Home Again

“C’mon, sleepy head, aren’t you coming with us? Time to go!” Gentle hands pulled me to the surface of my murky dreams and the soft voice held me there as I struggled, wanting to sink back into the depths. But a blur of an idea floated by and I blinked as it tried to define itself. Oh . . . yes. Time to go.

This journey would mark the longest and farthest I’d been away from home in all my ten long years. I had never left my state and only occasionally my county. The borrowed blue suburban sat packed in our driveway, an awe-inspiring upgrade from our tired, wood-paneled station wagon that would have wheezed at the mere thought of such a trip. We were finally off on our first real vacation, an entire week in California.

Five pajama-clad, pillow-hugging children stumbled out into a foreign, pre-dawn yard and clambered into the back of the suburban, where my parents had folded down the seats and laid out blankets, hoping we’d catch a few more solid hours.

Those hopes sat unfulfilled. Who can sleep surrounded by giggling siblings, while rumbling tires below roll you on toward lands unknown? Who can sleep while speeding away from the hints of a subtle sunrise, the desert around you changing hue in the rising light and the highway ahead never veering?

And so we bounced around, seatbeltless, in the giddy newness of it all. We worked our way through word searches and coloring books, stuck goofy Velcro facial features on fuzzy stuffed bananas, and made up lyrics to the songs on my mom’s ABBA tape, unaware that forever after these songs would have the ghostly power of dumping us right back into this bumping suburban at the first snatches of their melodies. (“Gimme gimme gimme a mannequin midnight. Take me to the doctor cuz I’m breaking my leg.”)

And the discoveries kept on coming. Every little thing was new back then. The (free!) individual containers of jelly at the breakfast restaurant. The palm trees that sprung up anywhere, as if they actually belonged on the side of a road instead of on postcard islands only, silhouetted against garish sunsets. The miracle of a ride like Pirates of the Caribbean, where the crickets and the breeze and the ink-blue ceiling above make you think you’re outside when you know you’re really in. The way the sound of the ocean can put you in a kind of trance, can make you say things as you sit on the sand next to your mom, things you’d never think or dare to say in the kitchen as she sweeps the floor.

One week later we pulled back into our driveway and spilled onto the grass, happy to be spread out and stationary. The neighbors drifted over and we lounged in the yard, putting off the unpacking as a familiar breeze came down from the canyon to welcome us home.

My mom sat on the porch with our neighbor, showing her how to put rag ringlets in her daughter’s hair. She asked me to run down to the laundry room and grab the fabric scissors, so I skipped into the silent house and took the stairs by two. I stopped short when I reached the sewing machine. There on the table lay the scraps of purple fabric I had been trying to fashion into a purse the night before we left—a lifetime ago. They had sat there, untouched in the stillness, while we got splashed by a whale at Marineland.

I looked around at the coat hooks, the carpet. My little brother’s sock at the foot of the stairs. The walls stared back like strangers, and I walked up to my room feeling vaguely traitorous. There was my bed, rumpled and cold, not warm like it had been when I detached myself from it and yawned my way out into the night, expectant and unknowing.

But I knew things now. So many things. I knew that one hundred miles might sound like a lot, but it’s nothing. I knew that a five-kid-family can incite amazement and disdain out beyond the mountains of my little valley. I knew that the ocean is real, and it smells like yearning, and your dad can teach you how to jump its waves as they roll in, and when you sit beside it and have a grown-up talk with your mother you feel like the tiniest, most important person alive.

I stood there knowing these things, in a house that knew nothing, breathing air that had gone stagnant in this lifeless space while the rest of the world had deepened. The pale blue curtains were placid, the trailing wallpaper flowers indifferent. When the quiet and the knowing got to be too much, I turned and ran.