That Mountain Highway

I’d just clicked the cruise control button at fifty-five when they started yelling. Sitting in the front, my sister and I exchanged glances. It hadn’t happened so close for a long time.

My parents began yelling at each other for reasons I didn’t know. I couldn’t even see them. It was too dark. All I could feel was their loud voices, my mother’s shrilling, my father’s growl. The distance between my mouth and their mouths was only three feet away. It made me feel like the blood in my veins was pumping in altering unisons between their two differently pitched voices.

“Why aren’t there any reflectors on this highway,” I said to my sister. “I can barely even see the lane.”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. They were still behind us yelling about nothing. “Maybe they just redid all of it.”

“I think we’ll be home within the hour,” I said, saying anything to say anything.

At the word home, I remembered when I used to live there. When home was the only place you could ever be. And I remembered their yelling and it always being there. How my sister and I either hid under our blankets because what we were hearing was the creature of a future we never wanted to witness. Or how we listened with our ears and hearts pressed against the door because of the very same reason.

“Yeah,” she said and by now there was only breathing. My sister and I, our breathing as light as nonexistence; our parent’s breathing heavy like they had been running for years. They had fought and I wondered how anyone could fight for so long and never be too worn out to fight again.

As we drove through the night and the car’s headlights gave us all we would ever see on that mountain highway, I was quite sure I’d never be in the presence of a truer love.