Carrie’s mom died at age thirty-six. Her dad when he was thirty-eight. Six to eight years. A red semi blared its horn when Carrie corrected the brief swerve out of her lane. While the semi passed, drenching her windshield in a wake of dirty water, the wipers thumped across the window like a metronome in double time. Or perhaps that was her heart. She gripped the wheel until her slim knuckles resembled vellum stretched over bone. Today was Carrie’s thirtieth birthday.
She stole a glance at Jeremy, her oblivious husband, currently muttering the contents of his cue cards in the passenger seat. He was defending his dissertation today, and she wished that was the reason he hadn’t acknowledged her birthday, but it wasn’t. Valentine’s Day had been overlooked too. The fog forming on the inside of the Toyota’s windows didn’t clear with heat or cold, or her harried swipes. Everything but inaction made it worse. It condensed on her neck, in her lungs. She turned off Forbes Avenue and into Pitt’s dreary campus. Jeremy had moved back in a month ago. He said things would be different this time.
Students and professionals with umbrellas skirted around their vehicle, clambering to eight a.m. classes while Jeremy packed away his cards. Six to eight years wasn’t enough. While the dappled throng of headlights, rain slickers and rain drops dulled her vision to a glittered haze, Carrie contemplated how to make the most of her remaining life. Suppressed longings and bloated dreams gurgled to the surface, almost forming an agenda before her eyes, then Jeremy said something. He sounded muffled as though under water.
“What?” she asked, blinking back into the present with a gasp.
“I said, can I have a kiss for good luck?” Then planted his lips on her before she could refuse.
The soured chocolate milk on his breath blasted the last of her domestic reservations away. Jeremy never remembered to brush his teeth unless she told him to. Morning and night. There were so many other things she wanted to do.
“Pick me up at five?” he asked.
“You know I schedule appointments until six,” she said. “Take the bus home.”
“I hate the bus. It’s so uncivilized,” he said. “Can’t you reschedule and skip out early? Let’s go out and celebrate. I’m thinking, the Cheesecake Warehouse.”
Her eyelid twitched. He knew she hated chain restaurants. “Celebrate what?” she asked, as the last threads of her patience unraveled.
“Umm, the end to this long overdue dissertation? Me successfully defending it? Me getting my PhD? What else is there to celebrate?” He scoffed. “See you at five.”
In a flurry of blue suiting and red Charlie Taylors, Jeremy ran towards Posvar Hall, a brutalist concrete building that was as grim and soulless as March in Pittsburgh. She pulled up the Travel Dealz app on her phone.
***
Carrie touched down in San Diego three hours past the time she was supposed to pick up Jeremy. She had only the clothes on her back, her purse, and the in-flight magazine that featured the Instantaneousgram-worthy Carlsbad Flower Fields—a surreal landscape that looked like a real life Candy Lane board. While in line at the rental car’s outdoor kiosk, she wondered if Jeremy had given up and taken the bus. She hadn’t checked her phone, hadn’t even taken it out of airplane mode, yet. The sky was big here. And the air was so dry, the perspiration at the nape of her neck had crystalized, feeling like chalk on her fingertips. He would be furious.
She arrived at the flower fields around sunset, when the Tecolote ranunculus blooms were bathed in the golden hour light. The flowers stretched across the hillsides in rows of burgundy, magenta, orange, yellow and white, bobbing and swaying in the coastal breeze. Each flower starts its journey as a bud, the size of a shooter marble—she learned this from overhearing a tour guide—and expands into a palm-sized blossom containing one hundred and thirty petals. When the tour ended, the field fell silent. The only sounds were the crinkle of bouquet cellophane, the distant river of Interstate 5 traffic, and the buzzing of Carrie’s silenced phone. The buzzing halted as soon as she blocked Jeremy’s number.
A spark of finality arced through her. She was in California, all by herself. She’d never done something so brazen or independent in her entire life, and it filled her with the yearning to press forward, see even more, do even more. First, she wanted to stop at the outlet mall butting up against the flower fields and get herself a suitcase and some new clothes; a new identity. Then, she’d stop by the hole-in-the-wall Cantina she’d driven past and get a burrito the size of a newborn. And a jalapeño margarita too. She wanted so badly to hit the gas and never look back. But.
Carrie propped her phone on an irrigation pipe for a timed picture of herself among the orange and pink ranunculus, her face and arms turned up to the apricot sky in a jubilant stretch, long auburn hair blown backwards. Four tries, and a bunch of judgmental looks from tourists later, she got her Cartier-Bresson decisive moment, and posted the image to her Instantaneousgram, writing only:
I was thirty years old when I learned #YOLO. Goodbye Jeremy. P.S. Congratulations on your PhD. If you can find the car in long term parking, you’ll never have to take the bus again.
As the last of the sun dipped below the riffling flowers, Carrie took a deep breath, let it out slow, fully planting herself in the moment. She could feel the layers around her loosening and expanding in a slow acquiesce. Death was inevitable. Fact. One day she would die. Fact. But until then, she would bloom.
Meryl A.H. Franzos grew up primarily in California and the Bible belt of Michigan, plus a few other places salt bae-d in there. She now lives and writes in Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in Litbreak Magazine and soon, The Fourth River.