Mom\u2019s sigh broke the long silence first. She\u2019d been staring out the passenger window for fifteen minutes at least. This long straight stretch of green hills and flat valleys swim away from the two-lane highway on both sides. She always said the sky was bigger on the drive between San Francisco and LA than it was at the beginning or the end. \u201cEmptiness,\u201d she said, \u201cthe absence of people and buildings hemming in what your eye could see.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her sigh woke us\u2014Dad from his silent, attentive driving, and us from our screens in the backseat. We could see her fingers resting soft on the glass. We had to pull out our earbuds to hear, only seeing her mouth move at first while she tapped the glass, one finger at a time. Then, we heard her quiet repeating, \u201cStop.\u201d Louder still, \u201cStop!\u201d<\/p>\n
Again when Dad asked, \u201cWhat?\u201d and \u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cStop!\u201d<\/p>\n
When she realized he didn\u2019t or couldn\u2019t understand, she filled her fingers with the door handle, looked back at us, found all our wide eyes in a moment, and screamed, \u201cStop the fucking car! I need air.\u201d We\u2019d never heard her voice so clearly.<\/p>\n
Dad\u2019s foot, heavy on the brake, squealed the tires to a halt at mile 183. We watched our mother open the door, stand outside for what seemed like forever as if to stretch.<\/p>\n
We gasped together when she sprinted toward the field. We\u2019d never seen our mother run so fast or so long. Dad yelled through the open door, still unbuckling his seatbelt, \u201cWait!\u201d We blinked at one another in the backseat, mouths gaping, swallowing the highway air rushing in from both open doors.<\/p>\n
She cleared the low fence before he managed to stumble out of the car. Dad took off, then skipped back to slam his car door shut\u2014we think he must have been worried about oncoming traffic hitting the door, snapping it clean off, because he didn\u2019t pause to push Mom\u2019s side closed. We watched as she ran, grass sweeping to her ankles, waves of undulating swirls playing with the hem of the flowered dress she held up in clumps with both hands. We thought he would catch her for sure. He looked like he was gaining on her anyway. He ran track in high school and she swam.<\/p>\n
Without warning, she stopped almost as suddenly as she\u2019d started, as if she\u2019d hit a glass wall and wanted to pause before slamming into its crystalline surface in the field. We pressed our noses to the glass, fogging the back windows, saw her turn back toward the car, breathed a sigh of relief because surely she would return now, this silly joke passed.<\/p>\n
Dad galloped nearer every second, so fast, we worried he might bowl her right over, her arms spread out like that, the cross of a big letter \u201cT\u201d, hair blowing wildly in a wind we couldn\u2019t feel, but could see sweeping the blades at her ankles into a frenzy, flurrying her hair wildly.<\/p>\n
We screamed when she fell\u2014straight as a board as if waiting to sluice into the arms of someone\u2019s trust fall stance at summer camp, leaden, weighty. We whispered, murmured back and forth while Dad ran through the exact place, we knew, where she\u2019d fallen only a moment ago. He wandered in circles in the silvery grass, stomping flat shapes with his feet over and over again until the bravest of us called out to him, \u201cDad?\u201d We listened to his name carry over the field, saw his head snap back. \u201cWhat\u2019s happened? Where\u2019s Mom gone?\u201d Though we all, it seemed, already knew, if not where exactly, at least that she was gone. He waved us to stay put\u2014remain where you are!\u2014his outstretched hand appeared to say. Wait for me.<\/p>\n
The rescue search teams found no trace of our mother. After three days, the local sheriff declared that, in the eyes of the law, our mother was not missing, just gone. We\u2019ve seen her over and over again throughout the years. We\u2019ve tapped enough mothers on the shoulders to be sure it has never been her that we\u2019ve seen picking apples out of the bin at the supermarket, jaywalking on second street, stepping onto the BART at 16th and mission, sleeping in a tent at the homeless encampment. Our father drives there still: mile 183. Just sits in a lawn chair with a canopy for shade or shelter and waits, for what we don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Her sigh woke us\u2014Dad from his silent, attentive driving, and us from our screens in the backseat. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[887,2127,851,2128],"class_list":["post-15655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-dad","tag-drive","tag-father","tag-missing","writer-kari-treese"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15655"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15703,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15655\/revisions\/15703"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}