The low drone of the car and the twangy whine of the country radio was the only sound for the next few hours. Dawn painted a long pale-yellow line that seemed like a reflection in a black pool of the yellow line disappearing beneath my tyres. I smiled as I pushed the car just a little faster; it didn't really matter where we were going. It just felt good to go.
I looked in the rearview mirror not because I needed to check for cars behind me; I hadn't seen another car for quite a while on the country road that weaved its way to and fro. I looked in the rearview mirror because I liked the way Michael and Zara looked dozing together like two kittens.
Zara's head rested on Michael's shoulder and Michael's cheek rested against the top of Zara's head in a perfect little puzzle. Zara's book lay open between their two laps and the breeze from my cracked window fluttered the pages so it sounded like hundreds of tiny white butterflies flitted around them.
It looked magical, the two of them asleep together in the back seat of my car. It was what I dared not even hope for when I called Michael way back when I found out I was pregnant. It was the dream that I chased away from my pillow, because it was too perfect, too happy, too together. I'd only ever known lives to fall apart, not weave themselves back together.
It was like the tears my mother used to get in her pantyhose. Once it started to run that's all it did was run…run…run…
I dragged my eyes away from Michael and Zara and gripped the steering wheel a little more tightly as my palms began to sweat.
On the windshield, as the last remnants of night stretched before me, I could almost imagine drops of rain hitting the glass. I could almost see the long trails they streaked against the pane. I could almost hear the pitter-patter over the wind in my ears.
I forced my eyes to the back to reassure myself Michael was still there, because the memory of the morning I woke up to him gone was threatening to take over my mind: the rain, the cold sheets, the lingering hope dying like a snuffed-out candle.
I wanted to believe Michael was different. I wanted to believe that he cared for Zara, that he cared for me. I wanted to believe the beautiful little dream in the back seat of my car might not run away with the fast-approaching dawn.
But Michael had run before. There was a tear, not a small one. No, certainly not a small one. I wasn't sure his feelings for me could stop something as inevitable as a snag in pantyhose running…running…running…
Michael
I groaned as someone woke me with urgent fingers on my knees, and for a bleary moment I was back in Glendalough, crammed into the back seat of that rickety old bus. There was the same crick in my neck, the same blurry sense of disorientation, the same dry, woolly feeling in my mouth. A golden ray of sunlight pierced through my eyelids no matter how tightly I squeezed them shut. My knees were wedged against scratchy old fabric and I was all contorted up like a doll shoved into a box. I didn't know where I was and I didn't want to know—I just wanted to sleep.
Just like in the mountains, the persistent prodding came again only a second later. I imagined the old grouchy bus driver nudging at me with his muddy size-thirteen boot, and I knew he'd tell me to get the fuck off his bus any second now. But I grinned in my half-asleep state because that meant any second now Abbi would hurry onto the bus with cheap gas station sunglasses and two shots of Poitín. I'd squint against the dazzling light that haloed her sunflower hair and she'd smile down at me, because with her wild desert magic, she already knew we were linked forever.
"Wake up, wake up, wake up!"
With my eyes still closed, I frowned slightly. The voice I heard was sweet like the smell of pollen in spring, not hard and gritty like gravel. It certainly didn't sound like the voice of an old, irritated bus driver.
I peeked open an eye and regretted it as early morning sunlight stabbed at me.
"Ugh," I groaned.
But it wasn't a piercing headache I was suffering from, it was an upset stomach. The threads of my memory started to come undone and I was dragged away from the bus in the mountains. Shielding my eyes this time, I dared to pry one open to find the empty bag of Skittles lying in my lap. Small hands pressed insistently at my tucked-in shins, and I sat up enough to see Zara waking me.
"Would you get up already?" she said, bouncing eagerly just outside the open back door of Abbi's car. "You're missing it."
I rubbed at my tired, puffy eyes and smiled at my daughter. It was like she and the gentle morning breeze were playing a game: Zara would tuck her blonde hair behind her ear and the wind would tug it free. Zara huffed impatiently as another strand came loose. I knew that impatience, that uncontrollable energy, that need to move
