The People Who Stay by Samantha Rideout

Author:Samantha Rideout
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flanker Press
Published: 2016-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

28

“Sing out to Sylvia,” Susan had told her husband fourteen years earlier. “I believe she’s out in the car again.”

“Always out in the car.”

•

Sylvia thought about her obsession with being inside a car as she zipped along in her present-day rental. Trees greeted the shining silver car as it shot over the pothole-laced pavement.

Long before she could drive, she was always in her parents’ car. She would sit there, in the warmth—always warm. The sun always seemed to be pouring in through the windshield, even if it wasn’t sunny outside, like a portal to another place, a better place.

“What do you do out there?” her parents asked.

She did the same things she did inside. She would read, study, listen to music. All the things most kids did in their bedroom, Sylvia did in the car. She preferred it to anywhere else.

“Why?” her parents would ask.

There was something she couldn’t explain about it. It gave her a refreshed, relieved, reassured feeling. It reminded her that there was a way out.

She didn’t have to stay forever.

One day she would get in a car and drive.

The romance with the wheel was lost once she made her great escape, but there was always something new to escape from.

Today she was driving away from the empty space that blossomed up when Ty was gone, and he was always gone.

Her foot eased off the gas. She didn’t need to shoot away. She was floating, floating down the empty asphalt, weaving through the woods; she was going nowhere now, nowhere in particular.

Sylvia stopped, eventually, when the road ran out.

She shut the engine off on the wharf. She listened to the ocean slapping the worn, barnacle-covered pillars, the seagulls arguing in the sky, and the country music buzzing from 620AM.

Never going to feel like that again—the new car smell of the rental car was a stretch from her parents’ old Honda. It didn’t have as much character, no bloodstains, cracked window, pen marks, none of the signs of wear that came with life.

Never going to be as young as I was then—Sylvia never expected this. She never expected to be back. She hadn’t looked past the escape. Maybe that was her problem: the follow-through.

Sylvia was an organized person. There was a process for everything, agendas, itineraries, schedules; she liked things to go according to plan. The problems came when things veered off track, when life went beyond the plan, when things got messy and disorderly, and life always had a way of getting messy.

The plot of her life was supposed to be neat. She prided herself on her neatness. By now, she was supposed to be done. By now, all her decisions were supposed to be made. She was almost thirty. She was supposed to be waiting to die. But now, thirty felt young. Would forty? Fifty? She was aging, but she couldn’t feel older. She couldn’t get to where she was supposed to be.

“Thirty,” she said, as if saying it aloud would make it more real. At

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