Take What You Need by Idra Novey

Author:Idra Novey [Novey, Idra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Leah

Why aren’t we getting out? Is this the place? Silvestre asks from the back seat and I assure him this is it—the place we meant to reach.

Except I never meant to reach this place, to be in proximity with Elliott again. Jean knew how repellent I found him and his friends, how frantic I was to get away from them. I can’t picture her intending to trick me into coming back here to see her towers just to trap me in a situation with Elliott once again. Jean wasn’t conniving in that way and hadn’t lived with mortality at the front of her mind.

Although she must have thought about dying at some point, enough to draw up a will.

In all my fairy tale conjuring, I didn’t account for the possibility that I’d be the one who’d fail to anticipate the twist. Unbuckling Silvestre, I hear Jean’s laughter again that night in the woods, her shouts in the truck defending Elliott and his friends like her very existence depended on her allegiance to them. The memory is so destabilizing it takes me four tries to extract Silvestre from his car seat, my fingers too clumsy with shock to hit the center of the buttons in order to unlock the straps.

At the gas station, I had such a strong feeling that we should turn around. I’d recognized how naive we were being about Elliott, that I had no grasp from one phone call of who he was, the likelihood that he was as racist and unhinged as the woman at the next pump. Maybe I’ve never really had any grasp on who Jean was either.

My last trip here I made the same mistake, jumping into Jean’s truck, as trusting and eager for her attention as if I were still ten years old. That trip I came alone with my father. The one friend he’d kept from our years in Sevlick had died, a librarian he had liked at the county hospital where he’d also met Jean. I was newly back to the U.S., relishing our nascent life in New York, where I assumed I’d be able to get a connecting flight to the tiny airport in Sevlick I remembered, with a single runway.

That nothing airport? Oh, that’s long gone, my father told me on the phone. It closed over a decade ago. He said there was no operating runway in any of the Allegheny Mountain towns around Sevlick either. The surrounding towns had become equally unreachable, isolated as an archipelago, the only airports a considerable distance away, in Pittsburgh or Cleveland.

I balked at the six-hour drive, but my father reminded me that I’d been living on another continent for over a decade. We hadn’t taken a trip together since I was in college, and after all my years living in another language, I felt ready to see Jean again, show off my fully formed adult self to her. I was proud of the first job I’d found at a bilingual children’s press, and of Gerardo, who’d been hired as an interpreter at a news service.

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