they’d turned for home, the sky a muted violet not yet pierced with stars, Matt knew without a doubt that he had just volunteered to a life sentence within these 1.015 square miles.
Regardless, he had meant every word he hadn’t said that night. He’d felt full for the first time in his life, filled with the knowledge that he was deeply, enduringly loved by someone who knew the worst of his story and still chose to weave it into their own narrative; who knew his vices better than her own and chose to be with him, not despite them, but because of them.
But this is not a love story. He left her behind with the rest, after all.
Matt’s knuckles were ashen on the wheel, but he kept his speed steady.
They had parted with the usual string of empty “I love you.” With every use, the words lost a fragment of their meaning, chipped away until they were a courtesy, a verbal touchstone, a substitute for “goodbye.” A shell of what they were that first time. His eyes graze the index finger of his left hand where the promise ring Lisa had given him seemed to burn the skin beneath it, trapping his finger in a circular prison he’d accepted all too willingly. Today he had destroyed everything that trinket stood for. Unable to stand the sight of it, he tugged it off and dropped it from the window in one violent motion. He didn’t need to look back to know it was lost forever, concealed in the roadside shrubbery. Perhaps someday someone would stumble across it and wonder what its story was. Whatever that story had been, it was over now. The End.
They’d said he was a safe bet. He’d heard them round the back of the garage while he was fixing up their battered old Chevy with some new brake pads - the thing was a wreck, but Matt had been in the business long enough to know it was salvageable on sight. He couldn’t have told you the speaker’s name, but he recognised the voice - hardly a surprise in Elloree. One-horse, stagnant little township.
“Dependable. That’s the word. Matter of time ‘til he takes over the family business, settles down with that nice girl of his.” A pause in which Matt envisaged a wheezing drag on a cigarette. “He’ll be here all his life, that kid.”
Those words were a splash of icy water down Matt’s back in the hazy July heat. The wake up call he had spent his whole life waiting for. And just like that, his future had flickered across his closed eyelids, an exact replica of his father’s; a life he had never asked for in a claustrophobic vacuum of a town he had come to despise.
He’d argued with his mother the night before. Something trivial about dirty boots on clean carpets had been a spark to a bonfire of underlying resentment, ending with him telling her to go to hell. He’d never forgive himself for that; the hurt that had softened her features, reducing her to a young child as her eyes brimmed with the threat of tears would haunt him for the rest of his life. He should at least have said goodbye - he owed her that much. She was his mother, after all.
He hadn’t planned his departure. There hadn’t been time to pack a change of clothes - hell, he hadn’t even finished work on the Chevy. When someone shows you that the door to the only exit is closing, you don’t bother to grab a toothbrush.
But what if he had picked the wrong side of the door?
As he approached the Old State Road roundabout, he knew with a leaden heart that he would turn back. He knew that he would turn around and go home, the same way he knew that the sun would be casting its parting fanfare across his small town right about now. And sure enough, as he took the turn-off that would take him back the way he had come, he was greeted by a blazing crimson furnace just over the horizon.
Maybe that had been his destination the whole time.
He would explain everything to Lisa. He would tell her how he felt, and maybe one day they would leave Elloree together. He would tell his father he admired him. He’d tell his mother he loved her. He would save up to go to college and finally, honestly, leave this shitty little town that he loved and loathed so much in his rear-view, once and for all.
Or he would have, if the brakes hadn’t failed.
Sheila McGee, northbound on Old State Road en route to visit her sister and good-for-nothing nephews, would later tell the police that the approaching Chevy simply veered off the road, as though the driver had been on the drink. The ambulance would arrive at the scene within minutes, but each one would cost the young man dearly. Passers-by would comment that you could hardly tell which direction the car had been facing - you could hardly tell the wreckage was a car, for that matter. Nobody would ever know that it was pointing back the way it had come.
But, for the moment, as he turned the car around, that same defeated smile playing across his unscarred face, Matt knew none of this. He was simply driving home to the people who loved him more than anyone else in the world.