Driven by Melissa Stephenson

Author:Melissa Stephenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Part 3

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Eleven

The Vanagon

On the Road: 1994–98

There’s something I need to tell you, but I can’t because there are no words. No words to describe inhabiting a body vacated by drive. No words for how I am no longer little sister or wife or she, but a wound in a human costume. No words for the nothing I feel about Matthew’s big red Ford, other than dumbstruck by how frivolous it now seems that I ever loved cars at all.

Without Matthew, I’m beyond fear and time and lonely. His absence leaches into my bones, which become tuning forks for the wind. The “real” world feels like a television show on mute, under water, infecting my head with a permanent white noise. A sound like the ocean inside a seashell. The sound of quiet, amplified, waves of stillness vibrating around you. It is the sound of a haunting, and it takes me all the days in Georgia to realize that it is now the inescapable sound of me.

Vodka cranberries don’t dull the sound. Closing my eyes doesn’t turn it down. Sobs arrive like seizures, leaving me so still afterward that my heartbeat slows between breaths. The only thing that distracts from this un-sound, this sonic absence, is following my brain where it runs—miles and years back—to glimpses of Matthew I pushed away so I could believe in the story of our family, the story we all wanted to be true. Now the evidence rears its head, demanding to be counted, his death lurking between frames.

How did he get so lost? And how had I gotten so lost that I hadn’t seen it coming? Or did I? Did we?

One day we were alive in a Squareback, singing songs of our own creation. Another day we were swimming in our new in-ground pool under a hot July sky. Another we were opening presents on Christmas, bedhead until noon, mimosas all around.

The stories that return to me now are the ones between these greeting-card memories. They are the glitches we’d tried to erase because they didn’t fit. Like the time Dad sideswiped a tree with the Volaré, only weeks off the lot. We all stared down at the dent the size of half a basketball and agreed: It’ll buff right out.

Like the time we glossed over Matthew’s near death in a cornfield outside of Vincennes, or normalized his doomed marriage, or ignored his absence at my wedding, or that last time we saw him—in the final days of 1999. He’d returned to Indiana to try to stay alive, and all we knew how to offer, without words, was that same old message, flat as a worn-out tire: It’ll all buff out.

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