The driving started a few days after he pulled his cord telephone off the hook. He remembered how it swung around and swung around in small, dangling circles by the curly wire, hitting the wall a few times gently before it settled like a limp snake. He knew that Maria, at least, would come to check on him, but he did not want to leave a note at the door letting her know that he would be gone indefinitely. At the age of twenty-two, he did not want to have to announce to anyone—to reveal—that he was leaving. That he needed to leave.  

It was after his mother died that the house felt emptier. He had moved up from his bedroom to her’s, which had always smelled faintly of stale cigarettes, no matter how deeply it was cleaned. The newspaper from the previous week lay on the nightstand. It was about the first American woman in space on some NASA mission. Humanity had already landed on the moon, all before they had even bothered to consider that a woman should experience the vast emptiness of space. Handling emptiness, his mother had told him, was not for men, who she deemed weak and fragile. It was women, she said, who had the courage to disappear and come back unmoved. 

Everything in the house lay intact like nothing had changed. Like she was still going to come back and turn on the coffee pot to hiss in the morning. Pour its black contents into her favorite porcelain teacup, which was lying on the counter gathering dust, ready to be filled. Demanding to be filled. Everywhere he turned, he saw her. Framed pictures of him and his mother were on the walls, next to the Monet reproduction they had picked out together when he was seven. The clock she had purchased from an antique store or that grandma had handed down—he was not quite sure which anymore and could no longer ask. The perfume bottle on the mantel that she habitually sprayed in a puff before leaving for work. Well, that was actually now reduced to a few shards in a stained circle on the ground that he tiptoed around. He had knocked it over the day she died in a fit of rage and the living room carpet had been imbued with her usual floral scent ever since—so overpowering he felt like he might choke sometimes. 

Perhaps the smells were the worst part. Without the cigarette stench in her bedroom, without her perfume adorning the living room, maybe he could have stuck it out. But everywhere he went, the smells triggered memories he could not suppress. Not with something as primal as scent. The only way out was out, he had decided on the fifth day, and on the seventh, he had enough courage to take action on that realization. To drive away for good.

So he beeped his Ford Escort XR3 doors open and settled into the hot leather seat, which burned his thighs through his pants. He popped his mother’s favorite cassette into the dash. David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” blasted through the dry air as he switched on the even drier air conditioner. As he pulled out of the driveway of the perfect all-American suburb with manicured lawns and identical houses mandated by the Homeowner’s Association, he acknowledged again to himself that he did not know where he was going. It was not a thrilling feeling, as one might expect, but a comforting one. He was leaving and did not know where he was going to end up. Possibly in some vast emptiness. Likely in a motel room bought with the stacks of money his mother had left him in her bedside drawer from his father, who funded them to keep to themselves and tell people he was on some work trip or the other. 

His mother had died a week prior, on the 6th, and today’s hot summer day was not one he was going to spend at the YMCA pool or at the mall with a popsicle. What was the point, he figured, of making happy memories when they came to define you? When the present no longer held a torch to all that the past had been?

*

It was as though his mother had posthumously put the car keys in his hand, and as soon as he had picked them up, months had passed. The days blurred together like a drunken bender—the kind with no sober moments in between and the threat of delirium tremens looming with every sip not yet taken, every mile not yet traveled. Driving on this interstate, driving on that back road. Sometimes, he would stop and ask a passerby for directions to the nearest city or small town, as though he had a plan and were not indefinitely suspended in time and space. Where is the nearest diner? The nearest motel? Once, he had stopped at a mall, but the familiarity of days looking at those same chain stores in that identical layout with teenagers bustling this way and that, was too much for him, so he purchased a new shirt and pants and left. Malls had since been crossed off his list of places to stop.