My mother and I were heading north out of Marathon, Florida, in the middle of the night, everything we owned in the back of the car. I was thirteen, and she was driving. We were coming off an overseas bridge when someone screamed from the opposite side of the street. I glanced left for a second—a woman, long black hair, white tank top, she might have had her hands to her mouth, or I might have made that up afterward—before looking back at the road, just in time to see whatever it was we were about to run over. A crumple of fabric, the size of a throw pillow, glowing white in the headlights. We hit the thing fast, sailed over it clear, the wheels bouncing twice and continuing on. By the time my mother could slow down and pull over, we were fifty yards up the road.
My mother could find a million reasons to leave a place. She’d been fired from her job in Jackson after thirteen months, fought with our landlord in Mobile after six, and been dumped by her live-in boyfriend in Jacksonville after just two. Two hours before the hit, she’d opened the door of the doublewide that had been our month-long home, sighed, and announced that hurricane season started the next day, and she didn’t want to be around to see it.
Soon we were eating dinner off paper plates on the rug in front of the TV and flipping through tour books from AAA to decide where we’d go next. I wanted to go north, to New York or Boston, where we’d see snow if we waited long enough, even though I knew we never would. My mother wanted to stay in the South, where she could have a year-round tan. We only paused our back-and-forth when the news ran an update on a story we’d been following, the one about a teenaged runaway who’d fled from a pious, oppressive home months before. My mother and I had been cheering on the girl’s escape for weeks. The update said that they had no update, that there was still no sign of the girl. We turned back to the guidebook. “Macon,” my mother said, and that was it.
I didn’t expect to be in Macon more than a week and a half, but that was fine by me. Every time my mother told me to get in the car, I was always ready to go.
This was the first time, though, that she’d run over something on our way out.
“What the hell was that?” she asked. “Did you see it?”
“Barely.” I undid my seat belt and twisted around so I could look out the back window, but we were too far ahead to see anything—not the thing we’d hit, not the woman I imagined bolting into the middle of the street to seize it, not the cars back there with drivers decent enough to stop and help. “You can pull into that gas station up there,” I said.
My mother’s eyes were still facing forward, not even shifting up toward the rearview mirror. “It was probably just a bag or something,” she said. Cars were passing by us, and although I couldn’t see them, I could feel their passengers rubbernecking, trying to catch a glimpse of the people who’d hit. . . whatever we’d hit.
“What if it was a cat?” I asked. “Or a baby?”
“Do you think they have a lot of babies lying in the middle of the road in the Keys?”
Her hands were back on the steering wheel, turning it slightly to the left. Her knuckles were white. “I can’t be here,” she said. “I need to go.”
“You have to at least see what it was. Don’t you want to know what it was?” I opened the door to get out myself. My foot was six inches from the asphalt when she—gently but surely—pressed on the gas.
—
We didn’t mention the hit again. After arriving in Macon the next day, my mother sold her car and hung pictures on the wall for the first time in my life. She got a job working reception at a travel agency and didn’t leave. Her post-work sighs became exhausted instead of angry. When I joined the track team and ran faster than any other girl, she never showed up for a single meet. She glanced toward the window each time a police cruiser drove by. I never told any of my friends about the hit. I spent nights at the houses of the one’s whose parents made dinner and asked about our days. My mother obsessed over every quit-smoking fad and failed them all. Her clothes sagged and gapped at the waist. She didn’t date or make any friends. I could never bring myself to throw away the old AAA tour books. I finished a year of school and then another and on until I graduated and fled to the West Coast on a track scholarship.
—
In the spring of my junior year, my mother asks me for the first time to come home. They found a spot on her lung.
We are in the car again, I’m driving her back from the doctor, when she says she wants me to stay. She—this woman who never did anything for me—wants me to leave school to take care of her. I tell her I can’t, I won’t, she tells me I’m being selfish and a coward, then an opossum darts in front of us. I jerk the wheel to avoid it, and we’re both thrust against our seat belts. We’re silent for a minute after that.
I ask my mother if she remembers the time, eight years ago, when we hit that thing in Florida and she was too afraid to go back and see what it was. She says that I have to be more specific about the “thing,” and when I tell her I can’t, then she remembers. She claims she forgot all about it, that she hasn’t thought of it since the night it happened.
I find this hard to believe. Wasn’t that why, when we finally got to Macon, we stayed?
She tells me that I’m wrong. She tells me there was something else from that trip she never forgot. We stopped at a motel outside Ocala later that same night. I had disappeared to the balcony the moment we checked in, and she flipped on the TV, wanting to see if the hit-and-run made the news. When it never did, she knew we were safe, and she put it out of her mind permanently.
She was about to go to sleep when the final story of the broadcast made her pause: The teenaged runaway, our teenaged runaway, had been found nude in the woods, less than five miles from her house. At first she called me in to see, to share in her horror, but I didn’t answer.
My mother walked to the balcony and peeked around the curtain, where I sat on one of the white plastic chairs, my bare feet on another, my leg pulsing a fast beat. A snuck cigarette burned between my fingers. I don’t remember this at all. I was turned away from her, headphones in my ears, watching the planes take off and fly away from there.
Christen Enos’ stories and essays have appeared in The New Orleans Review, Phoebe, Catapult , and MAKE Magazine, among other journals. She received her MFA from Emerson College and currently teaches writing at Northeastern University in Boston. She is working on a novel about an obsessed fangirl.