Page 34 of What August Heard
I looked at it for a long time.
Then I pulled my bag out from under the bed and I started packing.
At four in the morning the house was the kind of quiet that meant everyone was deep asleep. No footsteps. No voices. Just the ocean through the walls.
I sat up. My bag was already packed and standing by the door where I had left it. I had not slept. I had stayed awake in the dark on top of the covers and stared at the ceiling and let the hours pass because there was nothing else to do with them.
I picked up the dahlia. I held the stem in my hand and looked at the flower for a second. Then I carried it with me.
I wrote two notes at the desk by the window. The first one was for Callie.I’m sorry, I had to go. Call me when you’re home.Four words and a comma and I could not make it longer than that because longer would require me to explain and I was not ready to explain anything to anyone, not yet, not in a note at four in the morning.
The second note was for Jennifer and Douglas. I thanked them. I said something had come up at home and I had to leave early. I said I was sorry to miss the goodbye. I meant every word of that one.
I left Callie’s note on the floor outside her door. I left Jennifer and Douglas’s note on the kitchen counter by the coffee machine. Then I went out the back door.
The garden path was dark. The stones were uneven and I took them slowly, my bag on one shoulder, the dahlia in my other hand. The path curved toward the beach and then ran along the shoreline toward Sable Cove town. Twenty minutes in the dark. The ocean was on my right the whole way, loud and steady and not interested in any of this.
There was an all-hours car rental place on the main strip. I had seen it when we walked through town. The man behind the desk had tired eyes and didn’t ask questions. I gave him my card. He gave me the keys. I walked out to a small gray sedan that smelled like air freshener and drove out of Sable Cove at four-thirty in the morning.
The dahlia went on the passenger seat.
The highway back to Millhaven was two hours of dark and white lines and my own head, which was very loud company. I turned the radio on. I turned it off again. I drove.
Forty minutes out, I pulled over.
I sat on the side of the highway with the hazard lights going orange on the dashboard. I picked up the dahlia and got out of the car.
I set the flowers down on the road barrier, upright, where the light from the next set of headlights would find it.
I got back in. I pulled back onto the highway.
I watched it in the rearview mirror getting smaller. And then I went around a bend and it was gone.
I got home as the sky was going from black to gray. The rented car sat in front of my building and I sat in the rented car and looked at the front door of the building for a long time before I decided to get out.
I went inside.
I put my bag down on the kitchen floor. I sat down next to it, back against the cabinets, and looked at the ceiling.
I didn’t cry right away.
I sat with it. The ceiling. The quiet. The way the kitchen looked in the early morning gray, all the familiar shapes of the only space that was entirely mine.
Then I cried.
I cried for a long time. And when it stopped I stayed on the floor and I looked up.
Five years.
Five years of nothing.
I had made up five years of nothing.
Because I was a nothing.
***
Chapter 12
