Page 129 of The Turning of the Tables

I’d driven up to Baltimore before, but never farther. And Baltimore had seemed a world away from the only places I’d ever called home—Richmond, and a tiny town in the Shenandoah Valley where Noah and I had grown up.

And now I was going a thousand miles away—one thousand thirty-nine, to be specific.

I’d made my choice. I’d chosen to build a new life—hopefully one that would include Elliot in it.

The longest driveI’d ever made before this one was from Charlottesville to Virginia Beach, stopping to pick up Noah on the way when I’d had spring break my senior year of undergrad at UVA. It had taken just over three hours. I was currently looking down the barrel of a sixteen-plus hour drive.

I also had to figure out what to take with me.

Clothes, obviously.

Shoes.

Epi pens. Pain meds. Toothbrush and toothpaste and deodorant and soap and shampoo and all that stuff. I made up a duffel I could just take into a hotel in case I didn’t manage the drive all in one day. The rest went into old boxes from shit we’d ordered online, my laundry hamper, one of Noah’s old backpacks that he’d given me to use, and my messenger bag.

There wasn’t much. A fleece blanket that Noah had bought me a few years ago, which I wrapped around the print of Noah’s mermaid mural. Trinkets and odds and ends that I’d collected over the years. A couple boxes of books, although a lot of what I read were ebooks. My travel mug. My sad aloe plant. A big plastic tote I store my hiking and camping gear in.

Once the car was packed, I discovered that everything I owned in the apartment didn’t quite fill my FJ Cruiser. It was a pretty pathetic commentary on my life.

Sure, I had all my lab equipment in the storage shed—I’d leave everything there for now. Either I’d have Noah sell it or maybe try to figure out how to have it shipped out to me—once I figured out if this was an epic mistake. I didn’t want to pay to deal with that stuff if I was just going to have to move it again.

This way, it would only cost me gas and dignity.

I had no idea what that was going to be like or, to be completely honest, what it was going to do to my body. I sometimes spent a few hours in my car driving to and from the lab, out to a crime scene, maybe on errands out to Short Pump and back, and I knew from experience that after about two or three hours of driving, my knee started to get annoyed and my back stiff.

I wasn’t going to let it stop me. Slow me down, probably. I knew there were rest stops and gas stations and fast food restaurants and coffee places all along the route, and I was probably going to stop at a lot of them to give myself a chance to work through the inevitable aches and kinks.

How bad could it be?

After about three-and-a-half-hours,when I hit the start of the Pennsylvania turnpike, my whole body felt like it had been tied into a pretzel and shoved into a box. My knee had a low, pulsing ache, my back felt compressed, and my shoulders felt like they’d been worked into nothing but knots.

I pulled over and got gas at one of a whole collection of gas stations, filling up and giving myself a chance to walk out a few of the hitches in my legs. After filling up the tank, I moved the car and went inside, perusing the snacks on offer. I’d stop for a slightly late lunch in a few hours, but I wasalready hungry. And snacking on things helped to keep me from being lulled into a kind of boredom-induced sleepiness. So did coffee.

I’d gotten used to all manner of horrific coffees working for the state crime lab—I’d had RPD precinct coffee, lab coffee, and a lot of gas station and convenience store coffees over the years. Sure, Quincy and I splurged now and then by going to Starbucks or Blanchard’s or Ironclad, but there were far,farmore bad cups of coffee in my past than good ones.

This wasn’t bad, in the realm of gas station coffee, and I’d also bought a bag of prepackaged minimuffins and a family size package of trail mix.

The muffins were fairly terrible in comparison to Hart’s muffins, but not too bad as far as prepackaged blueberry muffins with more preservatives than fruit in them went. They took the edge off my hunger, at any rate, and helped to soak up the acidity of the coffee.

Two hours later when I was ready to stop, the Pennsylvania Turnpike very unhelpfully had no travel plazas, so I had to wait another hour until I crossed into Ohio, my knee throbbing and my back a mess of cramps.

It was hot, humid, and deeply unpleasant outside the car, but I figured I would get fewer stares if I laid down on one of the weird molded picnic table benches outside than I would on the floor or a table inside. I put an arm over my eyes to block out the sun, trying to use my breath to ease the pain out of my lower back and limbs.

It helped. A little.

My stomach growled. I’d finished the muffins about two hours ago, and the salt of the trail mix had made me overly thirsty, so I’d stopped eating it about an hour or so after that.I was hungry, thirsty, tired, and in a lot more pain than I’d expected.

About the only thing I had going for me was the fact that I was still somewhat excited about where I was going to end up, even if I wasn’t nearly so enthusiastic about the process of getting there. I pulled out my phone and checked my route with a grimace. I knew from experience that tomorrow was going to be much worse than today, so I needed to push on at least another couple hours to make that hell somewhat less awful.

That would put me somewhereelsein Ohio.

I sighed, but at least the Ohio Turnpike had regular rest stops. If I needed to, I could pull over, get food, stretch, get more coffee… And question my life choices going all the way back to going out into the woods as a kid without first coating myself in DEET. And the fact that I hadn’t learned my lesson and still didn’t coat myself in DEET when I went into the woods, which is how I’d ended up with both Lyme and alpha-gal.

I rubbed at my eyes, dry and tired from staring at nothing but highways glimmering in the July sun. I wanted to take out my contacts, but I hated driving with glasses. I promised myself it would only be a couple more hours, then I’d stop.

I held up my phone again, using it to block the sun from my eyes as I pulled up my text messages, of which there were quite a few.

Noah, still arguing with me.