Free A Simple Distance by K. E. Silva

started raising a ruckus underneath the window. The intrusion of their barking more than I could bear, I got up to shush them. And when I moved to the window, Susan was there; the mixture of our smells, still on my skin that day. The dogs had allowed her cautious access.
    She reached up her hands to meet me halfway, slowed my drop as I climbed out my mother’s window.
    We matched each other step for step. And held on, out back, for all the ghosts to see, until the sun dropped below the horizon, took its final rest.
    This is not the way we will end, Jean. It isn’t a forever goodbye, just a temporary one. She promised.
    But the next afternoon I got on a plane, and for the next year, every time Susan took a step toward me, she took it alone.
    * * *
    The night sky never turns all the way black in Oakland like it does on my mother’s island. In Baobique, when it’s dark, it’s just the same to have your eyes open as to have them shut. But in Oakland, the streetlights and the fog keep it white underneath—my mother missing that night, everything reflected back to me, making it impossible to throw a single thought away as I waited for her to return. Like playing handball against a brick wall, the ball just coming back faster the harder I swung.
    The telephone rang me awake at dawn. A man with a gentle voice apologized for the hour of his call, hoped he had the right number, said to me, I believe your mother just spent the night on my front porch.
    Where are you? Where do you live? Breath shallow and fast, shallow and fast.
    I live in Redwood City, 245 Mira Vista. At—
    The corner of Alta Mont.
    How do you know? His gentle voice inching toward concern.
    Is my mother all right!?
    Well, she’s having some tea. She told me you were her lawyer and gave me your business card. I don’t think she’s well. She thinks I’ve stolen her house. She’s asked me to leave.
    Oh God. I can be there in forty minutes … We used to live in your house. It was a long time ago … My mother is going through a rough time. I’m sorry. I’ll be there as soon as I can.

CHAPTER 11
    I pulled on my jeans, stumbled into my little gray Mazda, and raced to the freeway. Six-thirty Tuesday morning. Traffic was already clogging here and there across the bridge leaving Oakland, driving into San Francisco. The day had begun, whether I liked it or not. I took the 101, perhaps as punishment; its sound-resistant walls, their brick veneer, preventing, like the white of the night before, the escape of my thoughts. I was stuck with myself and the reverse-commuters leaving San Francisco, heading down the peninsula.
    I would not, I admit, have been an easy child for my mother to raise alone after the divorce, often thinking myself, at twelve or thirteen, more capable than she at governing my life. Even when she had the strength to try, I resisted with all my might.
    Once, on the 4th of July in junior high, Becky, my sometimes best friend, and I both made the All-Star softball team. We got to play under the big lights that night, stayed out on our bikes way past the end of the fireworks at the local commons, soft wind growing cooler as each hour deepened toward morning.
    Becky lived just a few houses down, and when we got to our street, we could both see the cop car parked in front of my house. It was 2 o’clock in the morning.
    My mom, scared something happened to me, had called the police. I remember carrying my bike up the front steps, walking it through the screen door, wondering what we had for anyone to steal.
    But what I remember most about that 4th of July was thinking, Who’s she to be calling the law, playing parent, imposing punishment? Near as I could tell, she was always upstairs in bed, half-gallon jug of cheap white wine propped up by the stack of condensed classics that covered the half of the bed that used to be my father’s, and would soon belong to Harold, her second boyfriend, the one I wouldn’t have liked no matter what, the one who would