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I didn’t realise my mother was a person until I was thirteen years old and she pulled me out of bed, put me in the back of her car, and we left home and my dad with no explanations. I thought that Ma was all that she was and all that she had ever wanted to be. I was wrong.

As we made our way from Virginia to California, returning to the places where she’d lived as a child in foster care and as a teenager on the run, repaying debts and keeping promises, I learned who she was in her life-before-me and the secrets she had kept – even from herself. But when life on the road began to feel normal I couldn’t forget the home we’d left behind, couldn’t deny that, just like my mother, I too had unfinished business.

This enigmatic pilgrimage takes them back to various stages of Alex’s mother’s life, each new state prompting stories and secrets. Together they trace through a life of struggle and adventure to put to rest unsettled scores, to heal old wounds and to search out lost friends. This is an extraordinary story of a life, a stunning exploration of identity, and an authentic study of the relationship between a mother and her child.

The Lauras is the new novel from the exceptionally gifted author of The Shore, which was longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award.

About the Author

Sara Taylor was born and raised in rural Virginia. She has a BFA from Randolph College and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. She is currently chipping away at a double-focus PhD in censorship and fiction at UEA, and splits her time between Norwich and Reading. The Shore, her debut novel, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. In 2015, Sara was shortlisted for the Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award.

Also by Sara Taylor

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Sara Taylor has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

The line “myself three selves at least” is reprinted from “I Am Myself Three Selves at Least” copyright © 2009 by Jennifer K. Sweeney from How to Live on Bread and Music, with the permission of Perugia Press, Florence, MA (www.perugiapress.com).

William Heinemann
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA

William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

To Laura, who left a hole in me.

‘Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.’

Matsuo Basho

‘Don’t make me turn this car around.’

Mom

CHAPTER I

I could hear them arguing, the way they argued nearly every night now, their voices pitched low and rasping in that way that meant they thought they were being too quiet to wake me up. They were right in that their fights never did wake me up—but that was because I always stayed awake until they started. I could feel one coming like the promise of a storm thickening the air. When rain’s on the way I can’t sleep either. Even though I always heard them, when morning rolled around I pretended that I’d slept through it all, because I didn’t know what else to do.

I listened to the rise and fall of their voices for hours some nights, for as long as it took for them to gradually calm. So on that last night, when they went from full pitch to silent in a moment, my stomach fizzed with swift fear: they never broke off in full flow. Then the sound of my mother’s boots on tile as she came down the hall. When my bedroom door squeaked open I went stiff and limp at once, hoping that she’d think I was asleep and go back to the fight.

Ma’s hand on my back made me jump; her voice was urgent, hard-edged, and I guessed in that moment that something was really wrong. I sprang up, comforter bundled around and over me, and she pushed me towards my bedroom door. The mix of dark and light and the gumminess of my eyes made everything smeary so that I almost walked into the door frame. As she hurried me out with one hand gripping too tightly to my upper arm I dove for the mottle of shoes in the entryway, scrabbled, then clutched my muddy-soled hiking boots to my chest. Across the front porch, the splintered edges of the boards catching on but not quite sticking in the tough soles of my bare feet, then down the steps. The gravel of the driveway chewed them, and I jumped into the back seat when she opened the car door for me. I twisted up to look through the rear windshield, blinking to clear my eyes enough to see, searching for smoke, fire, anything that would explain the urgency, but she lifted a fold of my comforter over my head and pushed me down, so that the bump in the middle of the seat pressed against my hip.

I couldn’t tell if Dad was still inside the house or if some of the footsteps were his, or if he’d gone out the back door while we went out the front. Then nylon rustled and something heavy landed in the footwell below my head: the backpack that Ma had kept by the shoes in the front hallway for so long that I’d stopped noticing it was there. Then the thunk of the car doors shutting and the grind and catch of the engine, the world dipping as we drove away.

It was a few moments before I realized that Dad wasn’t in the car with us. I wanted to sit up, to ask why we’d left him behind, what had happened to make them stop fighting so suddenly, but I stayed where my mother had put me.

When she turned on the radio I pawed the cloth from my eyes, felt the chilly night air gusting through the fine opening of her window, watched the stars rotate over us as we turned under them, a right and a right, and a right, getting farther and farther away. I knew better than to ask questions, or to say anything—give her the slightest reason and all that cracking anger I’d heard her unleashing at Dad would be turned to me.

At some point my eyes closed on their own and the seat became comfortable beneath me, and I stopped pretending to be asleep.

The clouds were pink. We were caught on the thin, hungry edge of the morning, before the sun sliced itself open on the horizon and bled out across the sky. In front of us, on the far side of a sorry strip of dirt and weeds, was a freeway, cars zipping by now and then with their windshields dewed and misted, some with their headlights on. We were parked up at a truck stop, the few people moving slow, the eighteen-wheelers looking like they were asleep. The air was greased with the smell of Southern-fried breakfast, stronger even than the smell of Ma’s cigarettes.

Walking into the truck-stop diner I felt naked—I’d gone to bed in thin flannel pajama bottoms, one of my dad’s old shirts—chilly with the breeze that made my clothes feel like tissue paper and made my skin go tight and prickly. It felt obscene being in public in my pajamas, but Ma said that thirteen is just young enough to still get away with it; I look younger. She hadn’t thought to grab my jeans on the way out.

Elsewhere, my classmates were getting ready for school, and I wondered if Ma would call in to say I wouldn’t be there. My school backpack had been left in the car the day before, so at least I’d be able to get my homework done.

The smell of old fryer oil turned my stomach, which was still tight with sleep, but I dutifully flipped through the menu full of laminated pictures of pancakes and waffles and ugly pucks of sausage doused in lumpy brown gravy. Breakfast was a normal thing to do, even a truck-stop breakfast, even if I was wearing pajamas and boots without socks; it was like being on a road trip. Ma sat across from me and scanned the menu, and I imagined for a moment that we were on our way somewhere fun, taking a day off from life, and when evening rolled around we’d go back home and Dad and dinner would be waiting for us. Then she set down the menu and pulled out her wallet, slid the credit and debit cards out of their slots, then got up, went to the ATM near the door, and started withdrawing great wodges of bills.

While I chewed a biscuit and washed the pasty slurry down with chocolate milk she sat across from me, ignoring her plate of eggs but sipping at her coffee, and I listened while trying to make it seem like I wasn’t paying attention as she pulled out her cellphone, called the number on the back of each card in turn and reported it lost, then carefully cut them all into pieces with scissors she’d borrowed from the waitress. The little phone had sat in the cup holder of her car, except when it was charging on the kitchen counter, for as long as I could remember, in case of flat tires or accidents that never happened; I had never seen her use it before.

Usually when a person looks back they have to reconstruct, invent, guess at what was said or felt or smelled. That twenty-four hours, starting with the moment we left home, was burned into my memory. Even now, years after, I can’t forget the grease and smoke, the flannel on skin, the fear of realizing that my life was taking a ninety-degree turn. Some part of me knew, as I listened to my mother’s footsteps coming toward my bedroom door, that everything was about to change, wouldn’t admit it to the rest of myself in the diner as I watched her turn her credit cards into confetti. The tipping feeling, of everything I knew and thought and trusted being pulled out from under me, has stayed with me for thirty-odd years, as if she branded it into my skin with her fingertips when she dragged me out of the house.

She dropped the card bits into three different garbage cans on our way across the parking lot, put the backpack in the trunk, tossed the cell into the passenger footwell as if it had outlived its usefulness, put the car in gear while I was still buckling my seat belt.

The phone began buzzing as we got onto the freeway. She’d let me sit in the front seat, to keep me from throwing up or to make things easier when I did throw up, and after a few seconds I reached for it.

The phone continued to buzz every little while, skittering on the floor like a giant insect. I wondered what she’d do if I picked it up and answered it myself, decided that, given the circumstance, that was a bad risk to take.

While we were stuck in rush-hour traffic halfway across a bridge Ma decided she’d had enough. She flicked her cigarette butt out the open window, ducked abruptly to the side, her hand flailing between my knees but eyes still on the road, and pitched the trembling phone off the side of the bridge and into the river.

“It was more than six years old,” she said after a little. It sounded almost like an apology. “I should’ve thrown it away with the cards—cops can use them to track you down if they want to. I’ll get a new one once we sort life out.”

I didn’t say anything, but she must have read my silence as expectant because, after a few minutes, she continued: “Maybe I’ll give it a shot, in a while.”

My mother had never been much of a storyteller. I knew the vagaries of her life—the foster homes and that she had a green card, the fact that she hadn’t spoken to her parents since she was a teenager—but it wasn’t until we left home that she began writing in the details. Maybe she began telling me then because she felt guilt, or whatever her version of guilt was, over leaving and taking me with her and not explaining anything. Maybe the stories had finally backed up in her and she had to let them out.

Around sundown on the day that she threw her phone out the window we pulled off the highway into one of those graveled roads that cross the tree-covered median where cops sometimes sit to watch for speeding drivers, and that’s when she started telling me about her childhood. I wanted us to be stretched opposite each other on the cold, solid ground, with a wood fire between us casting shadows across her browned, unlined face, because that’s how stories were supposed to be told. Instead, we were in the front seat of the Civic, my feet barely reaching the dash but propped up anyway, passing deli bags of salami and provolone and a can of Tab back and forth, the windshield dark with evening, the headlights rushing by on the highway on either side of us blocked out with spare clothes and the blanket from my bed, their edges caught between the windows and frames to make curtains. I sucked the flavor out of each slice of salami before swallowing it whole, kept my eyes wide and intent on her and nodded at intervals, trying to show how close I was listening.

When we’d stopped in the late afternoon for the salami and Tab and more cigarettes we also went to the Goodwill next door, found a few pairs of jeans that fit me, several men’s flannel shirts that were too big for both of us so we could share them back and forth, plus odds and ends like socks that we couldn’t do without. It was cold for May but the flannel would keep us warm enough, and I hoped that the fact that she’d not gotten jackets or coats or even sweatshirts meant that Ma wasn’t planning on us being away from home long enough to need them, even though she’d pitched her phone rather than talk to my dad.

She ate six or seven pieces of salami and cheese rolled up together like a cigar, cracked open the soda, took a swig, handed it to me, then said, “When I was fourteen, just a few months older than you are now, I ran away from home to be a ranger,” like she was talking to the steering wheel or the night on the other side of the windshield.

She wanted to be a caretaker of the wilderness, wandering the national parks counting birds and paring back mistletoe, carrying all that she needed with her and going days and weeks without seeing another person. She checked all of the survival books out of the library, read them under her bed because it felt more secret there, and took notes in a marble composition book that she’d shoplifted from the five and dime. When she had filled three of these with lists of things you could eat and things not to, instructions for making fires and building shelters and choosing drinking water, she set off, in her younger brother’s boots—her parents said that girls didn’t need boots—with as little as she couldn’t spare crammed into a backpack fished from a dumpster. She made her first mistake then: the boots didn’t fit properly and her socks were too thin. Her feet blistered, and they found her a day later.

“The first thing you do is take care of your feet,” she told me. “Keep them dry and comfortable, stop when they tell you to stop. Good shoes aren’t cheap, but you only ever have one pair of feet.”

After that, she began to save her lunch money and the pennies she found in the sidewalk seams and the crumpled one- and five-dollar bills that her mother forgot crammed deep in the pockets of her jacket, and on the day that she had enough she dumped it into a one-gallon freezer bag, skipped school to go into town, bought a pair of size five-and-a-half putty-green walking boots with yellow laces and space in the toes, and three pairs of cotton boot socks, because she’s always had a weakness for good socks. They felt like sinking her feet into cake batter. She hid the boots under her bed until the days lengthened and warmed, then photocopied maps from library reference books and bought lightweight food. When they found her the second time she’d hiked nearly one hundred miles of the Appalachian Trail.

I was scared to ask where we were going, but even so I wasn’t relieved when the cop knocked on our window at five the next morning and asked the question for me.

“To my parents’ house in Lexington,” Ma said, not bothering to specify whether it was Lexington in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Virginia, or somewhere else.

“Domestic tiff. We didn’t get violent, and the car is in my name. I can take my kid to visit my parents for a few days, can’t I?”

I shuffled in the glove box for the registration, which was in fact in her name, and after some hemming and hawing and muttering into his radio he had to let us go.

“I can’t tell you how to run your marriage, lady, but I recommend you make up quick. Your kid or not, your husband can charge you with kidnapping.”

“We aren’t actually married,” she said levelly as she took the registration back, but I could tell she was getting annoyed. “So there isn’t, in fact, much he can do. As you undoubtedly know. Good day, officer.”

“Are we really going to Lexington?” I asked as we pulled back onto the highway, and then when she didn’t answer for a few minutes added, “Where do your parents live?”

“We are going to find somewhere to get breakfast. Then we’re going to get ourselves to the other side of the West Virginia border, just in case the state brass are still looking for us. And then we’re seeing what we can do about this car.”

We pulled off a while later in a one-horse, one-stoplight town, where the morning sun didn’t touch yet because it had gotten caught on a spur of the mountains. It was nothing more than a strip of buildings along the highway—a diner with a Waitress needed sign in the window, a post office barely worthy of the name, and a gas station/convenience store/mechanic’s garage with out-of-date sodas and stickers on half the pumps that said they’d failed inspection by a representative of the Bureau of Standards—with the barest promise of more buildings farther into the trees. Ma said she’d be right back, and as her boots crunched across the gravel and scattered the auto glass that littered the parking lot I crawled into the footwell and peeled up the carpet. Linty coins were ground into the floor and stuck to the inside of the cup holders and fallen under the seats. I left the little caddy of quarters alone; that was for tolls. Ma didn’t carry a purse, instead crammed a billfold into the back pocket of her jeans until it wore permanent lines into the denim, so my scope for plunder was limited. She’d disappeared into the mechanic’s garage; I cracked the door open wide enough to slip out, and padded down the grassy shoulder of the road to the post office.

The counter was manned by a single perm-haired postal worker, who watched me through eyeglasses with plastic frames the same clear red as jolly ranchers as if she suspected that I was going to take off with her entire stock the moment she looked away. Her glare made my spine crawl as I picked out a postcard, not one of the Welcome To! or Greetings From! ones, but a placeless one with dogs playing around a water pump on the front—I wasn’t worried about being tracked down by the postmark, since we were on the move, but I didn’t want to make it too easy, if Ma really didn’t want to be found.

Daddy— I started it because Ma said he sometimes worried that I was getting too old to want him around, to not be embarrassed of him. Too old for him to be my daddy. Which I was, but hey. The cheap blue pen chained to the counter spluttered, and I went over the word again and again, until it stood out in ridges on the glossy side of the card.

Mom is all right and I am all right. Though I think she’s still upset. If she doesn’t want to come home, I will when I can, so don’t rent my room to anyone.

I’d meant that to sound funny, but it just sounded juvenile. But you can’t erase pen.

I love you. And miss you. —Me

I counted coins into the woman’s hand to pay for the card and a stamp, then held it for a moment before dropping it into the dark slot of the blue U.S. Post box, not quite a wish and not quite a prayer, but something between the two.

Ma was leaning against the car when I walked back, watching a man with pierced ears and a goat beard inspect the workings of her engine.

The bearded man finished his inspection, nodded at her, and ambled back to the garage.

“Mr. Freeborn over there is willing to trade out this car for a hatchback he owns,” she answered, “and to throw in a set of plates registered to a woman too blind to drive anymore. We might be staying here a while—the diner needs a swing-shift waitress, and there’s a room to rent within walking distance.”

“Are we moving here, then?” I thought guiltily about my postcard, pushed it out with thoughts about home, wondered if it was safe to ask more directly how long we were staying for.

“Not really. Just laying low for a little while. I want to figure out which end is up.”

I had found my mother’s green card before, in a desk drawer with my father’s birth certificate: her gap-toothed smile looks nothing like mine, her cream umber skin darkened as she aged. When I first found it she wouldn’t tell me what it was, why she didn’t have a birth certificate, and my father had explained that it meant that Ma was “off the boat.” And I hadn’t known much more than that until I asked her, sitting in the car in the turn-off near the West Virginia border just after the cop knocked on the car window, where my grandparents lived. Somewhere between breakfast and the town where I’d thought we wouldn’t be staying, she started in on that story.

In 1970 her parents emigrated, messily, from a little farming village in Sicily; she’d been six years old. Her mother’s father—my great-grandfather—had traded his stonecutting skills for U.S. citizenship, and only moved back to his own father’s hometown when he’d saved enough to start a family, but even with her inherited citizenship it had been difficult for my grandmother to bring her family across to America. An elegant woman with a degree in fashion design, she had been forced to take a factory job sewing men’s shirts in New York for the lowest legal wage; my grandfather worked construction, then started a business of his own. My mother and her brother had been left in a Catholic orphanage in Palermo for the six months it took for their parents to save their money, rent an apartment, and sort out all the papers that would let them stay in the country. Ma wouldn’t explain why her parents hadn’t left them with family instead, why an orphanage had been the solution they’d fixed on; it wasn’t until later that I found out that my grandmother’s parents had thrown her out and my grandfather’s had disowned him, and that none of their relatives would speak to them at the time, let alone volunteer to take their two kids.

When Ma arrived in the States her language marked her out: a rural, southern dialect that other Italians barely understood and held in contempt. The Americans she met didn’t care; all wops were the same: filthy, immoral, stinking of garlic and barely more than animals. She learned Spanish before she learned English, from following her father to building sites and listening to the foreman’s shouted instructions. Most of her English she learned from the secondhand TV her parents bought to keep her and her brother company on the long nights when they were locked in the apartment together, both parents working overtime.

As the language came to her she waited to feel like she fit in, but even when she had learned to diagram sentences and could recite entire scenes of Shakespeare by heart, she never did: she did not know how to act American. She did not even know how to act female—her mother had been at her place on the factory floor for hours by the time Ma woke up, and so for years she went to school with her stockings run and back to front, her brassieres the wrong size, her hair tangled, no packed lunch and no money to buy one. It wasn’t until she met my father that she learned the difference between scrambled, fried, poached eggs; she never stopped wildly mixing her metaphors.

She learned to blend in, to fade into the foreground, killed her accent so that she didn’t stick out, but every new English word took her farther from her parents and the country where she had been born. She wedged herself into an in-between space: not American, despite the social security number they gave her in her late teens; not Sicilian, despite her green card; but eternally other, so that she could only be comfortable when no one expected her to belong.

CHAPTER II

The apartment was above a little grocery store, with a porch and a staircase up to it out back, beside the dumpsters. It was one room with cheap pressboard furniture: a kitchen table with chairs, an awful couch, and a bunk bed; there was a hotplate in a corner and no TV.

Ma started work the next day, walked down the gravel road in the dark and birdsong to serve truckers and other lost souls oily coffee and comfort food from four a.m. until twelve noon. I woke when I wanted to, which was earlier than ever before because of the hollow feeling her absence gave the apartment. That emptiness made me crazy, so I laced up my boots while my toast browned, guzzled milk from the cold-clouded glass bottle until I stopped being hungry, and stepped out into the half-light of daybreak.

On that first morning I stood for a while in a beam of syrupy light on the porch, looking up the slope of the mountains in front of me. I catalogued everything I’d left behind, the almost friends that I almost missed, the toys and books and half-finished projects, wanting some reason to stay in the empty apartment, because I didn’t want to step out into those woods alone. It felt like a vacation, like I’d be back to normal life in a few weeks, and that made it easier to not want. We couldn’t be staying here forever. As soon as Ma got over her angry or her sad or whatever it was that had made her finally walk out we’d go home and everything would go back to the way it had been.

It was mid-May, a month away from the end of school and from my fourteenth birthday, and the woods were green with the mist of moss and lichen and budding plants, rich with the cold damp smell of decaying leaves and growing things. I felt the breath of it settling in my body and I stepped down onto earth, then slowly walked into the woods, stopping every few yards to look back. Then the apartment and the grocery store under it disappeared from sight, and I was freed from the fear of getting lost because I was lost. I wandered, up and down rough hills and through bottomland oozing like a scraped knee just beginning to heal, until the sunlight poured down the mountain that hid the eastern horizon and cut through the trees in heavy beams. Here and there the bones of the earth poked through, jagged-edged boulders and looming cliffs that begged to be climbed and which I did climb, not through any desire for conquest, but for the deeper stillness I found while perched on a crag, looking out over the rippling cloud shadows on budding treetops, not thinking of anything until suddenly I realized that eventually I would have to get down, and I wasn’t sure how I had gotten up in the first place.

After a few days I stopped wondering when we’d go home, hoped even that we wouldn’t leave until I had missed the last of school, maybe even gotten through the long, lonely summer without having to spend days sitting on the front porch of our house admitting that I had no friends and nobody liked me enough to talk to me when they didn’t have me in their face every day reminding them I existed. Then came a day that Ma did not return home at noon.

I had started to grow confident in my ability to navigate the mountain, comfortable in the silence, and so at first I thought that I had just gotten home early. But I sat on the top step with my legs dangling in the sunlight, and still she did not come. Then I wandered down to the front of the grocery store beneath our apartment and saw that her car was gone, and I wondered if she had gone home without me, or gone on without me. If she had found out about the postcard, and abandoned me because I couldn’t be trusted. I ran back up to the apartment: her clothes were still there, but she could buy new ones. Then I ran my hand under the mattress of the top bunk, and found that our bankroll was still in place, a thick pack of cash wrapped in a sandwich bag that she didn’t want to carry around. That was only so comforting.

I waited, counting my breaths, until I heard the hum of her car and the grate of tires on gravel. She cut the engine and came around the corner of the store carrying a large cardboard box. I was so relieved that I nearly threw up.

“Where were you?” I asked, trying not to sound accusatory but not quite succeeding.

“The Baptist church down the highway was having a book sale. You weren’t back when I came for the car, but you can come with me next time.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t think how to tell her about my overwhelming fear without sounding like an idiot, so instead I helped her haul the books inside. It was only half past one.

“You didn’t have to wait for me to eat,” she said, and I noticed the paper sack of diner food on the table. My fear melted into embarrassment.

Tucked into the box of paperbacks was a map of the United States, like the one that hung in the back of my seventh-grade classroom, except less colorful and with the major highways picked out like veins showing through thin skin. After we ate, she quizzed me on spelling words while she sat before the unfolded map on the floor, searching the wide page carefully, her pen hovering, before marking little stars.

“Places I’ve been. Places I might go sometime. Places where people I know have gone to.”

While I worked through math problems she scribbled notes in black next to the stars, her writing tiny. I pretended it didn’t interest me.

The days began to bleed into each other. I spent mornings wandering the woods and getting lost, but never so lost that I wasn’t waiting to greet my mother at a little past noon, or rather to greet the bag of leftovers that she brought from the diner: old chili or mashed potatoes or meatloaf, cheaply made commercial food we warmed in a frying pan and wolfed down without dishing it onto plates. Sometimes, after eating, she went with me into the woods, where she named the plants and birds and we stuffed wrinkled sandwich sacks with the mushrooms that she knew were safe, to sauté them in butter and pile them on toast. But eventually she’d give me the Look, and even if I washed up and swept the entire apartment it couldn’t be put off forever, and we would settle at opposite ends of the table, she with a book and me with my schoolwork. When I lost my way she would stare, unblinking, at the text, until memory gelled and she could explain the equation, the part of speech, the chemical reaction, that had given me pause, but mostly I plodded on as she read, in a papery, comfortable silence, shaped by the scratch of my pencil and the cry of birds and the brush of wind and the rattle and voices of the people in the store below. I lost track of where we were in the week, in the month, what month it even was, so that I felt as though I existed outside of time, in a never-ending summer.

On the days that she didn’t work we threw food and water bottles into our rucksacks and wandered the mountains, until our legs and hips grew hard. More rarely, she drove us into what passed for civilization, to the thrift store to poke among other people’s memories, or to the Baptist church’s weekly book sale to replace what we had already read. It wasn’t long before these trips filled me with the same trepidation that I had felt on that first morning, staring down the mountain. I was forgetting how to be around other people. My words were drying up.

She picked up every extra shift that she was asked to, stayed late and arrived early with the understanding that she might have to leave at any time. The less she said to her co-workers about why she might have to quit town quickly the more people imagined, so when, nearly three months after we first turned up, the sheriff’s deputy in the brown cruiser came with photographs of her and me and my father, her boss shoved her out the back door with her pay in cash and a kiss on the forehead, and promised to keep the deputy talking for as long as he could while we made tracks.

When my mother left by the back door of the diner I was ranging across the face of the mountain, wandering from one band of heavy August sunlight to the next, feeling it stir my blood and bring my selfness to the surface, and I heard my name in her voice echoing at me off the rocks.

I imagine now that she stood on the porch hugging herself, or paced on the gravel by the car with a cigarette between her fingers, thinking, weighing her options. She’d run away on an impulse, I know that for certain, and maybe if she’d been given enough time hidden away there in the mountains she’d have gone back home on impulse. But the arrival of the fuzz forced the choice. Maybe if I’d taken longer to come when she called for me, or else been quicker and given her less time to think, she would have chosen differently.

By the time I got to the apartment, having made as direct a return as possible, she had piled our books into a plastic milk crate—permanently borrowed from downstairs—bundled our clothes into our backpacks, and crammed our food and cooking things—a pan, a spatula, an electric kettle, and two plates with cutlery—into a heavy canvas bag, and stacked it all in the middle of the room. The map, her map, was folded into a clear plastic freezer bag on the table along with all the money, and she stood pensively on the tiny porch, chain-smoking cigarettes and dropping the butts onto the lid of the dumpster below, waiting for me.

We stuffed all of our things into the car in one trip, locked the apartment door and left the key with the grocery clerk, and set out south, her hunched over the steering wheel, me leaning back in the passenger’s seat, the zip-lock full of map and money on my lap. My conscience was pricking—I couldn’t know that it had been my postcard that was setting us on the run, but I felt guilty.

I held my peace for a few hours, watched Ma suck on cigarettes and wondered what she was thinking. We went south for a good while, and I could tell by the map that we were running parallel to the West Virginia border— not the folded map that Ma had marked up, but the road atlas that she’d pulled out when she’d gotten in the car and left opened to the correct page on the dash in front of me, in case she got lost. Then we dipped back into Virginia, and I crossed my fingers that we were going home—we were, I guessed, quite a way south and west of it, but in our part of the state the best way to get to a place was often to go in exactly the wrong direction, at least until an interstate showed up, because taking the mountain roads could take you forever.

But the farther south we went the less faith I had in that theory, and when the green sign with Welcome to North Carolina! whipped past I had to admit to myself that Ma hadn’t decided to save the sheriff’s deputy the bother of dragging us home. The sky had clouded over, and a slow rain was falling, the drops fat. The sound of it hitting the car and the way it greyed and hazed everything outside the windows made it feel as if we were in a cocoon, made the smoke-and-candy-smelling inside of the car feel safe in a way that the nerves in my stomach couldn’t accept was real.

“South,” she said, and her voice crackled on the vowels. She took a drag on her cigarette like she didn’t expect me to say anything else, but as she let out the smoke she reached down and turned off the radio, which had only been on quiet, so that I knew that she knew that the time for a little explaining had come.

“As far as it takes to get somewhere where no one expects us to go and no one knows us.”

She took another drag on her cigarette, kept her eyes square on the road. Her hair was tied back tight for work, and I couldn’t tell if the bones of her face were standing out stark because she was tired or for some other reason.

“I’ve been thinking about that for a while now. When we left I just wanted to get away, didn’t care where to. And when we got there I wanted to keep our options open, earn some money, not be findable until I wanted to be.” She gave me a sharp glance then, and I thought about the postcard and felt the back of my neck blaze hot. “There are places I’ve been meaning to go back to, loose ends I should have tied up, that I’ve been putting off for years now. Since I met your dad, really. And now that moving on seems like the wise choice, I can’t see a reason not to get it all done.”

“Why not go back home?” I asked, and I could tell from her silence that it was the wrong thing to have asked. I waited for the coldness to wear off, then said, “So we’re going to visit some people for a couple days?”

“Not quite, kid. There are some things to sort out first, people I need to get in touch with. Guess the cops couldn’t have turned up at a better time—school will be starting in a few weeks, and you need to be in it.”

“Oh, hush. It’ll probably take me until next June to get the money together. What else is there for you to do all day?”

I listened to the rain a while, then dropped the map onto the floor and kicked my feet up onto the dashboard.

She pulled a cigarette out of the packet with her lips, cranked down the window an inch, lit it one-handed without taking her eyes off the road, then let out the first plume of smoke. Then, to my surprise, she started telling me.

Her father was a black sheep, disgraced and turned out by his parents for differing reasons depending on who told the story: an argument that ended when he stabbed a cousin; money stolen from a brother; the police coming to their home in search of smuggled food, pilfered truck parts, missing livestock. All of the stories about him that her aunts and uncles and cousins had told her were probably true, or not far off the truth.

He was passing through town looking for seasonal work when he met my grandmother, fresh from the big city with her new degree and planning on making something of herself after one last summer at home, cooking for her brothers and making dresses for her mother. He fell for her; her parents knew he was no good; they had a little romance in secret. It was the oldest story ever told, but with a twist: when he asked her to marry him, she said no. She wouldn’t go against her parents.

It was with a small-gauge bullet, barely larger than the BB gun my own father had as a boy, in the fleshy part of her leg, and even though it bled and scarred into a thick raised keloid that my mother remembers running her finger over when she was little, her life was never endangered. But she had to go to a doctor to have the bullet dug out, and the doctor called the police, and the police took my grandfather to jail.

When he was released on bail he went to see her, asked her again, would she marry him? He was sorry about her leg, but he’d been forced to it: he would be tried, and she, as the only witness, would have to testify, would have to tell the truth, would send him off to prison for years and years. Unless—wives could not be asked to testify against their husbands. She could fix it, or she could have his imprisonment on her conscience.

Whether she bowed to this logic immediately or was slowly worn down, the result was the same. She married him. Without a witness, the case was thrown out. And when they found out what she had done, her parents threw my grandmother out.

CHAPTER III

We stopped only for coffee, to refill the gas tank and, once, to coax a suspicious counter boy into giving us the battered key chained to a block of wood that unlocked a reeking unisex bathroom. The sun set and the road emptied but we continued south, passed through cities that were nothing more than constellations of lights in the dark, then back into the nothingness of the countryside, time suspended.

The night felt too thick for talking. But then a song that Ma didn’t like came on, and she fiddled the tuner up through the 100s and around to the low numbers again before clicking the radio off. She settled her shoulders back against the car seat and when I had stopped expecting her to speak she began, in a slow quiet voice, a story about her life before that might have been for me or might just have been to keep herself awake.

The first Laura Ma met lived across the road from her from when she was nine until she was twelve. She was a short, plump girl with mouse-brown hair and an astigmatism that meant she had to wear glasses but constantly tripped into things anyway. She was Irish, but since they went to the same church, confessed to the same priest and received the Host together they were permitted to be friends.

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Sara Taylor

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III