Finally, Forever (11 page)

“It’s something else,” I admit. “I’m starting to get why you like traveling so much.”

“Why’s that?” she asks.

“It’s just freeing. Going to a brand new place where no one knows you. You get a fresh start. It’s like you purge your old life and you’re new again. You get to reinvent yourself.”

She nods. “Everyone needs to do it. People get so domesticated.”

“That’s because we’re designed to domesticate,” I point out. “We’re not wild animals. We have this whole evolutionary gap with apes for a reason.”

Dylan
gives me an unbelieving stare. “But maybe we are wild,” she says. “I think deep down, in the oldest part of our reptilian brains, we still have that instinct in us. I think we’re meant to be wild, at least for a while.”

She makes a good point.

“Don’t you ever feel like you’re running away, when you’re leaving all the time, when you never stay in one place for very long?” I ask her.

“No. I’m not running away,” she says. “I’m just on my own path. It’s hard to explain because it’s uncharted. It isn’t paved out and marked with street routes. It’s invisible to everybody
but
me. I think that’s the best part about it.”

I listen to her talk and her words slide into places inside of me. They fill
empty spaces and cracks like caulking fills holes and I’m nodding in agreement.

“Moving to New Mexico was the best thing I ever could have done,” I tell her. “And I get to leave every summer to play baseball. It’s almost too easy.
I feel like I’m cheating. I get to leave all my problems behind, shove them in a closet and forget about them.”

“It gets old though,” she says and finishes her last bite of pancakes.
“And your problems always resurface, no matter how deep you bury them.” I’m surprised to hear this.

“That doesn’t sound like White Fang talk.”

She shrugs. “The last time I was home, I spent a couple of hours just walking around my house. I was enamored with our basement. My parents have a storage room with all these boxes of decorations labeled for every holiday. They’re in neat stacks piled all the way to the ceiling. It made me jealous.” She sets her elbow on the table and rests her chin in her hand. Her eyes turn thoughtful. “I wonder what that would be like,” she says.

My forehead creases. “To have a holiday decoration box?”

She laughs. “To have some consistency. Rituals. Traditions. My only tradition is to be nontraditional.”

I smile and swipe the last smudge of syrup
off my plate with a piece of toast.

“After a while it’s nice to be around people that get you,” she says. “Starting over all
the time, making new friends, it gets exhausting. When nobody knows you it’s hard to even know yourself.”

I read into all the things she’s not saying. Is
Dylan considering settling down?

“Do you think you’ll ever go
back to college?” I ask.

“I went to a class t
his spring,” she tells me. “I was living in Minneapolis, and one of my friends was a student, so I went with her to experience this whole ‘college phenomenon’ everybody talks about.”

“And?” I ask.

“They were all introductory courses,” Dylan says. “Intro to biology or intro to drawing. I watched people study in coffee shops, quizzing each other with note cards, memorizing words that mean nothing to them. Real life isn’t like that. You don’t get ABCD options. You can’t fill in the blanks of your life. It’s maddening if you think about it. Life doesn’t start out easy and eventually get harder. Life asks really hard things of you, right away. That’s what I love about it. Life’s the best teacher.”

“So what are you going to do next?” I ask
.

S
he lifts her shoulders. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”

I try again.

“What’s your final destination?”

She meets my eyes.
She knows what I’m asking.

“
Flagstaff,” she says.

I nod slowly. That’s
all the validation I need. She’s still a drifter, a dreamer, an ambling vagabond. She doesn’t plan five minutes into the future. She can’t follow an outline for her life. She’s only capable of letting it unfold, one scene at a time. Dylan hasn’t changed. I doubt she ever will.

I leave a ten dollar tip on the table and slide out of the booth. I follow
Dylan outside where the sun is already beating down on the black top. Even after a cup of coffee, my eyelids are heavy. I hand her my car keys.

“It’s your shift,” I tell her. When we get in the car, I text my parents to let them know I
survived the tornado apocalypse. I’m surprised Dylan hasn’t texted Snickerdoodle yet. But then I remember Dylan’s attachment to people is out of sight out of mind. Nick might as well get used to it.

PART TWO: THE DETOUR

Gray

I wake up to music pouring through the speakers and the sun is glaring in my eyes like it’s
mad at me for sleeping the morning away. I squint out the window at the farm fields bordering the highway, scorched and brown from the summer sun.

I hear the song
Faith
playing, by George Michael. If Dylan is right, and listening to local radio stations is a cultural experience, then it appears most of America is stuck inside an 80’s time warp.

I twist in the
seat. My neck’s stiff from attempting to sleep and hold my head up at the same time. I blink at the dashboard clock with surprise. It’s already past noon. I look out the front window at a beige highway that seems to never end, just repeat itself over and over with monotony and sun-bleached billboards advertising fast food restaurants and hotel chains. It feels like we’re going nowhere, just circling a wide track of road. I suddenly feel too constrained. My knees are pinned. My legs want to stretch. I stare out at the western horizon and I just want to get to Arizona. I want to put distance between me and Dylan. I want to drop her off and drive away without ever looking back and think, finally, forever, we are DONE.

“Isn’t the open road great?” I hear
Dylan say. “It’s like having wings.”

I turn my neck and wonder if
Dylan is talking to me, or to herself. I watch her take a bite of red licorice, and then use it as a drum stick against the steering wheel to match the acoustic rhythm of the song. She’s nodding her head, singing along to the lyrics. 

I stretch my arms out and
Dylan notices and says, “Hey, look who decided to join us.”

I wrinkle my forehead and wonder what she means by
us
, as if she has an imaginary friend or a split personality. Either scenario wouldn’t completely surprise me. Dylan has always hovered dangerously between being mildly insane and having a full blown personality disorder.

I’m about to ask her this question when I hear a deep, scratchy voice from the backseat say something like, “Yup or Yeah or Yar,” I really can’t make it out. My neck is still stiff so I have to turn my shoulders and I look in the backseat to discover a third passenger. An older man, probably in his sixties
, is making himself at home, eating a bag of popcorn. He smacks his teeth loudly, the teeth he has left, which are stained a purplish-brown. His thin, gray hair shines with grease. The deep wrinkles set into his tan face make his skin resemble a wood carving.

He doesn’t actually place the popcorn in his mouth, he tosses it
in. Half the kernels miss and land either on his black, sleeveless shirt or all over my car seat. The loose, wrinkly folds of skin on his arms jiggle as he throws the popcorn. He nods at me and says either, “Hey or Ha or Har.” I can’t understand him. I do notice he’s missing his two front teeth and probably several more. How does he chew his popcorn? I sense a unique smell permeating through my car that wasn’t there earlier. It has all the subtlety of an overflowing trash dumpster.

I glare at
Dylan and she’s chewing on another piece of licorice and nodding her head to the music like this situation is completely normal. And safe.

“Did I miss something?” I ask.
The song
Jack and Diane
starts up on the radio and Dylan leans forward.

“I love this song,” she says and tries to turn
up the volume, but I catch her hand in mine. She looks over at me.

“There’s a man in my backseat,” I point out, trying to stay calm. I pray that
Dylan has more sense than to pick up a hitchhiker. Hasn’t she ever watched the evening news? More like the evening obituary report? I drop her hand.

“That’s Jim,”
Dylan says as if this should explain everything. “I call him Slim Jim,” she adds.

I glance back at Jim and he coughs and it sounds like he’s upchucked half
a lung into his mouth. He glances around and has the manners not to hock a loogie in my car, so he swallows the mouthful back down. I feel my gag reflex kick in.

“I guess we never went over my car rules,” I explain. “See, I have a strict no hitchhiker, or other possible serial killer policy,” I say to
Dylan.

“Oh, Jim’s not a hitchhiker,” she says. “I met him at the gas station, while you were asleep. He just needs a lift to
New Mexico. He even offered me gas money,” she adds.

“So, he’s a polite hitchhiker?” I ask. I look around the front seat. “Where’s the money?”

She looks at me like I’m rude for asking. “Well, I didn’t accept it. Haven’t you ever heard the saying, ‘Do onto others…?’”

“Have you ever heard of highway safety tips? First being, fasten your seatbelt,” I point out, since she forgot to fasten it. She tugs it over her chest and clicks it in place.

“Gray,” she says and her voice turns all soft and consoling. “His car broke down and he needs to get back to his family tonight. That’s it. You helped me out in Omaha, I’m just passing on the good karma.”

I glance back at Jim and he’s starting to doze off. His chin is resting on his chest. A white kernel of popcorn is stuck in the corner of his mouth.
Low snorts escape his parted lips. He has a dirty black duffel bag on the floor next to his feet.

“He can take a bus,” I say and her eyes narrow.

“You’re being crabby,” she scolds me, like I’m twelve. “You just need some food.”

“Crabby?” I say. “My car smells like a urinal. Just pull over at the next exit we come to, Dylan.”

“Fine.”

Fine. This is Dylan’s verbal cue for saying she’s mad.
She’s
mad? I cross my arms over my chest and strain my eyes out the window looking for an exit, any exit, but we seem to be lost in tumbleweed national park. Then I hear something in the distance. I turn down the stereo and look in the rearview mirror and there’s a police car behind us, coming into view over the hill. Blue and red lights rotate and a siren wails.

“I was not speeding,”
Dylan insists which of course is true. Dylan never drives over fifty-five miles an hour. She’s used to handling such clunky, undependable piece of shit cars, she isn’t aware that you can actually drive fast in a normally operating vehicle.

She slaps a hand against her forehead. “Is this because I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt?” she asks.