Trapped in Forever

3 ~ The Jeep.

“I don’t really understand,” I said, holding the silver phone to my ear as I sat at my desk, my browser focused on the last picture Roxanne posted on Facebook—a brownie with chocolate chips and caramel drizzling off the side. On the napkin under the white, pristine desert plate was a café’s logo. “You’re getting rid of it?”

 There was a pause on the other line and I imagined her, sitting on her couch, wearing her purple bathrobe and examining her manicure as her husband brewed coffee. “We’re taking it to the junkyard tomorrow,” she replied. “We don’t have the use for another car and besides . . .”

The sentence hung in the air around me, even if Roxanne’s mother was four miles away inside a home in a cul-de-sac. As the silence followed, I closed out my browser, watching the caramel brownie disappear and swung my swivel desk chair to face my door. I could smell my mother cooking dinner downstairs and, faintly, I could hear my father’s Sunday traditional football on the TV. Since football season finished last month, I was betting it was a tape of an old Super Bowl.  

“. . . We just don’t need it,” she finally finished after a moment. Then she cleared her throat. “If there’s anything of yours in the car just come over.”

 She hung up before I had a chance to reply. Slowly, I pulled back the phone from my ear and pressed my thumb against the small Off digit, making a tiny click sound.

Roxanne’s parents were getting rid of her car. The same car that we drove every day to school or to The Iceberg for a slushie and a small ice cream cone. We drove it to the lake with a box of popsicles to sit at a picnic bench to watch the waves roll. We took the car to all of Roxanne’s model competitions in nearby cities with the sun visors down and quickly applying last minute lip gloss before scrambling to get into the arena before they closed it down for entries. The car of a piece of Roxanne. Tossing it to the junkyard for scrap metal just wasn’t right.  

It wasn’t the nicest kind of car and sometimes it smelled too much like chocolate and there were empty, crushed cartons that at one point held chalk inside. But it was Roxanne’s car. It was piece of the puzzle of her life. It took us everywhere we ever wanted to go, even if it never made sense to anyone but us, and sometimes not even that. It was red, her favorite color, with a dent in the left backdoor so that you couldn’t open it. I hated that door, especially when I was exiled to the backseat. But it was something of her, a part, however small and forgotten.

One of her Michael Jackson CDs was probably still inside the CD player under the digital clock, scratched and worn, all the signs that the CD was loved. The hula girl, the one that danced at every turn and every stop, would probably still be on top of the dashboard, holding her ukulele in her tiny, plastic hands with a lei made of yellow, orange, and pink flowers hanging from her neck over her coconut bra and her bare stomach without touching her grass skirt. She bought it at a garage sale years ago and kept it on her window sill until her dad bought her a car with a dashboard to stick it on.

I stood up from my desk chair and walked over to my closet, gripping the small crescent moon shaped carving into in the wood to push it aside and as I reached my hand in to grab my jean jacket, the knob on my bedroom door began to turn, agonizingly slowly, and I took a step back. For some reason, I felt like I had to hide what I was going to do. The white door pushed open, grazing along my blue carpet, and I watched as my father stepped into view, smiling slowly at me.

I guessed, as he put one sock clad foot inside my room and then the other, that either Mom made him turn the TV off or that his taped game had ended. “Dinner’s ready, sweetie,” he told me.

My dad had been acting like he was walking on eggshells around me, carefully selecting his words and offering me burgers now and then with hopeful smiles, already holding the car keys with the keychain of the Statue of Liberty dangling out of his palm even though my answer was always the same.  Since the funeral, all I thought about was that summer with Orion and the fall after that when he told about her pica and it spread to Madison. Sometimes, in the middle of the night when it was the quietest, I hoped that Mikayla would sneak out of her window to a party just so I could focus on the sounds of her crawling across the roof to the oak tree instead of Orion and Roxanne.