The Carolina Border

There was a moment, not too long into the whole affair, when she was in that little country house by herself. She walked into the shop, past the air compressor with its scary noises and the toolbox with the rusty lock, to switch her laundry, and it was raining. She paused for a moment to listen to each big drop as it fell against the tin roof and realized, very suddenly, that she could start screaming at the top of her lungs and not a soul on earth would hear her.

She hadn’t screamed, though. She’d laughed out loud to herself.

Yes, it was a good place to be in hiding. And she expected to spend the rest of her days hiding out there, completely undiscoverable to the rest of the world, held in a sweet

oasis by the gently running river and the killdeer birds lying in the warm weather grasses.

So it was a strange feeling, many, many months later, when she found herself flying

down the four-lane highway that ran through town, passing the brick Baptist church and the cornfields, the gas station and the Dollar General, the fried fish restaurant and the clear-watered pond. The windows were down, sweeping her hair from her shoulders into her eyes, and she’d been overwhelmed by the thought that she might just keep driving on, forever and ever and ever, never to return.

It would be a good story, she thought. To disappear.

But there were, of course, people. There were dinner tables and big scoops from casserole dishes and loud conversations and even louder laughter. There were birthday parties and gift boxes filled with a silver bracelet with a sabal palm charm dangling from its band. There were kittens with big personalities and bare feet gone chasing them around the yard. There were silent tears and quiet mornings passed by spoonfeeding cheesy grits to the lips. There were nights on a porch swing spent counting every little star in the sky in a place untouched by any light besides the big, shining moon.

There were only two kinds of people in a place like that: those who called it home, and those who stumbled there by accident. She wasn’t from the country. She’d fallen into it by some mixture of fate and chance.

She’d spent a long time there with those people, hearing their words as they rang through her heart. In the hiding place, good stories had heroes, and they had villains, with battles won by the noble and endings written by the good grace of God. As she drove on and on and on, she realized how the story would be told if she left.

Because there was, of course, the gift of a man. And it would not be too pretty for the fiction of it all to explain that because of him, she herself was both hero and villain, and so was neither.

To be more honest, she knew that if she left, she would never, ever be able to tell the secret of the man, because to hear of him was to know where the fault would lie for how spoiled and sour it all would become.

For he would be told as the villain for loving her.

And she would be the villain for everything else.

She took a breath, leaning her scalp back against the headrest, and was inhaling the scent of slipping into summer. The coastal land was so flat and straight, she could see it as it stretched out before her into simplicity. There was nothing ambiguous about it; everything in that town dwelt in plain sight until the road dipped into another hiding place, and another.

She could keep on going, fifteen miles over the speed limit, counting on a single hand the cars that passed. What else did the world contain?

Did she care to discover the answer to such a question?

She turned the signal on and sat in the turn lane, listening to the soft clicking as the little green arrow flashed on the dashboard. She put her chin on the wheel and saw the cattails growing out of the swampy ditch beside the road, the cows as they took big bites from the lush, green grass, the ivy as it grew upon the trees. There was a lump in her throat bigger than the whole state. Would she be able to stand it, if this were the last time she ever saw it all? If her voice never contained the slowness, the honey that overcame it when she spoke there? Could she handle the thought of her name on their tongues rotting away until it was nothing more than an ugly secret they told when they remembered her on cold, dark nights?

But would she be able to stand it being the only thing she ever saw, the last picture before closing her eyes for the final time?

She turned the signal off, the silence of it overwhelming her. She was struck then, very suddenly, with the distinct feeling that she could start screaming at the top of her lungs and not a soul on earth would hear her.

She didn’t scream, though. It caught in her throat in suffocation. She let the tears fall from her eyes and swerved her little car out of the turn lane, her big toe pushing the gas pedal like she was fleeing from a monster, on and on and on.

She didn’t see much anymore. Perhaps she flew by the water tower on the edge of town, the maintenance shop, the baseball fields. Maybe she avoided the potholes absent-mindedly out of habit, consumed by the memory of her own muscle.

She lost herself in a daydream about coming back there. What a strange thing to do, she understood, to console herself in leaving by imagining a return. She pretended that time would grow to ease the sting of her presence, that she could visit and be welcomed back with the same open arms as the first time she traveled there. She pretended that she would be right, that she would have found something fantastic, brought meaning to her name in the world. She imagined that they’d see her name on their screens and smile, that they’d allow her to keep their home as her hiding place.

The number on the meter in front of her read eighty, and she knew she was wrong. The only destination was strangerhood. She would never not be a foreigner, and now she would be a cruel one, one who spent two years growing flowers in a place and abandoned them to wilt in the dirt.

Her phone rang. His name lit up with a picture of them laughing together. She tore her eyes from the road to gaze at the girl in that photo. Had she been lying with her happiness?

Was there ever such a thing as the truth?

“Hey, honey,” his voice echoed through the speaker, slow and soft and gentle. “How much longer are you gonna be?”

For a second, there was no response, just the wind as it passed through the windows and the sound of her weeping.

She spoke many words to him, then, but said nothing at all. There was nothing to say.

“You aren’t coming back?”

With her white-knuckled fingers on the wheel, she replied, “Not for a while, at least.”

Her mind lifted up in a prayer that he would understand. That for just a moment, a blink, a breath, a heartbeat, he would see her for the woman she was and not the girl she promised him she could become.

Perhaps he did. Maybe he saw, finally, the villain. Suddenly, he might know that the compatibility between them had been their contrast, and that he was a good man, and decided what that must make her.

The call ended, but the drive did not. She turned onto the road with the Walmart where the woman had told her in the bagel aisle that her children would be beautiful. There were more cars, filled with people whom she might have known and now never would.

She managed to merge onto the freeway. Part of her accepted that the road had ends, in towns like this one on either side, one blisteringly cold and another swelteringly hot. Another part of her believed that she would fall right off the end of the earth if she could just make it there with half a tank of gas.

But she did not need to make it there. In less than two hours time she would cross into the smoothness of the Carolina Border, and then she would be sailing instead of flying.

Yes, the road would continue on.

And so would she.