Zierman - Night driving: a story of faith in the dark

If you remember this trip at all, it will be in the blurred sounds of Disney DVDs against the rough highway. Youll remember it like the sun streaking orange through the windows of our minivan, sitting warm and heavy on your laps like a purring, striped tabby.

Maybe youll remember fragments of these long days: the sun-bleached backs of dozens of baby alligators, piled on top of one another like lumber in that restaurant lagoon in Georgia. The seashells you lined up along a worn bath towel on a strangers guest-bathroom sink. The rough beauty of those pinecones you gathered from that farm forest in North Carolina, hand in hand with a woman you will likely have forgotten by now.

Maybe youll remember nothing, but youll be tricked into thinking that you remember because of the pictures youll see through the years, photographs turned into half-imagined memories in your still-solidifying minds: That shot of the two of you standing ankle-deep in the restless blue of the Atlantic. The one of you with the giant plastic roadside elephants. That hastily taken selfie of me, thirty years old, pantomiming a shout of enthusiasm as we entered Florida. The two of you asleep in your car seats behind me for the first time all day.

For the record, heres what happened: During the February of 2014, we left our home in Minnesota for no good reason at all and drove south. Dane, you were four. Liam, two.

You wont remember the few wiry gray hairs that began shooting out of my parted blond hair that winter, but I do: ten and a half years married, mama of two, running away from it all.

I stood in front of the streaked bathroom mirror, pulling at the grays, one sharp swift tug after another. Liam, you stood below me, carefully brushing my blue jeans with a Walmart hairbrush. In the face-magnifying mirror on the wall, I could see the crows-feet sprawling outward from my eyes and that worry line fixed stubbornly between my eyebrows. (You called them eye browns then. My worry line you called an ouchie.)

The woman standing in the halo of those halogen lights felt to me like a watermark, a ghost, some streaky, half-realized version of the person I imagined Id be by now: Whole. Happy. One of those fun moms, with a smile on her face and a spring in her step and lots of ideas for macaroni-based crafts. Instead I felt stripped bare as a tree branchbrittle and sharp and falling apart, still, after all this time.

Will you remember this? The mornings I stumbled out of bed only after youd poked and tugged and hollered and I couldnt ignore you anymore? I lay on the couch in bleach-stained yoga pants and a ratty sweatshirt, hair piled sloppily at the nape of my neck, and I let one PBS kids show bleed into another all day long.

I reador didnt. Cleanedor didnt. You wanted to play in the snow, but I couldnt manage to work myself up to it, so I lugged the bikes and riding toys into the house instead, and you rode them back and forth from the front door to the patio door, leaving salt streaks on the wood floors. You were slamming into things and leaving bits of drywall and paint in the corners and scars in the walls, whooping and laughing and unaware.

At night I fixed your dinner, then stood behind the counter and filled my wineglass to the brim with cheap cabernet. You ate your grapes and picked at your tacos and elbowed each other and whined about the vegetables. Be kind to each other, I told you. And you couldnt have known what was happening, really, when I drained the glass all the way to the bottom in a few smooth motionsand then filled it to the top again. You couldnt have guessed at the small, terrifying ways that I felt myself giving up.

After the third time school was closed in our district for freezing windchills, I began to trace a route from Minnesota to Florida on a map with my index finger. By then wed had forty-seven days of below-zero temperatures in our suburban Minnesota town. The coldest winter in a generation, the weathermen were saying, and I believed them.

That week I created a new document titled Epic Winter Road Trip? where I calculated the time it would take us to get to Florida and listed the names of friends and family and acquaintances we might be able to crash with along the way. Minnesota to Buffalo Grove, Illinois, where my parents lived (6 hours, 15 minutes). Buffalo Grove to Indy (3 hours, 15 minutes). Indy to Nashville (4 hours, 36 minutes). And although the trip had been more of a vague hypothetical than anything until that point, seeing it laid out like that in sans serifeven with a question mark after itwas something of a decision in and of itself. Once I saw that it could, theoretically, be done, there was nothing to stop me from doing it.

I would load you up into our van and pull out of our driveway, and the three of us would merge into the throng of American Road Trippers working their way across the continental United States. We would go for all the usual reasons that people goand for a few reasons that I didnt have the courage to admit, even to myself. Mostly those reasons had to do with the darkness that pressed down on my partly healed places, making my heart throb painfully, reminding me of the ways I had almost ruined everything about this time a half dozen years ago. The ways I still could.

Nashville to Atlanta (4 hours, 15 minutes). Atlanta to Florida (6 hours, 13 minutes). Once we got down there, nothing much mattered. I believed in that sparkling romance-movie way that Florida would heal us. After that, who cared? It was just a matter, then, of getting home again, and I imagined that it would be nice to head back up the southern East Coast, to see the Carolinas, to wander among the pastel beauty that I pictured to be Savannah.

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