The Place Called Home

Scenarios like this stay afloat in Jenna’s mind as inevitable.

There’s too much she doesn’t remember; like how she wound up in the driver’s seat of her car with the girl she hates more than anything in the passenger’s side next to her, her best confidant in the back, a thick layer of crisp leather, polyvinyl, glass, and what feels like hundreds of miles rippling between that comforting presence and her brain. Life was always and never fair that way. Always giving her things she thought she did or didn’t want.

“Drive. Faster”, The snake next to her hisses, so loud and full of vitriol, ricocheting across her eardrums, words rattling around in her skull, crashing, sinking her mind into submission. Jenna feels the petal give easy, her neck almost following, she hears a pop others would probably find disturbing as her head jerks back against her headrest. It hurts, and she hates the passenger for it. Jenna starts to hate her confidant. Jenna hates herself most of all for realizing in that moment she deserved it.

All the things Jenna despises to have affection for come to the surface as steadily as her bare foot on the gas, small, lined indents-her mother’s straight lips-mar her toes, the flesh, pink like the tendrils trickling across her own eyes-her step-brother’s fingers-a numb ache to remind her of where she had been and where she was heading. 

Anywhere but where she left.

The end of any road if she could bring herself that far.

She wonders what it is she wants to leave behind most, emerge from those scenes dripping into an ekphrasis before her mind’s eye, so damning that she’d rather wade into the unknown. Jenna hears rather than sees the bits of wood and gravel and muddy water droplets smack her dad’s old windshield. She tries not to focus too much on the moisture-worn pebble digging into the arch of her left foot, the ache oddly just. 

She swerves just in time to narrowly miss another car passing her by, brights and horn blaring, cursing her out with actions. 

“You really don’t care if you die and take us with you, do you, you pitiful fuck?!” 

Jenna tries to whimper out something in retort, a reprimand, an insult, an explanation, a plea, anything that would eject her from blame. The only sounds she registered were her own choking gasps and the scoff of the girl in her right ear. She vaguely registers the quite voice saying something behind her, but the words blur together like her vision, swerving around things that are and aren’t there. A few words swim to the forefront of her mind.

“Jenna, stop the car.”

“I can’t!” She cries out, “You don’t know what this feels like! I can’t go back there.” She sobs.

Jenna’s body does a small leap as her father’s car goes over something it probably wasn’t supposed to. The vehicle makes an angry noise, one she can’t put into words, like a warning.

“Jenna, pull the car over.” Clearer that time.

“You’re wasting your Goddamn time trying to reason with her. Mom was right, she couldn’t listen if her life depended on it.”

“SHUT UP! Shut up! Just stop talking! I can’t think!” Jenna cries.

“You never think! That’s the problem.”

“You don’t have to go back if you don’t want to. Just stop the car.” The voice behind her reasons. Jenna feels her foot ease off the gas unthinkingly, pins and needles stabbing relentlessly like it had been dunked in ice water. The quiet words breathed to her ebbed and flowed and she feels as though her head is just beneath the surface, the small licks of her living conscience’s diction strike up hard memories like an electric shock.

It all makes her think, something resembling conviction settling over her unsightly form in the shape of her father’s visage. Jenna remembers the strong hands like the iron he used to weld, keeping her from falling under as he taught her to thrive under the pressures of water and everything outside of it. She remembers how he breathed life back into her when she faltered, the burning in her chest reminiscent of what she’s feeling now.

She recalls how hard he fought to keep her alive.

Where had she been heading?

“Stop the car, Jenna.”

Jenna’s nose almost collides with the steering wheel, neck popping for the second time as her stiff foot slams on the break petal, the car skidding like marbles on an ice rink toward the dark, chilly lake. The one where her dad taught her to swim.

            She sees nothing over the dashboard but the water swaying back and forth, moving leather in the stream of her headlights. She sweeps away brown strands from her eyes, nostrils, and mouth, placing the shaking palm of her left hand on the handle before remembering she needed to use her fingers.

She stumbles out onto sharp gray pebbles, rocks, weeds, and broken beer-bottles, hiccupping. Her shorts and short sleeves do nothing to offset the nights chill, but it wakes her up. Jenna surveys herself, seeing nothing but a small damp area of blood beneath her left foot-taunting her.

“You couldn’t even kill yourself right.” Jenna’s own voice echoes in her skull. She ignores it, the way she used to, the way she should have the whole time.

She does a glance over her father’s car, nothing amiss inside or out, seats empty and in pristine condition still, like she expected. 

She plops down beside it, the thing that means most to her in the world now, heedless of everything marring her skin on the makeshift beach, bugs and all, and thinks.

She could keep running from her problem, move forward without a second thought, leave tire streaks on the ground outside the lake to match the clear ones on her face, and join her father wherever he may be. Or she could turn around, and start down a whole new stretch of road, a new path to her life.

She makes her decision.

She stands up, not bothering to wipe the dirt and gravel off her. 

“It builds character,” the voice lingering behind her now at the front, and Jenna recognizes it as her own as well. Something her father used to say.

A tug on the handle and she back in the driver’s seat. 

She shifts into reverse.