Evergreen

Her breath caught in her throat, like a momentary clarity amidst a lapse of judgment. Like her breathing had been an administrative mistake, the problem of her existence had been admitted for too long. He gripped her wrist with comforting force, his fingers suffocating her pulse, his eyes still focused on the road before them.

“Hey–hey! Don’t, it’s ok. We’re not going to think about that!” He sung.

She didn’t want to think of it; that’s what she’d been trying to say. Now her eyes darted wildly, taking in the blur of traffic lights, and the tranquil suburban street. There was a desolate bowling alley. One she’d passed on this drive home her whole life, waiting for its inevitable closure.

Everything she’d known would one day be gone. Including herself. She gagged, futilely pulling against the door’s handle. She continued pulling, her stomach crawling up her throat, an acrid tingling pricking her nostrils.

“Oh–hold on.” He undid the child-safety lock in time for her to lurch her torso out of the car, her chest restrained by the seat belt, her body supplying nothing but breath and spit.

“Ok, the light is green–so, Lila, I’m going to pull over, ok? Pull your head up.”

She did so, half-heartedly pulling the door towards herself, not enough for it to latch shut. She rested her forehead against the cool window. He did as he promised, unbuckling himself and leaning over her.

She opened the door and fell to the curb. The pavement was sandy under her sneakers. She spat into a pile of dead pine leaves. Between heaving breaths, she looked up to see an Afghan Pine above her head, shading her body, blocking out the stars.

She heard him rustle through the glove compartment behind her.

“Where’s your puffer?”

She waved him off, and he exited the car, rounding the front to crouch next to her.

“Just breathe, ok?” His hands rested on her shoulders. “Lila?”

She nodded, adjusting her crouch. Her knees ached, her head in her hands. She measured her breath, her palm pressed against her chest. Count it. Slow it. Satisfied, she stood, pulling Henry with her, making a nod to the car door. The doors shut with little ceremony. She slid her palms under her seat, hoping the touch could shackle her to Earth.

Mount St. Helen. That’s what they’d been discussing. “The volcano?” She’d questioned when he first mentioned the podcast he’d enjoyed earlier that day.

“Yeah, a super volcano! Essentially, scientists are trying to predict when it’ll blow since it’s sort of overdue. ” He says this, near glee. A tightly curled smile. “And, yeah, like when it blows up, it'll cover up the sky with ash.”

“Like the dinosaurs?” Her mouth dried, her tongue and tonsils ashen.

“Mhmm.” He nodded, blinking.

Because the meteorite hadn’t killed them on impact, it had been a years-long apocalypse. Another podcast they’d listened to, on this unending road trip.

She watched the car, as it ate the road in front of them, her thoughts turning to the baby dinosaurs, newly hatched, taking their first uneven steps in near-darkness.

The silence she and Henry had settled into was soon accented by her sharp intake of breath, the fluttering, weak exhalations. Choking on invisible sand.

She opened her eyes now, a cool rush of relief melting down her spine. His face was contorted with concern.

“Did I freak you out?” He whispered.

She smiled weakly. “Don’t you hate that?” Like she was discussing an unpredicted rain storm, an inconvenience rather than a premeditated natural disaster.

“But that’s life. Not only is your death imminent, but there’s a constant possibility of a–a–global event that ends the human race.”

She cleared her throat, “Ok, Hen.” She patted his shoulder, indicating for him to back off. She stewed in the discomfort that settled in between them. She cracked her neck into the quiet.

“Sorry. That was shitty of me.” He looked to the deserted road now.

She didn’t want to discuss it. “To the dinosaurs, maybe.” She provided an unnecessary laugh.

He grinned. “Well, they’re birds and lizards now. They’re fine.”

“They’re dead!” She guffawed.

“They evolved.” He said, as though it mattered. For your extinction, a consolation prize; From the ashes, came lizards.

She refused to speak the rest of the ride, though this was hardly noticed, as they were five minutes from her childhood home.

They pulled into the sloped drive, the house dark, and asleep. They slipped into the house, hoping not to wake Dorie, Henry carrying both rolling suitcases under his arms awkwardly as an extra precaution. The effort was for naught, they discovered both her and Lila’s mother awake in the living room, Ruby between them being lazily petted. A true crime show droned on.

“Hello, weary travelers!” Her mother chirped.

“Hello,” Henry sighed, from his backlit silhouette in the doorway.

“Henry, you aren’t a pack mule, set those down,” Lila’s Aunt Dorie waved.

He looked to Lila, nodding his head towards the stairs. They shared an exchange of mouthed words and hand gestures.

She turned to her Aunt and Mother. “Henry’s tired.” She announced indelicately. She relished the groan this produced from him. Dorie and her Mother laughed. They chimed their goodnights from where they sat.

“G’night!” Henry called.

She crossed the room now, careful not to step on Ruby’s wet dog bones or her Mother’s half-completed craft projects. The phosphorescent glow from the Netflix logo, the only light illuminating the path. She precariously bent over the two women, depositing a kiss atop both their heads.

They watched the show together, Lila curled between the two awkwardly, her feet taking turns falling asleep. The show was about disappearances. From what her Mother had filled her in on, the first episode had featured political disappearances, and the second, kidnappings. Now they watched the third episode in rapture, detailing stories of people who disappeared themselves. Cars abandoned on artery roads, phone lines disconnected, suicides presumed. A few subjects were found, giving their full testimonies. Some avoided the cameras and upheld their assumed identities.

“I’ve never been to Tuscaloosa, never left this town. My name is Marianne and it always has been. I don’t know nothing about a Linda Sorello.”

Lila felt embarrassed for these individuals. It’s one thing to be caught, a dead man walking, it’s another to refute your existence.

“How could anyone do that?” Her Mother sighed, particularly referring to a mother who’d abandoned her infant son in a post-partum mania.

“Oh, I could.” Dorie smacked her lips together, folding her aged hands in her lap. Dorie could. She essentially had. From the time Lila could write in cursive to the time of Dorie’s diagnosis. Neither Lila nor her Mother had heard from her. She’d disappeared. Still on Facebook, still Dorie, just not her aunt, not her sister.

Eventually, she came back, and the decade of silent treatment was long forgotten.

Her Mother essentially said as much. “Oh, you did.”

Dorie laughed big, which pitifully died into a hacking cough, which started her Mother’s laughing.

You were dead to me. Now you’re back and dying.

They clicked the TV off, Dorie and her Mother trudging to their respective bedrooms. Dorie’s CPAP machine droning on, an uneasy white noise machine. Ruby panted on Lila’s lap now, drops of drool falling from her tongue onto her jeans. She let them. Signs of life. The dog happily responded to her Mother’s call, pouncing onto her bed in another show of youth.

“Turn off the kitchen light, will you?” Her mother murmured from her comforter cocoon.

She agreed, gently shutting her door. She made the climb up the stairs, to her bedroom. Still paisley pink, her stuffed animals lining the dust-covered bookshelves, her memories lining the wall. If she peeled off the One Direction poster now, the paint would strip off with the tape. So it stayed that way, archival, waiting for an unknown fate.

There was Henry, his behemoth body occupying every square inch of her childhood bed, his limbs akimbo, his snore deafeningly reminiscent of her aunt’s. She’d have to buy earplugs, or better yet, lay awake next to him, count the space of time between each inhale….He stirred then, rolling to his other side, pulling the quilt with him. His t-shirt stretched across his expansive back…and exhale.

He was too good a man for her to worry about him leaving her, so she was afraid of his death. She kept his location and would watch his car eek along the highway on his commute home. If his car stopped at any one location too long, she’d check the address to make sure his car hadn’t broken down somewhere along the 405. He was usually at a gas station or a McDonald's. She’d lecture him on eating fast food, heart disease ran in his family. He’d kiss her worrying forehead.

There was no room for her here, and tonight, she didn’t feel like waiting for sleep.

She slipped on her sneakers and wool coat. Easing the front door open, praying it wouldn’t give one of its temperamental squeaks. Ruby was a light sleeper.

The car hummed awake, and she drove back down her road, lined with evergreens, and back out to the highway. The highway that had been the death to her small desert town nearly sixty years ago. The small town where her mother had been born and raised, where she then birthed and raised. The town where her mother would one day die.

The highway, the one way out, and resented by locals. Lila had taken that highway to California six years ago and only looked back during the colder months of the year, when her deserted desert town was cold at night, and tepid in the day. When the more eager strung Christmas lights over cacti.

Hurricane, Utah, rested in the basin of a wide valley, so the best they got was rain and wind. There had once been a peach grove, but the trees died. Now there was a summertime peach festival made up of imported peaches, and a complex irrigation system that kept the golf course green.

She turned onto Route 9, passing the highway stops—the Super 8 and the Taco Bell. Her town was a cultureless strand of sprawling parking lots, one pouring into the other, a water system of fast-casual franchises.

She slunk past the blinking red lights as the town sputtered onto the desert’s two-lane road. The trees thinned, a few downed, their carcasses home to desert mice and shed snake skins. She was now the sole protagonist in the road trip movie. They filmed Thelma and Louise somewhere near here, her town a passing backdrop in a larger narrative.

Her eye caught a gleam of light resting on a telephone pole. It was a makeshift memorial comprised of Roman candles and childhood photographs. She couldn’t recognize the face in the car's crawl, and she wasn’t eager to stop. She leaned on the gas. Who would leave a candle lit in the desert?

She took the long way home, passing the police station and the entrance to US 15, towards Zion. She’d take Henry to Zion. He’d like all those paths, the small creatures scuttering over your hiking boots, and the dust caking your ankles. He liked stuff like that. He was a city boy, looking for his Lewis and Clark discovery. She could roll her eyes at it now, but one day it might get annoying. But she was trying to be present.

She turned on the radio, quickly clicking off the NPR station. Henry insisted on being informed, “vigilant,” as he liked to say. As if one day Steve Inskeep would send Henry into the fray, fists flailing in the name of justice.

She was from a desert town. Desert people were supposed to be unknown and unknowing. Adobe clay houses and infinite landscapes. An oasis in an overcrowded world. A refuge for overthinking minds. It’s why the artists flocked to the barren roads. O’Keeffe, Dalí, and Dixon.

There had been a bomb on Bourbon Street. They’d blown up a Christmas market. She didn’t know why, and neither did the authorities. But they knew the names and ages of the people killed, and they took to reciting them before a moment of silence. She had never been to New Orleans and didn’t like crying for the dead. Let alone the dead she didn’t know.

With one hand, she plugged in her aux, flicking on a Phoebe Bridgers song. For someone so afraid of death, she didn’t mind singing along to songs about it.

You can’t deny the other side

Don’t want to die any more than we do

What I’m trying to say is, don’t they pray

To the same God that we do?

Tell me, how does God choose?

Whose prayers does He refuse?

She slipped back into her home, undetected. Turned off the kitchen light, crawled into bed, propping her head against Henry’s chest.

The next morning, between sips of coffee, her Mother mentioned a rainstorm that’d blown through a few weeks prior. How the powerlines had whipped, how a few trees were downed.

“One hit a passing car.”

“Oh?” Henry asked, his mouth full.

“Mhmm, the driver was dead on impact. Young guy too, only in his twenties.”

“So sad,” Henry offered with little emotion to his voice.

Lila thought of the memorial she’d passed the night prior. The lit candle near a creosote bush. “Was there anyone else in the car with him?”

“His girlfriend. Alive.” Dorie spoke, her voice hoarse from sleep. Her oxygen clicked, moaned….exhale. Later that visit, Dorie would brave the second story of the house, heaving up the stairs to present Lila with her Advanced Directive form.

“Your Mom won’t sign it.” Do Not Resuscitate. She signed. The right to live, the right to disappear. O’Keeffe in the desert. Lila gave her signature. Dorie kissed her cheek, smoothing her hair.

“It takes guts. Dying.”

Henry and she hiked the Canyon Overlook trail. Lila stopped a few times to take hits from her asthma puffer. Henry, as she’d suspected, was alight with the scenery, even as gusts of wind bit at their ankles. He had a subtle fear of heights that only reared its head on roller coasters or domestic flights. Luckily, it wasn’t triggered here.

It was unnerving to see his steadiness devolve into sputtering fits. Normally, he was as reliable as an in-flight oxygen mask. Put your mask on first before helping others. In case of emergency, he’d put her in a mask before she could decide to die by suffocation or die on impact.

He stood at the overlook. Arms outstretched, laughing and whooping like a coyote. His knees, unwavering, the drop before him no matter.

A bomb on Bourbon Street, or a falling Evergreen, or a bald cliffside, none of life’s surprises suppressing his liveliness. Evergreens fall. They dangled their legs over the edge.