Less Than Five Miles From Home

My mother and I were driving north in the middle of the night from Marathon, Florida, with everything we owned in the back of the car. She was driving, and I was thirteen. Someone screamed from the opposite side of the roadway as we exited an international bridge. I cast a quick glance to the left—a woman with long black hair and a white tank top, who may or may not have had her hands to her mouth, or I may have made that up later—before returning my gaze to the road, just in time to see whatever we were going to run over. In the headlights, a crumple of fabric the size of a throw pillow glows white. We slammed into it hard, soared right through it, the wheels bouncing twice before carrying on. We were fifty yards up the road by the time my mother could slow down and stop aside.

My mum could come up with a million excuses to leave a location. She'd been fired from her job in Jackson after thirteen months, had a squabble with our landlord in Mobile after six months, and had been abandoned by her live-in boyfriend in Jacksonville after only two months. She'd opened the door of the doublewide that had been our month-long home two hours before the hurricane arrived, groaned, and declared that hurricane season began the next day, and she didn't want to be around to see it.

We were soon having dinner off paper dishes on the rug in front of the TV while perusing AAA tour guides to figure out where we should travel next. I wanted to go north, to New York or Boston, where, if we waited long enough, we might see snow, even though I knew we wouldn't. My mother desired to remain in the South, where she could tan all year. Only when the news broadcast an update on a story we'd been following, the one about a teenaged runaway who'd gone from a religious, restrictive home months previously, did we cease our back-and-forth. For weeks, my mother and I had been cheering on the girl's escape. The report stated that they had received no new information and that the girl had yet to be found. We returned to our guidebook. My mother said, “Macon,” and that was the end of it.

I wasn't planning on staying in Macon for more than a week and a half, but that was great with me. I was always ready to go when my mother instructed me to get in the car.

This was the first time, though, that she’d run over something on our way out.

“What the hell was that?” she asked. “Did you see it?”

“Barely.” I swung around to check out the back window, but we were too far ahead to see anything—not the thing we'd hit, not the woman I pictured sprinting into the middle of the roadway to take it, not the cars back there with decent drivers willing to stop and aid. I said, “You can turn into that gas station up there.”

My mother's gaze remained fixed on the road ahead, not even shifting up to the rear view mirror. She answered, “It was probably just a bag or something.” Although I couldn't see them, I could sense their passengers rubbernecking, hoping to catch a peek of the individuals who'd hit... whatever it was that we'd hit.

“What if it was a cat?” I asked. “Or a baby?”

“Do you think they have a lot of babies lying in the middle of the road in the Keys?”

Her hands were back on the steering wheel, turning it slightly to the left. Her knuckles were white. “I can’t be here,” she said. “I need to go.”

“You have to at least see what it was. Don’t you want to know what it was?” I opened the door to get out myself. My foot was six inches from the asphalt when she—gently but surely—pressed on the gas.

We didn't bring it up again. My mother sold her automobile and, for the first time in my life, put pictures on the wall after arriving in Macon the next day. She landed a job as a receptionist at a travel agency and hasn't looked back. Her moans after work grew fatigued rather than furious. She never showed up for a single competition when I joined the track team and ran faster than any other girl. Every time a police cruiser passed by, she looked out the window.

I never mentioned the hit to any of my pals. I stayed at the homes of those whose parents prepared dinner and inquired about our days. My mum tried every quitting-smoking gimmick and failed miserably. Her skirt sagged and her waist gaped. She didn't date, and she didn't make any friends. The old AAA tour books were too valuable to me to toss away. I completed one year of school, then another, and so on, until I graduated and moved to the West Coast on a track scholarship.

My mother invites me home for the first time in the spring of my junior year. A spot on her lung was discovered.

We're back in the car, and I'm driving her home from the doctor, when she asks me to remain. She wants me to drop out of school to care for her—this woman who has never done anything for me. When I tell her I can't and won't, she accuses me of being selfish and a coward, and an opossum darts in front of us. To prevent it, I jerk the steering wheel, and we're both slammed against our seat belts. After that, we're silent for a minute.

I ask my mother if she recalls the time we hit that thing in Florida eight years ago and she was too terrified to go back and see what it was. She insists on being more detailed about the "object," and when I explain I can't, she remembers. She claims she has completely forgotten about it and hasn't thought about it since the night it occurred.

This is difficult for me to believe. Isn't that why we stayed in Macon when we finally arrived?

She tells me I'm mistaken. She claims there was another aspect of the trip that she will never forget. Later that night, we stayed in a motel outside of Ocala. She flicked on the TV to see if the hit-and-run had made the news, and I had vanished to the balcony the instant we checked in. She knew we were secure when it never happened, and she shut it out of her mind for good.

She was ready to fall asleep when the broadcast's final report caught her attention: a teen runaway, our adolescent runaway, had been discovered naked in the woods, less than five miles from her home. She called me in to see what was going on, to share her terror, but I didn't answer.

My mother stepped up to the balcony and peered through the curtain at me as I sat in one of the white plastic chairs, my bare feet on another, my leg pumping at a quick pace. Between my fingers, a sneaked cigarette blazed. This is something I don't recall at all. I had my back to her, headphones in my ears, and was watching the jets take off and fly away.