Ansel nodded.
“If he cries, where do we take him?”
“To the rocking chair.”
“Good,” Lavender said. Choking now. “Smart boy.”
It was time. Lavender’s decisions did not feel like decisions—more like flakes of ash, settled on her shoulders. The moment was not hers to judge. She could hear the grumble of the truck’s engine at the edge of the field, Johnny’s looming presence, constant and menacing.
Lavender could not bear even one more glance. Somewhere deep and full of denial, Lavender knew the last time she saw her children had already passed—she could not withstand their questioning eyes, their rosebud mouths, the little fingernails she’d grown from nothing. So she didn’t look. With her back turned, Lavender stepped into the day.
“Be good,” she said, and she shut the door.
*
Lavender had not left the farmhouse property in over five years. At first, the isolation had been a gift, the wilderness like an antidote to the chemical misery of her mother’s trailer—Lavender couldn’t pinpoint the turn, the moment the farmhouse had become her captor.
Now, the universe was unfolding through the windshield, both familiar and alien, gas stations bustling with energy, fast-food restaurants puffing the delirious scent of beef. With one arm stuck out the window, the wind chopping and whirling in her ears, Lavender almost forgot the wreck of her life. She had to count on her fingers to remember that she was twenty-one years old—her friends from school would have jobs by now, husbands, children. Lavender realized she did not know who the current president was; she had completely missed the election of ’76. Speeding at ten over the limit, Lavender was hungry. But also, she was free. She was away from her children, and it felt intoxicating; she was light-headed, giddy.
“South,” Lavender said, when Johnny asked where she wanted to go. Shame radiated off him, and he drove in silence. The steering wheel seemed so trivial, miniature in Johnny’s hands—they were going at least eighty miles an hour. She could have done it, veered them into oncoming traffic, or fast into the ditch on the side of the highway. Vaguely, this had been the idea. But the air smelled so fresh, the radio was humming, and it was a surprise when Lavender realized that she did not want to die.
They stopped for gas outside Albany, two hours from home and halfway down New York State. Lavender smiled as Johnny pulled the truck into the station, picturing the hundreds of miles between him and her boys.
“What’s so funny?” Johnny said, still sheepish.
“Nothing,” Lavender told him. “Bathroom.”
As Johnny clicked the door open, she studied the hair that trailed up the back of his neck. The knot of his spine, the breadth of his shoulders, the divot of tenderness between his ear and his skull. The difference, she thought, was as small as that. A patch of vulnerable skin. She wished that patch was the entirety of Johnny—it would have been so much easier, if he had just been good.
Lavender swiped quarters from the dashboard as Johnny pumped the gas. She walked toward the store, her heart jumping to a pattering beat. When the bell on the convenience store door dinged her entrance, Lavender realized that this was the most alone she’d been since she was sixteen years old.
The cashier, an older woman, eyed Lavender suspiciously. Rows of snack food lined the walls in bright colors. In the very back of the store, between the soda fountain and a freezer of ice cream, there was a pay phone.
This was it. Lavender’s pulse thudded in her temples.
Her chance.
Lavender wished for time. She wanted to sit and think this through, to consider what she’d be giving up. But through the grimy window, Johnny was jiggling the gas pump, and she could still feel the raised lump of goose egg on the back of Ansel’s head, throbbing phantom beneath her palm. Time did not belong to her. Nothing did.
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
Lavender forced herself to stare at the label on a bag of potato chips as she gave the address for the farmhouse.
“Ma’am, you’re going to have to speak a little more clearly.”
“A four-year-old and an infant. You need to get there, before Johnny comes back. He’s hurt them, you’ll see. We’re two hours away. Please, before he gets back.”
She was crying now, tears rolling onto the plastic. She repeated the address, twice for good measure.
“Dispatching now, ma’am. Stay on the line. Are you the mother? We need to know—”
Out the window, Johnny craned his neck. Lavender panicked and hung up the phone.