Anger rifles through me. It clears the tears away—the trade-off is that I’m now shaking with rage. But it lets me function, where my sadness wouldn’t.
I check the road both ways, and then back out, my shaky hand jerking the shifter into Drive, and I hit the gas. Too hard—the tires bark and I’m thrown backward in the seat.
Immediately, I back off and drive the exact speed limit to the stop sign at the end of our road. The house—my home—is in my rearview mirror. “I did it.”
“Good girl, Mike. Now…drive away.”
“Okay. Thanks, Ana.”
That’s my sis—she can feel things. She justknowsthings, always has. When I broke my ankle chasing after Angus and his friends and I was stuck and crying at the bottom of a ravine, sheknew, and she found me.
She breaks seemingly impossible tasks into manageable chunks and talks me through them.
“Call me every day, y’hear?” she says. It’s not a request, though.
“I will. Promise.”
“You promised, and if you make a promise—” she starts.
“You keep it, no matter what,” I finish. It’s one of our family mottos.
“You have all your stuff?”
“Yes. Everything I care about that’ll fit in a car, at least.”
“Cash, hidden in your bags, your purse, and your car?”
“All but a couple grand in the checking account I opened at the big bank across town.”
“And you know where you’re going?”
I laugh, the first laugh in days. “Not the first clue, sis. Anywhere but here, that’s all I know.”
“You need anything, you call. Me, Mom and Dad, any of us. We’ll all drop what we’re doing and come right to you, no matter what.”
“I know, I will. Bye, Ana.”
“Bye, Myka. Be safe.” A pause. “It’ll be okay.”
I know she’s not lying about my family dropping everything for me. I have five siblings—Anastasia (Ana, to everyone), Angus, Jordan, Juniper (we all call her June), and Mallory. I’m the baby. Any of them would drop what they’re doing at the word boo, and find me and do anything I need, come heck or high water. So would Mom and Dad.
It’s a heck of a support system, and honestly, they’re the only reason I’m still here. If not for my family, I don’t think I’d have come through the past year even halfway sane.
But the one thing they can’t do is fix me. They can’t give me my virginity back. They can’t give me the past six years of hell back. They can’t restore my womb or my fertility. They can’t piece my heart back together. They can’t tell me what the heckle-schmeckle I’m going to do with my life, now.
I’m twenty-four, divorced, and I have no college education, no work experience, and a grand total of five thousand dollars to my name, plus a paid-for ten-year-old Jeep Wrangler with a souped-up engine, thirty-five-inch mud tires and black wheels, upgrades courtesy of my brother Jordan, as a birthday gift last year.
I realize I’ve been stopped at the stop sign for more than a minute, staring in the rearview mirror at my erstwhile home. I yank the mirror down so I can’t see it, and gun the engine. My thoughts are boiling, my emotions cycling rapid-fire from anger to sadness to fear to doubt to rage to loneliness.
I turn on the radio, tuned as always to the local Christian station. I don’t think it’s ever been changed. I drive west, on autopilot. Past the church I’ve gone to since I was christened at birth, the church I was born-again in, baptized in, married in. Past the courthouse where I was divorced. Past the CrossFit gym where I went to boot camp five days a week the past year, in an attempt to exercise myself out of depression and down enough sizes that maybe my husband would want me again. It didn’t work on Darren, and I’m still depressed, but I’m in killer shape.
I’m tempted to flip the gym the bird, but I’d never do that in a million years. “Sorry, Lord. I didn’t mean it,” I whisper.
Further west, and through the town I’ve grown up in, the tiny North Carolina town I’ve only left three times in my life (missions trip to Mexico my senior year of high school, honeymoon to Belize, and a girls’ trip with my sisters to Myrtle Beach over the holidays this past year). In a blink, I’m through the downtown, past the library and the school complex, and then I’m away, on the two-lane blacktop highway headed Lord-only-knows-where.
Anywhere but here.
* * *
