2. Ryan
Ryan
Present Day
The window is scratched, a thin oval of clouded acrylic that distorts the world beyond. I press my forehead against it and feel the engines’ vibration through my skull, a dull, constant buzzing that has been with me for eight hours and feels like it might never leave. Below is France.
Fucking France.
This is some crazy shit.
The seatbelt sign dings on and the woman beside me folds her magazine, steeling herself for the descent. The cabin pressure begins to shift, and my ears pop, a hollow click that echoes through the bone behind my eyes.
Three months ago, I was in a motel in Harrisburg with a chain lock that I checked three times before letting myself sleep. The room smelled like cigarette smoke and industrial cleaner, the kind that leaves a chemical burn in your sinuses.
I ate vending-machine dinners sitting on the edge of the bed in the same clothes I’d been wearing for two days, chewing mechanically, watching infomercials for kitchen gadgets I would never own, and falling asleep to the sound of sirens in the distance.
Police never came knocking, and I didn’t see anything on the news, so I assumed Paul was alive.
That was something I had a nightmare about the first night—being taken away to prison for homicide, doomed to a life of incidents with other inmates that I presumed would feel how Paul’s assault felt.
Although I also wasn’t exactly up-to-date with prison-related issues, so I had no clue whether they’d put me in with men or women.
Either way, I knew how I looked. I was bound to become a communal hole, or, best-case scenario, someone stronger’s prison bitch.
After sleeping maybe two hours at most, I’d walked three blocks from the motel to a CVS at eight in the morning. The store had been empty except for a bored teenage cashier and an old woman comparing incontinence pad brands. The fluorescent lights made everyone look sick.
The pharmacist handed me the Plan B box with the same expression she’d use for allergy medication. “Take it as soon as possible,” she said. “Might experience nausea, headache, fatigue.” I nodded, sure she could somehow tell just by glancing at me that I’d been through it all before.
Back in the motel, I sat on the edge of the bed with a bottle of water, swallowed the pill, then set an alarm on my phone for seventy-two hours—the window the pharmacist mentioned, the window during which I was supposed to watch for bleeding or pain or the complete absence of both—and I waited. I didn’t feel anything.
Each morning after, I would trace the bruise on my wrist. His fingers had left five distinct marks that had turned purple, like he’d painted me with his grip.
I pressed my thumb into the center of each fingerprint and watched the color change.
Purple to yellow to a ghost-green that lingered at the edges, then nothing.
The bruise faded, but the ritual remained.
A way to mark time. A way to confirm that my body was still mine, even if it didn’t always feel that way.
I changed my phone number. That was easy. A ten-minute call to the carrier, a new SIM card from a kiosk in the mall. Harder was the restraining order. I wrote three drafts.
The first one was furious. There were pages of it.
I described everything—the broken condoms, the weight on my chest, the lamp, the wetness between my thighs as I ran—in language so raw it made my hands shake to type it.
I didn’t send it. I read it once, then closed the document and opened a new one.
The second draft was more clinical—dates, times, specific incidents cataloged with the precision of someone building a case.
On or around October 12th, the respondent engaged in nonconsensual sexual contact while the petitioner was asleep.
I used the word petitioner like it belonged to someone else.
The document was four paragraphs long and could have been written by a lawyer. I almost sent it.
The third draft was two sentences. I don’t want to see you again. Stay away from me. I deleted all three drafts one night while sitting in the parking lot of a Taco Bell, eating a mushy burrito that tasted like nothing.
I was able to have my mail forwarded to the motel, despite the ever-present fear that Paul would somehow be able to find the address online.
Six weeks in, I received a letter.
A letter from France.
The envelope was thick, cream-colored, with a return address I couldn’t read. Ma?tre Aubert, it said, and below that, a string of French that Google Translate rendered as Notary Public, Saint-Luc-de-Vézian, Hérault. I almost threw it away. What would France want with me?
Convinced it was a scam, but so incredibly bored after weeks in the four crusty walls of my motel room, I opened it.
It spoke of a deceased man named Alberte Legrand and a stone cottage that was supposedly now mine.
I ignored it for a few days, maybe a week, but eventually I decided to email the provided address.
That led to an overseas call with a woman who claimed to work with this Ma?tre Aubert person.
The assistant spoke careful English and explained that Alberte Legrand was my paternal grandfather, that my father had legally changed his surname years before I was born, and that Alberte had died without other heirs, so I was inheriting his property in the south of France.
I wasn’t really too surprised that my deadbeat dad had buried his family history; the man had buried most things, including himself, in a series of bad substances and worse decisions.
He was an abusive piece of shit who hardly even noticed my absence when I was taken in by Paul’s family just before my eighteenth birthday.
What surprised me was that my grandfather had apparently tracked me down and quietly updated the will some years back without ever making contact.
After the call, I was emailed a scan of a death certificate I couldn’t read, a property survey showing a small parcel of land on a hillside with boundaries marked in faded ink, and photos—three of them—taken on what looked like a gray afternoon.
There was a fairly large stone cottage with a red-tiled roof, windows flanking a wooden door, and wild rosemary growing through cracks in the stone path.
I stared at the photos for a long time. Days, actually. The cottage looked abandoned. Lonely. The kind of place that exists in stories about people who disappear.
As time passed and my life continued standing still, I made a decision. Was it a super smart, well-thought-out decision? No. It was a decision made by a person with nothing left to lose and no path forward.
I booked the cheapest transatlantic ticket I could find.
Toulouse, one way. I bought a phrasebook from a used bookstore and a grammar workbook from the dollar bin at Office Depot.
I packed everything I owned into one rolling suitcase—clothes, medication, the phrasebook, the workbook, the printed scans of the cottage photos folded into the front pocket.
The suitcase weighed almost nothing. I had been living out of a duffel bag ever since I left the apartment.
The night before the flight, I sat on the motel bed with the phrasebook open to the chapter on transportation.
Où est l’aéroport ? Combien co?te le billet ?
Je dois changer de train. I practiced the pronunciations under my breath, mouthing the words until they lost their shape.
The grammar workbook lay beside me, its pages half-filled with penciled exercises.
The next morning, I checked out of the motel, wheeled my suitcase across the cracked parking lot, and called a Lyft to the airport. The driver didn’t speak. The roads were empty. Harrisburg slid past the window, gray and featureless, and I didn’t look back.
Now, the plane banks, and the runway appears through the haze.
The landing gear engages with a series of mechanical thuds that travel up through the fuselage and into my spine. The woman beside me gathers her things. The flight attendant makes her final announcement in French, then English, her voice bright and performative.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Toulouse-Blagnac Airport. Local time is 11:47 AM. The outside temperature is 19 degrees Celsius—that’s 66 degrees Fahrenheit for our American friends.
We will be arriving at Gate C12. Please remain seated with your seatbelts fastened until the aircraft has come to a complete stop and the captain has turned off the fasten seatbelt sign. ”
* * *
I wheel my suitcase across the cracked asphalt of the bus station, following the signs for Ligne Régionale with the same dulled focus I’ve been operating on since Harrisburg, and when the driver sees me coming, he gives a single nod that might be acknowledgment or might just be the way his face rests when no one’s talking to him.
The luggage hold is a narrow metal cavity beneath the bus.
I heave my suitcase up and in, and the driver watches without offering help, which I’m grateful for.
Help means conversation, and conversation means French, and I genuinely think I’m too fucking tired to even hold a conversation in English at this point.
The suitcase lands with a hollow thud. I close the hatch and climb the steps.
The interior of the coach is exactly what eight hours of airports and customs have prepared me for—worn upholstery the color of dried blood, and windows clouded with a thin film of grime.
I find a seat near the back, where the smell of diesel is slightly less aggressive, and drop my backpack onto the empty space beside me.
The seatbelt is a lap belt only, frayed at the edges. I fasten it out of habit.
The driver pulls away without ceremony. No announcement, no passenger count. Just the grind of gears, the lurch of acceleration, and then we’re moving, leaving the airport behind in a smear of concrete and rental car lots.