We stopped for gas just past Toledo. It was freezing outside and not much warmer in the bathroom, where my reflection in the mirror was clouded by a long exhale. That girl looked like me, moved like me, and somehow didn’t seem to be me at all.
At the pump, Mom was listening to the slow, steady glug, glug of gasoline.
“How much longer?”
“Maybe another hour, especially if I can keep going eighty.”
I leaned up against the side of the Volvo and watched the numbers roll, the dollars increasing much faster than the gallons. This was getting to be quite the expensive trip my family was taking, I thought—especially when you factored in a new transmission and all the unseen costs of whatever my dad was about to do.
Mom leaned back next to me, both of us ignoring the mud splattered against the side of the car. She looked exhausted, like an older, less healthy version of the person who had been standing in her driveway to greet me just two days ago. I wondered who we would be by the end of this trip, if either of us would even resemble ourselves.
“You want me to drive?” I asked.
Mom snorted.
“Don’t say I didn’t offer,” I told her, relieved.
She put an arm around me. I held back at first, then rolled my head to the side so I could rest against her. Somewhere in this state, my dad was driving around with a gun, looking for the man who’d killed my brother. For just a moment I thought I would be okay if we stayed right here, at a gas station off the Ohio Turnpike with Mom’s arm around my shoulders.
“I missed you,” she said.
“I missed you, too.”
“Just the little things, you know? Even the stupid stuff, the day-to-day things. I miss seeing you every day. Hearing your funny observations. Laughing at your jokes.”
“I tell very few jokes,” I said shakily. I was in a fragile place. Instead of a flesh and blood heart pounding away in my chest, it felt as if I had nothing more substantial than one of those construction paper hearts that kids make on Valentine’s Day. One false move, and my little red heart might rip right down the middle.
Mom laughed an in-spite-of-herself laugh. Like, nothing is really funny right now, but I’m going to cling to this one tiny moment.
I tried to make my voice sound normal, although I was on the verge of crazy blubbering. “But when you think about it, we probably talked more than most mothers and daughters who live in the same house. If I had a joke to tell, you probably heard it.”
“I know. And I loved our talks. I loved hearing your voice, your wit...but of course, it wasn’t enough. And I always felt like we were holding back, like you weren’t telling me all the bad things, and I wasn’t telling you how lonely I was, because we both wanted the other person to be happy.”
I didn’t say anything, because she was absolutely right. I’d babbled on every week about dumb stuff, about what Dad and I had made for dinner, about having to study for a test, about the competition on one reality show or another. I basically spent the week gathering these little scraps of information so I would have something to fill the silence, the void that was created by all the things we wouldn’t say. Somehow, in the middle of all that talking, I never told her about losing friendships and being lonely, about failing P.E., about how awful it was to lose my virginity to a stranger on someone’s bathroom floor.
“Now, no crying,” Mom told me, using the sleeve of her fleece sweatshirt to dab at my eyes. And then she dabbed at her own, which were sparkly with tears. We smiled at each other madly for a moment, and then Mom replaced the gas pump with a clunk, and we got back into the car.
When this nightmare with Dad was over, I promised myself, I would tell her everything I’d left out, every single thing.
And then maybe, maybe, things would be all right.