Flight

Angela remembered how, in that moment, the night felt infinite. The further she drove the smaller she felt. The downtown lights in their blended multitudes became sparse bars of strip malls and gas stations, until the only light left came from the starlike beads that lined the highway north. The treeless plains passed by in darkness without depth. She kept going. Dawn broke to spiderlike lightning that printed softly pink on an off-white sky, as though reaching down across the Midwest to pluck her from her northward escape. Looking at it reminded her of how small she had made herself by going so far. Too small for them to find. But still she kept driving. At the end of the trail, Nic listened to all of it with an impassive expression. He could see the weight of the journey written in Angela’s face.

The Houston skyline. A baby crying. The red lights of a cop car splashing in waves on a popcorn ceiling.

Angela had met Lizzie last year at a faculty dinner, and instantly she had the impression that she was face to face with one of those quietly extraordinary women. The patient eyes and easy smile of power-in-waiting. How she sparkled in emerald-green! Chestnut hair in a neat- but unassuming- high bun. She was brilliant. Angela knew she was brilliant before Peter told her so.

“Angie, this is the young lady I was telling you about. My new graduate assistant, Lizzie Fontenot. Liz, this here is my long-suffering…”

Angela didn’t hear Lizzie’s name again until January, when her husband told her it was possible to love two people at the same time. He was as much a victim of it as she was, when you thought about it. Peter could explain it that way to his wife, but not to the university. When he realized this, he promised her he would break it off. By the time spring came around, both of them pretended that it had never happened.

By the end of summer, Peter started spending less and less time at the house. Angela became used to falling asleep in an empty bed. When he came home, she didn’t ask him where he had been, yet Peter felt the need to ramble about some vague research project or other. Angela didn’t say anything. Seeing Peter mumbling like that, looking anywhere but at her, made her pity him. She didn’t like that feeling. Peter wasn’t someone she had ever pitied before. It took him time to register her indifference, but when he did, he stopped trying to explain himself when he came back late. Her apathy only made him bolder, and soon his absences became an unspoken, open secret.

One night Peter came home and started crying. He sank to his knees in front of her, holding Angela around the waist. Angela imagined that she could smell Lizzie on him somehow. She thought about caressing his hair but decided to keep her arms still by her sides. She could tell that the man she had nurtured in so many ways for so long was about to ask one more thing of her.

Silly little man, what have you done?

Now there could be no more pretending- from either of them. Peter went into his study to make a phone call while Angela held back tears at the breakfast table. Lizzie rented a place close to downtown. Palmettoes blocked the view of the exterior staircase.

“Um, I better go up alone. I’ll be right back,” Peter said. Angela didn’t look at him. She gazed up at the lighted skyscrapers, at the blur of midnight traffic, at the long shadows of the palm fronds on the sidewalk. Moments later the sound of a baby crying snapped her out of her trance. She could hear the child before she could see it, because of the palmettoes. Something about the sharpness of that cry punctured what was left of Angela’s strength. By the time Peter was fixing the baby seat into the back of the station wagon, her eyes were blurry with tears. In no time at all that awful sound was inside the car with her, unrelenting in its bombardment of her ears. For a while she didn’t dare look back. She kept her head down, silently sobbing, praying to any god that might listen for the sound to go away forever.

Peter then placed a large bag on the seat next to the baby.

“Angie?” he muttered.

Angela ignored her husband. He went back out onto the sidewalk and talked in a low voice to Lizzie. Angela thought she heard the phrase “I’m trying,” but she wasn’t sure. She wiped her eyes and stared out the window at Lizzie. She didn’t look brilliant anymore, Angela thought. Just another scared, dumb kid. She was a bony, pale thing, standing there in a worn t-shirt and athletic shorts, arms folded across a flat chest. Her eyes were puffy, and her unwashed hair tied into a makeshift bun that gave her face a harsh, angular look.

Lizzie wouldn’t look back at Angela. Not even once. Peter appeared to be trying to console her. He reached out to caress her arm, but she remained frozen in place, her jaw locked. Angela couldn’t hear whatever Peter was saying to her.

Stupid, silly man.

Just then she noticed that the baby had stopped crying. She turned around and almost flinched when she found the baby staring right at her. The child’s face was fixed with a look that could almost be construed as mock-distress, the eyebrows stretched exaggeratedly high, betraying eyes no longer interested in crying. The mouth hung open less than an inch, as though the child wasn’t sure what sound to make with it. For a long time, the two of them stared at each other.

Peter came over to tell her sheepishly that they had to get more stuff and would be back soon. Angela ignored him once again. She was aware in her peripheral vision of Lizzie and her husband heading back down the path and up the stairs, before their bodies disappeared once more behind the palmettoes.

What happened next was the most difficult part of the story to explain. As soon as she had mentioned the baby, Nic peered over her shoulder toward the gravel driveaway. But he didn’t say anything. He listened patiently as Angela reached inside herself for the right words.

She remembered it in the third person, as if it hadn’t been her that closed the back passenger door and climbed into the driver’s seat. As if it hadn’t been Angela, but Angela’s hands that had put the car in drive. Angela’s feet that had pressed down on the gas pedal. Angela’s eyes that didn’t dare look in the rearview mirror.

She couldn’t explain it in a way that would make sense. Like a horse that bolts and keeps going and going long after it’s free of danger, Angela’s body drove north out of Houston and into the night. It had been so easy. At first there was no destination in mind, no thought process whatsoever. She just did it. But once she did, she couldn’t go back. Even when she had only taken the car one block, she knew she couldn’t face going back. She realized what it was she had done, but now that she had done it, the only thing to do was to double down. To keep going. To never stop.

Flight.

Texas passed like a dreamless sleep. By the time Angela crossed the Red River into Oklahoma, she started to think consciously about what her body was doing. Child abduction and grand theft auto. Not the kind of things you expected a body like Angela’s to do. You expected a body like Angela’s to do exactly what it had always done; tying her husband’s ties, proofing the articles he sent to journals, knowing intuitively who to be depending on what he needed her to be in a given moment. A body with a smile that assured Peter there was no burden too great for Angela to handle. There was only one thing that Angela’s body couldn’t provide for him.

That Lizzie offered her husband exciting sex was a small insult. An insult nonetheless, but one she could take. That Lizzie had brilliance that her husband admired was a bigger insult. It hurt to think of them connecting on that level, but nonetheless Angela could take that too. What Angela couldn’t take was this- and she had realized that the moment she first heard the baby crying back in Houston.

Angela wondered how long it would take her to get found. Against the immensity of the prairie she felt like a needle in a haystack. No doubt they could use Peter’s car, but honestly, how would that information be enough to contend with the vastness of this place? For all they knew, she was still in Houston somewhere. It amused her to think what might be going through Peter’s mind. What she had done couldn’t be less like her. What would he even say to the police? There was nothing Peter would be able to suggest. They would ask him where she was going, what she was doing, and why she was doing it, and he- her own husband- would have nothing to offer them.

Maybe, Angela thought, as gray light filtered into the prairie, just maybe, Peter and Lizzie would do nothing at all. What if taking the child away had solved everything? She could see it: at first they would panic, they would cry, maybe even get a little hysterical. But then it would dawn on them that, deep down, they were relieved. Perhaps this was one final burden she would take for him.

She didn’t stop until she was halfway through Kansas. She changed the kid’s diaper in a gas station restroom and learned that she was a girl. She fed her with the formula packed into the bag. Keeping her head down, Angela bought herself a donut and a coffee before returning to the station wagon. As she strapped the child into the seat, she stared into her round eyes. Not long after leaving Houston, the baby had cried herself to sleep. That she wasn’t crying now felt like a compliment. To Angela, it was a gesture of trust. She wanted to stop somewhere else so that she could have another excuse to hold her. It was a weight and warmth she could get used to.

After another hour of driving, Angela couldn’t go on any longer. A headache was growing above her right eye. The child was crying again. Angela pulled up at a motel opposite a truck stop and slept until the baby woke her up. There was no hot water in the shower but Angela didn’t mind. The hissing of the showerhead muffled the sound of the child.

The station wagon, Angela realized, was a solution and problem all in one. It had taken her this far, but as long as she had it with her, she could be found. That afternoon she wandered over to the truck stop and found a man who said he could take her to Wisconsin. The man didn’t want her money, but that didn’t mean he wanted nothing. Angela returned to the motel room to try and get more sleep. She dreamed of the life that she and the child would live together off the grid. Unlike her previous life, where Angela lived to sustain Peter, she and the child would sustain one another. When the girl was old enough, she would dote on her hardworking mother. And when Angela grew old, she would have a loving daughter to take care of her.

She was conscious of the baby’s crying before she was awake, as though the girl were reaching into her dreams to pull her out of her sleep. When she opened her eyes, she saw the waves of red light on the popcorn ceiling. It took her a minute to realize what it was. Angela sat up. She couldn’t deny just how unhappy the little girl looked, wailing at her from her chair. She tried to feed her, to sing to her, to cuddle her, but the child wouldn’t relent. Angela sighed, placing her safely back in the chair.

Outside, the cops seemed to be waiting.

Why don’t they just come in and take her?

Angela curled up in the fetal position on the bed, keeping her back to the child. She closed her eyes and tried to escape the noise. Her dream had been brief, and was already beginning to feel distant. Whatever came through the door, she would accept.

She wasn’t aware of when the child stopped crying, nor when she started to fall asleep. When she finally woke up, morning was approaching- and the police were gone. Angela fed and changed the baby before heading down to the motel reception. The cops, they told her, had been called for a row in one of the other rooms. Angela looked up at the motel balcony and hesitated before going back.

An hour later she called the cops from a pay phone and told them she had seen a baby that looked like she had been abandoned. She gave the room number and hung up. By the time they arrived, the door would be unlocked, and Angela would be in a long-haul truck headed toward the Missouri border.

“It wouldn’t have been right…” Angela told Nic, who remained silent. She looked up at him for the first time, bracing herself for a slew of questions. But Nic only nodded slowly, exhaling through his nose.

Angela had had to do what she had had to do to find him. The trucker took her as far as Madison, and from there she took a Greyhound to Wausau and called Nic from a payphone. She knew that Nic, even after all this time, would come and get her.

“You haven’t changed whatsoever,” was the first thing he said to her.

“I was about to say the same thing.”

“Are you okay?”

“I will be.”

They drove north, and by the time they reached the ungraded roads that skirted the old growth forests, Angela knew that no one on Earth would find her. Nic only asked her about her present- whether she was hungry, whether she was cold, whether she needed medicine. Everything from the past she volunteered herself, and Nic listened because he knew that she needed to tell him. Not just about Peter, Lizzie, and the baby, but everything that had happened in the past seventeen years. She hadn’t thought about Nic in a long time, but now all of a sudden, high school didn’t seem that far away. By the end of the night, she was rambling, trying- without saying so explicitly- to justify the life she had chosen. The one that hadn’t included him.

“Let’s get you to bed,” Nic said.

“I…”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything.”

Angela let him guide her to the guest bedroom. It wasn’t much compared to the house she had kept for Peter, but it was uniquely comforting. Nic showed her the bathroom and gave her a pair of his spare pajamas. The pajamas, like the house, and the old growth trees, made her feel safe. After she changed, he helped her into the bed and gently pulled the covers over her. When he turned to leave, Angela begged him to stay. She started to sob uncontrollably. Nic sat on the bed and held her hand for a long time.

“I’m so sorry,” she stammered.

“It’s okay, Angie.”

“I’m not a bad person.”

“I know.”