FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #9

It was the thing he'd always loved about her.

Even when she made it impossible to love anything else, her smile made him love her still. Even when she was being a complete fool, she could crack a smile and he would forget all about her conniving, deceiving ways.

We had travelled across the country together, chasing her, and through it all, I loved him enough to hate her completely.

My earliest memory is as clear as a bell. I’m lying in my bed, the sun setting outside the window, listening to my mother bellowing along to an Aretha Franklin song that I am way too young to understand. I remember crawling out of bed and peaking through the crack of the open door.

My Dad comes thundering from the front porch, just getting home from work. His hands are black with grease from the auto shop, and I can smell gasoline from where I’m perched. His angry words propel me backwards from the doorway, into my bed, and I pretend I’m fast asleep when the door swings open. She lifts me in her arms, wrapped in my blanket, and carries me away into the night.

I don’t know why he didn’t come after us. I have made up a million reasons why. The truth is, he probably realized it was a fair trade – giving me up and getting rid of her.

I remember taking the train to Denver when I was six. She had swindled our way on board without tickets, with a wink and a smile. I knew the scenario all too well, and I was embarrassed by her flirting, but I was terribly excited to be on a train.

Duncan didn’t see us coming. They never did. She slid into the seat across from him and waited for her long legs to catch his attention.

I liked him straight away. His haircut was a bit lopsided. He wasn’t the usual kind of man she went after, but I almost hoped she would.

“What’s waiting for you two in the Mile-High City?” he asked.

“Not a whole lot,” she replied. Her cool made it sound as if not a lot was all we hoped for. He fell for that like a sack of potatoes.

Mom settled down pretty quickly with Duncan, and my little fingers were crossed inside my pocket for months. Duncan had an apartment in Aurora. He got me a bike and taught me to ride. Mom stayed inside, labouring over grand paintings of mountains and oceans. As far as I knew, she had never seen either. Soon they were stacked all around the living room, like a tribute to all the places she was going to go. I thought it made the place feel claustrophobic.

Duncan loved her paintings like he loved her. He saw such beauty in them, and he felt like the luckiest man on earth. He took me to the library to find books about the ocean, about the mountains, about the world. I hid them under my bed and cursed her stupid, ugly paintings in my head.
 

“What do you think, kiddo?” he asked me one Friday afternoon, standing in a shop downtown with me on his shoulders. He held the ring up so I could see the tiny diamonds, and I hoped that she would say yes. He took me by the school that same afternoon to register, and I squeezed his hand so tight that he thought I was frightened. Secretly, it was excitement.

I woke up two weeks later to the sound of Aretha Franklin’s “I Say a Little Prayer For You”. Like before, I crawled out of bed and peaked out from the crack in the door. I saw Duncan come into the living room, groggy from sleep. He turned down the song and looked around the living room. She had taken every single painting.

This time, she’d left me behind.

 
I remember the street lights of every road we took that night, and all of the nights after. They whizzed by the window, making it impossible to sleep. How could I sleep? I was abandoned. 

We caught up with her outside Spanish Fork in Utah. I almost didn’t say a word when I saw the ocean in the back of a car as we passed. The thought of us driving forever, with every part of her pulling him after her, with his eyes grazing over every redhead we passed, made me speak up.

“Lets eat,” I said, pointing to the place. He was never one to say no, even to me, so he pulled in to the parking lot and got out of the truck. She was sitting in a booth with a big slice of pie.

“Oh baby,” she said, peeling out of the booth and scooping me up in her arms. Her hair smelled like cheap perfume. I scrambled away from her as she batted her eyes at Duncan, a sad smile spreading across her face.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she wailed, brushing her hands across his shoulders, “I just had to get out of there. I wanted to see the ocean.”

His face screwed up as he stared at her, and I felt the tiniest shred of hope for him.

“Oh my dears, I should have taken you with me,” she cried, smiling fully and twisting her hands behind her back like a child. “Can you forgive me?”

Of course he could, with a smile like that. We slid into the booth with her and ate as if nothing had happened, her hands moving wildly as she told Duncan about the feelings that had overtaken her, and her plan to return as soon as she had seen the ocean.

We spent the night in a cheap motel. I listened to her steady breathing and his fidgeting, not sleeping a wink.


In the morning, well rested, she carried her paintings to his truck and lay them painstakingly in the back. I climbed into the middle seat and tried to create as many inches of space as I could between myself and the passenger seat. 

It took me a few hours to realize we weren’t travelling back the way we had come. When I did realize, I had to swallow hard to keep the tears at bay. I looked at Duncan in the rear-view mirror, and he smiled back at me. I hoped everything would be okay, for his sake and for mine.

 
It took us two days to make it to the Pacific. We had picked up a tent, and slept outdoors during the nights. It was as close as I had ever come to a real family vacation, and I tried to ignore all of my bad feelings.

“It will be simply beautiful,” my mother told me, and I tried to believe her. I tried to believe that she had felt so terrible about leaving us. She made it easy to believe her, with that wide and welcoming smile, but every time we stopped for gas the smell of the pumps would bring me back to Aretha, and I had to pinch myself to keep from screaming.

Would she have told my father she felt so horrible for leaving, if only he had chased us?

The ocean was wonderful, and I felt bad for having hated it all this time. I dipped my toes in the cool water as I watched my mother peel off her layers of clothing and plunge, naked, into the waves. Duncan sat in the sand watching her. In my innocence, I didn’t realize that part of this was a show for him – she was manipulating him, even as she got exactly what she wanted.

When she came back to the beach, wrapping herself in the sweater she had thrown just out of reach of the water, I could see ideas forming behind her big blue eyes.

“We’ll spend the night,” she said, kneeling in front of Duncan in the sand, “I want to take my baby swimming in the morning – she needs to feel that ocean all around her.”

I smiled, enjoying the fact that she had thought of me, despite myself. As Duncan perched the tent on the sand I hoped he had only agreed to stay because he had seen me smile.

In the morning, as the sun rose, she woke me up with a gentle push.

“It will be so wonderful,” she cooed, as we ran towards the waves. I felt wild. I cursed quietly as the first waves licked my knees. The water was cold, but a part of me wanted so much for her to be proud of me, so I plunged deeper in.

We swam past where I could touch the bottom, with her urging me on. We were both laughing.

Then, the rain drops came. She looked up at the sky and swirled around in the water.

“The paintings!” she screamed, horrified, and began to swim towards the beach. I tried to follow. The waves were too high, the rain pelted my face. Suddenly, she was gone. I was paralyzed with fear. A wave washed over my head and pulled me under.

For a moment, I didn’t realize what was happening. I moved my arms slowly in the water, trying to return to the surface. Then, like a brick had been dropped on my chest, I felt the pressure of the water and the lack of air. I tried to scream into the wall of water, but the sound was pushed back into my lungs.

I wanted desperately to see someone coming to save me, but my eyes squeezed shut so tightly against the pressure. My ears throbbed, even with the complete lack of sound.

It felt like a lifetime. When I felt his hands gripping my arms, I imagined it had to be God. I waited to see the bright lights, and instead I saw the grey of the sky, the churning waves. I was still choking as he dropped me on the sand.

I had never seen Duncan so worn. The sight of him, and the water coming out of my ravaged lungs, brought tears in pools to the corners of my eyes.

I didn’t look for her. I didn’t want her.

He swore at the sand.

I wondered whether he would blame me for her leaving, but I couldn't bare to ask. He wrapped me in the blanket we had been sleeping on only an hour before. It still smelled like her, and I began choking up water again.

We didn’t chase her that day. He carried me to town and got a motel room. I slept for hours, shivering under 3 layers of blankets. Duncan paced the room until it was dark, and then settled in a chair by the door and closed his eyes.

 
The next morning I woke up with the realization that we were never going back to Aurora. She wasn’t going back, and if she would never go back, Duncan certainly wouldn’t.

He was gone from the room, and I thought for a moment that he had left me too. My breath caught in my throat as I sat up in the bed, but he came through the door triumphantly, with a new set of car keys in his hand.

His smile made it easier to breath, for the time being.

 
We chased her for miles and long stretches of highway, always asking people if they had seen her. I grew up in that car, on those highways. Sometimes we found her, in a gas station or on the side of the road.

Sometimes she climbed into the old car we’d picked up, convincing one of us, or both, that things would be different.

Once, we settled down in Santa Fe for six months. She planted a garden and made sculptures from bits of wire. I sat in the library reading books about families that loved each other, about sciences and math. I read great literature, feverishly trying to catch up on so many things I had missed in schools.

Even at 16, I didn't understand how we afforded to stay there, but I hoped it would last. Even when I realized Duncan couldn’t work, and couldn’t sleep, I hoped it would last.

Of course it didn’t. She left again, in a fury of Aretha lyrics, tearing out of the yard like she had been held prisoner.


We stopped at a motel a week later, following a lead from a waitress in Marietta, Georgia. Duncan left me to get the room keys, and when the man at the front desk asked if my mother would be joining us, I told him she was dead.

I saw her one last time, on the night of my 18th birthday. Somehow he had gotten in touch with her, and had told her how much it would mean to me if she just slowed down long enough to watch me blow out some candles.

The last thing I wanted was to see her, after all this time, on a night when I was officially an adult who didn’t have to keep chasing the person who was supposed to protect me.

We sat in the diner below her motel. I was wearing a too-short navy dress that she had given me, wrapped in a wrinkled gift bag. She had pleaded for me to put it on with a look of pure joy.

”It’s gorgeous,” Duncan had said when I came back to the booth.

The waitress brought us three slices of apple pie. Mine had a candle puncturing the crust, burning brightly. I blew it out and wished for some normalcy.

When our plates had been cleaned a smile spread across her face.

”Come up to my room, won’t you?” she murmured sweetly, taking my hand. “My honey is all grown up, we should have a little drink!”

”That’s a brilliant idea,” Duncan chuckled. He so rarely laughed these days, and the lines on his face were obvious under the florescent lights. 

The blankets were in a pile on the floor, topped with her open suitcase. She pulled a bottle of wine from the mess, and three glasses from the bathroom. I sat on the edge of the bed and downed the glass of wine quickly, feeling the warmth through my chest.

I watched the smile on her face widen as she swallowed more of the stuff, and as she watched Duncan sip his own glass of merlot.

My eyes fell to the sheets of the bed, and I rubbed the fabric between my fingers as the minutes crawled into an hour, filled with a second glass, and a third. I heard my mother giggle.

”Heavens,” she said, bolting from her seat, “We need ice - have to go to the machine!”

She left the door open behind her, and I closed my eyes as I heard the roar of her engine pulling from the parking lot. Sitting across from me, Duncan tipped the bottle up to his lips, drinking the rest before going to close the door.

He stood with his hand on the doorknob for the longest seconds. I stood and stumbled over to him, resting my hand on his arm. For a moment I thought that, just maybe, he would turn and see that I had grown into a woman.

For a moment, as he turned, his face moved towards mine and I felt him breath in deeply. I looked at his lips, waiting for them to part into a smile.

Instead, he shook his head, pulling away from me, crossing the room to her suitcase and zipping it.

”Leave it,” I said. He turned to face me, looking lost.

”What am I supposed to do?” he asked.

”Leave her,” I said, and he looked deflated. He sat on the bed and I stood in front of him, feeling the wine churning in my stomach. He reached out to hold my hand.

I woke up in the morning, that navy dress hanging on the door handle. I knew before I rolled over that he had gone. I knew that I was completely alone.

I hated him for having to follow her, and myself for not being able to do it anymore.

I reached for her suitcase and dumped it into the floor, found a CD in the pile and shoved it into the radio. Lying back on the hard mattress, I waited for Aretha Franklin to assail my ears. I let my mind drift back to that night as a child, being carried by my mother from the only home I’ve ever known.

Aretha’s voice began to fill the room, like she knew I was waiting for her to remind me. I felt myself, in her arms, and remembered opening my eyes as we came through the living room, seeing so much blood. I remembered her pulling the blanket over my eyes as we passed him on the floor.

I reached for the radio and threw it at the door.

I pulled a pair of sunglasses from the pile of her things, and pulled the navy dress over my head. I closed the door behind me, and looked into the sun. For the first time in the longest time, I turned back the way we had come. I thought about the apartment in Aurora, the normal life I could live. I wondered for a second where they were headed, but I didn't turn around.

back to Contest #9