His eyes looked at me without expecting anything. I put my hand on his shoulder in a sisterly way. We went into the living room, and we sat side by side on the sofa without talking for nearly an hour. On the wall hung a calendar with a picture of Jesus leading a flock of sheep, showing the days of the month of November.
Finally I said, my voice close to a whisper, “Where is everyone?” The room was unusually tidy, and the house was silent.
“Dad’s at work,” he said. “Kids are in school. Mom’s upstairs in bed.”
“Why aren’t you at school?”
“I’m looking after things here.” He pushed back his hair, which by now was as long as mine. “I clean. I buy the groceries. I cook.”
I hated the lost look in his eyes. “Are you okay?”
“Did you hear about Ryan?” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “He tried to kill himself last week.”
I hadn’t heard. I couldn’t imagine Ryan doing anything that serious.
“They kept it out of the papers.” Michael rubbed his eyes. “He took pills. Are you reading the blogs? People are saying he killed her.”
“I can’t imagine Ryan doing that.” I noticed reddish welts along Michael’s forearms, as if he’d repeatedly scratched himself.
“I can’t, either. But people say he did it. They say he had the opportunity and the motive. They say he was jealous of her. I never saw that.” He looked in my direction, his eyes vague. “It makes you wonder how much you can ever know anyone.”
There really wasn’t anything left to say. I sat with him for half an hour more, and then, suddenly, I couldn’t stand it a moment longer. “I have to go,” I said.
He looked at me blankly.
“Oh, I read On the Road.” I wondered why I’d said that.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. It was good.” I stood up. “I’m thinking about going on the road myself.”
Actually, I’d never thought of such a thing, except for my vague yearning to see America. But suddenly it seemed like a fine plan, a necessary plan to counter the inertia all around me. I’d do what my father and Dennis hadn’t done — I’d follow my mother’s trail, find out what had happened to her.
Michael walked me to the door. “If you go, be careful.”
We exchanged one last look. His eyes had no feeling left in them. I wondered if he took drugs.
On the walk home I began to reason it out. Why shouldn’t I get away from this place for a while? Why not try to find my mother? I don’t know if it was the weather, or seeing Michael, or the need to burst out of my depression, but I craved change.
My mother had a sister who lived in Savannah. Why not visit her? Maybe she could tell me why my mother had left us. Maybe my mother was still around somewhere, waiting for me to find her.
For all of my education, I didn’t know much about land distances. I could tell you how far Earth is from the sun, but I had no idea how far Saratoga Springs was from Savannah. I’d seen maps, of course, but I didn’t plan to look at them for the best route, or to calculate how many days it would take to travel. I figured I could reach Savannah in two or three days, meet my aunt, and then come back around the time of my father’s return from Baltimore.
The most planning Kerouac had ever done was to make sandwiches to last his journey coast to coast, and even then, most of the sandwiches went rotten. The best way was simply to go, to initiate motion and see where it led.
By the time I reached home, my mind was made up. In my room I packed my new backpack with my wallet, journal, an old pair of jeans, and my new shirts, underwear, and socks. I packed quickly; the room felt claustrophobic to me now. I hated to leave my laptop, but it would add too much weight. As an afterthought I threw in a toothbrush, a bar of soap, my bottles of tonic, and sunscreen, sunglasses, the protein bars, and Michael’s copy of On the Road.
I left Dennis a note: “I’m going away for a few days” was all it said.
In the kitchen pantry I found a piece of cardboard and with a marker wrote one word on it: SOUTH, in letters a foot high. I wasn’t running away, I told myself. I was running toward something.
On the Road South
Chapter Ten
My first stop was the ATM downtown. My father had given me an account for clothing, food, movies, that sort of thing. It had a balance of $220, and I withdrew it all.
I figured it wouldn’t be smart to hitchhike in the center of town, so I took a bus to the outskirts, then walked to the entrance ramp for I-87 South. It was late afternoon, and the sun emerged briefly from gray cloud blankets. I held up my sign, exhilarated to be out in the world, en route to an unknown destination.
My very first ride was lucky: a family in an old Chrysler New Yorker sedan stopped for me. I sat with three children in the wide backseat. One of them offered me cold french fries. The car was big and roomy, and it smelled as if they lived in it.
“Where you headed?” The woman in the front passenger seat turned around and looked me over. One of her front teeth was missing.
I said I was going to visit my aunt in Savannah.
“I-95 gets you right there.” She nodded, as if agreeing with herself. “Well, you can ride with us as far as Florence. We live outside of Columbia.”
“Thank you,” I said. I didn’t know what states those places were in, but I was too proud to ask.
The father, a large man with a tattoo on his right arm, drove without talking. The children kept surprisingly quiet, too. Next to me sat a girl, around six, who said they’d been visiting their cousins in Plattsburgh. I didn’t know where that was, either.
I pressed my face against the cold window and watched the landscape: snow-covered hills, and houses, mostly white, with square unlit windows like lithophanes waiting for inner light to illumine them. As the sky grew darker, I imagined families inside the houses, talking around dining room tables, like the McGs in the old days; I imagined the smells of roast meat and mashed potatoes and the soft sounds of television in the background. I let myself imagine what it might be like to be part of a normal family.
The girl sitting next to me offered me another french fry, and I chewed it slowly, savoring the salt and grease.
“My name is Lily,” she said. She had dark brown hair in tiny braids, with a bead at the end of each braid.
“I’m Ari,” I said. We nodded at each other.
“Want to hold hands?” she said. She slipped her hand into mine. It was small and warm.
As the big car moved through the darkness, Lily and I fell asleep, holding hands.
We stopped twice at highway rest stops for gas and bathroom breaks. When I offered to help pay for gas, they acted as if they didn’t hear me. The mother of the family bought hamburgers and coffee, sodas and more french fries, and she handed me a wrapped burger as if it was my due. Besides my tonic and protein bars, I’d planned on eating only ice cream and apple pie in diners, in honor of Kerouac.
I tried to say no, but she said, “You look hungry. Eat.”
So I had my second taste of meat. At first I thought I’d throw up, but I found that if I chewed each mouthful fast and thoroughly, I could tolerate it. And it didn’t taste bad.
After eating, the family’s father began to sing. After each song, he announced its title, for my sake. “That was ‘I Saw the Light,’” he said. And later, “That was ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky.’” He had a high tenor voice, and the children joined in on the choruses. When he stopped singing, everyone but him went to sleep again.
They stopped on an off-ramp in Florence, South Carolina, early the next morning to let me out, and they seemed genuinely sorry to see me go.
“You take care now,” the woman said. “Watch out for the cops.”
I stepped out into a cold clear morning, the sun rising over a flat maize-colored landscape marked by motels and gas stations. As the car moved away, Lily waved at me frantically through the rear window. I waved back.
I’d never see her again, I thought. My father was right: people are always leaving. They fall in and out of your life like shadows.
It took me more than an hour to get my next ride, which brought me only fifteen miles down I-95. I spent that whole day making slow incremental progress, and I began to realize how lucky the first ride had been. I told myself that every mile might bring me closer to my mother, but the romance of hitchhiking began to fade.
I remembered what the woman had said, and every time I saw a police car I ran into the trees near the road’s shoulder. None of them stopped.
Most of the people who stopped for me drove old-model cars; the SUVs passed me by, as did the trucks. One man driving a tank-like SUV nearly ran me over.
The sky grew dark again, and I waited at an entrance ramp in the middle of nowhere, wondering where I could spend the night. Then a shiny red car (little silver letters on its side read Corvette) stopped for me. When I opened the passenger door, the driver said, “Ain’t you a little young to be out here by yourself?”
He was probably in his early thirties, I thought. He was small and muscular, with a square-jawed face and greasy-looking black hair. He wore aviator sunglasses. I wondered why he wore them at night.
“I’m old enough,” I said. But I hesitated. A voice inside me said, You can choose not to get in.
“You coming or what?” he said.
It was late. I was tired. Though I didn’t like his looks, I got in.
He said he was headed for Asheville. “That work for you?”
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t sure if he’d said Nashville or Asheville. Either destination sounded sufficiently Southern.
He gunned the engine and barreled the car up the ramp onto the highway. He turned up the radio, which played rap music. The word bitch was in every other line. I focused on rubbing my hands. They felt stiff and cold despite my gloves, but I kept them on, for the illusion of warmth.
How long was it before I knew something was wrong? Not very. The route signs said I-26, not I-95, and we were headed west, not south. I’d have to double back to get to Savannah, I realized. At least I wasn’t standing outside in the cold.
The driver held the steering wheel steady with his left hand and rubbed it repeatedly with his right. His fingernails were long and stained. The masseter muscle in his right cheek clenched and unclenched, clenched and unclenched. Once in a while he looked over at me, and I turned my head away, toward the passenger-side window. In the gathering darkness, I couldn’t see much outside. The road stretched ahead, flat and pale, lit only by headlights. Then, gradually at first, it began to climb. My ears popped, and I swallowed hard.
Two hours later, the car swerved and headed down a ramp so fast that I never saw the exit sign.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
He said, “We need to get a bite to eat. I bet you’re hungry, ain’t ya.”
But he turned the car away from the lights of the service station and fast food restaurant, and a mile or so later he turned sharply down a country road.