Runaway
Janyce Stefan-Cole
Word Count 888
I was a chronic runner, routinely threatening to leave home. One summer day my sister and I did it: we packed a doll valise with pjs, toothbrushes and tramped across the front lawn, past the cul de sac into the wild field. We hiked through weedy high grass until we came to a stone wall where we set up camp behind a large rock from which we could still see our house. We had cookies with us but no money or water. As darkness approached, we packed up, marched home and rang the doorbell.
The youngest, I longed to be told I was found in the bulrushes, like Moses, especially after my sister stopped running away with me. My brother offered to help. He lifted me onto his bicycle bar and pedaled for what seemed like miles. “Here,” he said, dropping me off, “you’re free.” I had no idea where I was and did the only sensible thing a nine year old could: sat on the curb and cried. My brother, hidden, watched me. After a time he pedaled us home, telling my mother I’d learned my lesson. Partly true, at least I stopped talking about leaving home.
My college dorm was a step away from homelessness; an institutional space between classes. I stayed in Boston after graduation, moved in with a guy I didn’t know very well and started a master’s degree in education, taking a job at the registrar’s office. After one semester I understood I was kidding myself, teaching wasn’t for me, just a safety net I didn’t believe in. After a couple of years we decided to pack up the apartment in the South End. There wasn’t much, no couch or TV. Only books. I’d become a voracious reader who’d take a book over a chair any day. We gave most of our things away.
My boyfriend might have been on the run for dealing–strictly small time, but I was eager to hit the road. We revamped a laundry truck into a makeshift camper, loaded our few belongings, two dogs, and took off. For three timeless months we traveled across America, destination unknown. We grieved at the end of the highway in San Francisco. Broke, I took a job with my boyfriend’s army buddy, a junky doctor specializing in diseases of the skin. He would have liked for me to join him down the rabbit hole, but I had plans for the money I was saving. A year or two later, I announced I was heading south. My boyfriend could come along if he wanted. He agreed.
We traded the laundry truck for an old Chevy. I wasn’t sure about the boyfriend, but was even less sure about heading out alone. Mexico turned into three years living in a desert town that almost felt like home, but I began to hanker for the green of my childhood. Nine years had accumulated since I’d left New York. I wasn’t homesick when I hitched a ride with a couple of guys; piled in my dog, a hand-painted Guatemalan chest of my things and headed for the border, crossing into Texas at Brownsville. I was let off in Jacksonville, Florida, with one of the guys. My father was working in Miami at that time and sent someone to get me. I sat on his balcony overlooking Biscayne Bay, feeling lost .The dog and I boarded a plane bound for La Guardia Airport.
My mother was still living in the suburbs. I was no more at home there than the day I ran away behind the rock. My sister came to the rescue, subletting her apartment on East 69th Street to me when she moved out. Employment at a specialty cheese shop paid the rent, leaving me smelling vaguely cheesy. I liked walking the streets, and it was only a short bus ride to the city’s true cathedral: the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It was there, in the European wing, in front of a Rembrandt self-portrait that I rediscovered the one person in the world who could stop me in my tracks. I’d first set eyes on him as a teenager. He’d have been the one who got away except he’d never been reeled in, though I’d offered myself as bait. But I was the one who’d left—gone but not forgotten.
On a spring day in May we took the subway down to City Hall where, papers in order, we wed. Mostly I remember the Madras jacket the bored-looking official wore as he pronounced us legally one. We went for lunch with our witness pals and then my newly minted husband went home to his mother’s house, where he lived, not far from where my mother lived. The idea was that I would live there too: back to the roots that never took.
Within two years we were ousted. My mother had finally given in and joined my father in Miami. My husband’s mother put her house on the market. We moved to a cheap walk up in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. I took a job with irregular hours clerking at Time, Inc. I was halfway through my thirties when we bought a beat up brownstone in crazy wild Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The tree we planted has grown tall. Its leaf buds thicken as I write, another spring come round.
Janyce has published two novels: The Detective's Garden and Hollywood Boulevard (Unbridled Books). Story or essays appear in: The Adirondack Review, Sandstorm Journal of Arts & Letters, Rattapallax Magazine, The Broadkill Review, The Laurel Review, The Open Space, Pank. "Conversation with a Tree" won Knock Literary Magazine’s Eco-lit prize.