Anywhere But Here, Chapters 4–6
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a young adult novel, posted 3 chapters at a time
Chapters 1–3 | Chapters 4–6 | Chapters 7–9 | Chapters 10–12 | Chapters 13–15| Chapters 16–18 | Chapters 19–21 | Chapters 22–24 | Chapters 25–27 | Chapters 28–30 | Chapters 31–33 | Chapters 34–36 | Chapters 37–39 | Chapters 40–42 | Chapters 43–45 | Chapters 46–48 | Chapters 49–50 | Chapters 51–53 | Chapters 54–57 | Chapters 58–60 | Chapters 61–63
AWBH is a work in progress and an experiment in crowd editing and serial posting. Your feedback is welcome!
Chapter 4: Emily (Summer 2012)
Please, Emily remembered her mom begging her dad, Can we please go to San Francisco?
Anywhere But Here trips did not mean going to San Francisco. Every. Single. Time.
Her dad gave in to her mom once, on Emily’s first and only visit to “The City.” She didn’t know why it deserved the special “The.” Really. It was “a” city, in Emily’s opinion, meaning “a” chaotic city, “a” dirty city, and “a” city never wanted to visit. San Francisco was a special intersection of chaos and crazy that made it a disaster.
Before that first trip to San Francisco, five years back, she’d desperately pleaded with her Dad to go somewhere with a meadow, she’d been studying meadows, and surely Anywhere But Here could be a meadow?
“Emi-bear, Mommy really wants to go to San Francisco. Next Anywhere we’ll find a meadow,” her dad said.
She’d pouted with her miserable sad face that usually got her dad to give in, but it didn’t work.
Emily summed up San Francisco in one word: suffocation. Tall buildings leaned down on top of her. People crowded around her, as she gripped her dad’s hand tightly. Honking cars, snorting buses, and clanging cable cars accosted her. Her dad’s hand squeezed back, saying, I won’t let you go. When they left downtown and reached a pale long stretch of beach on the bay, Emily complained of her feet aching, her legs aching, her abmondinals aching.
“Ab-mon-dinals, Emi-Bear? Can you show me where those are, exactly?” her Dad smiled.
Emily pointed at her bottom, and her Dad covered his mouth to hide his grin, “Yeah, my ab-mon-dinals hurt too. But this is the best part of the city, the place where you can see both bridges at once,” he said, pointing. Emily saw red arches to the right, and gray arches to the left. Her mom was walking slowly behind them, as she had been the whole trip.
Her mom nearly ran into people at every step as she looked everywhere, except where she was walking. Every sentence she said was an exclamation. “Look, the kittens, in the windows at Macy’s!” Or, “Look! The ice skaters! The giant Christmas Tree!” Her mom walked so slowly, they had to wait for her at every street corner.
At the end of the day, Emily exclaimed, “Look! The car! Let’s go home!”
She didn’t remember anything else, except her Dad teased her later, “Emi-Bear, that was the first trip you fell asleep when we got in the car, and slept the whole drive home.”
Emily glanced out of the car window as they drove over the Causeway, the stretch of elevated freeway over wetlands between Sacramento and Davis. An arrowhead of mallard ducks flew overhead and beyond to the south over the dry rice fields. How do they decide which direction to fly? Emily wondered, but wouldn’t ask her Mom. Her mom never knew anything interesting, and would toss the question back to Emily, like a hot potato. “Why do you think, Emie?” If Emily knew, why would she ask? Were the fledglings at the mercy of their parents as well? Maybe the parent ducks are more sensible, they’re flying away from San Francisco.
The water towers of UC Davis ballooned and then flashed past on the right. Dad’s school, Emily thought, noticing her mom didn’t say it this time, perhaps the only time she’d never called it out on this drive. Last year her Dad made them go to Picnic Day in April, where she saw a cow with a plastic porthole in its stomach, like it was a boat with intestinal inhabitants inside. “Ewwww!” She objected, but was secretly fascinated.
Six months ago, she might have said, “Hey Mom, remember that cow?” But not today. Her mom wasn’t worthy of her words. Any of them. Mentions of her Dad got one of two reactions lately: tears, which her Mom failed to hide, or a resigned, far-away look and uncomfortable sadness that Emily hoped was guilt. Walk on nails, knife in the gut guilt.
A boyfriend? Seriously! Only loser Moms have boyfriends. She didn’t know if it was worse to move, or stay and have everyone she’d known since Kindergarten looking at her that way on the first day of high school, like she grew a giant red birthmark on her face over the summer.
Because her mom had a boyfriend.
A green rectangular road sign announced in white paint:
Vallejo 22
San Francisco 52
Emily felt a bubble of excitement from her mom she wished she could stab with an ice pick.
Chapter 5: Sandra (1998)
Sandi was certain she had left most of her heart in San Francisco. Not in one place and not in the obvious places, although the obvious places captured her breath: pushed by strong winds while standing in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge looking back at the city; or breathless at the top of Twin Peaks seeing the waves of technicolor houses undulate towards the skyscrapers of downtown. Chartreuse! Fuchsia! Indigo! Colors prohibited in suburban Conditions, Covenants, & Restrictions.
No; the less blatant, less touristy spots got deposits of her heart: walking along the Embarcadero holding Drew’s hand, their daughter asleep and snuggled in close to her Daddy in the front carrier.
Nobody stared in San Francisco, unlike home where the silver-blue haired ladies visually stabbed her, trying to shame her into … into what? Putting the baby back? It didn’t help that her wedding ring didn’t fit yet either, as the baby weight was slow to disappear.
Nobody glared, judged, whispered, or cared. Sandi felt ebulliently invisible, and love for this city swelled with each exhale.
The streets were filled with life and energy, and people beyond basic vanilla, joined in couples less blatant in Sacramento.
“Don’t stare, San,” Drew grumbled more than once. He seemed to be less enthused about being in this city.
“What?”
“Men hold hands here and kiss in public, but don’t stare.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Drew glared, shaking his head silently. The topic dissipated in the gutter next to the used cigarette butts.
Sandi wanted to dig and ask questions about why Drew disapproved, but his thoughts were barricaded by impenetrable defenses. She missed Parker, her friend from high school theater. He didn’t have an easy time being the only gay boy in their Yuba City school, but didn’t hide behind teenage norms; he was chartreuse, indigo, crimson, and every bold color. Sandi felt more colorful being his friend, and he watched her back more closely than any girlfriend.
But she dropped the subject, into the gutter next to his silence, which didn’t get a piece of her heart, but a sliver of her voice.
She didn’t say anything either, when they passed by an abruptly ending street, a diamond yellow sign amended to proclaim “Dead FRIEnd.” Faded silk flowers twisted around the pole, and the frame of an old Schwinn 10-speed bicycle, silver flakes of paint curling, was held to the pole with a black U-lock. She swallowed a surprise sob, and stared out the window of the taxi, hoping Drew didn’t see.
Otherwise, if Sandi smiled more on their escape; Drew smiled less. Late in the afternoon, her daughter fussed, hungry and restless, while they looked for somewhere to nurse her.
“What about there?” Sandi pointed at a park bench. “I saw another woman feeding her baby in public? I have a blanket to cover …”
“Like I want the whole world to see your breasts? Really, Sandi, I don’t know what is in your head sometimes. Let’s find a restroom.”
“Restroom? Will I feed our daughter perched on the toilet in a locked stall?”
That glare again, his eyebrows joining and eyes narrowing. Sandi didn’t talk back to Drew.
“Fine, just somewhere, hopefully that I can change her as well.”
They were near Union Square, and Drew lead her to Nordstrom, pointing at the door to the Women’s Lounge. “I’’ll be in the men’s department. Come find me when you’re done.”
Sandi entered and saw two other women nursing infants on a couch. One looked at her, and shifted over to make room. “I think I’ll change her first,” Sandi said, “but thanks.” Even nursing is made comfortable here, Sandi thought, as another piece of her heart floated off, implanted inconceivably in the padded changing table.
“That was the best trip, ever,” Sandra said, dreamily watching the lights of downtown fade out the car window over Drew’s shoulder.
“Maybe I should have showed you the darker parts, the crack addicts confrontational and violent mid-month, or the filthy homeless sleeping on the sidewalks, protecting their stolen shopping carts full of crap?”
It wouldn’t have mattered, Sandra thought, not answering Drew’s question. The further down I-80 they drove, the closer they got to home, the more Sandra felt the tug of her heart strings, tethered solidly to at least a dozen unlikely places in the city of San Francisco.
Chapter 6: Emily (Summer 2012)
Emily didn’t know a lot more about San Francisco, except that she was going to live there with her Mom, and her Mom’s boyfriend.
“Dad, what about you?” Emily had asked, when he was leaving the night before.
His face rapidly shifted from sad to joking. “Out of a suitcase, Emi-Bear, and traveling as usual.” Emily couldn’t remember the last time he was home for more than a week before hopping a plane to another business trip. She had a collection of petite snow globes from cities across the US and the world. One shake and it was snowing in Texas or Hong Kong. Her collection was trapped in a box, along with a lot of other boxes in a storage cube alongside a bunch of other storage cubes somewhere in Sacramento. She couldn’t make it snow anywhere now.
Her Dad rushed off so quickly, with a hasty hug, a predictable goodbye kiss on the top of her head, and his shiny black car drove away. She was used to his goodbyes, but all his next hellos would be by phone.
“You will love San Francisco!” her Mom enthused, last night after her Dad left, and again this morning as they packed and left the driveway. “There is so much to do; so much that’s interesting and unique and …” The sales pitch was getting old.
On green road signs, the miles to San Francisco descended with the force and regularity of a time bomb. A new city appeared above San Francisco like a side-kick with acne; the city names unknown and instantly forgotten.
Traffic crawled as they passed under an arched foot bridge bisecting the freeway, guarded on each pedestrian entrance by angry metal people brandishing poles with vicious geometric shapes. She wished she had one.
She caught a blink of skyscrapers beyond a gray bridge, a dark blue-gray mass rising arrogantly into the sky, like the tall popular kids in school.
“There it is!” her mom chirped.
Emily exhaled forcefully, causing her mom to send her a cautious glance. She’d done a good job scaring her mom away from talking to her.
Fog smothered the tops of the tall buildings and most of the red tips and arches of the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. Emily looked at the car’s temperature gauge: “Sixty-five degrees!” Then she looked down at her bare knees and saw a couple golden hairs she’s missed shaving. She hadn’t meant to speak out loud.
“I warned you,” her mom said.
I warned you; I warned you; I warned you. The voice echoed in Emily’s head. You didn’t warn me that you were annihilating my life … but you warned me about the weather.
Traffic crawled again as they veered right towards a lineup of toll booths. An overhead row of stoplights blinked on and off; on and off. If the light stays red, I wonder how long my stupid mom will stay at the light? Emily thought. But the light blinked green, and their Subaru Outback, packed full to the ceiling accelerated onto the Bay Bridge.
Keep reading — Chapters 7–9
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