Runaway

IV. We Are Heroes

We stayed at Lizabeth’s house for the night, but we couldn’t bear to stay later than lunchtime, feeling like freeloaders no matter how often she assured us that she was so pleased with the company. We learned a lot about her and Jerry, and about how they had met. We had sat around their fire eating some more of their homemade pies as they told us story after story, and it felt more like home than mine had in months.

Lizabeth and Jerry had told us that we reminded them of themselves. They were high school sweethearts, the kind where them being a couple was as known around town as green means go. They won Homecoming King and Queen and they were the typical couple that everyone knew would be together forever.

And they were so sweet, and they looked at us and they saw history repeating itself.

I wished we could have stayed longer, but eventually we had to leave. They stood outside on the driveway as we pulled away and waved goodbye, and they waved to us in the rearview mirror until they were long out of sight. They gave us their phone number and email, and they told us both to keep in touch.

I would, when I got home. I would write them an email every single week.

“I never expected that,” Charlie told me as we were driving away, his voice thoughtful. I turned to look at him gazing out the windshield with a deep expression on his face, his mind miles away. “I mean, I expected us to meet people. It’s nice that some people in the world still have hope for others.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but I didn’t ask. I figured that I would find out eventually.

Charlie sometimes said things that were way beyond his eighteen years of age, and I just stored them in my memory bank. One day, I would understand all of the pondering that he did. Something would happen to me and I would think about words too wise for Charlie even though he had been the ones to say them, and I would understand that maybe Charlie knew more about the world than I did.

I figured that was just going to be another moment I would live. Another moment I would look back and think of him.

We drove north-northeast.

~*~

It was nighttime when we hit the bridge, and the windows were down. David Bowie was playing from the radio on repeat and it was a moment that Charlie knew was my favorite in books and in movies. We rode out of the tunnel, onto a bridge as a downtown lit up the night before us, and the book and movie had been right—I felt infinite.

I think Charlie did, too, because he didn’t ask me why I was crying. He seemed to understand.

We had driven a long time, but we had finally made it to New York City.

I heard someone a long time ago who had gone there before say that there was something about that city that set it apart from all the others, but she couldn’t eloquently put a word or a phrase as to why. One of the girls, one of her friends, had told her that the city was made for Empire States of mind.

I know it had been a pun, and perhaps even a song, but when I was looking at the skyline outlined in lights against a dark background, I couldn’t help to think that it did take a certain state of mind to understand this city.

By day, it was a concrete jungle. Dark grays and graffiti and millions of people wandering the streets. At night, it was magic, the kind that could only be written in the stars.

“Where are we going to park?” I asked him, and Charlie shrugged.

“That doesn’t matter right now,” he told me, and I knew he was right, so I didn’t ask another stupid question.