Sylvie Coward
It started because I was scared of our tall white van, looming
in the garage like an albatross. You have to be able to share
the driving, Cal said. It was only fair. In the past,
when I’d bit off more than I could chew, I’d make myself
choke it down. But I was tired of striving. I didn’t want
to see Zion National Park anymore. I didn’t want to watch
Winslow roam the amber waves of grain,
I wanted to dump my high school boyfriend
who couldn’t get through a conversation
without “well, actually”-ing me, I wanted
to dump him for the way he ate fries. For how
he mooched off my mom. Every time
he smiled at me with the dimples I once loved
to poke with my pinkie finger, I wanted to tell him
where he could shove it. All of it petty, none of it
enough of a reason to dump him. Except
we were taking a trip I’d once thought of as mine
and he’d gotten his stink all over it. I was over it. I wanted
a summer by the park district pool daydreaming in the sun,
for once responsible to no one. Then I’d remember
how much I was throwing away. So much money, so many
hours planning the trip, hours kitting out the van,
sweat equity, the hours I spent with a table saw
teaching myself to make perfect cuts, it was too much
for me to hit the brakes. I’d become the enemy. No,
it had to be mutually assured destruction. Like:
Cal and I would drive off into the sunset
in this fifty-four-square-foot septic-smelling prison
with a golden retriever who farts when he’s sleeping
and we’d fight about where to go and who had to dump
our sewage water and who should do the cooking and for once
I wouldn’t back down and our whole relationship was contingent
on my backing down—et voilà, a few days on the road
and Cal would end things just the way I wanted him to.
He’d turn us around. Or (this was thrilling) maybe he’d leave me
on the road outside Louisville and I’d have to call my mom for help,
say, You know Cal? The guy you like so much, sometimes I think
he should be your boyfriend? He abandoned me. Cinematic
but painless, no real consequences (after I Ubered to the airport
on my mother’s dime). Either way, I’d make him be the bad guy.
All I had to do was bide my time. But then
it was actually April and we were actually leaving
in one actual month and I was nauseous with dread, all that meanness
inside of me about to spew out as sewage and I thought,
I will give anything to make this feeling stop.
Late evening in my mom’s car, recycling all the reasons
why I needed out, needed out now: Cal’s face every time
I outscored him on an English test, Cal never asking me
if I wanted something to drink when I came over
to his house. Can you believe the pettiness
of this litany?
It was an accident, everyone said,
but that wasn’t what I remembered.
I remembered Cal’s voice crying out for his mom
in the endless maw of time after the impact
and before the paramedics arrived,
too late. My face looming over him
was the last thing he saw. At the funeral,
Cal’s dad took my shoulder to say that
none of this was my fault, and that
no one would ever forgive me.
2.
In the uncomfortable bed in the back of the van
I hold Winslow with my eyes closed. Nothing
has changed. Knox is still here, in arm’s reach,
but it still feels like something is ending,
a way of being that felt endless
until just now.