Free In Every Way by Nic Brown

Goldsboro, over the Neuse River in Kinston, now through the Croatan National Forest, toward the end of the continent, the Carolina coast, destination Beaufort.
    Maria sings along in a whisper. “Tutti frutti,” she says. “Alutti.” She need not sing quietly, though. Almost nothing wakes her mother.
    A road sign warns of bears, and within six miles of it, an old Ford Country Squire with faux wood paneling is stopped on the side of the highway, its hood crumpled into a small alpine range. On the wide gravel shoulder, one man and a small girl in a tangerine dress stand before a large bear lying on its side.
    â€œMom,” Maria says, but there is no response.
    The bear is black with a tan muzzle and three distinct white spots on its forehead. Maria slows almost to a stop as they roll up alongside the animal. As she does so, the man gingerly pokes the bear with a stick, and Maria steps on the gas, suddenly afraid the bear might at that very moment awake.
    One hour and twenty minutes later she enters the corridor of strip malls west of Morehead City, a horror she seems to never recall until she encounters it once again in the flesh. Traffic here is slow, chopped up by stoplights. The cars surrounding them increase in luxury the nearer they come to the coast. By the time they reach Morehead City proper, the cars are almost all SUVs made by Lexus, Infiniti, and Cadillac. Maria begins to fear that they have made a mistake leaving Chapel Hill, that they have remembered this region incorrectly. But then, soon after they pass a thirty-foot-tall inflatable penguin standing in front of the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences, the strip malls begin to recede, replaced instead by small, tin-roofed houses painted turquoise, pink, and gray. White latticework surrounds their foundations. Gingerbread lace rots on the dormers. As the landscape of her memories returns, Maria’s fears abate.
    The Sanitary Fish Market stands among boat slips on the Morehead City waterfront, lorded over by a sculpture of King Neptune holding an invisible scepter, long ago vanished from his cracked wooden hand. Two young girls walk without sunglasses through bright sunlight, their brows so furrowed by the glare that they both appear angry. Their father follows in khaki shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with a jumping marlin. Maria remembers walking here so often with her mother, jealous of the tanned flesh of her coastal peers. She tells herself theywill die of cancer long before she does, but then again, her mother is as pale as she.
    On the shore beside the bridge over the Newport River stand two rounded warehouses tipped with tiny galvanized sheds. They rise like a pair of huge industrial bosoms. Maria’s mother always called this place the boob factory, and Maria is glad her mother is now asleep so that they are not forced to make the joke today, dangerous with all of its pitfall connotations. They pass Radio Island Marina at the base of the bridge and approach the drawbridge that spans the last stretch of water into Beaufort. A green North Carolina state sign announces the town and its founding year: 1709.
    With miles of strip malls behind her, crossing the drawbridge feels like rising to the surface. Maria can now breathe. Nature reasserts its supremacy. Marshes open on either side. Gulls swoop in low. The air is briny through the window. Though Beaufort is not an island, the bridge is the only access point of which Maria knows. Hurricanes have cut into so much land north of town that, depending on the map and tides, Beaufort is basically more island than peninsula. It feels that way. This isolation is part of what Maria loves.
    They pass Big Daddy Wesley’s, a convenience store whose windows advertise bloodworms, night crawlers, cut minnows, cigar minnows, ballyhoo, the coldest beer in town, cigarettes, and bail bonds. She turns right on Live Oak Street, which is cracked and shot through with tall, rangy weeds. Things are lush and