Chapter 5 #2
I was not ready. But I was leaving, and I needed to know what my body would do without the medication that had kept everything quiet and controlled since the accident. I stopped taking them two weeks before my departure date. Vera watched me with worried eyes but did not ask, and I did not offer.
The heat hit on a Tuesday morning, five days after I stopped.
I woke up with my skin too sensitive and my heart rate elevated and the particular ache that meant my body was demanding something I could not give it.
I lay in bed for an hour, breathing carefully.
It was lonely and it was hard and it was exactly what I had known it would be.
I did not call anyone. There was no one to call.
I handled it alone in Vera's guest room, the beige walls and the floral smell and the drawer with the red clip still sealed inside. I built a nest from the spare pillows, the thin blankets and Pop's flannel from the wardrobe. I lay in it and waited for the hours to pass, but It was not sufficient.
It was not right.
But it was what I had, and I survived it, the same way I had survived everything else.
When it was over I packed the nest away before Vera could see it and stood in the shower until the water ran cold.
I told myself it was the last time. The last heat I would spend alone in a borrowed room, in a place that smelled of someone else's fabric softener, with materials that were not mine.
The day before I left, I packed.
It was a quiet day. Vera made pancakes in the morning and set them on the table without small talk.
I ate them and thanked her and she nodded, refilled my coffee and did not try to make it into anything larger than what it was.
Trent was gone, which felt like the specific kind of relief that comes when you realize you had been bracing for something without knowing it.
The list of what was coming with me was shorter than I expected.
Nana's recipe journals, wrapped in cloth, going in first. The spiral notebook Claire had given me in the hospital, filled now with my own handwriting, medical terms and dates and the word in its box.
Pop's guitar in its case, the secondhand acoustic he had cleaned up and restrung himself when I was fourteen.
The good knife. The cast iron pan I had bought in March and used almost every day since.
The small accumulation of things that had become the practice of cooking: a wooden spoon worn smooth on one side, a thermometer for bread.
At the bottom of the nightstand drawer, still in its plastic hospital bag, still sealed, the red poinsettia clip.
I held it for a moment without opening it.
I had not opened it since the hospital. I put it in the inner pocket of the bag, where it would be safe, where I would know exactly where it was, and I zipped the pocket closed.
I stood in the guest room that evening and looked at the bed with its beige coverlet and the nightstand with its empty drawer. I felt something loosen in my chest that I had not known was tight.
I was leaving this room.
I was leaving Maren.
I was leaving the story that had been written about me here, the damaged Omega the Steele Pack didn't want, the tragedy people told at dinner parties, the sad case. I did not know what I was walking into, but I knew that I could not stay in the place where that was all I was ever going to be.
I left on a Friday morning in early May.
Vera walked me to the car. She had wanted to come with me, to drive me wherever I was going and make sure I arrived.
I had said no and she had accepted it with the particular set to her jaw that meant she was trying to respect something she didn't entirely understand.
We stood beside the car with my bag already in the boot, the morning sun already warm on our faces, the street around us quiet.
She reached out and took my hand, her grip tight and brief and then gone.
"You'll call," she said. Her voice had that careful quality, level and controlled, the one she used when she was managing something that wanted to be larger than she was allowing it.
It was not a question. It was not quite a demand either. Something in between.
"I'll call," I said. I meant it. I squeezed her hand once before letting go.
"And if you need anything..." She stopped, her jaw tightening, her eyes going bright.
"I know." I picked up the bag and settled the strap on my shoulder, felt the familiar weight of the journals inside it. "Thank you, Vera. For everything. For trying."
Her eyes went bright in earnest then, the tears she would not let fall, and she nodded once, sharply before she stepped back.
I got in the car. I did not look back as I drove away, because looking back would make it harder and I had used up all my hardness on the months that had come before this morning.
I drove north first, then east when the north road felt wrong, through towns that were not Maren and past fields still finding their green at the edges.
The radio played something I was not listening to.
The car smelled of coffee from the travel mug in the cupholder and the old wood of the guitar case and the cloth around the journals and something faintly like cedar, Pop's flannel still at the bottom of the bag.
I did not have a destination. That was the truest thing about the day.
Just away, and the road, and the morning light on the streets as I just kept driving.
I had the inheritance and the journals and Pop's guitar and the cast iron pan and the clip in its sealed bag and whatever was left of the person I had been before December twenty-second.
It was enough to drive on….It was going to have to be.