The highway cut through the darkness like a scar. In the backseat a child three years old maybe younger stood gripping the seatbelt and swaying with the motion of the car. His sister slept in her car seat beside him oblivious. Between them an ice chest sweating condensation onto vinyl.
His job was simple. When his father's hand reached back palm open the boy would lift the lid and retrieve a cold can. The sharp crack of the pull tab. The ritual repeated at intervals he couldn't yet measure.
The voices in the front seat rose and fell like waves each crest carrying words he understood but couldn't parse. Words that lodged in his throat made breathing difficult. His mother's voice climbed higher. His father's responses came edged and dark. Why did they have to fight?
The boy sank lower into the seat, the seatbelt cutting across his small chest. The tightness in his throat became unbearable. When the crying started it seemed to emerge from somewhere outside himself a sound he couldn't control, couldn't stop.
His father's shoulders tensed. His mother went quiet in that particular way that meant something had broken.
The car veered suddenly toward the shoulder. Gravel crunched under the tires as they rolled to a stop outside a truck stop its fluorescent lights casting everything in sickly yellow. The engine died. In the silence that followed the boy could hear his own breathing ragged and small.
His father opened the door, reached back into the ice chest, and pulled out two beers still connected by the plastic rings that held the six pack together. He stepped out into the night. The boy watched through the window as he walked toward the bus station, his silhouette shrinking against the artificial light, the cans swinging at his side. He didn't look back.
The farm, his mother's childhood home where his grandparents still lived where visits had always meant safety remained hours away in the darkness. They would not arrive together.
Decades later the memory surfaces without warning. The boy is a man now nearly fifty and his father no longer remembers anything at all. Alzheimer's has taken even the possibility of asking why.
His mother when he finally asks is startled. You remember that?
He does. The ice chest. The seatbelt cutting across his chest. The crack of the pull tab. The words that filled the car like smoke. The way his father walked away without turning around the two beers dangling from his hand.
Some memories don't fade. They calcify becoming dense and permanent small monuments to moments when the world first revealed itself as unstable. This is one of them.
He writes it down trying to understand what the three year old couldn't. That he was witnessing a rupture, that he was learning what it meant to be powerless in the presence of adult rage.
The writing doesn't heal it. But it steadies the image, gives it shape and boundaries, transforms it from a recurring nightmare into something he can hold in his hands and examine in daylight.
This is how we carry our earliest wounds, not as scars that fade but as stories we tell ourselves until we understand what they mean.
🖤
