The Runaways

Chapter 35

Hailey

It felt like one of those mornings—one of those beautiful beginnings of a day that start out post-card-perfect before things go terribly wrong.  From the lulling quiet of Georgia’s barn, to the warmth of Caleb’s skin, the grace in a moment like this grated away at my conscience.

The thrill and terror of last night numbed underneath the fear of familiarity. The fear of infinitely reliving that morning, a day that started out just like this one, deceptively peaceful.

On a morning like this, my Mom left. Actually left.

We'd had hundreds of conversations on car rides to school about how she was going to leave—how she was creatively stifled, because she was emotionally stifled, because Dad had become stifling the second he got a seat in the Senate.

I didn't even know what stifling meant at the time. I thought about googling it, but never did ‘cause I didn't want to know. It felt like a bad thing, so I left the definition to chance, and hoped to God that "stifling" wasn't a synonym for separation. The problem with my dad was, he just wasn't good at being a husband. He wasn’t even good at being a dad.

Mom said he was better "before", before the whole politics game drove him crazy, before he started loving work more than he did her or me—the famous "before". Mom liked to say that he really did love me; he just didn't show it properly. 

Apparently he used to when I was a baby, but seeing as most people don’t remember the first few years of their lives, hearing that didn't provide much comfort. But she remembered a time when they loved each other enough to have me, enough to start a life together, and the absence of that wore her down to watercolors.

That morning, I'd been pretending to be asleep, pretending that I hadn't been up half the night listening to their last argument instead of studying. They shouted through the walls till the sun came up.

Never mind my grades.

Never mind my sanity.

They never cared to stop, and the colonial-era-crappy walls just amplified their problems. There was no quiet place to escape to in that house. Every fight, every raised voice, every breakdown was audible everywhere.

Mom came in and she wasn't crying, but she had so much concealer under her eyes that I could tell she had been. And I knew. She didn't have to say anything to me, ‘cause she had that look parents give you when they know they're going to break your heart but are too selfish to stop themselves. That, and her suitcases were jam-packed at the top of the stairs.

She walked over to my bed and sat down, like sitting down would somehow make me feel better, and said, "Your Dad's arranged for a driver to take you to school this morning. It'll only be for a little while, I'll be back when him and I can figure things out."

She never came back. Dad never drove me to school after that, and my driver got so used to me crying in the back of his Lincoln that he stocked up on tissues at the end of every week.

So it went.

When my resentment for my Mom dissolved into loneliness and paled in comparison to dealing with a detached, workaholic father, I called her and we decided to spend the summers together.

 Every summer except this one. This one was Caleb's. For another forty-eight hours at least, and I hated every minute the sun rose higher over the mountains to remind me. Mornings like these were beginnings and endings all rolled into a sunrise, and I've never been good with endings, especially ones I can't control.

I stared out at the country quiet, watching the fog burn off the grass a section at a time, like the ground was unveiling its seven o’clock secrets. Caleb was still asleep and snoring open-mouthed, not enough to be embarrassed about, but enough for me to it find endearing.