Free Travelling Light by Peter Behrens

already decided to skip the goodbyes if he could get away without them. He would spare his parents all the emotion and just slide away. That would be easiest on everyone, especially his mother.
    He silently went down the hallway carrying his shoes, then down a set of back stairs they called the servants’ way, though they’d never had servants, except burly old Mme Poliquin, who came once a week to clean the house. His sisters used to sneak up the servants’ way coming home late from a date. Maybe Bobby had too — Mike couldn’t remember. The stairs led down to the basement and a door that opened to the driveway. As he was going down the stairs he could hear his father on the kitchen phone still talking to California.
    It was early enough so that the driveway was still shaded and the air almost blue. He’d polished and waxed his car and in the morning light it shone the same blood red as the tulips in the flowerbeds.
    He unlocked the driver’s door, eased it open. Tossing in his shoes and backpack, he slid behind the wheel. Then he released the parking brake and pushed out the clutch and the car started rolling silently towards the street. A neighbour getting into his own car across the street waved and Mike waved back. The neighbour looked surprised.
    Michael turned the key and the engine fired. He suddenly felt an urge to roll down the window and yell to his parents, or to the house — yell something spirited, and reassuring, but he couldn’t think what. He could smell fresh exhaust jetting from his tailpipes, moist and sweet and promising, and he let in the clutch and drove away.
    That night Mike slept on the ground beside a lake in northern Ontario. He’d meant to phone home from a gas station but forgot about it while paying for the gas and only remembered as he was unrolling his sleeping bag and swatting mosquitoes. And by then the last payphone was probably twenty miles back.
    Alix finally went to bed at midnight and dreamed the house was destroyed and nothing was left but a pile of empty glass bottles.
    And Mr. Heaney sat in the kitchen with a shining glass of whisky, neat, wondering if his dead father and himself and his dead son were in some ways the same person. The dead were joined to the living. They would always be powerfully connected. Or was that just hocus-pocus?
    His throat narrowed and for a few seconds he felt very close to tears. But instead of giving in, which would have been weak and pointless, he sat up straight, poured another finger of golden whisky, then raised his glass and took a sip.

AWAY

INTERSTATE HEAVEN
    â€œI hate this stuff,” said Olsen, the younger of the brothers, maybe nineteen.
    I was in a coffee shop at Elko, Nevada, with two brothers who had picked me up out in the desert. On the table between us was a bowl with little plastic tubs of coffee creamer, and Olsen was reading the label on one of the tubs.
    â€œâ€˜Non-dairy product,’ that’s what it says. Cancer for sure.”
    â€œQuit your complaining,” said Timothy. He was maybe twenty-one.
    â€œWould you drink this stuff, professor?” Olsen said.
    â€œI have in the past,” I told him. “But no, I don’t think so.”
    Olsen was looking around for the waitress. “Where’s the bitch?”
    â€œLeave her be,” said Timothy. He stirred his coffee and began scribbling lines on a napkin. He had told me he was a poet. While he jotted what could have been verses, his pencil point kept making gashes in the soft, fibrous paper. He tore the lid off a creamer and a jet of the milky white gunk hit his brother on the chin.
    â€œBastard!” Olsen jerked a napkin from the steel container and wiped himself furiously. He needed a shave, and the paper made a rasping sound.
    â€œSorry,” said Timothy, laughing. “But hey, it was an accident.”
    The manager, behind the cash, squinted at us. The waitress with green eyes came over to