by Sienna Blake
"You tell her," Michael said, eyes sparkling.
"No, you tell her."
My chest was swelling with that old happiness, the kind that came from an open road, a tattered map and a roaring engine. I felt like I was nineteen again. Michael and I went back and forth like this, like teenagers each insisting “no, you tell her” before Zara grew tired of it.
"Tell me what!"
Michael nodded at me and I held Zara's pouting cheeks in my hands.
"We're going on a road trip to Albuquerque and we're going to see as many national parks along the way as we can," I told her.
These words must have been unbelievable to her, because Zara stared at me like I told her we were going to the moon.
"Go pack!" I said, shooing her off the couch.
"We're really going?" she asked, standing in front of Michael and me.
She looked from me to him with the same kind of hesitancy I saw in Michael: she wanted to believe and yet she was the only thing keeping herself from doing so.
My only answer to her was, "We leave in fifteen minutes so you better hurry."
Zara's eyes widened and burst into light like the sun emerging from behind the clouds. She darted off to her room without another word.
"We better hurry ourselves," I said, grinning at Michael.
But when I went to stand, he grabbed my wrist and pulled me back on top of him. I fell against his chest. He guided my lips to his with his hand at the nape of my neck. He kissed me fiercely, his mouth as hot as the desert sun.
"What was that for?" I whispered when he pulled back to smile at me.
"A thank you," he said.
Our fifteen-minute packing spree was full of nothing but chaos and laughter and stolen kisses between Michael and me. I peeked in on Zara to find her duffel bag filled with library books and a compass.
"You're supposed to pack M&Ms and underwear," I told her, happily shaking my head.
In the kitchen Michael was emptying cabinets into a cooler. I ducked under his arm as he reached for a top shelf and rifled through what he'd packed.
"You have sugar, toasted sesame oil, and chia seeds," I told him.
He frowned down into the cooler and then knocked a jar of peanut butter in before grinning at me.
"There," he said, "that should make something, right?"
I laughed and stretched up onto my tiptoes to kiss him. He tasted like that first whiff of salty air on a long drive to the beach; you couldn't see the white crests or the glimmering horizon, but you could taste the excitement like taffy melting on your tongue.
"Whatever it makes will be perfect," I said, cupping the back of his neck.
We awoke half the apartment complex hurling half-packed duffel bags and deflated pool floaties and armfuls of bath towels and the top half of a large umbrella minus the pole and floppy hats and hiking boots and a cabinet worth of near-empty bottles of sunscreen into a pile. Michael helped Zara unpin the big map of the American southwest from above her bed and she slipped the rolled-up poster on top.
I brewed up a bitter pot of black coffee to hastily pour into to-go mugs while Michael and Zara sat on the bottom steps of the concrete staircase outside, passing back and forth a bag of Skittles and plotting our journey. We loaded everything up into my shitty beat-up car with the radio blasting and the windows rolled down, and we peeled out of the parking lot like Bonnie and Clyde and Zara the Kid.
Michael took the first shift driving. As we hit the highway he stuck his arm out the window and howled like a rabid wolf. I glanced back in the rearview mirror to watch with surprise as Zara did the same. I couldn't be the only one left out so I stuck my arm out the window and howled at the top of my lungs as Michael accelerated into the night like a pirate on a black sea. The wind rushed past my fingers like icy water and my hand rose and fell like it was flying. Zara giggled from the back seat, and I wasn't sure any of the natural wonders we were destined to see would compare with that sound: happy and carefree and loved.
After driving for several hours, I offered to take over when we pulled over for gas at a middle-of-nowhere station with nothing but an outhouse and two pumps, one of which wasn't working. Zara's chin was starting to nod heavily toward her chest as she struggled to keep reading her book on the Grand Canyon by the light of Michael's Blackberry. Michael went to sit in the back with her, and the sound of the gravel crunching under the tyres as I drove out of the gas station awoke a distant part of me that kept me awake for hours.
The low drone of the car and the twangy whine of the country radio was the only sound for the next few hours. Dawn painted a long pale-yellow line that seemed like a reflection in a black pool of the yellow line disappearing beneath my tyres. I smiled as I pushed the car just a little faster; it didn't really matter where we were going. It just felt good to go.
I looked in the rearview mirror not because I needed to check for cars behind me; I hadn't seen another car for quite a while on the country road that weaved its way to and fro. I looked in the rearview mirror because I liked the way Michael and Zara looked dozing together like two kittens.
Zara's head rested on Michael's shoulder and Michael's cheek rested against the top of Zara's head in a perfect little puzzle. Zara's book lay open between their two laps and the breeze from my cracked window fluttered the pages so it sounded like hundreds of tiny white butterflies flitted around them.
It looked magical, the two of them asleep together in the back seat of my car. It was what I dared not even hope for when I called Michael way back when I found out I was pregnant. It was the dream that I chased away from my pillow, because it was too perfect, too happy, too together. I'd only ever known lives to fall apart, not weave themselves back together.
It was like the tears my mother used to get in her pantyhose. Once it started to run that's all it did was run…run…run…
I dragged my eyes away from Michael and Zara and gripped the steering wheel a little more tightly as my palms began to sweat.
On the windshield, as the last remnants of night stretched before me, I could almost imagine drops of rain hitting the glass. I could almost see the long trails they streaked against the pane. I could almost hear the pitter-patter over the wind in my ears.
I forced my eyes to the back to reassure myself Michael was still there, because the memory of the morning I woke up to him gone was threatening to take over my mind: the rain, the cold sheets, the lingering hope dying like a snuffed-out candle.
I wanted to believe Michael was different. I wanted to believe that he cared for Zara, that he cared for me. I wanted to believe the beautiful little dream in the back seat of my car might not run away with the fast-approaching dawn.
But Michael had run before. There was a tear, not a small one. No, certainly not a small one. I wasn't sure his feelings for me could stop something as inevitable as a snag in pantyhose running…running…running…
Michael
I groaned as someone woke me with urgent fingers on my knees, and for a bleary moment I was back in Glendalough, crammed into the back seat of that rickety old bus. There was the same crick in my neck, the same blurry sense of disorientation, the same dry, woolly feeling in my mouth. A golden ray of sunlight pierced through my eyelids no matter how tightly I squeezed them shut. My knees were wedged against scratchy old fabric and I was all contorted up like a doll shoved into a box. I didn't know where I was and I didn't want to know—I just wanted to sleep.
Just like in the mountains, the persistent prodding came again only a second later. I imagined the old grouchy bus driver nudging at me with his muddy size-thirteen boot, and I knew he'd tell me to get the fuck off his bus any second now. But I grinned in my half-asleep state because that meant any second now Abbi would hurry onto the bus with cheap gas station sunglasses and two shots of Poitín. I'd squint against the dazzling light that haloed her sunflower hair and she'd smile down at me, because with her wild desert magic, she already knew we were linked forever.
"Wake up, wake u
p, wake up!"
With my eyes still closed, I frowned slightly. The voice I heard was sweet like the smell of pollen in spring, not hard and gritty like gravel. It certainly didn't sound like the voice of an old, irritated bus driver.
I peeked open an eye and regretted it as early morning sunlight stabbed at me.
"Ugh," I groaned.
But it wasn't a piercing headache I was suffering from, it was an upset stomach. The threads of my memory started to come undone and I was dragged away from the bus in the mountains. Shielding my eyes this time, I dared to pry one open to find the empty bag of Skittles lying in my lap. Small hands pressed insistently at my tucked-in shins, and I sat up enough to see Zara waking me.
"Would you get up already?" she said, bouncing eagerly just outside the open back door of Abbi's car. "You're missing it."
I rubbed at my tired, puffy eyes and smiled at my daughter. It was like she and the gentle morning breeze were playing a game: Zara would tuck her blonde hair behind her ear and the wind would tug it free. Zara huffed impatiently as another strand came loose. I knew that impatience, that uncontrollable energy, that need to move and move fast and far: it was her mother. It was Abbi.
I wanted to see more of it in my daughter, who had appeared from the start a carbon copy of myself. Abbi was the better half of the two of us; she was the rush rapids over my stony, dark rocks. Without her I would be lifeless, I would be barren, I would be unmoving.
"Did you hear me?" Zara whined, sounding more and more like her mother by the second. "You're missing it."
I sat up fully and tried to spy through the windshield, but the reflection of the morning light created a blinding rectangle of liquid gold.
"Missing what?" I asked, trying to push down the cowlick at the back of my head. "Where are we?"
"Just come on," Zara said, grabbing my hand.
I stumbled more than climbed out of the car, and before I was even to my feet, Zara was hurrying me along. I found my footing but lost my breath entirely when I saw what lay before me: we were at the Grand Canyon, and Abbi stood silhouetted against a sky of blooming cactus flowers.
My feet moved one in front of the other after Zara as if in a trance. I wasn't conscious of moving, I wasn't conscious of stepping forward. All I was conscious of was the sky growing higher and higher and higher and chasms growing deeper and deeper and deeper.
Zara and I came to a stop next to Abbi at the railing and we stood in a row of silence as profound as the silence I imagined in space. My breath came in shuddering exhales as I drank in the absolute majesty before me.
Everything I'd done in my life before that very moment was intended to make myself bigger. I earned promotion after promotion so I could walk into a boardroom as a giant among men. I moulded and sculpted a reputation for myself so that I was so tall, so high above everyone else, that people's voices came to me only as hushed, frightened whispers. I puffed up my chest like a goddamn rooster with the confidence of Rolex watches and a Maserati and private yachts. I would be big, bigger, biggest.
And yet, whether or not I was ever really willing to admit it to myself, all of that only made me feel small. My wealth, my career, my office were a balloon I inflated day after day, because the truth was if I didn't, it would fall and shrivel into almost nothing. It was a façade and it was exhausting. It was a lie and it was lonely. It was a hoax and I was the goddamn sucker who had to pay the price.
But something strange struck me as Abbi and Zara and I watched sun rise over the Grand Canyon: I'd never felt smaller. And in being dwarfed, I'd never felt more filled.
The very universe itself seemed to rise and fall before me in shades of vibrant pink and deep lavender. I'd pretended to stand tall amongst steel skyscrapers, but I could not fool myself at the brink of those ancient rocky cliffs. I was small and that was the truth. I was small and insignificant and I would be but the blink of an eye compared to this natural wonder. The reality of this was unavoidable, and for once I didn’t want to avoid it.
I wanted the wildfire in the sky to burn higher and the wishing wells of the canyon to run deeper and I wanted to feel smaller and smaller and smaller still.
Because I was there with Abbi and I was there with Zara and they were enough. They were more than enough.
And with them there, I was enough.
I suddenly saw the last few years of my life not as a titan of the executive world or a modern-day boardroom conqueror, but as a child, a small, naïve child. I'd been dipping my hands into a well and, cupping my hands together, running toward where the silhouette of my father, small and unmoving, stood on a distant hill. But the faster I tried to reach him, the quicker the water sloshed over my thumbs and seeped through my fingers. Again and again my hands were emptied long before I reached the darkened outline of my father on that far-off hill. I would run back to the well and think that the answer was to dip my hands in deeper, holding more. But I never reached him. I never reached him. And I was left with nothing but empty hands held out like a beggar.
But with Abbi and Zara on either side of me and the Grand Canyon before me, I didn't have to reach down into any well. I didn't have to run. My hands, my heart, were filled with more healing waters than I knew what to do with. I did nothing to earn it. I simply received.
I sucked in a ragged breath. Abbi slipped her fingers between mine. I looked over at her and found her eyes sparkling with a faint mist of tears. I frowned. She smiled and laughed and shook her head.
"I'm just tired from driving," she said, waving her other hand to dismiss her wet eyes.
I wondered when she'd started to do that, to hide her emotions, push them away, as if they were dirty clothes to shove under the bed. I remembered when she not only wore her emotions on her sleeve like a badge, but weaved them into the very fibre of her being. I remembered when she practically burst with emotion, bold and unafraid. I remembered when the flames of her passion and anger and joy and love threatened to burn down anything and everything in sight.
I wondered if it was because of me that she laughed it off and blinked her eyes dry. I wondered if it was because of the hurt I'd caused her when she'd put so much on the line that she'd retreated into herself.
I let the swell of emotion in my heart bring tears to my eyes. I was crying for the pain I caused Abbi, the pain I caused my daughter. I was crying for the second chance I was getting with them. I was crying for my father. I was crying for the absence of him in my life. I was crying for the fact that it mattered to me, despite desperately wanting otherwise. I was crying for the emptiness of the last decade, the loneliness, the exhaustion, the pointlessness. I was crying for the sunrise. For the warmth of Abbi's hand in mine and the sparkling green eyes next to me looking out on a world of amazing possibilities.
I squeezed Abbi's fingers and whispered, "Hey."
Abbi turned her face to look up at mine. I could see her surprise at the emotion welling in my eyes, as complex and multi-faceted as diamonds.
"It's beautiful," I said.
Abbi, who had clearly still been struggling to hold back her tears, nodded with a choked sob. It was with a sigh of relief that the first tear streaked down her rosy cheek beneath the rosy sky. It was as if she'd been waiting for permission and I'd just unknowingly given it. It was as if she'd been waiting at a locked door and I'd handed her the key. The dam had been cracking and moaning beneath the strain and I'd given her not rolls of duct tape, but a sledge hammer.
With a sniffle, Abbi turned her face back toward the canyon and rested her head against my arm, which she held tightly. I smiled as I felt the heat of her tears through my t-shirt. We stood there long enough for her to soak my sleeve, long enough for it to dry and long enough that I was certain I never wanted her fingers to leave mine.
Abbi
The next two days of our impromptu road trip slipped by too fast. With each passing moment of laughter, sunshine and toes wiggling out the window along some tumbleweed-lined highway, I was more and more afraid to breathe.
The time with Michael and my daughter, happy and giggling, was like a dandelion ready to flutter away at the smallest of contented sighs.
After exploring the Grand Canyon for a few hours, we headed back north across state lines in Utah and found ourselves at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The three of us tumbled out of the car, messied with candy wrappers and tags from gas station sunglasses and cheap, touristy caps, and wandered in awed silence between the towering red stone formations, like a city unto itself. That night we ate at a roadside attraction called Hole N" The Rock, which was, quite literally, a hole in the rock. The food was greasy and slopping off our plates when the harried waitress flung them down. But we lapped up every trace of gravy with buttery biscuits and ordered three whopping scoops of chocolate ice cream each.
After sleeping in the first motel with a vacancy we rumbled past, we awoke early, wolfed down sugary bowls of Lucky Charms from the motel's continental breakfast, and drove the short distance over to Moab and Arches National Park.
"They look like the eyes of giants," Zara whispered as she stood between Michael and me, staring at the massive arches of stone overlooking vast stretches of other-worldly red desert.
She was being opened to a whole new world. Not just one of natural beauty and the wonders of the world outside her home in Denver. But to a world where there were two parents in her life, a world where they were happy and present and together. A world where she was safe to stretch outside her shell, to take bold steps forward, to be daring and brave.
I'd worked so hard to keep her safe, to keep her sheltered, to hide anything negative from her, including my own fears and scars. But this trip had opened her eyes to what she'd been missing: life and love. I just hoped it wouldn't all be ripped away from her with the definitive thunder of a book of fairy tales being slammed shut.
At Arches we hiked and drove along the scenic trail and munched on trail mix Zara and Michael put together from our gas station raid, which consisted of ninety percent M&Ms, five percent peanuts, and five percent leftover Skittles.
