Night Drive

‘I’m going out west,’ she said, ‘I’m going back home.’ She had signed the note with her initials and sealed it without a kiss, and he knew that he shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. She was beautiful and flighty and lived to drive him crazy and make his heart ache. He loved her more than he knew what to do sometimes and he knew that, in her own way, she loved him as well.

He waited for a few days, and, when he hadn’t heard anything from her, he gave her a call. She was completely swamped with moving, she said, laughing at her own ineptitude and disorganized nature. She had misplaced her phone in a box of towels, unable to locate it until he called. He smiled and chided her for her forgetfulness and said what she wanted to hear. As he placed the phone back on the table, he blinked and inhaled, smelling the lingering traces of her perfume that had steeped into his furniture and rooms and life, after so many years. It smelled of tea and roses and it made his head spin, just as it always had. It was surreal, a small voice said. He felt as if he could only just close his eyes and she would be standing right there again when he opened them.

She was, truth be told, a West Coast child at heart, with her sunglasses and sandals and little coloured dresses. The fact that she had stayed with him in his cold, grey home so long was a miracle, really. Or perhaps it was a testament to her childlike spontaneity, driven by sudden and wild enthusiasm and never any planning. After all, her sole reliance was in her ability to keep moving. After all, she had traveled the country on a whim.

In the years he had known her, she acted like a migratory bird – school and life on one coast, home and family on the other. While it only took six hours for her to fly home, the prospect of sitting still in a long box while someone else whisked her away made her screech. Instead, each summer began with the long and tedious process of filling the car with music, bottles, and blankets and setting off across the country. She would drive sporadically, veering north to visit an old girlfriend and cutting south to avoid an ex-lover. She had her favourite roads, of course, having driven them “a hundred times, I feel, darling.” Once, before school and work and life had gotten in the way, she made the trek at least twice a year, and could still, if she tried, make the trip in less than two days. (When she first told him this, he shut his eyes and tried not to think of her wrapped around a tree in the middle of nowhere. He had never been much of a fast driver himself.) He had started coming with her, three years’ past, and had even driven a leg or two, something, she swore, she had never let anyone else do, not even her mother. Guess you’re special, she said, tossing her hair as she did when she was teasing him (which was often), and smiling.

Once she had left, life was simpler for him. Without her whirlwinding around him, he slowly fell into a routine of normalcy. His buddies at work had slapped him on the back when he finally told them and told him it was a crying shame, letting a looker like that go. He nodded and someone made a joke, and while he laughed, his mind wasn’t in the pub across from the office, but across the country, standing next to her on rocky beach.

It wasn’t until the fall came (‘What was that sound?’ she had asked, the first time they had parked under an oak tree and the wind came along. ‘Acorns falling,’ he had replied, and she giggled as the car was bombarded by a second wind) that he finally realized that he had, as he always dreaded, lost something special within himself when he had lost her. He had woken in the middle of the night, shaken from a dream filled with laughter, the crashing of waves, and her eyes lit by streetlights. Not fully certain if he was still dreaming, he crawled out of bed and into his car, driving until he reached the coast. He spent the night sitting on the beach and watching the sand, sea, and sky until the sun finally rose. It was something she would have done.

Before he could come to his senses, he was packed and on the road. The states slipped by without a notice – coast turned into valley, east bleed into mid-west, trees and hills changed to grass and plains.

Driving through the middle of Nebraska, sometime before midnight, a small rest stop caught his eye. He pulled over. As soon as the headlights were off, he looked up at the night sky. Stars, the brightest he had seen in years, stretched out over him. For this first time in almost a year, he felt like he had finally woken from the half-sleep he had fallen into once she had left his life. He looked around the empty space around him, recalling from the edge of his memory how, almost two years ago at this point, they had stopped in an almost identical lot. (She had pulled out her packet of kreteks and stuck her tongue out at him when he made a face at her. As much as he hated cigarette smoke, he still associated the soft smell of cloves with the sight of her, standing outside in the middle of the night, puffing away.) The mid-fall chill crept on to his skin as he sat on the hood of his car. Turning away from the sky and the stars, he reached for his thermos (of tea, which he had never drunk before she came into his life, really) and made one silent wish on the stars above before bundling up back into the car and heading westwards.

The first sign of mountains off in the distance raised his spirits (his hope, his heart as small voice whispered) – he could never really understand why she loved the huge open ranges of the middle states or how she could drive for miles and miles without getting bored (or perhaps he was just happy that he was one step closer to the coast). Once he reached the mountains, Wyoming seemed to flow into Utah, then Nevada, then California, Rockies into Sierra Nevada into Central Valley, mile after mile.

When she had first left, she had written to him sporadically, telling him about her new house, new job, new life. He had written back dutifully (though he had nothing new to say), and had taken to starting writing letters even when he hasn’t heard from her, though he could never bring himself to send them. On the last day of his trek, he pulled out her final letter, received a month before. At the bottom, next to her large scrawl of a name, she had written a small postscript – ‘I’ve got a spare room ever since my old roomie hooked back up with her ex – I’d certainly love the company. You know the address if you ever feel like it. J’ At every stop light and gas station, he would read those few sentences again. He hoped that the offer still stood.

As he pulled off the highway for the final time, visions of her crept into his mind. He saw her as he navigated the streets; she was standing on the corners he drove past. He found her house (‘It’s the only red one on the block! I love it. I’m planning on planting a garden since the last renters left it in such a mess…’) and blinked several times, for he couldn’t quite believe that it was indeed her in her front lawn. He stepped out of the car and slowly started walking towards her. She turned at the sound of the door shutting and waved when she saw him – long hair, light dress, bare feet in the warm California fall. Before he could realize what had happened, she had thrown her arms around him. He looked down at the smiling woman in his arms (he felt like she hadn’t changed a bit, despite the new colour in her hair and the different glasses she had on) and felt the days, months, years slip away from since he last saw her. He could only think one thing. “I love you more after all this time.”