In the Rearview

My windshield wipers are shit and the snow piles on over the haze that seems impossible for my defogger to cut through. I watch the break lights through the glass. They become only slightly clearer with each stroke of the wipers. The light is broken, scattered among the droplets that have started slipping down from above my visor. 

Whirrr, whump.

Whirrr, whump.

My eyes follow the black bars that, even trying their best, only seem to move water from one side of my vision to the other. It’s okay for now. We aren’t moving. 

I turned the radio off a while ago, when it was dark and the snow was heavy and the music was too loud for me to see where I was going. I raise my hand to press the loose knob and turn it back on, but stop. I don’t want to hear what’s going on. At the very best, I’ll hear an inappropriately upbeat, summertime song that will remind me of the days at the lake or the fourth of July when I was young enough not to worry about how fast the seasons change. At worst, I might turn on the news and hear the reason traffic has hauld. I don’t want that either. If there is broken class and silent lives somewhere on ahead the ice up ahead, I would rather sit and tick the minutes away with my shitty windshield wipers. 

I check my phone. Only six thirty and the sun is gone. My battery is low, so I turn off my navigation and sit. I think about putting on a podcast or maybe starting one of the books I need to read for the spring semester on Audible. I have credits to spare, but if I get lost in the dark, I’ll need what is left of my battery to find my way back to campus. 

The car in front of me inches, its brake lights going dark then flashing red again. I don’t move, just sit and watch the light hit the drops. The car’s image is upside down in the water and it makes me smile. I look into the rear view mirror and see nothing out my back window but ice. I want to click the back defroster. Let the lines heat up and melt away the cold. I want to watch it break apart, shattering glaciers slipping down the back windshield. 

I smile wider. When we were little, my brother and I begged our mother to keep the car outside during a snowstorm. We liked to make up adventures with the breaking ice as we drove to school after the night left the car covered in white. It was always some sort of Indiana Jones story. A group of tiny, two dimensional people ran along the snow caps as the ice broke and slipped off the back bumper to shatter on the road in a million crystal pieces. My brother’s character, always the leader, led the group, jumping between the barges as they fell away. My character, some smart, headstrong woman, never traveled without her trusty beagle. Or golden retriever, depending on the breed I wanted that day. A dog though. Always. 

“Go! Go! Go!” my brother would yell in the backseat. Hurrying our band along. We imagined a line of shadow people running across the ice. Jumping, falling, helping each other up. They ran and climbed until they reached safety in the highest corners on the other side of the window, treasure still heavy in their pockets.

I watch the two kids in the rearview mirror. They twist in their seat belts to stare at the sheet of ice of the back windshield. Waiting for it to break. Waiting for the action portion of the adventure to begin. They are shadows, the kids. See through. Just ripples of steam shimmering in the headlights of the car behind me. But I can see them. In the mirror, the girl turns. Her hair moves, floats like a mirage before my eyes and she smiles at me. She raises a hand to point at the window. 

Turn it on. 

She mouths. I don’t hear her voice because she isn’t there.

Turn it on, mommy. Pleeeassse. We wanna play.

I don’t. I won’t. If I do, the ice will vanish and the kids will go away. Melt like ice and fade until they are nothing but the darkness the headlights cut away. The little girl looks between me and the window, her smile deadening. Her eyes, hungry. 

I put my head in my hands. My eyes are tired, but I know the second I close them, traffic will move. I press my fingertips to my eyelids, knowing I am smearing my makeup, but not caring. Everyone will be asleep when I get there, anyway. I raise my head again to the mirror. The backseat is empty and I know it was always empty. The children born in the headlights are gone, the girl with her confused, wondering smile. Melted away. 

I breathe deeply and take a look at myself. The makeup is worse than I thought. I’m crying. Wet mascara warms the creases where my skin has grown purple beneath the concealer. My eyes themselves are reddened with heat and bitterness, but the color I have always known is still there. My dad told me I had the best eyes. They were light around the edges like his, but deep and dark in the center like mom’s. 

The best of us both.

His voice in the seat beside me. I feel my eyes close again, though I don’t mean them to. I feel the dark paint I had put on this morning twist and clump my eyelashes together and wonder what the hell I put the stuff on for. It was just me in a car all day. No one would see me, unless I stopped for a burger and then why would I care what Jeff the ninth grade burger boy saw in the drive thru? The girl in the back seat wouldn’t care. She would shriek at the idea of changing her face. The thought of painting herself anything but a dog or a lion was inconceivable. 

But then again, she hadn’t yet known the feeling of wanting to impress a ninth grade burger boy. Of wanting him to stop his day when he saw her, frozen by her perfect face. Later, when he saw his friends, he would tell them he had seen the most beautiful girl in the world. Maybe she would run into him at a football game and he’d get tongue tied asking her to the movies. But if she wasn’t wearing makeup like Taylor and Sophie and all the other ninth grade girls, then he’d never notice her. The girl watching ice with her brother in the back seat had not yet known the suffocation of wanting a boy to see her. She would. Everyone does.

What’s wrong, pickle-bear?

Dad says. His voice is soft. It moves like my breathing and melts into the sound of the cars’ engines idling beside me and the brushing of the wipers as they keep time.

Whirrr, whump. Whirrr, whump.

The passenger seat is empty, but not quite. The car in the lane beside me has their reading lights on. It’s a young couple looking up directions. A baby is sleeping peacefully in a car seat behind the mother, protected from the storm. Their light drips through my window, swimming in the droplets that have settled on the glass around a shadow in the shape of a person. A man. The dark shape moves, blocks out the view of the other car. It turns its face toward the brake lights straight ahead and I see the red bounce in the bumps and indents of a face. The profile I know. I watched the same one drive on long winter nights through the Pocono Mountains on our way to New Jersey to visit Gramma and Grandpa. The roads were always bad, but dad could drive them. 

And sing while he did it. 

“Dad.” my voice is shattered like the light.

The wipers.

Whirrr, whump.

Whirrr, whump.

“I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna go back. I --”

Whirrr, whump.

Whirrr, whump.

“I miss home. I miss mom and…” The tears leave rivers between the hills of my cheeks. I press my fingers together and rest them on my chapped lipstick. They are so cold. My breath whistles between my clenched teeth as I cry. I shake. I feel like a dryer filled with pennies. Nothing but hot breath doing something other than for what it was made. Just racket. Noise. And heat.

The little girl is in the backseat, alone now. The ice is melted. She stares up from her book -- Matilda -- and smiles. Like I used to when I saw daddy watching me in the mirror on car rides. He would wink. 

When I grow up,

She little mirage girl said.

I want to move things like Matilda can.

Well, honey. Said the shadow in the passenger seat. It spoke with dad’s lips. His voice in the windshield wipers. I bet you can already. Here, try moving the car.  

I would stare, he’d jerk the wheel. Whoa! We’d laugh. I wonder if that is what happened the night he didn’t come home. One jerk of the steering wheel, right at the wrong time.

I cry harder. My chest hurts. It feels tight, like the feeling I used to get when I cuddled my neighbor’s cat up to my cheek. It’s hard to breathe. I can smell the hot exhaust from the car in front of me. It weighs me down. 

The little girl tilts her head to the side. In the hum of the engine I hear her ask,

What’s wrong?

Just wait, I think. I laugh in the sobs and the sounds mingle, a Christmas carol on the sixth of January. Sad to be late, glad to be there at all. You’ll find out one day. One day you’ll get the thing you’ve always wanted. Your own space, away from home. Great classes. Smart people. Wild nights. Good friends. A better boyfriend. The things you see in movies. Things people are always trying to get. You’ll have them all and you’ll realize that you were happier on the couch watching Jeopardy with your mom for the fifth night in a row because you’re too young for your license and wouldn’t have anywhere to drive even if you could. You’ll go away and find out you’d kill for more than just Christmas break on the couch in front of the tv. With your mom. Dad, too. 

But.. 

The little girl in the backseat nods. Like she heard it all. I guess she did. The cars in front of me pull forward. I ease off the brake and wipe my eyes and nose on my wrist. The shadow beside me is gone. I want to turn around. Go home. 

But it doesn’t feel like home. It hasn’t since I went away. My bed creaks the same, but sleep is harder to find. My mom’s cooking tastes the same. Better even, after nights going hungry because the dining hall food is too vile to eat and the tables are too sticky to rest my textbooks on while I read for my next class. But mom cooks it like a treat now, instead of a presumed part of the day. We sit at the table for pasta night now, instead of curled up under the same blanket on the sofa. Comfort and familiarity must have left when I did. 

My dorm room is cozier than the bedroom that took me all of high school to decorate just the way I liked. The stuffed animals, most whose names are forgotten, crowd my sheets and annoy me. I kick them to the floor to get some wiggle room when I come home. My new bed is softer. The mattress pad is better than my box spring and the duvet doesn’t have fishes and sailboats on it. It is a grownup’s bed. Color coordinated pillows and throw blankets. Gorgeous watercolors of Falling Water and the Louvre hanging on the walls, even though I have never been there. I want to seem artsy and well-traveled to anyone who visits, but they never notice. They don’t looked up from their spot on the rug my roommate picked out. Their eyes fixed on the dirty grape flavored paper they roll their weed in, waving the lighter against it to seal. I hate the smell. My roommate doesn’t mind. All of her clothes smell that way. It’s okay. It’s more her space than mine.

I sleep in Drew’s room most nights. He is a nice boy. The kind of boy my high school self should have cried for instead of the football asshole with the tidal wave eyes. But his room, even with a drawer set aside for me and an extra toothbrush and robe, my deodorant and perfume, is no more my room than the one I woke up in that morning. My childhood room. Wishing beyond reason that time would freeze, and I could stay home. If just to have a place that was mine again. 

The cars sped up, a break in the dam. The brake lights ahead fade, the headlights swerve behind me and dissipate. The young couple turns off their reading light and the baby in the car seat never stirs. 

I let my car crawl along, feeling tired and alone. I like this kind of alone. Just me and myself, listening to the wipers. I drove slowly, not wanting to get back to campus too quickly. Not wanting to feel the bad alone. When I smile and joke and love everyone around me, when there are plenty of people around me. But I am alone, with no space of my own. 

I drive slowly. In the first car my dad bought me before he died. In the only thing that still feels like it is mine. The ice on the back windshield is gone, and I can see the empty road behind me. Where I came from. Ahead, there is only dark. And snow. Perfect freckles of light swirling toward me. For a few more hours, anyway.

I drive slowly. Holding every second longer like I wish I had years ago. Like the girl in the back seat hadn’t. But the backseat is empty. I watch the storm. 

I drive slowly.

Whirrr, whump. Whirrr, whump.