I had to get off the highway.
There was no way for me to see if something was in the road ahead. And with wind like this, trees could be down anywhere.
I searched the darkness, looking for the right place.
Not the well-lit chain gas station. Or the convenience store across the street. Places that, in a past life, would have looked like safe havens to me. But now, all I saw was all the ways I could be spotted.
I drove further down until I came across a sprawling abandoned building. So long abandoned, in fact, that an actual tree had burst through the roof—swaying in the wind.
The chances of video cameras on a building in that much disrepair seemed slim to none.
Just in case, though, I turned off my lights before turning into the lot, wincing as the car hit the curb, then climbed it before slamming back down again.
“Almost there.”
I wasn’t sure if I was talking to myself or the chocolate brown toy poodle sitting in the passenger seat with her tight purple anxiety shirt on under her harness.
Her little body was trembling as I pulled behind the back of the building, letting the engine idle so the window didn’t fog up. To be fair, she shook relatively often. But her whole body was vibrating when I unclipped her safety belt and pulled her into my arms.
We were quite a pair, the two of us.
“I know. It’s been a rough couple of days, huh?” I asked, burying my face in Edith’s soft, powder-scented fur.
The urge to cry was almost overwhelming, the stinging at the backs of my eyes requiring a lot of blinking to fight off.
I needed to at leasttrynot to let my emotions get the better of me. It was more important than ever to attempt to keep myself calm.
Even if my whole world just went off its axis and had been spinning ever since.
“I’m sorry we had to do this,” I told the dog that had been the sole reason I kept chugging along the past several years.
Because even on the days when the hopelessness of my life made me think that there was no reason to force my weary limbs to climb out from underneath the fort of blankets piled on top of me, Edith’s soft little whimpers to go outside or be fed were theonly things to force me to be vertical. Even if it was just for an hour.
Sometimes, the act of caring for her reminded me to eat and drink and shower as well. Others, at least I had a buddy to curl up with me under the blankets and sleep the day away.
While taking her with me created a whole new complication that had required a lot of preparation, there was no way to leave her behind.
Edith gave my cheek a quick lick before letting out one of her dramatic huffs.
“I’d offer to take you out to go potty, but you and I both know you’d rather gnaw off your own foot than go out in that.”
To that, she sniffed, wiggling until I let her down onto my lap. She curled up in a circle, tucking her head in tight against me, and drifting off to sleep.
She hated the car.
Which was something I never could have known until I shoved her into one with me and hit the gas. She hated the faces in the cars that passed. Hated the horns beeping and the music blasting from stereos. And she really, really hated the gas station attendants that insisted on cleaning the windshield at each stop we’d been to since driving into New Jersey.
Between the anxiety about running, the stress that accompanied driving a car for the first time in years, and Edith’s chronic barking at anything she didn’t like, I’d been a ball of frazzled nerves for days on end.
What I really needed was sleep.
I even reclined my seat all the way back and reached for a blanket to cover us both.
But all I could do was stare up at the roof, fixating on a burned spot that looked like someone had possibly been reckless enough to put out a cigarette into the felt.
This car had a whole three or four lifetimes before I got it horribly used and at a steep discount. It was perpetually stuck on one radio station that, since getting to the upper east coast, had been playing nothing but static that set my teeth on edge, a crack in the windshield I’d been praying wouldn’t splinter across the whole glass panel, and so many mystery stains on the seats that I wasn’t really sure what color it had been originally. Tan maybe. Or gray. Definitely not the grubby brown it currently was, making me spread towels over the surfaces so Edith and I didn’t need to sit in the filth.
Slowly but surely, Edith’s shaking lessened as sleep fully claimed her. Leaving me utterly alone in my anxiety.
