Portland
Go is what I say. Or think I say. We’re up and frenzied. We grab whatever we can—our wallets and my backpack, two of the smaller photo albums—and bolt. The front door opens. There’s a voice but we don’t stop to listen. We reach the bedroom I broke in through, window still open. I heave myself out. Fall into the slurping lawn that runs behind the duplex. My backpack’s open, so painkillers and wadded tissues and sticks of gum and tampons spill out. I gather what I can, jam that and the photo albums in the backpack.
“Around the corner,” I say to Dean, and we go around the corner. Except when we do we practically run into the Sheriff’s chest. He trips backward and a hand goes to his gun, he’s calling, Stop stop stop. We explode the other way, through the yard toward the gap between a garage and another house. The rain is spitting into my eyelashes. I can’t blink it away, things go blurry. The Sheriff’s hollering behind us. We hear the jingle of those keys. We keep running, but I’m clenched for the shooting to begin. They always shoot at people like us.
But we make it to the gap and out the other side. Noa’s sweatshirt is swimming and sucking on me, too big and getting wet. When we don’t hear the Sheriff, I stop and look back the way we came. He’s far away, running to his car. My hair is starting to drip all over me. My breath smokes in the cold.
“Go,” Dean says, and we do, again. Only I don’t realize he means different ways: when I break across the next street, Dean goes for something kitty-corner, through a yard, and by the time I realize it, he’s already on a fence, scrabbling halfway up and over.
The Sheriff’s car comes hot down the street, lights boiling bright. No sirens, which makes it feel nothing like a movie. It’s real, we’re real. I turn and run my way. There’s a break between two houses and I go for it. Dog growls crack out and roll over me, bounce around the walls on either side, but whatever’s there I can’t see and nothing lunges. I don’t stop. There’s a tire squeal. A metal crunch. It’s all behind me. What I see is in front of me, the wide-open land past the houses.
I’m out. It’s just an empty lot. So much space and air it’s like the world’s taking a breath. Stacks of lumber under blue tarpaulins and little wooden stakes stabbed into the cold dirt, orange ribbons twirling from their ends. I leave the lot and turn onto a new street and run another block and cut through to another yard. There’s no sound at all. I heave in oxygen. My left backpack strap is loose and I yank it down tight on my shoulder.
Right beside me is a set of patio furniture. The sort of thing most of my classmates in San Diego probably own, modern and minimal and violently expensive, right? Like, there are all these plates of gray stone in the ground, making up a walkway that goes from the patio through the lawn to the driveway. In the driveway is an idling car. There’s no one inside the car.
I hear the Sheriff’s siren. Howling now. The part of me that wants to run is grabbed by the part of me that’s smart and it says: You see what you need. Go slow. Act like this is your neighborhood. Like this clean white sedan with butter-leather interior is your car.
And then it is. I pop the driver’s door, slip into the seat, crank the car into reverse. Funny. You think a thing like car theft is something incredible, all complicated screwdriver technique and dark parking lots and hammering pulses, okay? But it’s as easy as flicking a switch.
I back out of the driveway fast and gun the engine down the block, screech the first turn so that I feel all my insides swing. But then I say again: Go slow. This is your neighborhood. You’re on the way to the grocery store. I start looking for Dean. I turn a few more corners, try to see anything I recognize. Easy slow loops across each block. I think I’m generally going toward where we separated. The Sheriff’s siren goes again. Not here, but closer. I keep thinking of how when I saw the police lights and knew they were for me, right? My heart moving the same as the lights, skittering and spinning.
Dean comes out from behind shaggy hedges in front of me. He’s limping with his head down, chest naked and wet where Noa’s raincoat blooms open. One hand is clutched on the waistband of Noa’s sweatpants, which he can only keep halfway up his ass. I pull up close and honk and roll down the passenger window.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
I imagine how it must look. Me, his enraged sister, sleep-starved and food-starved and panicked, rolling up in a white luxury sedan with a 109.5 The Prayer bumper sticker, stinking of floral air freshener. “Get in,” I say.
He’s in the passenger seat and we drive down to the end of the block. This doesn’t feel real. I’m watching a brother and sister try to escape, catching crime, making the wrong choices. But it’s not me, nothing to do with me except to try and tell them no.
“You stole this car?” Dean says. I turn on the windshield wipers. For a second my view is completely clean.
“It was there,” I say, and shrug.
I stop at a sign that says Stop.
“Are you kidding me?” He’s looking around. He says we’ll get arrested for real now, we have to dump the car. But I say no. We’re going to get out of here, the whole state and the whole continent and all of it, everything that started from before that fucking kiss, the climbing and the culvert and every square of earth Van and I ever stood on together, and the sharks and the news and all the parts of Hawai‘i that killed my brother.
I’m still driving.
“We can catch the bus, we can hitchhike. We can walk, even.” Dean’s pinching his nose. “Not this.”
I stop at another intersection. The road we’re on goes long, and down at the end of it you can see a busy street, a row of businesses. Bougie clothing stores with gossamer fabrics and jaunty mannequins, I bet. A six-dollar coffee shop. The avenue and the buildings and the sky all the same shade of gray.
“Go if you want,” I say. “I know the way back.”
Dean’s quiet. He chews his lip and shifts in his seat so we can share a look. Something funny settles in his eyes, right? Scared but then dead calm, almost relaxed. He lunges for me and then darkness and something jamming into my chest and he’s pulling me, his knee cracks my skull, and buckles or knobs jam and scrape over my ribs and hip. Every edge of me is hitting something but my brother keeps pulling, pushing. I’m folded up. His feet and his hands as he’s jamming me under him and crawling into the driver’s seat. I figure my back will hit the passenger door, but it’s just air. Sharp slap of my shoulder on asphalt. Water and light and my backpack pitches out in front of me. I’m out of the car, in the street. By the time I’m able to stand up, Dean’s in the driver’s seat and piloting the thing forward with the passenger door still open. And there’s the Sheriff’s car, coming straight at him with the lights and siren. The Sheriff’s car swerves sideways, screeches to a stop across both lanes. Dean’s blocked.
While I’m standing there another cop car blows past me. The engine yelling. The car filling whatever exit Dean had left behind him. The brake lights go when the officer sees that they’ve got him.