In Return

Ellie Plachinski, '16

 

i.

 

He leaves the day of his sister’s graduation. The entire ceremony is stifling; on his left is the overly fruity stench of his mother’s perfume, and on his right is his father, constantly reminding him to “sit up straight, Elijah.” His father is already quite angry with him, since Elijah is almost late (he had gone for a run that moment, and hadn’t wanted to stop). When his eyes flicker to his sister, easy to pick out by the dark skin they share, Elijah makes sure to glance at their father. Sure enough, he is tilting his chin up at her, telling her to maintain the image of perfection, even when she grows visibly more uncomfortable on the stage as time makes dainty posture almost painful. Immediately, he searches for a different reason… the boy on her left merely looks down (and somehow Elijah knows there’s no one to meet the boy once he leaves the auditorium), and the girl on her right is too busy picking at her nails to pay attention to anyone else. It’s just the pressure of looking perfect and making their father proud that’s bothering her, Elijah decides. But there isn’t time to let his thoughts spiral any more, because now Father nudges Elijah to remind him of his place, and Elijah’s chin instinctively tips upward.

 

All of a sudden (somewhere around when the F’s and the G’s start receiving their diplomas), the thought that this will be him next year seems suffocating. Elijah will be sitting on the same stage, hearing a slightly different variation on the same speeches, and he will have to keep his chin up. He’s tired of keeping his chin up, of being above all of the injustice and suffering present even in their little town simply because it’s what his father orders (“Because we’re better than that, Elijah. We earned what we got and we ain’t gonna just give it away.”) The thought of being silent, of resigning himself to the same fate as his sister, is decidedly unbearable. For as long as he can remember, his father’s life has been about one thing: money. But money is paper, nothing more; he wants no part in it.

 

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. He doesn’t know why that line, hidden among dozens of others in the Thoreau book his sister keeps in her room, stands out to him now, but it does. Elijah will not be one of those men, he decides, even if he is only technically a boy. He has a car (ancient and loud as it might be), and he has just enough paper saved up from working to make it far away from here.

 

It’s almost too easy, his departure. After the lines of robed students, now free from high school but already chained to college or work, descend from the stage, his parents are caught up in congratulating his sister. They don’t even notice when Elijah leaves his past behind, the short walk to his car the perfect time to take off his tie and suit jacket, bundling them messily. Quickly, he unlocks the door, throwing the bundle into the backseat, not caring where it lands. Elijah’s phone still sits on the counter at home, but he doesn’t care.  

 

He lets the sounds of the bluegrass music that he grew up on calm his thoughts as he drives north.

 

 

ii.

 

Eventually, he settles down in a small town in Minnesota. He works for an old couple, married for fifty years and running an antique shop. The days are spent making quiet conversation and sorting through everything that comes through, and Elijah knows he’ll look back fondly on the year he spends with them. In the mornings, he runs through the town (with its one four-way intersection and refreshing lack of traffic lights), the pure air making him feel honest and open. The nights are quiet, the only sounds being the bugs or the soft crackling of a fire.  Elijah could be beginning his freshman year of college now; instead, he is happy.

 

“I can close up, if you like,” he offers quietly one night. It’s the couple’s anniversary, and the husband has already left, to set up whatever romantic surprise he has planned. (For her part, she’s been smiling all day, a soft smile that lets Elijah know how excited she is.)

 

“It’s fine. We planned around this.” She places some of her husband’s hand-blown glass on a shelf, taking a moment to admire a small horse figurine.

 

“Go get ready,” he urges, a small smile on his face.

 

“And what about you? It’s a Saturday night,” she says, though she hands the box of glass to Elijah. For a second, her pale hands brush against his dark ones, and he sees the care in her eyes. She’s never been anything but kind to him, and she’s never asked any questions about where he came from.

 

“Like every Saturday night, I’m not needed anywhere else.” Elijah’s voice is light, but she merely rolls her eyes in response.

 

“You’ve been here nearly a year, and never once have you been on a date,” she scolds, lightly slapping Elijah’s hand.

 

“Mmh,” he says noncommittally, placing the works of art on the shelf.

 

“Lovely boy, you need to get out more.” Her voice is light, and she laughs. But then her face changes. “You live your life in solitary. You’re so quiet, so lonely. I get that you’re hardworking, but I worry. You can’t be a day over eighteen, and yet you’re here and you don’t talk about where you came from or what you’re going to do. You’ve got to do more than this. Or you’re not living.”

 

“I’m fine. I’m not lonely.” He is, quite frankly, shocked at her words. But he is also honest in what he says.

 

“Not yet you’re not. And don’t let whatever ghost you’re hiding from keep you from being happy,” she says, her hand shaking as she reaches up to touch his face. Despite himself, his father’s face flashes before him.

 

“I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.” Elijah has never lied to her, nor is he about to start. There is a beat of silence.

 

“You’re leaving tonight, aren’t you?” There is no doubt in her voice, even though it shakes a little. When he says nothing, she merely wraps her arms around him, squeezing him with more strength than he believes she has.

 

“Thank you,” he says, surprised to find his throat thick and his hands trembling.

 

“Just be good to yourself, you lovely boy.” Her voice is full of warmth, and she pauses, her eyes sad as she stares at him (self-consciously, he runs a hand through his wild black curls). “Come on, we’ll close together.”

 

After they lock the doors, she goes to meet her husband, who carries a dozen tulips (she hates the smell of roses), and Elijah drives off alone.

 

Singing the songs of the south, he heads east.

 

iii.

 

He only spends one month in Massachusetts before he has to leave again. A part of him misses the antique shop and the old couple’s company as he struggles to keep up with the noise and the speed of the club he now works at. But then there’s a night with a man who wants things that Elijah doesn’t want and he puts something in the water bottle that Elijah accidently left a little too visible in a corner of the bar and everything is fuzzy. There’s no words to describe the enhanced terror the drugs cause, and Elijah is constantly looking over his shoulder for the man as he stumbles home. There’s no way he can stay after that.

 

So he drives, for the first time craving something similar to where he grew up. Not because he misses his old life, but because after Massachusetts he needs something familiar. He doesn’t want the same as that little town in Mississippi, but he needs something recognizable.

 

iv.

 

It’s surprising how much he loves Texas. Again, he works tending a bar (now always careful to keep his drinks hidden under the counter), but it’s different from the clubs. The bar is primarily a restaurant and Elijah finds himself feeling attached to the waitresses there. The owner, too. He’s an older man, with salt and pepper hair and a mischievous smile, but he starts calling Elijah “Elijah” and that’s his name now. What it was before doesn’t matter, because that’s a part of his first life. He likes the name Elijah much more than what his father and mother called him, and now he feels just a little bit safer from the ghosts (like his parents) that haunt him.  

 

Only a month after Elijah starts working there, he gets into his first fight. It’s after a waitress throws up in the backroom because a patron felt her up that Elijah sees red, and when he’s done he has a broken nose and bruised knuckles, and the other guy is worse. In an instant (as soon as the adrenaline is gone), Elijah’s heart sinks, because he knows he’s going to have to leave again. But his boss merely pulls him up from the floor and wraps him in a hug.

 

“You’re a good kid,” is all the man says, before hauling the other guy out of the bar.

 

So Elijah tends bar, talking to the regulars and making jokes with the waitresses. They call him brother now, and he teasingly replies with a wink and a ‘sister’ every time. And when it happens, though Elijah doesn’t always know (they can be quite good at hiding it), he punches the man (because it is always a man) who touches his sisters without their permission and hauls them out of the bar.

 

It’s a good job, and he makes enough so that he can fix his car when it breaks down, with a little extra for books. And does Elijah read. He reads about revolutions and he longs to start one of his own. He will refuse to keep his chin up and he will fight to end the suffering and injustice that he’s become so intimately acquainted with in his three years on the road. There are so many places with so many reasons not to treat humans like humans, places where people, fellow members of the human race, are denied jobs and treatment and societal equality because of something completely arbitrary (Elijah feels especially hurt by the racial injustice). He will start a revolution for these girls he calls his sisters to end their harassment, and for men like him who are denied jobs because of the color of their skin. There’s a burning desire to do something, because he is sick of doing nothing.

 

Sometimes, he and the owner of the bar talk about it as Elijah mixes him a drink (careful not to splash too much vodka in). His boss will tell him about the protests he was a part of, of the people at the soup kitchens and homeless shelters he volunteers at every weekend, and they’ll discuss Enlightenment writers and the latest cause for anger within the supposed ‘land of the free’ they call home.

 

“I remember Kennedy saying that we can’t be the free country we claim to be until the people are free,” the owner slurs one night as Elijah wipes down the bar at closing. “Forty years later, the people still ain’t free.”

 

Only three weeks later, the owner is attacked and dies after only a few hours in the hospital. Elijah is there, along with his sisters, and he holds them as they cry and lets the tears slip down his face as the man slips into the somewhere that Elijah never thinks about.

 

When it’s done, he wipes his face. He doesn’t want to do this, but it’s the only thing he knows how to do. For the first time, he considers heading back to his old life, with the father he’s been running from for years and his sister and just what he knows, but the whimsy flits away as quickly as it comes. He hates that life.

 

“Sell my things. You need the money more than me.” And then, after they say goodbye, he drives off into the night.

 

This time, there’s no music. But there is the splashing of tears as they fail to cease.

 

v.

 

His car breaks down for good in Seattle, so that’s where Elijah stays. When it’s crushed in the junk yard, it’s hard to hold in the tears. That car is (was) the one constant in his life, and he remembers rushing through an inky purple sky with the windows down, wind whipping his hair around and his heart beating with a happiness he still can’t explain.

 

But then he leaves it behind (like he leaves everything else behind), and finds a job in a bookstore. Elijah doesn’t think that he can handle working in another bar; it’ll all remind him of Texas. And right now, he wants to remember Texas less than he wants to remember Mississippi, his home that was never really home.

 

Here, there’s a young woman who runs the small store and the adjoining café. She enjoys talking with him about political philosophy, and loves his opinions on the books she makes him read. Elijah reads for free here, and he doesn’t miss the stack of books he’s left behind. But she isn’t his only friend.

 

College students, practically burning with idealism, pour into the shop. Slowly, Elijah begins to talk to the few regulars, and finds himself taking his lunch breaks with them and they walk with him after work (and when they take him to a club and there’s something in his drink again they take him home and keep him safe because with the drugs in his system he sees the man from Massachusetts again). It feels as though he’s begun to put down roots, and it’s so scary he’s almost run again more times than he can count. But there’s not enough money for even a fixer-upper car, not to mention no space to hold it until he can get it running.

 

Slowly, he finds he doesn’t want to. It’s on the fourth anniversary of his second birth--he hasn’t celebrated his first since he left that life behind--that his friends (friends, how odd that word sounds) drag him from work to celebrate. There’s lots of laughing and when Elijah escapes to the porch for a little, his heart swells. He’s smiling into the darkness, bright lights and brighter smiles behind him, and it’s filling him with a warmth that he can only think feels like Christmas.

 

Suddenly Elijah is five years old again, and he sees the marshy fields he grew up surrounded by instead of the cramped Seattle suburbs. Crisp fall breezes give way to muggy Mississippi summers when the pounding of the bass fades into the soft whispers of his mother’s favorite country song that barely escapes from the kitchen. From where he sits in his father’s lap on that creaky old rocking chair, Elijah can hear his dad softly humming along. His arms, warm but welcome, keep Elijah from slipping from his lap, and Elijah remembers how proud he used to be to share the exact same skin, so brown it’s almost black. Elijah almost wishes he never left, never stared down that open road, until one of his friends accidentally slams the door on their way out to draw Elijah back into the party. As quickly as he transported himself to Mississippi, Elijah finds himself back in Seattle. A hand, hardened by work and made tan by the sun, wraps around his shoulder and Elijah remembers all of the awful ghosts he ran from, that he still sometimes thinks he sees. Words sink to the front of Elijah’s brain, one stanza of an old Whitman poem he read behind that bar in Texas:

 

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens;

I carry them, men and women—I carry them with me wherever I go;

I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them;

I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)

 

And he will fill them in return.