Chapter Text
Natalie followed Travis and his mother across the parking lot to the green Chevrolet Lumina parked at the far end of it. The walk dragged on, making everything worse than it perhaps needed to be. Although, like everything else lately, that was also up for debate.
She doubted any of it really mattered.
Following them like that, she felt a mix of humiliation and embarrassment, sprinkled with good, old self-caution. Her fabric bag, next to nothing, was awkwardly clutched under her right arm. It felt like a joke. A few clothes. A toothbrush. And the book she'd been pretending to read every night. The rest was packed up, left behind, and most likely never really hers to begin with.
Travis pressed the button on the key fob and the car let out a quick, sharp chirp. He didn't look back when he reached out for the bag. She hesitated before letting go, then watched as he tossed it into the trunk. It was everything she currently owned, but in his hands, it seemed like nothing at all.
Marianne opened the passenger door and smiled at Natalie.
The smile tried to be comforting but didn't quite make it that far. All it accomplished was making Natalie feel even more out of place.
"You can take the back if you want, sweetheart," Marianne said, using that nickname again.
Marianne hadn't used her name yet. Not even once. She had been a sweetie and a sweetheart, and never simply Natalie.
Natalie nodded and climbed into the back seat. The tracksuit she was wearing was too slick against the leather, and the leather was too cool under her. It wasn't uncomfortable exactly. It just didn't let her quite relax into it. The seat tilted too much toward the door and she had to brace herself to not slide out. It felt like holding on to the last thing that mattered and even that was beginning to slip.
She stared at Travis as he took the passenger seat, arms close to his core while he searched for something on his phone. He'd been glued to that damn thing all afternoon. Her brain kept registering every time the phone made an appearance. He was typing. Typing a lot. There has never been a trace of a smile on his face when he did. He was writing again, and whatever it was, it looked more like an epic poem than a haiku. She watched the text growing bigger and bigger, paid attention to the rigid line of his shoulders, searching for some clue what was going on in his head, but he gave nothing away. Maybe he was giving it all to the person on the other end of that screen.
Marianne glanced at her again. It was a quick look, not long enough to telegraph everything, while still long enough for Natalie to catch the pity quite well. She tried her best to be more neutral about the whole thing. It hadn't been working that much. But frankly speaking, if it was just concern and nothing more, it felt almost ostentatiously stiff and forced, like Marianne didn't really know what to do with it. Most likely she didn't. Natalie was positive that the woman most likely had never experienced anything like that before.
"Do you want to keep your bag with you?" Marianne asked.
Natalie didn't know if it was that painfully obvious from the way she acted or Marianne just had a lucky guess.
She nodded again, wondering where all her words had gone. Marianne passed her the bag. She didn't even try to open her mouth. The moment that followed was nearly suffocating as a result. She couldn't force herself to do it. She closed the door with a soft thud that sounded louder than it would've if she had said something, and fastened her seat belt. A part of her still wanted to get out of the car and just run straight ahead. Anywhere else but here. She had no idea where she'd run or what she'd do if she had. Not even some unrealistic vision that matched reality halfway. That realization should have terrified her, yet the fear just didn't come.
Marianne started the car, and the engine coughed to life, humming beneath their legs.
The heater kicked on as well, filling the car with warmth that reached even Natalie at the back. The faint smell of mint gum and dog hair in the air made her wonder if there was a dog in the house. She'd like that, she thought. At least the dog wouldn't ask questions or look at her like it could see everything she wanted to keep a secret.
No one said anything.
Marianne shifted into gear. The car rolled forward.
Natalie listened with huge satisfaction as the wheels started to crunch over the gravel, then fixed her gaze on the far edge of the lot, on the concrete fence with a particularly dumb graffiti she'd been eyeing for days. She stared at the fence as they passed that stupid writing: "LICK MY SOUL." She had no clue what it was even supposed to mean. It was scrawled in neon green across the side of an old electrical box. Most likely an outcome of some stupid bet or one too many beers. She was sick of seeing it. She was sick of the fact that every corner of the world outside the hospital seemed to be tied to some memory, one way or another. This conversation. That phone call. The disappointment still clung to the concrete around here. Winter was coming to a close, yet the frost around here didn't want to melt. And quietly, a part of her was starting to believe the world might stop right there, right at that spot where nothing had changed and nothing ever would.
She tugged at her sweatshirt sleeves, pulling them over her hands to warm them a little. Her fingers were still painfully numb. The soft cotton of the hoodie she'd been given by the hospital staff had done next to nothing against the cold on their way to the car.
The day was slowly winding down. What had been warm sunlight had turned bleak and washed-out. The Sun was now just a faint silver glimmer trapped between the tall buildings lining the Seattle skyline.
Marianne kept her eyes on the road, trying to steer through both the traffic and the awkwardness between them. She said something about the traffic, and Natalie mumbled back, though she was not sure what came out. Her throat felt tight, like the words were just filling space, waiting for the quiet to swallow them up.
Travis still did not bother to talk to her.
Natalie glanced up at the buildings again, trying to focus on what was in front of her.
She wanted to remember it; the place she had been thinking about for so long, never quite sure she'd ever get to make it that far and see it with her own eyes.
Still, the city ended up feeling more like a blurry mess than anything stable, like she was looking through fogged-up glass, waiting for the view to solidify enough to see. The buildings barely looked like buildings, even though she was certain they were real and had real people in them. To her, they were just dark shapes, floating in and out of focus, lacking contour and detail. People walked by. They seemed more like ghosts than real people she could talk to. It felt almost absurd to imagine that they had genuine lives, issues and places they were running back to. Everything felt distant. Or maybe it was her who got disconnected. Maybe it was her who was simply no longer a part of it all. Separate. Drifting. Fading. Maybe she was the one who was a ghost. A phantom at the end of its journey, ready to slip into nothingness.
She knew the feeling well by now.It had been with her pretty much all her life. Now, however, it felt somehow even more mellow.
The absence of music in the car certainly wasn't helping.
Her bag sat beside her on the seat. She kept tracing the seams on its polyester strap with her left thumb. It was silly. Still, it felt like losing sight of it would send her over the edge. She could not explain why, but she knew it would.
When they finally merged onto the interstate, things got slightly less tense. The drive to Portland, where Travis and his mother lived now, was supposed to take a few hours, mostly spent on the interstate. It felt comforting knowing that for the next few hours she was covered. She had an excuse, a good one, to silently disengage.
The tires hummed against the asphalt as the car glided forward. The radio was still off, so she could hear it loud and clear as they started to accelerate.
Marianne was a fast driver and didn't swear, even if the situation was borderline calling for it. She had a good sense of spatial awareness and was decent at spotting opportunities. Natalie noted it for later. Just in case.
The highway stretched on, flat and endless in the best way, broken only by the white lane lines flicking past them. The view itself wasn't anything special. Not that it needed to be. Everything moved fast, and that was exactly what she craved. She watched trucks pass in the opposite lane, appreciating their speed as they blurred nicely into smears of colorful metal. Billboards rose and fell like strange punctuation marks on the horizon. She didn't take in any of the words, only the shifting shapes. She marked, though, when they passed the first KFC.
Then a green road sign came up around a slow curve, Welcome to Oregon.
Natalie stared at it when they passed it.
She was almost there, she told herself, though she wasn't sure what there was supposed to mean anymore. She felt it again, that strange flicker of something warm, as Oregon plates started overtaking Washington ones. She wasn't going home, home didn't exist anymore. Still, she did feel something. The closest thing to fine she'd been in days.It seemed like the world was trying to nudge her forward, one license plate at a time.
Natalie hadn't quite expected the week to unfold the way it had. In hindsight, the signs had been there. They had been there all along, in the small things and details that were easy to dismiss if one wanted to believe it wasn't what it really was. And she really had wanted to believe it. Her mother had been dodging phone calls. First from her, and for some reason, preferring to communicate through the hospital staff. Then, however, that had extended to the calls from the hospital as well.
She had clung to hope longer than she wanted to admit, much longer than she likely should have. It was easy to hold onto the hope that things were going to turn out fine as long as she remained stuck in Seattle. The illusion had cracked for good the moment Taissa called. Afterward, things just unraveled.
Taissa had been discharged first. Her case had been deemed straightforward enough to allow for it. Natalie, on the other hand, was the last one to be ready. Everything had gotten complicated when she had tested positive for Lyme disease and anaplasmosis. Not that it had been any surprise. She knew things weren't good, given the massive swelling behind her right knee. Her bloodwork had come back pretty bad. Bad enough that the doctors in Seattle had made it clear they wouldn't discharge her until they were sure she was really improving. Her health needed to improve enough for moving closer to home to make sense, or so she had been told. Otherwise, it would have just meant swapping one sterile room in a large medical center for another. Flying her closer to home in her condition had been expensive too, so they chose what made the most sense and she stayed behind.
She had been tethered to an IV drip for most of her stay. The steady flow of Ceftriaxone, or so it had been written on the IV bags, constantly coursing through her veins. She had gotten stuck. Twelve days in total. An entire ten days more than Taissa. A week longer than Travis.
When she was finally being discharged, she left with a detailed contingency plan in place. The treatment for anaplasmosis had been completed, but Lyme disease was a whole different beast, requiring ongoing management. She left the hospital lugging a mountain of medications. The stash looked almost absurd laid out on her hospital bed after she had reviewed dosing and side effects with her doctor earlier that day.
She had asked Taissa for help herself.
She had been close to being discharged, and the lack of updates from home was getting ridiculous at that point. Maybe she really hoped her mom would change her attitude if she saw someone real. Someone real enough she could not ignore that easily.
Taissa had tried to be gentle with her. She had spoken in a tone that made Natalie's stomach twist into a knot because it always meant something bad was coming. Taissa had described her visit to Natalie's house, how quiet it was, how strange it felt. And then she had told her what her mother had said. She had explained her mother's reasoning, making an extra effort to make it all sound reasonable and not as bad as it actually was.
Natalie barely remembered the details. They didn't really matter. At the end of their conversation, it was clear that Natalie was on her own.
It was Taissa who'd reached out to Travis, or maybe straight to his mom. Natalie wasn't sure what exactly had been said and in which order. It was clear, though, who Taissa had called first, because as soon as she hung up, Travis called.
She couldn't say exactly why the decision had been made that she was staying West coast-bound and that her place was with Travis and his mother. The reasoning was murky, half-lost in a blur of urgency and awkward silences. Sometimes it felt like mercy. Other times more like a punishment. It mostly depended on how willing she was, in that moment, to blame the chaos, or to dissect every tiny, humiliating piece of it.
What stung the most wasn't the decision itself. It was the fact that it had been made in a room she hadn't been invited into, that her name must have been passed around like a problem. It made her wonder too if the main reason Marianne said yes was because her son had slept with her, like that mistake came with some kind of moral invoice. Or maybe it was just geography. She was the closest adult when the fallout hit, and proximity won.
One thing stood, she was sure that Marianne definitely wasn't thrilled by the idea of having a stranger under her roof, dumped on her doorstep like a fucking cuckoo egg. Little cuckoo chicks are wired to push from the nest other chicks and eggs, so the analogy was more than fitting.
Natalie still couldn't wrap her head around why her mother chose this, why exactly she'd decided to drag their broken mess out into the light like that, to put it on full display and let others watch.
She couldn’t fathom what her mom was thinking, if she was even thinking at all.
Her mind kept circling around the question, switching between disbelief, anger, sheer panic, and a desperate search for clues. She was convinced that there must have been something buried there at the bottom of it all. Some missed signal, some mistake she'd made a hundred years ago that led to this.
She wanted to find it, even if all it did was prove how much of a fucking burden she had always been.
From the back seat, she watched the silhouettes of the two of them. Travis's profile, unchanged and infuriatingly familiar. Marianne's eyes kept occasionally landing on the rearview mirror. To them, in that moment, she must've felt less like a person and more like a box of fireworks; all fucked up and ready to explode.
She’d been nothing but bad news for Travis all along.
Now, he simply learned that it had been in her very blood all along. A generational fuck-up.
She and Travis had spoken for over an hour on the phone the night before, quietly going over what his mother had decided. It had been... strange. Almost too gentle. He hadn't spoken to her like that in months. There had been brief moments every now and then where he'd softened, where he'd let a little warmth slip through, but never for a full hour straight. There were no sighs on the other end of the line that night, no long pauses, as if he was trying to measure how much of her he could stand in one sitting.
Just before they hung up, he told her, firmly and with that tenderness she hadn't expected, that none of this was her fault. He made her promise she would not blame herself, repeating it as though saying it enough times could make it actually stick.
That was last night. Now, he was quiet.
It was his mother who did all the talking, who asked the questions, who tried to pull her into something resembling a social interaction. He had gone back to being his usual self, treating her like she was something he didn't want to look at for too long.
She didn't blame him for it.
What didn't escape her was the math of it all. The time they'd spent together, if you could even call it that, didn't add up to much. A few fractured months, a threadbare, almost-relationship built on the illusion of shared silences and brief moments of warmth, none of which granted her any right to this. They weren't a couple anymore, and maybe they never had been. They sure as hell weren't friends.
It felt wrong, this constant tugging at him, as if he owed her anything at all. And now his mother was caught in it too.
She reached the same conclusion again, like the tenth time that day: she hated herself.
She hated this whole fucking situation, too. She could keep telling herself she hadn't meant for any of this to happen, but what difference did that really make? Intent didn't excuse or erase the fact that she just made the two of them pick up after her. It didn’t matter whether she planned or even wanted it, if she just forced them to rearrange their lives to keep her from falling apart. She was supposed to be gone by now. This was the one decent thing she could've done for him, but she hadn't done even that.
She was like a goddamn leech, stuck tight and sucking the life out of everything.
The day still wasn't over, and she was pretty sure she'd loop back around to it again, a dozen more times before it ended.
They left the interstate.
The road they had to take led them to some small, sleepy town, maybe even the outskirts of the city itself. Its streets were calm and lined with modest houses. Everything looked faded and softened under the curtain of rain. A faded sign for an old lumber mill stood rusted at the edge of the intersection. The main street didn't look any better. It was just a handful of shops, an old bakery with yellowing window displays, and a diner with neon lights blinking uncertainly. Not enough to call a proper town anymore, even if the people who lived there insisted on calling it home. It made her wonder if all of Portland was anemic like that. She hoped it wasn't, but she was bracing just in case.
Travis opened the window on his side for a moment. It carried a faint mix of damp earth and pine.
Somewhere beyond the trees, she could hear the distant whistle of a train, the sound growing closer and closer until it revealed itself a moment later. They had to stop and let it pass. It was a freight train, long and lumbering, hauling flatbeds stacked with shipping containers. It looked like a caterpillar, mostly yellow, with specs of black on its wheels.It inched forward longer than it had any right to.
"You hungry? I know a cozy place nearby. Good home-style food. Enchiladas, tamales, maybe some pozole. We can stop and have a little break."
Marianne asked gently, cutting through the quiet that was beginning to take roots for good.
Travis didn't say anything, which only confirmed what she already knew. It wasn't really about hunger. Not for either of them. It was about keeping things in order.
She figured this was one of those moments when his mom might start laying down rules. Not the strict kind. Not from the get-go. They'd be unassuming. Reasonable. The kind that sounded like common sense: leaving shoes by the door, or keeping the kitchen tidy. And they'd make sense, sure. Marianne would see to that. And yet, somehow, every single one would still manage to make Natalie feel like she was on probation.
Natalie opened her mouth to say she wasn't sure, that she wasn't really hungry, but then thought better of it. The idea of stopping, of finding an excuse to delay reaching their house, benefited her too.
"Yeah. That sounds good," she said quietly.