1.
The hills around the freeway were a dusty yellow, showing wear from months of drought. Winter rain hadn’t settled in yet, and the last few years had been absent any significant storms.
I was not good at having confrontations, so I was fleeing again.
After you’ve driven through Mojave, California, there isn’t much left in the way of towns as you head north. An airplane graveyard sparks up from the dry brush a few miles out, where pickup trucks with DON’T TREAD ON ME stickers drive fast on narrow roads. The kind of roads that lead into vast desert nothingness, punctuated only by rusted, spray-painted freight trains that roll slowly toward one border or another.
Outside Mojave, red rocks spring up before giving back over to flat, dusty land dotted with wind-worn white crosses jutting out at different mile markers by the road, signifying people who didn’t make it home.
This emptiness, of places long past their boom—mining towns and turn-of-the-century company towns—felt comfortable to me. I looked for burned-out ghost towns next to long-shuttered convenience stores, because I liked to think about the limitations of what someone’s imagination could build out here.
I stopped at one such relic on my drive, enticed by a sign that looked newer than anything else alongside the road, announcing FROG BALLS FOR SALE. The store’s glass doors were grimy and locked, the shelves dusty and half filled with faded boxes of Hamburger Helper and milky-hazed jars of what I could only assume were floating frog balls. This ghost town was not all that different from other roadside stops I had made before—it was just missing a burned-out Cadillac out front. Here, freestanding motel bungalows with broken-down doors lined the two-lane road, evidence of a simpler time. One such bungalow had been converted into a bar with a rotting piano inside, with bottles strewn across tables and yellowed American flags serving as both window dressing and curtains to diffuse the light. It was the kind of place that looked like bad things happened there—both when it was up and running, and now.
“Evelyn was not a mistake.”
I repeated this a few times as I walked through the bungalows. Each time, I changed how I emphasized my name. I tried the sentence as a question, too, wondering if a question mark had ever been considered instead of a period. It was a sentence my husband, Bobby, had written on the third page of his journal. I don’t know why I picked it up and flipped through it, but I wasn’t sorry.
Route 395 along the Eastern Sierras is my favorite drive in California, because it is both desolate and alive with people looking for an exit from their lives. I had done it before—alone and not—a number of times and was always charmed by the seeming lawlessness of this stretch of California. On the open road I never saw highway patrol or police of any kind, and I could drive well over the limit until I hit a speed-trap town, where I’d go from ninety to thirty-five before I reached the first stoplight or a lumbering RV slowing things down as the road narrowed from highway to Main Street every forty miles or so.
I always found someone to pace with on my drive—usually a pickup truck or some other loner to align myself with. I wondered where they were going and made up stories about a soldier just home or a rancher heading to his land. Always men, because men always seemed to be going somewhere alone. The women I saw were part of family units: passengers in SUVs or drivers for packs of sporty children. I didn’t often see women like me—women heading to an unknown destination, alone.
On my drive this time, near the turnoff to a gas station, a motorcyclist entered the highway. I could tell immediately it was a woman, the way her leather jacket clung to her slim frame. She and I drove side by side for miles and I made up stories about her: tried to answer what might be in the small pack she had tied at the back of the bike, what color her hair was under her helmet, if we were close in age or not. And where she was going and if there was anything stopping her from riding away from her life forever.
When cars slowed her down, I let her slide in front of me. On the road, as we paced each other, she became my ideal, the kind of person I wanted to be. And before she turned off to the road that led to Death Valley, she looked at me and nodded. My heart soared at this acknowledgment. I slowed to watch her become a black speck disappearing on the horizon and imagined that one day I would be able to find freedom, too.
My phone rang, and I looked at the console to see Bobby’s name. I considered not picking up, but after three rings I punched Accept.
“Did you see my texts?”
I looked down at my phone and saw I had missed six.
“They’re not coming through for some reason.”
“I don’t know why that keeps happening. You need to get your phone checked.”
“I should.”
“What time are you leaving work?”
“I have to stay late. A few more hours at least,” I said.
“Maybe pick up something for us to eat before you do?”
“Like what—”
“Just get whatever.”
He hung up before I could say anything else. I looked in the rearview. No one was behind me, so I slowed to pull a U-turn and reluctantly headed back to Los Angeles.
Copyright © 2021 by Karolina Waclawiak