5. Andy
Andy
The wine-red polish on my nails catches the dashboard light every time I adjust my grip. Nails I got done this morning for a dinner that didn't happen, in a life that doesn't exist anymore.
My cuticles are perfect. My marriage is over. The disconnect makes my head feel floaty, like I'm watching someone else's hands navigate the steering wheel while I hover somewhere above the car, looking down at this woman in a black dress driving north through the dark.
The radio died somewhere past Bakersfield.
I must have turned it off, but I don't remember doing it.
Music felt wrong. Silence is easier than trying to find something that matches the inside of my head, which sounds like white noise and the hum of tires on asphalt and the question that's been looping since I got on the highway: is this actually happening?
This morning feels like it happened to someone else.
My eyes burn. My back aches from sitting in the same position for too long.
The kind of tiredness that goes past sleepy into something deeper, something that lives in my bones.
I drove this route in reverse five years ago, heading toward LA with everything I owned stuffed into the back of my Honda Civic.
I was leaving home for the first time, and not for a show, terrified and excited and in love with a man who taped audition sides to our bathroom mirror and kissed me goodbye every morning like he might not come back.
The highway looked different in daylight. Hopeful. Like I was driving toward something instead of away from everything.
Now the dark stretches between cities feel endless. No streetlights, just the cone of my headlights cutting through black air and the occasional truck rumbling past in the opposite direction.
The geography changes gradually — flat valley giving way to rolling hills, then the foothills starting to rise on either side. The air feels different here, thinner and cooler, carrying the smell of grass and oak trees instead of exhaust and ocean salt.
My throat is dry. I should stop for water, but the idea of getting out of the car feels impossible.
Like breaking the spell that's keeping me moving forward.
If I stop, if I stand under fluorescent lights in a gas station bathroom and look at myself in the mirror, I might have to accept that this is real.
The exits start looking familiar. Names on green highway signs that I haven't seen in months but that still feel like coming home. Visalia. Porterville. Each one closer to Copper Falls, closer to the life I used to have before I started disappearing to make room for someone else's dreams.
Mile marker 247. Mile marker 248. The numbers count up like a timer running out, or maybe running toward something. I can't tell the difference anymore.
My hands shake against the wheel. Not a tremble — actual shaking, like my body finally caught up to what my brain has been processing.
Since I saw those photos and that video and felt something inside me crack clean through.
The shaking makes the steering feel loose, unstable, but I keep driving because what else is there to do?
Pull over and call who? Go back to what?
The Copper Falls exit appears in my headlights like a promise I forgot I'd made to myself.
Population 4,847, established 1952, elevation 1,200 feet.
The same sign that's been there since I was a kid, the paint faded but the letters still clear enough to read.
I take the exit without thinking, muscle memory guiding the car down the off-ramp and onto Main Street.
The town is dark and quiet. Not the empty quiet of the LA house — the natural quiet of a small town asleep.
Porch lights dot the residential streets like breadcrumbs. The ice cream shop where I worked summers in high school is closed, metal chairs stacked on tables visible through the window.
The library, the post office, the diner with the neon sign that flickers on the second E in "Eats." Everything exactly the same, like Copper Falls exists outside of time while the rest of the world changes around it.
I turn onto Maple Street without thinking about it, following a path my car could drive with its eyes closed.
Past the Hendersons' house with the garden gnomes, past the Yamadas' place with the cherry tree that blooms pink every spring, past Mrs. Chen's yard where she still hangs laundry on a clothesline even though she's eighty-three and owns a perfectly good dryer.
The house looks the same. Of course it does — my parents' house has looked the same since I was twelve and Dad repainted the shutters blue because Mom read an article about curb appeal.
The porch light is on, the one that's been broken since my junior year, flickering in that uneven rhythm I used to fall asleep to. I park in the same spot where I used to park my first car, the Civic with the dent in the passenger door from when I backed into the mailbox learning to parallel park.
It hits me that I'm twenty-eight years old, my husband is with another woman, and I'm sitting in my parents' driveway at midnight like I'm coming home from a bad prom.
The engine ticks as it cools. My heart pounds against my ribs, fast and irregular, like it's trying to catch up to where I am.
My hands won't stop shaking. The house sits in front of me, solid and real and exactly the way I left it, and something about its unchanged-ness makes everything feel surreal.
Like I'm having a breakdown in someone else's life.
I take a breath. Another one. Slip into my heels and get out of the car.
The night air is cool against my skin, carrying the smell of jasmine from Mom's garden and the eucalyptus trees that line the back fence.
My heels click against the concrete driveway — why did I put them back on?
— and I kick them off, leaving them by the car.
The concrete is cold under my bare feet.
I walk to the porch on unsteady legs, my dress wrinkled from hours in the car, my makeup probably destroyed from crying earlier. Earlier feels like a different century. I haven't even raised my hand to knock when the front door swings open.
Mom stands in the doorway in her bathrobe, the blue one with the flowers that she's had since I was in middle school. Her hair is messy like she's been running her hands through it, and there are tears in her eyes — not fresh tears, but the kind that have been there for hours, waiting.
She doesn't ask what happened. Doesn't ask if I'm okay, because she can see I'm not, and she's never been the kind of mother who makes you explain your pain before she's willing to hold you through it.
"Oh honey, come here."
That's all she says, and something inside me that's been clenched tight since six o'clock — or maybe since long before that, maybe since the first time I watched my husband kiss another woman and told myself it was just acting — lets go.
I fall into her the way I used to when I was small enough to be picked up, when scraped knees and hurt feelings could be fixed with a hug and a cookie. She can't fix this with a cookie. But the hug still works.
The tears come differently this time. Not the angry, broken sobbing from earlier, but something deeper.
Relief, maybe. The kind of crying that happens when you've been holding it together and someone finally says you don't have to anymore.
When someone opens their arms and catches you and doesn't ask you to explain why you're falling.
I bury my face in her shoulder, in the soft fabric of her robe that smells like lavender detergent and the vanilla lotion she's used since I was little. She strokes my hair, murmuring the wordless sounds mothers make when their children are hurt, and I cry like I'm five years old again.
"I've got you," she whispers. "I've got you, baby."
Dad appears behind her, filling the doorway with his broad shoulders and his steady presence.
He doesn't say anything — he never needs to — just wraps his arms around both of us, Mom and me, creating a circle of safety on the front porch.
His arms are solid and warm, the same arms that taught me to ride a bike and carried me to bed when I fell asleep on the couch during movie nights.
I cry harder, not because it hurts more but because being held by both of them makes me feel small in the way I need to feel small right now. Not diminished. Protected. Like I'm their daughter first, before I'm anyone's wife, before I'm anyone's disappointment.
The porch light flickers above us, throwing uneven shadows across the wooden boards.
A car passes on the street, its headlights sweeping across the yard before disappearing around the corner.
The night moves around us while we stand there, the three of us holding each other the way we used to when I was young enough to believe my parents could fix anything.
Eventually the tears slow, then stop. Not because I'm fine — because my body is empty. Wrung out. Mom pulls back to look at my face, her thumbs brushing mascara streaks from my cheeks.
"Let's get you inside," she says softly.
Dad closes the door behind us. The house wraps around me like a blanket, familiar and warm and smelling like whatever Mom was baking earlier — probably the oatmeal cookies she makes when she's worried about something.
The living room looks exactly the same. Dad's recliner in the corner, the coffee table with water rings from years of forgotten glasses, the bookshelf crammed with paperback romances and Dad's collection of woodworking magazines.
I stand in the middle of it all, still in my wrinkled black dress, mascara on Mom's robe, and try to process where I am.
This morning I woke up in a house where the kitchen island seats six and no one ever sits at it. Tonight I'm standing in my childhood home past midnight, my life packed into a suitcase in the trunk of my car.
This isn't the life I imagined when I was eighteen and planning my future in this same living room, sprawled on the carpet with college brochures and audition schedules spread around me like possibilities.
But standing here, held by the two people who have never once made me feel like I needed to be smaller or quieter or less than I am, I know one thing clearly: this is not the end.
I don't know what comes next. Don't have a plan or a timeline or any idea what my life looks like tomorrow or next week or next month. The future is a blank space that feels too big to contemplate right now.
But I am going to rebuild. Somehow, someday, I'm going to build a life that feels like mine again. A life where I don't wait in empty houses for men who don't come home. Where I don't swallow my words or shrink my laughter or perform gratitude for things I never wanted.
I don't know how. I don't know when. I just know that I will, no matter what it takes, because the alternative — going back to being someone who disappears a little more each day — isn't an option anymore.
Mom guides me toward the kitchen table, the same one where I've sat through every important moment of my life.
The vow forms quietly in my chest, not with fanfare or determination but with the stubborn certainty of someone who's too tired to quit.
Standing in this kitchen where I learned to scramble eggs and did homework at the table and called my best friend to talk about boys, I make a promise to myself that I don't say out loud.
This is not the end. No matter what it takes, I will rebuild.
Mom touches my arm. "Come on, sweetheart. Let's get you some tea."
I follow her, Dad's steady presence behind us, and for the first time in hours — maybe in years — I breathe all the way down to my toes.