The other road

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my drive home from the office. I had opted that day to take a lazy, slow-paced drive home rather than fume in traffic. Last night, the shortest distance between the point where I was and the one I needed to be was via a different road.

Darker skies, longer lights, a straighter road. Nothing unfamiliar, though nothing preferred. From my office, the road takes me past the courthouse where my sister married her seventh husband. I glance over and remember she married on a Tuesday and was hurt and angry that we would not come and would not allow the children to come. She did not realize, nor would accept, that we were at work and they were in school.

I drive through an intersection and glance across a parking lot to the tiny Mexican restaurant where a woman I worked with said out loud some things she never should have. A lot went down after that night. Accusations, litigation, depositions. Spinning, spinning, spinning. It was a long year, that one.

Down that road is the neighborhood where a friend used to live. Her name was Laura. Her family moved here from New Jersey and we met at the stables where I boarded my pony. Laura and her sister seemed to always have gum in their mouths, and they had fiery tempers the likes I'd never seen before. They turned me onto Bruce Springsteen.

That apartment complex over there is where another friend from those stables lived. She was older than the rest of us, would assist our riding instructor sometimes. I cannot recall her name anymore, and barely recall what she looked like. But I do remember her helping me study for a test and my asking her how to spell maybe and her saying, Think about it. And that moment being my first cringe experience with the obvious.

The reason I'm on this road is my sister. She needs me. Actually she needs money. And cigarettes. And beer. She needs attention and saving and somebody to listen to her. She needs to show me things and tell me things. She needs to yell and cry. She needs. She left seven messages for me in two hour's time. She yells, she cries, she pleads. She calls her children, asks them to call me. They call, she calls. I am on call. Telling her that I'll stop by on my way home from work is not good enough. She wants me to be there now, nothing is more important. Than this, than her need.

An hour later, she sleeps in her chair. I tip-toe out the door, through the gate, quietly click the security latch in place. I should take a right towards home. I take a left. And a left. And a right and a left and a right. I find myself driving onto the street where Mom lives, turning my car around through the drive, turning off my lights. The car idles. Windows rolled down, I stare at the house. I know she's safe inside, tucked in the sheets, sleeping. She's right there.

And I cannot move.

Dark house, dark windows, dark yard. I'm there. She's there. He's there. And her, and him and her. I spy on the present, recall the past. I want to go inside, want to curl up beside her.

Mother. Daughter. Daughter. Three women. One screams, one whispers, one struggles. Three very different women. Three very different roads to their doors. Mine passes through theirs.

I pull out of the street toward home, pass the street where my first friend used to live. We met in pre-school. On a hot day like today, while our parents drank lemonade with a touch of vodka, we sat in her back yard with a bucket filled with a bit of water, picking up the tiniest of baby frogs, delighting in them, dropping them into the bucket. Called inside for lunch, we leave them, returning hours later to find them drowned, dead.

We run from the scene, scramble onto the laps of our mothers, sob our grief as they hold us, continue their conversation, pull loving fingers gently through our hair.

I shake my head at the memory, at the night, reach for the volume knob and turn the music up loud. I roll the windows down and let the warm summer wind blow through my hair and my mind, blow all the ghosts and demands away until there's nothing left but the music. And the road.