Getaway Car

By Phoenix Nguyen

 

No, nothing good starts in a getaway car.

The ties were black, and the lies were white; in shades of grey in candlelight. I hated it. I hated how we were. I hate that I was chasing make-belief status. I knew you tried to change the ending, but alas, Peter still lost Wendy. You never saw it coming, so I too blinded myself.

‘Tis was another fine evening in June. The chill of the northerly wind having given away in the late afternoon to a lovely warm stillness and clarity in the air. Far different from the atmosphere inside the car, far different from the cages and chains in my throat trapping those fierce claps from bursting my heart open, fluttering words up my throat, throwing up the butterflies that were pacing my mind since forever.

Wise men say love is a rebellious bird, coming and going, passing by unbeknownst to us. If such is true, then I ought to be the wintriest place for any bird, for I have never experienced the flame that is true love.

Seemed to have noticed the absence of my mind for a long while, dear Shearlie made it known. His deep yet meandering lilt voice connected me back to the moment, like I’d pressed my fingers against an electrical outlet; the shock of it pushed me back into some higher awareness. “Honey, are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, in an effort to hide a prick of annoyance when the shock had worn away. “I feel perfectly fine.” A smile was well-fabricated. I felt like my teeth could fall off any second. I hope he couldn’t sense the insincerity that I let out by mistake.

The car was silent for a moment, but his arms still stretched out, pulling me into a cold, or I’m supposed to say, heart-warming embrace. Leaning onto those broad shoulders, his fingers ran so gently through my hair. It was a habit. It was a small gesture of intimacy he had done for so long, almost like an inside joke, a brief moment of comfort at dinner parties and weddings.

“I love you,” he said. It was abrupt, a bodily lurch of words. I looked at him as if I hadn’t known it was going to come out until it did. We had said it so many times before, so often it meant nothing at all, but this was the first time he said it and surprised me.

“I love you too,” I finally replied. It felt strange to say this aloud, although I thought I knew the fact of it to be true.

Now, he realized too slowly that I was asking him to not bother me. “You should get some rest,” he said like it was an option, “you must be tired by now.”

I didn’t respond, but my eyes did. It closed. Like sinking ships, as the night sky and the water had disappeared, and as the horizon washed out into an endless ink of blue. I felt a brief, earth-shattering exhaustion, a desire to fall asleep and never wake up, to sink into the land of dreams, the land where all things started, the start of our fairytale.

***

Eileen was my best friend, and had been for about a decade by the time I slept with her husband. For his part, he had known me longer than anyone else in the neighborhood. He was the first person I met when me and my parents moved to the neighborhood, the first person to welcome us. Really, it’s impossible to isolate a single photograph of my family that doesn’t include Shearlie somewhere in the frame.

Yet, Shearlie always said he couldn’t believe how long it took for me to realize that he was in love with me, but that’s not true. I knew from the very first moment we met. I’d been mature for my age for as long as I could remember being called mature for my age. The world had always revealed itself to me in brushstrokes of breathtaking simplicity.

I remembered sitting on the grass outside our house. My parents were unpacking inside the house, and I was bored, and I saw this man walking towards our house, and I saw an opportunity.

A snakebite, I told him. I pointed at an ingrown hair on my kneecap, and to my complete surprise, he took me seriously.

I told him to suck the poison out, and in a way he did: by the time his fingers touched my skin, I felt whole, as if I’d previously been a mirage and had now been willed into dimension by him alone.

I watched him draw a wobbly star around the blemish.

Trouble, I thought suddenly.

Almost instantly, I was struck by the permanence of what had happened. I felt, even then as a child, that I might never be the same. And so, I made up some excuse to run away from him and sprint back into the safety of my home.

As for Shearlie, he was hardly subtle about his affection for me as the years went on. He witnessed me fall for Jean, married Ed, and got pregnant with Christopher. That’s when “Mrs. Shears” finally came around. She was there. But she was just there. Entangled in our love affairs. Her existence was like nothing to him. I felt bad for her. I did. So, we ran away together. So that everyone could be free.

***

Ed was a coward.

Those were the words that had set ideas for me to hurtle across the country, but they were hardly the first offense.

Things had been crumbling by that point. Our defense systems were poorly suited for one another. Each additional fight made me kinder, more submissive, desperate to defer, and each additional fight made Ed sharper, more angled. When he spoke, he spoke to kill. So, I did what every human would do. I ran.

Maybe the only thing we’d ever had left in common was circumstance, he said on that last day. “Maybe we’ve been trying to build something up out of nothing. A house,” he added, latching onto the only metaphor within reach. “We’ve been trying to scrape together a house with all of the wrong materials, and it just won’t hold.”

It was meant to be something reasonable, the only argument that could get us both off the hook before it all became truly irreparable, and instead I had stepped back like something abused and said, “I think you’re a coward.”

He didn’t know that I had other plans. We had. Shearlie and I had. Months before that fateful day, Shearlie kissed me. He kissed me and said words that touched my heart. He showed me a sign it was time for me to choose better. So, I stood on the tips of my toes, leaving the faintest trace of myself on his lips. “Life is messy with me, Shearlie. I choose chaos. I want darkness. I want sunshine and rainstorms. But now I want escape.”

“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for this?”