Page 13 of Anywhere with You
Earlier in the week, Cara had shared a work-in-progress itinerary with me online, titledSpring Break, Bitches!!!It made me laugh. I opened it now.
“Nothing of note today except to put our non–spring break life in the rearview mirror,” I said. “We’ll spend the entire day in the car and barely make it out of Texas. Kind of a bummer, isn’t it? Maybe we should’ve gone east. For morale.”
“We have your day one playlist for morale,” Cara said. “And day two will be worth it.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Cara spared half a second to glance at me. “What are you talking about? You got the itinerary, didn’t you?”
“Sure, but I didn’t look at it.”
Cara gaped. “You didn’t look at it? You just got in the car with me and let me just take you wherever?”
I looked her up and down. “Are you a kidnapper? Smuggler? Recruiter for the WNBA?”
“No.” Cara’s tone saidobviously not.
“Then I’m probably fine,” I said.
Cara drove with that same baffled expression on her face for miles. Unsurprisingly, she also drove the speed limit, with hands at the two and ten positions.
I watched the miles and miles of buildings, intertwining roads, and repetitive billboards until my eyes started to feel heavy. I made myself stay awake until we were out of Houston. I wanted to wish it a silent farewell and fuck off, which I accidentally said out loud.
“Amen,” Cara said.
Somewhere in the Texas Hill Country and in the middle of “The Tortured Poets Department,” Cara murmuring along with Taylor about being truly known, I fell asleep.
Chapter Nine
We took three-hour shifts behind the wheel, sometimes swapping when we stopped for gas, sometimes pulling over next to fields where cows grazed, once near a field of green plants that I thought were cotton. I’d stopped once on a weekend trip to Austin to pick up a boll and feel its strange softness, the lumps of seeds inside.
“It’s the fruit, you know,” Cara said when I told her.
“What is?”
“The cottony part of the cotton plant. That’s the plant’s fruit.”
“Huh,” I said. “Weird.”
And we drove on.
Cara never failed to spot a baby cow or goat in the field and say, “Awww! Look, BABIES!”
We talked about the flowers—it was an excellent time for a road trip. Bluebonnets, Indian paintbrushes, and evening primroses filled the grassy medians and ditches. I did internet searches for the ones that I didn’t already know, which were…all of them but the bluebonnets.
Cara and I fell silent when we passed fields of sunflowers at sunset.
“Wow,” she said finally.
“I’ve definitely seen uglier places,” I said.
She just nodded.
Cara napped, too, during my first driving shift, which surprised me for some reason. I guess I’d imagined her as someone who would sit straight, seat belt perfectly buckled, watching the road in case I missed anything, not leaned back with her sock feet on the dash.
Was I too hard on her? Possibly. But she also wouldn’t apply lip balm while driving because it was too distracting, so I can’t be blamed.
I twisted my purple streak into a curl, finished off the last of Mom’s monster cookies that Cara enjoyed as much as I did, and listened to my playlist as Cara slept, singing along in a whisper, and when I grew bored, I quietly recited the Mary Oliver poems I’d memorized: “Wild Geese” and “Black Oaks” and a prose poem, “May,” about encountering a copperhead snake for the first time, in which she doesn’t run away screaming like I would but has a profound emotional experience instead. Because…that’s Mary Oliver.
