Kurt is in Pennsylvania, two hundred miles away. Lori is proud to have dropped him off without crying. Now, she finds herself replaying the day in her memory: the fast westward drive over polished black highway, the abrupt stop at the campus whose gate rose into view like a halting hand. Lori hadn’t cried when they located Kurt’s concrete dormitory, breathtaking in its ugliness. She hadn’t cried when they laid eyes on the cinder block cubicle where he’d sleep for the next ten months, out of her sight and protection, at the mercy of Quaker gods. She had adamantly not cried. This moment of separation, she told herself, had been scripted from the beginning, contained in the very moment of his birth. It was the destination, the destruction, of parenthood.
But now, Lori cries. Sobbing, she allows herself the dangerous luxury of remembering the first months of Kurt’s life, when she—her looming smile, the warmth of her body—was all he knew. She would watch his little face, its twitches and flashes of dawning comprehension, and wonder at the shadowed, textured mysteries that were evolving there. His little mind would be labeling everything it encountered, eliminating possibilities, whittling the world into its proper shape, its ultimate, disappointing narrowness. She would stare, as if she might witness the transformation as it occurred. But it was too fast, it was too slow. And one day he became a boy, kicking a bicycle to the ground. From an infant at effortless swim in the world, he’d become a stout little person with a name, a wish, at odds with everything.
It is the story of every mother. Lori leans against the headrest and puts a hand over her eyes. It seems, at times, that everything ends the minute she thinks of it. The minute she considers a thing’s eventual end—no matter how far in the future—it ends. She takes her hand away from her eyes and looks through the moon roof at the stars. Those stars may as well be dead the minute she considers their death. The remaining thousands of years are only a technical distraction.
Lori lets her body sink farther into the driver’s seat. It is a surprisingly comfortable seat, the headrest expertly contoured to the shape of a woman’s skull. She allows herself to be cradled by the upholstered foam and focuses on relaxing each muscle of her body, beginning at her toes, the way she learned to do as an insomniac girl. Like this, she could become a floating being, weightless and free.
As Lori shifts her focus to her abdominal muscles, she feels suddenly and irreversibly tired. It’s as if all the years have piled upon her at once, the accumulated hours of lost sleep. She lies with her eyes closed, her brain requesting the release of the cinches that hold her abdomen together. As she does this, a maw of exhaustion opens in her core. It would be so easy to just go to sleep. In the corner of her consciousness, she is aware of being a woman alone in a car at night. She thinks of locking the doors, but her hand disobeys the order to move.
Distantly, she wonders what time it is. Perhaps her husband and son are already home from the party or, more likely, out looking for her. The childish pleasure of this thought is undercut by a feeling of trepidation. Her family will be distraught by now, convinced of the worst. What, exactly, is she doing? An animal whimper comes out of her as she strains helplessly against sleep, its steady velvet tug.
Hours pass. Lori sleeps shallowly. Half dreaming, she drives out onto Cannonfield, then snaps back into place at the stop sign, over and over. When she partially surfaces from sleep, she senses that the black screens of her eyelids are changing, becoming reddish. Possibly, the morning sun is approaching, lighting her blood vessels. She allows her lids to remain closed. Groggily, she understands that the residents of this town, invisibly sleeping in the houses surrounding her, will be rising soon. The Christensens will be waking to hangovers, to a fresh-faced cleaning crew ringing their doorbell. Two hundred miles away, Kurt will be starfished upon his narrow dorm bed, possibly working toward a hangover himself, but for the moment still lost in dreams, his mind enviably clear.