Page 100 of Cut Off
“Same thing.”
“It really isn’t.”
She’s laughing now, that snorting laugh of hers that has no dignity, and I’m laughing too. And for one whole minute, I’m not thinking about anything else but a shoebox under a bed and a fort in a tree and the smell of our parents’ kitchenat six in the evening, that exact specific smell, burnt toast and dryer sheets and whatever Mom was making for dinner.
Maddie goes quiet. The road hums beneath us. The wipers come on automatically because the sky’s decided to spit on the windshield.
“I don’t know what my life looks like now, Zo. Like. I don’t know what I want. I had it all mapped out, and now the map is wrong, and I don’t know how to draw a new one.”
“You’ll draw one.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you drew the first one.”
She thinks about that, looking out the window at the pine trees and the rain. “That’s a good answer, actually.”
“I have my moments.”
She reaches over the console and finds my hand again and squeezes it. “We are a mess.”
“Catastrophically.”
“You think we’ll be okay?”
I don’t answer right away. Somewhere far ahead of us, the highway is curving toward a city full of strangers. Somewhere far behind us, a nine-year-old is going to wake up in another strange bedroom, and his dad is going to wake up to a very empty house.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I think we’ll be okay.”
I’m not entirely sure I believe me. But Maddie nods like she does, and that is enough for now.
The Seattle skyline shows up the way Seattle shows up: not all at once, not with any kind of announcement, just a slow gray accumulation of buildings out of a slow gray sky, like the city is being drawn in pencil while you watch. The Space Needle pokes up. The Sound shows up on our left, flat and steel-colored and enormous. Maddie sits up and takes her feet off the dashboard without beingasked.
“There it is,” she says.
“There it is.”
“You okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fair.”
I’m not okay. I’m also—and this is the part I did not expect—glad. The kind of glad you feel under your ribs, low and steady, the kind that is not loud enough to be excitement, and not soft enough to be peace.
I’m doing this.
I look at the city through the windshield wipers and I think about being twelve years old in our parents’ living room, watching a woman in a blazer deliver the news from a desk in a city I’d never been to, and thinking, that. I want to be the one who makes that.
I still want to make that.
And if I don’t, I’ll find out, no regrets.
I’m also not going to wake up tomorrow in a guest room down the hall from a nine-year-old who’s just decided to trust me. I am not going to hear the six-inch creak of a closet door. I’m not going to feel a hand at the small of my back. I am not going to be in a kitchen with two stools beside mine.
Both. Both are true.
Maddie watches me. She’s always been better at this than I have given her credit for.
