CW 21: Synchronicity

I wrote this today as part of my commitment to the Clarion West Write-a-thon. A dedication means that person sponsored it by donating to CW, and then provided me a writing prompt that sparked the piece. If you would like something written especially for you, please consider sponsoring me.

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

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Synchronicity

For Jocelyn Paige Kelly. Thank you for your support of me and Clarion West.

My mother met me on the porch of our rental house with a paper bag in her hand and a horizon look in her eye, and I knew I would find the car packed and ready to go.

“Beth,” she said, “we are running for our lives.”

She tried to hand me the bag, but I stepped back. “Star, no, please,” I said. “Please. We’re good here. We don’t have to go.”

She gave me the second of her traveling looks: You are a roadblock. Don’t get in my way. “For our lives,” she said.

“We have lives here!” I always had to say we with my mother, but what I meant was my fledgling life: an art teacher I really liked, a little sunny patch in the back yard, and the most amazing guy in school said hello to me today —

Today. Probably right around the time Star began to think goodbye.

“Mama, please,” I said.

But now she wore the third look of traveling: I am a compassionate knife. A cleaver of love. “Honey, I love you so much. So much. And I want what’s best for us. If I stay here, things will go bad. I feel it. So come now, or I will leave you to the wolves.”

Knife in. Cleaver down. There goes the boy with the light green eyes and the scar I would have asked him about, but I will never see him again. There goes the sketch of an abandoned house in my art cubby that I will never finish, and isn’t that just the way, that I begin to draw an empty house the week my mother decides our house should be empty? Jesus, when will I ever learn? Goodbye, little life. Fly away without me.

I began to cry. I took the bag. “Chicken salad,” she said. “Let’s go.” So I got in the car with my backpack of textbooks and gym clothes, and I cried for the first hundred miles down the road.

#

My mother believes in signs and portents. Synchronicity is the engine of her world. It’s a really convenient way to live your life, because everything has a reason even if no one else can see it. That makes it so simple for her, and so complicated for everyone else.

#

We drove all afternoon and on into the night. We left the interstate for state highways, and I began to understand that she was taking us into the desert. That made me stop feeling sorry for myself, and start worrying instead about how much worse it could get. My mother calls the desert the heartland, but that is not a happy word for her. The desert is where she left her heart to wolves.

“Do you want me to drive for a while?” I said. “You could get some sleep.”

She gave me a wry and knowing smile. “And wake up back in Carson? No thanks, baby. You’ll see. Where we’re going is better.”

Sand around us. Stars overhead. She played John Denver and James Taylor and Audioslave and Nine Inch Nails with the windows open and the dial all the way to the right, and I imagined desert mice knocked flat by the bass as we boomed by. She sang as she drove. She was happy; and I couldn’t help it, her joy was so big and beautiful that finally I sang too. The two of us, the night air so cool, the music pounding, and the world was nothing but stars and possibility, and I loved my mother with every atom in my body.

#

I’m guessing that for anyone else, the experience of belting I want to fuck you like an animal with your mom would probably feel a little nonstandard. Although maybe Trent Reznor would approve.

#

About 4 AM, she was telling me again the story of her audition in high school for The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, the moment she stood before the bulletin board: “And I looked up, and I saw Star McGuire–”

Above us, a meteor arced and fell.

“Holy shit,” said my mom, and pulled the car into a hard right turn onto a two-lane county road, and followed her fucking star.

The road led to a small sleeping town, and a tiny building with a handpainted sign: The Synchronicity Cafe. And underneath, a second sign: Help Wanted.

My mother braked the car and looked at the signs. The engine idled, ready to run some more. But then she turned it off, and settled back in her seat, slowly slid the key into her jeans pocket, folded her arms. She gave the satisfied sigh of a hard job well done. She wore the fourth look of traveling: Home at last.