Runaway by Cheryl Snell

        Dan Finnen CC




Runaway

It was the middle of the afternoon on an ordinary Tuesday. I remember thinking about burning buildings against a clear blue sky, the misstep that breaks an old woman’s hip, the surprise attack by a virus charging out of the jungle. Don’t fret so much, my brother and I always told one another. It’s the thing you never think of that finally gets you, so what’s the use of worrying? Nature may abhor a vacuum, but life loves a sucker-punch. And here it was again – that knockout punch. The disaster we all hoped we had outrun was familiar terrain, a country once escaped from, dragging us back into the war zone.

“She’s gone.” My ninety year old mother’s voice shook across the wire.
“Did she say where she was going?”
“She went to see a group.”
“A group of what?”
“I don’t know, but she needed money.”    
“Did you give her some?”
“Yes, but she said it wasn’t enough.”
“Did you give it to her from your purse?”
“Maybe. It was quite a bit. One hundred. One thousand.” She put the phone down and snapped open her purse. I could hear her count the bills in her wallet. I waited, one hand clutching the edge of the table, until she picked up the phone again. She was crying.
“I didn’t know what to do. She got in the car and waved. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll find her.”

I should do something. What was it, again? I was three hundred fifty miles away from my mother, and who knows how far from my sister, my vulnerable little sister. Possibilities lined up like birds on a branch: maybe Amanda told Mom where she was going and Mom simply hadn’t registered or retained it; or Mom, with her quirky relationship to time, had no real idea about how long her daughter had been gone. There might have been an appointment to keep, a traffic jam to navigate, a flat to fix.

There is a brittle snap, a loss-of-limb sensation that occurs when a sibling is in trouble. I felt it now, in my left arm, the attached hand still holding a phone I could no longer feel. I turned it over, imagined crossed wires explaining next steps. I punched buttons that summoned my brother Eddie’s voice, waded through his electronic message and left my own. Our sister is missing. Call her doctor. Call the police. Emergency rooms and locked wards are full of mistakes that get fixed, people lost and found every day. We had survived this before, and we could do it again.

My body didn’t believe it, not this time. As I moved across the room in slow motion, sounds came at me from varied points of origin, and there was a loud buzzing in my head. The phone slid out of my hand.

I must have let people know Mandy was missing. Flyers with her picture appeared online and on bulletin boards at the laundromat and grocery stores. The phone rang and rang with questions from police and troopers, both of my brothers, Amanda’s friends.

I had a few answers. I knew the names of her medications and I knew that one had been discontinued and another reduced. I did not know where she was driving and I doubted that she did either.

“It might be easier to find her if we file the case as a stolen vehicle,” the detective on the phone was saying.

“She’s not a thief! She’s the most honest person I know!” That was beside the point, apparently. Categorizing her as a thief was just a means to a quicker end.

“Maybe she went to see you,” my brother said, and suddenly it seemed like a possibility. I visualized her behind the wheel of a three thousand pound car on a high-speed, congested road sandwiched between trucks and SUVs. With her brain blistering and her hands shaking, would construction on the road confuse her? Did she even know how to fill the gas tank herself?

I looked out the window at the falling snow burying the grass. Did she have an ice scraper in the car?  I imagined her at my door, dragging her grey suitcase behind her, smiling her wry little smile. I twisted the knob and looked out onto the porch — hoping, losing hope. “Come on, Mandy. Just come home,” I whispered. Watching the stream of headlights climb the walls and fall away again, I stood at the window for hours. 

The trouble with hope is that it’s so fragile anything can kill it—a cold night, the smoking chimney far off in the distance, a medical mistake. The night my sister was first hospitalized, years before, was a night I could finally sleep through; but when she walked away from the facility after refusing the recommended medication, her nurse told me, “These patients are runners. They never stop running.” 

“We’ve all tried, every day, to get her to accept the new medication,” another nurse told me.
“If she doesn’t, there will be other breakdowns and she’ll have no future. She’ll have to be in a protected environment.” It took me a minute before I realized she meant a long-term facility, an asylum. “Each breakdown damages the brain, and it’s a terrible shame when the patient is so smart. The organs break down, too, and she’ll age faster.” The nurse sounded as if she might cry. “I really care about Amanda! She is so sweet, and sick as she is, she’s always polite. I hate to think of what will happen to her without the right drugs.” 

These words now tolled in my mind like prophecy. How could I know my sister’s return,
three days in the future, would set off a chain of events that would ruin her? Sometimes,
like a fisted bud, hope can ride out even the snow that bends bough to ground. 

At last, I climbed the stairs to bed, but not before I had turned on every light in the house. What I didn’t know was that my mother was doing the same thing in our family home, lighting up the dark across the rolling winter hills three hundred fifty miles away. Beacons for my shipwrecked sister.



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​Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and novels. Her most recent writing has appeared in Tiny Molecule, Switch, Blink-Ink, Eunoia Review, BULL, Ink Sweat &Tears, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and other journals. Sher work has been nominated ten times for Best Small Fictions, the Pushcart, and BOTN. A classical pianist, she lives in Maryland with her husband, a mathematical engineer.