Page 5 of Born to Run Back
The night was eerily quiet, just the distant hum of late-night traffic on the 60 freeway and the rustle of wind between the canyon walls. I walked to where we’d sat together on what was left of the guardrail, half-expecting to see some trace of her, some sign that I wasn’t the only one who just couldn’t let this go.
That’s when I saw the white flowers, laid carefully at the bottom of the embankment, exactly where the BMW had been that night. Roses and baby’s breath, the cellophane wrapper catching the moonlight like a million scattered diamonds. They were fresh, maybe hours old.
My heart completed a complicated leap in my chest, a combination of relief and fear and desperate hope that made my hands shake as I lit a cigarette. She’d been here. Today, probably. The woman who’d held that teenage girl’s hand while I’d tried to save a kid who was already gone.
I stood there, smoking—yeah,disgustingas fuck, I know—and staring at those flowers until my cigarette burned down to my fingertips. She’d come back, just like I had. We were both circling this place like planets around a dying star, drawn by gravity we couldn’t deny even if we wanted to.
The rational part of my mind, the teacher part that graded papers and attended faculty meetings and lived a perfectly ordinary and boring life, knew this was—unhealthy. Obsessive. The kind of behavior normal people sought therapy for.
But standing there in the inky darkness, looking down at her wilting flowers, I felt more connected to another human being than I had in years. Since… well, since.
She was out there somewhere, probably lying awake like I had been, thinking about that night. About the weight of tragedy and this strange intimacy of a shared grief neither of us had signed up for. About the way we’d moved together without speaking a word, two strangers united by nothing but the terrible need to answer a call for help.
I stubbed out my cigarette and ground it under the heel of my shoe, then walked back to my car. But I didn’t start up the engine right away. Instead, I sat in the darkness and tried to memorize everything. The curve of the road, the smell of sage and rain-washed canyons, the exact spot where she’d placed that miserable bouquet, reaching with each petal, as if grasping for that connection again.
I understood. I was desperate for her, too.
Tomorrow I had lesson plans to write and tests to grade, a normal life to return to, a routine that didn’t include midnight vigils at sites of tragic accidents. But sitting there with dawn approaching, watching those white flowers glow in the silver moonlight, I knew I’d be back.
We both would be.
The drive home felt like waking from a distant dream, the ordinary streets of my neighborhood suddenly foreign after the solemn emptiness of those dipping hills and red canyons. I pulled into my driveway and sat there for a long while, keys still in the ignition, trying to hold on to a link that was already starting to fade.
Inside, I poured myself three fingers of bourbon and sat at my kitchen table, staring at the stack of ungraded World History tests I’d been avoiding for a solid week. The Ottoman Empire. The Industrial Revolution. Dead civilizations and distant wars that had nothing to do with the taste of rainfall and the memory of vanilla-scented hair.
I couldn’t concentrate, not on any of it. All I could think about was the tender, attentive way she’d arranged those flowers, the reverence in the gesture. The possibility that somewhere across this sprawling valley, maybe, just maybe, she was lying awake thinking about me, too.
I was losing my mind, one sleepless night at a time. And the strangest, most damning part?
I didn’t want to stop.
Chapter Two
Shadows in Motion
Wendy
Tuesday,2:16a.m.,threeweeks later
The lie I’d been telling myself evolved, becoming more sophisticated with each passing day. I wasn’t obsessing, not really. I was… processing. I wasn’t stalking a memory; I was healing through trying to find meaning in it somehow. The stack of printouts on my kitchen counter wasn’t evidence of an unhealthy fixation but rather, responsible research into the kind of accidents that occurred on canyon roads. For safety purposes, of course. Educational purposes. Perfectly reasonable purposes that had nothing to do with the way my pulse quickened every time I smelled the tiniest hint of spearmint, or the way I’d started taking the long route home from client meetings. The route that happened to wind through Hacienda Road.
The route that happened to pass mile marker eighteen.
My work was suffering. I’d missed three client deadlines this week alone, sitting in my office chair and staring at quarterly budget projections while my mind wandered to the curve of Hacienda Road, to the exact angle of twisted metal against brown earth. My assistant had started knocking more insistently, his voice carrying that careful note people use when they think you might be having some kind of a breakdown.
Well, maybe I fucking was.
The sketches were sort of the worst part. I’d find them later, scattered across my desk like evidence of sleepwalking; quick, violent strokes of charcoal, capturing the brutal geometry of the accident. Broken glass. Bent guardrails. Steam rising from an overturned sedan. My subconscious apparently had perfect recall for trauma, could reproduce every horrible, ugly detail with the accuracy of a police photographer.
I told myself it was meant to be cathartic. Art therapy, you know. A healthy way to process what I’d witnessed.
But I knew better. Even as I lied to myself, I knew.
The internet searches had started out innocently enough. Merely checking to see if there were any updates on the victims, any follow-up stories about what had caused the accident that night. But innocent had morphed into thorough, and thorough had become obsessive, and now I knew things that had nothing at all to do with closure and everything to do with the hollow ache in my chest that only grew and grew, like some kind of monster I couldn’t banish back into the dark.
Delaney Lewis, nineteen. Art major at Cal State Fullerton. Her Instagram was still active, only maintained by supportive friends as she grieved, posting their memories and leaving endless hearts on everything. Benedict ‘Beck’ Foster, twenty-two. Pre-med at UC Riverside. His obituary made mention of a younger sister and parents who’d immigrated from Canada in the nineties.
I’d printed their pictures, high school graduation photos with bright smiles and futures stretching endlessly ahead with no expected tragedy in sight. I’d taped them to my bathroom mirror, and they watched me brush my teeth every morning with their young, hopeful faces.
