Free Outside the Ordinary World by Dori Ostermiller

beating toward the night.
    “So. I want to know what you’ve been painting.” He withdrew his touch.
    “How about a hike, then?” My words seemed to vibrate in the café’s frozen air.
    For months I’d replay the scene: sliding onto the passenger’s seat of a vintage maroon Saab, checking my reflection in the mirror as we backed out of the parking lot, sped away from the town where everyone knew my face. I’d picture us, tiny and ridiculous, climbing into the heart of the Berkshires on recognizable roads that suddenly seemed foreign, and maybe that’s what I was after—a sense of life suspended, action without decision, the illusion that I could look down on myself calmly, as if watching a character in a play.
    Only, I didn’t feel calm. As we drove higher into the hill-towns, as Tai talked in his deep city voice about his childhood and asked after mine, my heart vibrated in my throat. The light was impossibly bright through the sunroof, the sky painfully blue. Every bump on the road thrilled and terrified. It was the same feeling I used to get at sixteen, doubting the existence of God; the same feeling at twenty, trying a new drug or man. It was how I’d lived for a time—courting danger, putting myself in harm’s way because I could. I did it, back then, to let myself know that I belonged to no one, that my mother could no longer control me, my father would never again lay his hand on me. Not even Jesus could claim me anymore.
    At twenty-something, I also wanted to quell the mind-warping ache of having lost them—father, mother, sister, God. I wanted answers, and stupidly, thought they would come on the edge of a knife: on the back of some man’s motorcycle, helmetless and wind-lashed, veering up Pacific Coast Highway in the dead of night; inhaling a line of white powder off someone’s smudged bathroom mirror at a party; walking, walking into all the bleak, trashy neighborhoods of the city—East Hollywood, La Brea, Wilshire, Echo Park—just to quell the restlessness that required constant movement, above all, required me to apply to far-off art programs, then get in my car and drive through the hot eye of the country and beyond. Never be still, the ache said. Never stop moving. What you seek may be around the next corner. Around one of those corners, blessedly, stood Nathan, steady as stone, and he caught and held me in his gentle hands as one catches a bird, stills its frantic beating. For fifteen years he’d held me in his loose carpenter’s fingers, fluttering on the edge of the continent, three thousand miles from where I started. I couldn’t imagine where I would go from here.
     
     
    We pulled into a muddy parking lot off a dirt road somewhere west of Plainfield. There was one other car—an old Honda with a dented rear bumper and Rhode Island plates. Tai got out and lit a cigarette before the trailhead map, then offered me one. I shook my head. I’d quit my pack-a-day habit years ago, after many crushing attempts, and wasn’t about to start again now. He didn’t offer to escort me over the enormous puddle we seemed to have parked in. I just waded through it, hitching my skirt above my knees.
    “There’s a pretty easy trail here,” he said. “Runs along the river for a few miles. It shouldn’t be too muddy, although—” Here he stared at my mucky feet in black leather sandals. “I guess it doesn’t matter so much anymore.”
    “I know, I know. These shoes are ridiculous, aren’t they?”
    “Impractical girl,” he scolded, stomping out his cigarette after three drags. “That’s probably what your doctor father says—an impractical artist, right? A dreamer.”
    “My father said lots of things about me before he died. But not that, I don’t think.” I felt deeply uneasy about the work I was leaving undone, the distance we’d traveled, the sun inching its way to the core of the sky. I started chewing a hangnail.
    “Sorry,” said Tai, bending over to tighten his bootlace.