I had just called to tell him my parents had sold the house and that I’d be moving to Florida in 10 days. I had to go, because it was late, and my parents wouldn’t let me talk on the phone after 8 o’clock, due to my penchant to lie prostrate on the kitchen floor with my legs up the cabinets, curled up in the phone cord and telling him every word I learned from Rod Stewart songs until all hours of the night.
( You laugh, but look me in the eyes and tell me Ease my troubles thats what you do isn’t one of the sweetest, simplest things you’ve ever heard? Now: be 13. I rest my case).
The night before I moved, though, I snuck into the kitchen after my parents went to bed and we talked until 3 in the morning. The next morning I woke up and wanted to call him once more before we left. While my parents were packing the last of our stuff into the moving van, I picked up the phone. It had been turned off. I wailed. I ran into the driveway hysteric, and my mom reluctantly handed me my dad’s work phone. I was a few sighs in when the battery died.
My mom shook her head and we walked to our next door neighbors house and knocked on the door. Miss Vicki answered the door. In Louisiana, you call all adults Miss or Mr. and then their first name. My mom was Miss Erin, my dad was Mr. Tim. It sounds silly now, but for the rest of my childhood I couldn’t figure out what else to call grown ups.
Anyway, Miss Vicki was my mother’s best friend. Her only friend. They hugged and sighed and they stopped and looked at me. I was standing on her doorstop, sobbing quitely, hiccuping.
“Oh honey,” she said, and put her hand on the back of my head. “Erin, we think we have it hard. She’s in love.”
12 years later and I still remember her saying that, how much it meant to me that an adult had acknowledged the gravity of my situation. How many times had I yelled at my mother as she shook her head, WE ARE IN LOVE, MOM. It was a wonderful thing to rebel against, stewing late at night with my journal, so sure that I knew more than my parents did, that I knew what they didn’t.
Miss Vicki led me into the sitting room and showed me her phone. He couldn’t come over like I wanted- we had said goodbye a handful of times already but kept trying to see each other again.
So I shuffled my way across our yards and dragged myself into the very back seat, long enough to lay down in and sob. I can still feel the seam of where the vinyl met the upholstery that I smashed my cheek against. I cried my way through Mississippi; none of us said a word. “Fire and Rain” came on the radio; it was the first time I’d heard it, and even though I know now that it’s about a lady dying in a plane crash and not about, well, me, it still makes me cry when I hear it.
A different song came on and my sister complained to my mom that I was singing in her ear. I have a terrible singing voice.
We strained our necks to see our dog, Rosie, sticking her head out of the passenger window, where she sat with my Dad up ahead in the moving van. I cried harder, imagining that any second she would fall out and get run over on I-10, having a tantrum just the way I did as a small child crying alone in my room: by evoking every terrible thing I could imagine— I was ugly, I was fat, my mom was mean, my Dad was stupid, my sister a brat, I would get a B in Math, I would never figure out how to make my G’s look good in cursive, — fueling my misery with anything I could think of, until it morphed into something more resembling existential grief than a reaction to a particular circumstance.
I imagined Rosie leaning her head out too far, her little feet tripping and flipping out of the U-Haul. I wondered if we would pull over and drag her body into the van, I cried with horror, lying down in the back seat, hugging a gigantic pillow shaped like Piglet’s dismembered head that I had spent many nights practicing french kissing on (if my life sounds like a Judy Bloom book, it’s because I read her religiously and tried as best as I could to model my entire life off of her characters). I couldn’t believe how unfair it was that Rosie would eventually die; I realized how much we needed her, for continuity, for stability, to give me someone to hug and cry to when I was alone with her late at night writing this boy love letters— “You didn’t get a letter from Meaghan today!” his mother would announce to him with a laugh, on the rare occasion that it held true.
I remember thinking, Of course Rosie is going to fall out of that window and die, why wouldn’t she? I cried and nervously told Mom to gesture for Dad to pull over. She refused and assured me otherwise, but it didn’t help. I sunk down in the backseat, feeling, I think, for the first time, that this was what happened to the things that we loved.
