Emmett laughed and didn’t bother to hide it from Nancy. “Oh, come on, you loved the note. Did you get The City of Lost Children reference? I put it in there for you. Plus ten points to you if you did.”
“I hated that movie.”
“Lies,” Emmett cooed. “Big sis loves her some dark sci-fi and fantasy films, and she loves me more for exposing her to the best of them.”
The two met when he was an outcast freshman and she a bored senior searching for a pet project. He became as much a fixture in her senior year as her makeup or smart phone—Emmett Brennan, the cute and lanky younger brother she’d never had. Two weeks after graduation she married a wealthy, hulking mass of a man named Gerry—a successful litigator who spent most of his time working in Dallas and who liked Emmett even less than Emmett liked him. Yet Nancy kept in contact, Emmett the welcome distraction for the young woman who already had everything.
When the latest nameless, faceless foster parent had died weeks ago—a woman Emmett was as unlikely to remember as she was to distinguish him from the dozen or so kids she already tended—Nancy had offered to take him in. Since then she’d spent long hours trying to guide him along the predictable path to the comfortable, if monotonous, life. School. Career. Marriage. Home. Fulfillment. She introduced him to her girlfriends, played hostess to double date nights everyone but Emmett seemed to know about. And though some girls had shown initial interest, the consensus was that, while intelligent and attractively aloof, Emmett Brennan could not be pinned down. Something else—or someone—called to him.
“What you’re doing is crazy. I don’t know what movie you think you’re getting this idea from—”
“Thelma & Louise meets Return to Oz seems about right—” Emmett offered.
“—but you are turning that car around and coming back here.”
“Yeah. Not so much. Not happening.”
She went silent. Emmett had to look away from the road to his phone to see if she’d disconnected or paused for dramatic effect. He saw she was still on the line, the picture attached to her contact information displayed still on his phone: Nancy and Emmett’s zombified faces from last Halloween’s horror marathon.
“Emmett, I’m going to assume that because of your age and inexperience you don’t know when you’ve pushed a woman to her limit. So let me just tell you: you have pushed me to my limit!”
Traffic slammed to a vocal stop. Emmett strained against his seatbelt as he hit his own brakes an almost-half-second too late. Horns blared from angry motorists delayed to their destination. He appreciated the appropriateness of the moment.
“Okay, okay, enough with the character-defining banter! You want me to come back, but a couple more weeks won’t make any difference. I’m not happy, Nancy. With any of it. The pre-planned life, the college courses, the environmentally responsible, pat-me-on-the-back-for-using-reusable-grocery-bags life. I get that it works for you, and I’m happy for you! But I need something different. Something … I don’t know … something intrinsically … alien.”
“Then watch Star Wars!”
He sighed and shook his head. Nancy knew him well, and yet she didn’t know him at all. She continued admonishing him as he half-tuned her out, thankful even more now that he’d left before she awoke. She was warning him of being broke and stuck in the backwoods of some rundown trailer park, unable to find work, and trading on the generosity of people who would let a skinny, almost-eighteen year old stay in their home seemingly rent-free.
Emmett turned the phone’s volume down, permitting himself a moment’s reprieve. He breathed deeply, purposefully, and looked eastward at the dawn. Blinking, listless hazel eyes once again met the slow-rising sun ahead. He pushed his tousled, floppy black hair out of his face and tucked it back under his signature Donnie Darko hoodie. He pulled a pair of sunglasses from his glove compartment as the wide yawn of an insomniac racked his entire body.
He tried to shake off the miasma of post-sleep somnolence still clouding his mind. He’d slept terribly the night before his planned escape. It was always terrible, unfulfilling sleep, frustrating and featuring the same recurring dream: a dream about a painting and a woman. The dream painting was always Belshazzar’s Feast, with the disembodied hand pointing at the words written in the air above the king’s head. The woman, too, was always the same—an unknown, amber-eyed woman who danced with serpents.
With Nancy still lecturing, he took a sip from his morning hot chocolate—his signature drink no matter how many kids mocked him for it—released a tired yawn, and willed his half-lidded eyes to respond to the sugar.
Emmett turned his volume back up as he yawned again. Her maternal instinct overrode her sermon on the dangers young people, apparently, weren’t prepared for out in the wide world. “I heard that yawn. Did you even get enough sleep to do this?”
“‘When you have insomnia, you’re never really asleep,’” Emmett quoted, “‘and you’re never really awake.’ Fight Club. So much truth. But yes, Nancy, you needn’t fear. By sugar and courage I drive forth into a new sunrise, with enough lens flare to make J. J. Abrams jealous.”
“I have no idea what that means,” she said.
“It means I’m wide-awake and so excited I could run to Florida,” Emmett answered. “And YouTube the lens flare bit after I’m gone. Totally worth it. Just have sunglasses on so you aren’t blinded.”
“Em, that car won’t make it to Florida.”
He hated “Em.” She knew it, and she said it when she had use for it. Nancy’s older-sister role-playing usually meant he had to tolerate her sometimes-condescending comments. She cared; it was her way of caring. Though it grated on him, it was the closest thing an orphan who’d grown up in a dozen different foster homes had ever known.
The sea of red lights ahead winked out and traffic resumed forward en masse.
“A broken-down car is a road-trip movie staple, Nancy. And it’s exactly what I need. Get thrown headfirst into adventure. Find allies in my quest. Learn something about myself and grow. I’m not going to get my hero’s journey started in that condo of yours. So, Act One begins out here on the open road, Ridley Scott style.”
“Let me see if I understand you. Because that’s what you want from me, isn’t it? To understand?” Emmett could picture her on the phone: arms crossed, nearly a foot shorter than him, pacing the hallway in front of Gerry’s trophy case. It was the posture she took just before making what she felt was a logical and eloquent argument.
“Sure. Shoot away.”
“You’re leaving Houston, just getting into your car—a car so old it probably wouldn’t make the drive—without a job or any money, and driving to Florida—a state you’ve never been to—with little money and no job or ability to get a job other than your high school diploma that isn’t worth much, to find a birth mother you’ve never known and who’s dead now, anyway, all because of Ridley Scott?”
This was the part when she raised an eyebrow, expectant of the imminent triumph. Too bad her logic always fell on deaf ears. Goes-with-his-gut ears.
“Hey! Ridley Scott can do no wrong. Well, maybe one recent wrong, but that wasn’t his fault. He didn’t write the screenplay.”
Signs indicated the interstate was two miles ahead. Emmett checked over his shoulder and moved into the far-right lane as he heard Nancy’s resigned sigh over the phone.
“I give up. You go ahead and leave because of a chick flick. And then you wonder why people gossiped about you in school.”
Emmett rolled his eyes, irritated more that she’d call Thelma & Louise a chick flick than the fact that she was making a dig on his masculinity.
“Some guys want the damsel. I’ll take Ellen Ripley. That Power Loader mech suit is so much sex.”
“I’ll buy you one then if you’ll just stay through your eighteenth birthday. After New Year’s you can head out. It can’t be that bad here.”
Traffic was thinning, Emmett increasing speed expectantly. He was close, and soon it would be an en
ding and beginning at the same time.
“Didn’t you ever know that you didn’t belong somewhere, Nancy? That you just needed to get away and try something different? Even if just to prove to yourself that you were fine right where you were in the first place?”
She went silent. Expecting she was preparing another counter-argument, another reason not to leave, Emmett was surprised by the quiet whisper that instead came through the phone.
“I never had to, Emmett. I got married,” she whispered, and in her hushed tones permitted herself the momentary vulnerability she secreted away even from her husband—the vulnerability that, in rare, quiet moments when she thought no one was watching her, would lead her to look out the window at the people exploring life and long, too, for freedom.
He said nothing, for nothing else needed to be said. On some level, Emmett knew Nancy finally got it—more than just accepting, that she finally understood. Emmett was his own man. And he was leaving.
“So,” she said finally, her tone curt and matter-of-fact. “How long’s your drive?”
“I should get to Ormond Beach by tomorrow.” The only thing Emmett had learned of his mother was that she was from that Floridian seaside town overlooking the gray Atlantic. It wasn’t much information, but it was somewhere to start.
“Promise you’ll call when you find what you’re looking for.”
He took a deep breath, willing the winter chill to steel his resolve. He would find a job. He could live in his car until he had the money to get his own place. Anything was better than what he had, floundering through purposeless days thirsting for some measure of truth in an otherwise unremarkable life.
“It wouldn’t be an epilogue if I didn’t,” he answered, hanging up.
He checked the rearview mirror and saw the glass towers behind him silently awaiting his acknowledgement that he did not have the courage to leave. He pictured Nancy waving at him from the corner outside one of those towers, standing in the shadow of her comfortable, careful life, where the routine was exciting and the ordinary was comforting.
Emmett’s foot reacted; the itching desperation to escape something that almost imprisoned him was quick to flare. He allowed one final moment’s consideration for the commonplace life he was rejecting. Could he quench his desire for the exotic and the bizarre in the stylized suburban supermarkets and kitchen table fundraisers that subsumed Nancy’s life?
Emmett released a heavy, deep breath of purpose. He needed to believe that life could be untamed, unbound from schedules. Life had to be about more than just existing. It had to be about living.
Edging forward in the congestion each time he saw a sign for the interstate, he had to constantly remind himself to slow down.
Five exits away.
His phone sounded from an incoming text from Nancy: Not going to see u again?
Three exits away.
Emmett did not respond. Only words on a screen, Emmett understood their underlying message. They were not accusatory but rather as a statement of fact, as if Nancy were finally accepting what she had not wanted to believe. And she was right. He had no intention of returning to Houston again. It was not his home.
The only place home exists is in your head, he quoted to himself. Dark City had it right.
Again, he fought the urge to push the car forward in traffic, feeling as if the city’s skyscrapers were poised to reach from the heavens and bar his exit. He pictured the constructs of metal and glass wrapping their beams about his car, both embracing and strangling him all in one motion.
One exit away.
He was ready to leave it all behind in search of the adventure awaiting those seeking its fickle attentions. When he finally banked off onto Interstate 10 East, he jolted the car forward eagerly, reverently thankful to bleed the neon from his eyes as he sped toward the promise of an unknown, strange new day.
I’m ready. Let’s do this.
CHAPTER 3
Morning soon became afternoon, and a sticky twilight descended over the Gulf Coast. Hours passed as the interstate proceeded southeast from the glass-topped skyline of Houston before turning north through the bustling port of Beaumont. Plumes of white smoke funneled up from massive refineries along the water’s edge. Emmett felt his head lighten as he crossed a high, steel-framed bridge in Orange that led to Vinton. He focused his eyes straight ahead until he reached the other side. Perhaps it was his usual fear of heights or maybe it was a sense of foreboding as he left Texas behind, but whatever the cause, Emmett wiped his hands and urged the car forward with mixed anticipation and disquiet.
Seeing the sign welcoming him to Louisiana, he kissed his index finger and rapped his hand against the dashboard. “One down. Three to go.”
Hundreds of miles of low-lying marshes escorted him on his journey. Navigating the knotted overpasses of Baton Rouge, Emmett bypassed New Orleans on Interstate 12 and took the shortcut toward Hammond and on to Slidell. The sun seemed to set almost as an afterthought along the horizon as he passed Gulfport and began to see highway markers for Pensacola, the first hint of his destination.
As the darkness heralded twilight, Emmett shook his head and stymied the first of several rolling yawns; his eyes felt as if they had swallowed too much light, but they finally adjusted to the approaching dusk.
The interstate grew sparse and unlit as he reached the Florida Panhandle. Void of landmarks or roadside diversions, mile markers ceased counting down. The fatigue of the previous weeks coupled with his usual insomnia finally caught up to him, and Emmett began to wonder if he could safely finish the long drive.
He considered stopping to sleep. The yawning had grown altogether irritating, as if reminding him that he had erred and not thoroughly planned the drive. He had researched it thoroughly, of course, ensuring that the roads he would take were all public and not under construction. He had budgeted enough money for gas and food, but an unplanned motel charge simply wasn’t an option. Emmett resolved to finish the drive, somehow, on sugar and the promise of a sunrise over poetic unknown roads not yet traveled.
He rolled the radio knob searching for George Noory, finding only static-laden hissing in the deep wilderness. It was the perfect late-night hour for radio: conversations about monster hunters, wielders of dark magic, and people who dream of the future.
Without the radio to distract a mind that did not readily quiet on its own and his phone’s battery long since drained, he tried having a conversation with himself but felt absurd for doing so. He quickly found himself passing the time by cataloguing the different rattles coming from the old car. It was all an effort to keep his mind occupied long enough to delay thoughts of money, job-seeking, and apartment-finding. When he was certain that he had nothing else to do but think on these things, he looked down and was oddly relieved to find the gas gauge’s slightly shaking needle holding steady below E.
“Fail at math, Emmett,” he said aloud.
Yet he felt thankful for something to focus his attention. The last interstate gas sign was at least twenty miles behind him. With so little gas left and the next major city, DeFuniak Springs, nearly forty miles away, Emmett decided it was prudent to pull off the interstate at the next exit.
When he reached the exit ramp, he shifted gears and coasted in neutral to save what little gas remained in the tank. The county road leading to the gas station quickly wound away from the highway and snaked deeper into the thick tree line. A sign marked the edge of Blackwater River State Forest, a vast stretch of feral wilderness that filled a huge swath of the northern Panhandle on Emmett’s printed directions.
A small opening in a copse of towering evergreens revealed a makeshift gravel driveway that led down a slight incline to a rundown gas station; its sign along the road was unlit but the station windows still showed interior lights. Allowing inertia to carry the car the remainder of the way, he slowly pulled up to the only pump, idling for a moment before turning off the car. The gas pump sat under a handwritten sign: “CASH ONLY—PAY INSIDE.” He pul
led his hoodie over his head and, drawing its strings snug, braced for the brisk winter chill.
Emmett opened the car and stepped outside. He shook the fatigue from his limbs and stretched his legs to the sound of aching creaks, rolled his head from side to side with an exaggerated moan, and forced the previous five hundred and ninety miles to shudder free from his limbs.
Then he looked around. He felt, for the first time since leaving Houston, complete isolation. Stepping out into Blackwater River State Forest’s edge, the boy raised by concrete and steel felt suddenly able to breathe. Freedom tasted of silence, expansive space, and undisturbed pine. Emmett could not remember feeling drawn to nature before, and yet finally alone within it, he felt like he had finally returned home.
Soon, he had promised himself when leaving Houston for the unknown. For this. And though he was not quite yet there, he was here now.
“So … when will soon be now?” he whispered to the night.
When no answer was returned, Emmett grinned and focused his attention on getting gas. Looking toward the gas station, Emmett saw that the store’s interior lights were flickering on and off through heavily fogged windows.
He finished with the gas and stepped over a gravel embankment opposite the gas pump to walk the twenty or so paces to the store. The light inside still flashed off and on as he drew closer and reached for the door. Then he stopped.
The night’s still silence was penetrated by an abrupt, loud snapping somewhere off in the distance beyond the tree line. The sound rebounded throughout the surrounding forest before dying away.
Probably an alligator. Or a bear. Does Florida even have bears? he joked to himself. But he wasn’t laughing.
He blinked and looked around the clearing. As far as he could see in either direction there were no other cars, no other people anywhere near him. Then Emmett recognized how alone he was out in the middle of nowhere, though the thought did not comfort him as it had just moments earlier.
The Waking Dreamer Page 3
