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I was exhausted after three days on the road.
From Seattle I’d headed across country to New York. I disappeared into the city for an afternoon, then got a cab down to New Jersey. At a gas station, I pulled out the electric clippers that were the last goody in my bag, slapped on an inch and a half guard, and cut off all my hair. Talk about liberating. I’d colored it a neutral brown and was happy to leave all the scratchy wigs behind forever.
Then I got back on the Greyhound and went down to Georgia.
Then to Missouri where I saw the big arch in St. Louis for the first time. I pressed my hand to the window glass as I passed, feeling like an alien passenger in my own body.
Every hour, every minute I was free felt…impossible.
I’d dreamed of this for so long, so single-mindedly. But now that I was finally doing it…well, it was beyond surreal.
I didn’t know how to feel.
How to be.
I’d defined myself for a decade in terms of that prison, and of nursing whatever pain he’d most recently inflicted on me, and to keeping up the façade and trying so hard not to wake the beast inside him.
But now I was free to be just…me again.
Except I didn’t remember how to be her. If I’d ever known her.
Who the hell was Not-Penelope-Chambers?
Over the endless hours as I watched the rolling scenery, I tried to remember the me I’d been before her. But when I tried to, it was a shock to think… maybe I’d never really known her—I mean, myself. I’d never really had the time to find myself, as it were.
But… not to know who you were, at your core… I mean, I knew crazy and that just felt plain crazy.
Before my marriage, I’d just gone from my mother’s house to college. There had been a brief flare of phoenix-like color when I got to college as I’d begun the process of discovering myself. I might have gotten there.
Except that within a month, I’d met Jeff and he swallowed me whole before I ever had the chance to even think of flying.
And now?
It didn’t feel like flying. More like I was one of those crippled birds with a sad, broken wing. How was I supposed to fly? I could barely crawl.
But—I sucked in a deep breath—I’d made it this far, right? I was here. And there. And everywhere. All at the same time. Living in the present and the past and still dreaming of a better future.
Except I just felt as unsettled as my roaming body.
The sun was long set as we pulled into a station in Oklahoma.
It was time for me to get off. This bus was headed back to California and that was one place I’d never go back to. No way, no how. Jeff had too much influence and he always would. My most impassioned prayer was that he’d look for me for a while, maybe six months? And then move on.
I bit my lip even as I wished it, gathering my backpack and pulling it on over my shoulders. Because I knew Jeff better than anyone else. I had no illusions that he loved me.
But he hated to lose. More than anything. An insult to his pride galled him like nothing else.
The thought of me of all people besting him, his prey, his mouse… that would gall him until the end of his days. And that made me very afraid of what it might make him do. The extremes it might drive him to in order to find me.
I pulled my hoody up over my head to block my face from any cameras as I stepped down off the bus and made my way into the bus station.
It was cold and mostly empty inside. I pulled out the burner phone I’d bought in New York to check the time. It was eight at night.
I hadn’t really checked ahead, and when I got inside, was dismayed to see there weren’t any buses heading south until six a.m.
Looked like a night of sleeping in the super comfortable bus station chairs was ahead for me. Oh goody.
At least I was tired. I hadn’t done much sleeping today in spite of the soothing rumble of the bus tires on the highway pavement.
