The Last Karankawas(46)
“Pretty,” she says aloud, and with that tiny opening finally, finally, pours in the guilt. What have you done, Carly Elena? Why?
Going was her only thought that morning. Her hands on the steering wheel, her mind on the road, even as her grandmother moved around in the kitchen, as she spoke about her summer Thursday plans. Going.
“After Mass, I’ll be with Ofelia, Patty is taking us to la Galleria to go shopping. And we will go to a celebration lunch, sabes.”
Carly blinked and focused: Magdalena was smiling. Her grandmother still on a high from retiring a week ago at the end of the school semester. She had said goodbye to the school library where she had worked nearly thirty years, was now launching toward the rest of her life—something new and unexpected, unformed, yet to be decided. A turning point. A crossroads.
Where she herself should be standing, Carly thought. Eighteen, Ball High diploma newly in hand. Summer, freedom. Shouldn’t the world lie ahead of her, too? Shouldn’t she be able to gaze ahead and glimpse another future? But she only saw Fish Village, the house on Albacore, caring for her grandmother, marrying Jess. Years and decades just like the years and decades behind her.
So much simmering. The restlessness, the longing to run from this known place, these people, toward the unknown. Have something for yourself. Take something for yourself.
“?Ni?a? ?Me escuchas?”
“Yes, Grandma.” Carly forced a smile.
“What will you do today? See Jesusmaría?”
“No, he’s at Mr. Pham’s boat today, I think they’re teaching him how to do shrimping. I’ll see him later.” She kissed Magdalena gently. “Have a good time. I’m going to go run some errands, go out for a bit.”
Going, going, going. Her grandmother leaving; her boyfriend away. Like on that day years ago when she stole the car, whatever has long bubbled inside her has burst out; whatever tether keeps her bound has split apart. Like sparks snapping off a burning log, she saw flashes of her own life ahead: the changes happening at sea, building from a distance, well across the water, gathering strength to emerge into something tangible. An illness, a marriage, a storm. Someone leaving her; someone staying. And there she would be, Carly Castillo, standing on the shore, seeing the shape of whatever it was, and simply waiting for it to rumble closer.
She felt herself already adrift. She saw the road, herself throwing a change of clothes and money in a bag, the bag in the backseat. A note on the table. I want to have something, Grandma, Jess. I love you, but I have to take something.
“Ten cuidado, mi vida.” Her grandmother’s hand on her cheek, cool and dry.
“I will.”
Gone.
She has enough gas to get to Dallas. Her Corolla contains nearly a full tank; her grandmother instilled the habit into her when she was fifteen and learning to drive. Don’t let the tank slip lower than a quarter because quién sabe when you’ll be stranded, or stuck. She knows to keep an empty gas container in the trunk, and always look for and remember the gas stations she passes so she can find them because we don’t wait for men to help us, ni?a, why would we, when we know so well how to take care of ourselves?
The lilt of Magdalena’s voice in her mind comes with a searing pain. You’ve left her. Carly shoves the whole mess of it away. Dallas, then. Just get to Dallas.
She has no plan. No steps to take, no final destination to aim for. She hasn’t thought this through. Take something for yourself. She drives on.
She spins the volume knob hard to the right to turn up Sunny 99.1; it loses signal the farther she drives. She can only occasionally make out the croon of “Human Nature” amid the droning buzz of static. She sings along with Michael anyway. Soon she will lose it, lose all the Houston stations preset in her radio. She doesn’t know any others.
* * *
A brown Honda heads north across the bay. In the backseat a sleeping baby; in the front her mother dozes with her cheek on the seat belt strap. Her father dances his fingers on the wheel in time with the radio, some slow Michael Jackson song. This is a day trip, a quick dash into the city to buy some baby things, new scrubs for his wife. A few hours at the mall. But already he is thinking—he glances at the sleeping woman, in the rearview at the fat-cheeked infant—of the north, of going and never stopping. A car, a radio, a road. Singing along as loud as he pleases, no one to worry about waking up.
* * *
Carly hasn’t planned to stop, but she changes her mind when she sees Sam.
His hand appears first. Blazing white like a sunbeam, it cuts a bright slash across the dark green of the trees. Large and curled, it thrusts itself forward, presenting his fingers to the freeway. As she drives on, the hand becomes a jacketed arm, snowy white. Below it, the tip of a boot and the line of a can stretching up. The boot becomes a leg, the arm becomes a shoulder and the border of a lapel, then a whole torso, and then the full statue comes into view, all at once like an apparition.
Carly leans forward to peer up at him through the windshield. The statue stands some seventy feet high, gripping a cane but not leaning on it. His head is high, and he looks past her, westward, beyond the trees, the mud-flapped eighteen-wheelers and lifted pickups and Corollas doing eighty on the interstate, to the rest of Texas.
Sam, she remembers. Sam Houston. Marking the gateway to Huntsville, to the university that bears his name. They learned about him in seventh grade. Texas history, Jess’s favorite subject.