Road Signs by Holly Abbe

Exit Here

My nineteen-year-old daughter leads me up the carpeted stairs. Even in the dim light, I see dog urine stains and try to step over the paisley shapes. As we enter the bedroom, I grasp the cardboard box in my hands, and the rough edge grates against my palms. The room smells foreign to me: bitter coffee, the rank of unwashed body and clothes, and a hint of vanilla cologne. We have one hour before her boyfriend returns home, one hour to pack up her items and leave.

What I know is this: she left her university and has spent a year living in a Peter Pan Neverland nightmare. One girl among five boys. Some things she hinted at in texts and phone calls. Others appeared in posted Instagram pictures of a man’s arms around her, his dead, black eyes staring at the camera without smiling. The night she finally called for help, I bought a ticket and flew out the next day.

As we pack, I try to focus and not let my eyes drift to the empty amber beer bottles next to crushed plastic water bottles, the orange prescription container tipped with blue pills spilled across the nightstand, and the unmade bed with twisted sheets. My daughter opens a drawer, grabs a pile of clothes, and drops them in her suitcase. I see a smear on the mirror—a hand print, I wonder? I catch sight of my reflection: pale but calm, limp brown hair matted from the redeye flight. I look like a stranger, and I don’t bother to smooth my hair. Instead, I tackle the laundry pile on the floor.

I hold up a gray T-shirt. “Yours or his?” I ask, keeping my voice steady.

She glances up. “Mine.”

I work through the underwear; easier to distinguish owners.

I lift a matching pair of white Nike socks. “Yours or his?”

“His.”

I drop the socks back on the pile and grab a blue sweatshirt with a fox graphic. “Yours or his?”

“Mine,” she says.

When did she get this? I wonder as I fold the sweatshirt in half and lay it in the cardboard box. When did I stop knowing her? is the bigger question, the one that plagues me, the one that makes me want to yell and cry at the same time.

We pack all her belongings into her car with the frenzy of a cyclone. I am vaguely aware that I am sweating. My chest and stomach are damp even though the outside temperature is a cool forty degrees. My daughter has wrapped a vintage record player in a gray comforter. She places it in the backseat tenderly, taking time to use the seatbelt to secure it like I had done with her as a child for years. Her longboard squeezes between the cardboard boxes. One wheel spins slowly. A cement buddha head with a chip above the ear—she calls him her “damaged God”—rolls around her feet. My heartbeat quickens as I look at the time on my phone. My fear is unavoidable; it sits with me like a passenger in the car.

I peer over my shoulder as I back out of the parking lot and realize that I recognize only some of the items stuffed in my daughter’s car. Even my daughter, sitting next to me, is barely recognizable, a ghost of her former self.

By the time I merge onto I-15 heading South toward highway 70 and the Colorado border, my daughter has fallen asleep. The Wasatch mountains loom to my left, a wall of giant brown and gray rock with stark white tips. To my right, the land spreads out like a faded, worn quilt, and every few miles a grass-green sign announces an exit. I cannot drive fast enough.

Fuel Next Stop

My daughter still sleeps in the passenger seat, her fist tucked under her chin, the same position she slept in as a child. In my focus to rescue her, only now do I have time to look at her closely. Under her new piercings and tattoos, I see remnants of her child self: her violet eyelids, the three freckles on her cheek, and a curled lock of her hair against her neck. I glance at her arm where a bruise blooms green under her rose and hydrangea tattoo like fingerprint leaves. I have no roadmap to navigate this trauma. In the twelve hours of driving, she has mostly slept, and I have let her.

I pull off the highway to refuel. The gas station store is as vacant as a church on Mondays. The brightly wrapped candy seems to flicker around me like sanctuary candles; the shelves are altars for hungry, weary travelers. I realize I don’t know what my daughter might want to eat, so I select an array. I push two diet cokes, crackers, and a pack of spearmint gum through the plastic shield on the counter to the gas station attendant. She has a halo of white fluffy hair and wears a navy blue uniform vest over a floral patterned sweater.

“Is that it, honey?” she implores, this stranger who speaks to me like a grandmother. Somehow the term of endearment feels so personal, my eyes well instantly. I nod and collect my items, embarrassed.

“Safe travels, honey,” she says gently.

Her words follow me like a pronounced blessing long after the tinkle of the bell from the gas station door stops ringing.

My daughter stirs as I get in the car. She blinks and reaches out with her hand, the hand with another tattoo, this one with the phrase “beautiful soul” in Arabic. I do not read Arabic; neither does she. I only know the words’ meaning because she posted about it on Instagram months ago. The caption said: when I look at my hand I will remember I have a “beautiful soul.” It is a good reminder for me, too. She touches my shoulder, as though making sure I am there and real. I place my hands on hers.

The earth around us whirs by in a kaleidoscope of brown winter fields with pale yellow wheat sheared near the ground, their golden spears withered.

“Who knew clouds could vary so much in a single day?” my daughter muses, looking not at the earth, but at the sky.

It is too early in this journey to hope for signs of healing. It is too early to process judgment of my own grief, guilt, and failure. Instead, I cling to the words of the gas station prophetess and plea for safe travels.

Welcome to Kansas

“Are you still afraid of windmills?” my daughter asks. Sometime in the early morning hours, the evergreen trees of Colorado became less dense until we found ourselves driving through the vast, flat plains of Kansas. The only landmarks in this winter landscape are the giant white windmills. They tower like alien sentinels. Their huge rotor blades are stiff arms scooping the air. I pay attention to how I feel as I look at them.

“Yes, I am,” I laugh. “You know, I actually looked up ‘fear of turbines’ once. It’s a real phobia.”

“No,” she says skeptically, already typing on her phone to google the truthfulness. “Oh my God. It IS a phobia.” She laughs, and it is the most beautiful sound.

“What’s it called?” I ask, trying to prolong this moment.

“Ane..momen..o..phobia,” she reads syllable by syllable. “It’s an irrational fear of wind turbines.”

“I get this mild heart racing reaction when I see them,” I try to explain. “And when I’m surprised by them, like if I’m coming around a corner and suddenly see them, I have a visceral reaction, like a shock.”

“That’s weird mom,” she laughs again.

“Yeah, I know.”

Three days of car travel leads to a voyage of conversation. I have let my daughter guide the topics. I am aware of how we navigate through manageable conversations about music, food, reminiscing childhood moments, Broadway plays. It has felt nourishing to reconnect, and yet, I am well aware we are sticking to safe topics.

“What are you afraid of?” As soon as I say it, I wish I hadn’t.

She turns away from me to look out the window at nothing.

And there it is. The fear. The fear of losing my daughter looms larger than the white spinning turbines. It surpasses anything I could possibly see out of my car window. I have lived with the fear during the months of her silence.

“It’s okay,” I say, fully knowing I am trying to convince both of us.

The moment of laughter remains behind us, like a cigarette butt flicked from a car window. I strain to see the spark of laughter in the rearview mirror, rolling to the edge of the road.

When I look out the windows to my left or right, the landscape nearest the car whizzes by in a blur. But if I lift my gaze to the view ahead, I can fixate on objects long enough to witness them. I am amazed by the details I see. A lace curtain in a window, a pile of red and yellow toy trucks on a front porch, the skeleton of a rusted tractor alone in a field, its wheels half buried in dark soil, the charcoal branches of a tree, a lightning victim, an empty high school stadium, the gray husk of an abandoned barn, a lone cow with shaggy brown hair, and of course, the wind turbines, some spinning and some perfectly still. I find comfort in the mundane, comfort in the passage of miles, comfort in seeing the landscape change.

As we pass towns, I wonder Who lives in these houses? The ones I am passing. What are their lives like? Are there mothers and daughters who know each other? Are there strangers living together and growing apart?

The wheels spin beneath us, two passengers on a journey. My daughter is here beside me, and for now that is enough. We travel mile after mile, thousands of miles with tens of thousands of travelers. If I look straight ahead, where the land meets the sky, the horizon beckons. With all my heart, I listen to the hum of the road and allow the lullaby to sing to me and my daughter.

Image Source: Ken Lund / Flickr Creative Commons