The In-Between
You are in the back seat of the teal Honda on the way to New Jersey. Princeton, New Jersey. Emily is going to do a tour there. You’re not old enough yet. Almost. You watch the other cars speed by on the highway, the smog that the paper factories cough and spit out like blood.
Princeton University. Ivy League. Big stone walls and spires like mythic castles and windows like lakes and trees like towering, stiffened, rotting pillars.
She’s lounging in the seat in front of you with round headphones on, bobbing her head and gazing out the window with drowsy, smiling, half-closed eyes. Her eyes are glassy, like the windows, because she’s half-asleep. Sleepy windows.
You have a piece of wrinkled, lined paper in your lap. You have a ballpoint pen in your hand. You’re writing what your history teacher told you to write for homework, you’re writing it as the car shakes and the pen jerks. She told you to write a list of world conflicts.
Racism
Terrorism
Sexism
Gun violence
Nuclear war
Climate Change
You stick the edge of the pen in your mouth. If you sucked in the ink, if you let it stain your mouth like blue blood, would it be easier to write? Would your head hurt to think about today, or tomorrow, or the next (you’re not even counting yesterday, because even the word “yesterday” makes your head throb)? Would you still wonder why it hurts?
Stressing out. You want to write it on the list, but you haven’t sucked in the pen ink and you don’t want to, so you won’t.
There is a textbook on your lap. You are writing on the paper, which is lying on the textbook, which is sitting on your knees, which are leaning against your squished, yellow backpack, full of folders and books and papers. Your head is full of papers. And dust. And spiders that spin little flimsy cobwebs in the corners to stop the sides of your brain from getting searing scarlet paper cuts.
You glance at Emily in the seat in front of you. Dad’s in front of her, his hands loosely on the wheel, humming some tune that doesn't really exist, bobbing his head to the noise in his chest, the thumping. He is a professor back home. At a college. MIT. He used to teach part-time at Harvard, but that got to be too much.
Too much.
Ma is sitting in the seat next to him, her head tilted back and her mouth open like a drifting fish. Her eyes are closed lightly. She’s dreaming. About work, probably. The office. The doctor’s office. She’s a surgeon for brains. A neurosurgeon? Yeah, that’s what is is—or, you’re pretty sure. But she can’t fix your brain, the way it is, filled with papers and books, all wilting and paper-cut and black and blue and squished under the backpack.
She can’t fix Emily’s brain, either. Emily’s brain, which tells her that she loves the papers, the way the owl hoots when she’s typing away while the sun rises, the no sleep, purple eye-bags, coffee addiction, shaking hands shifting eyes test-taking record-breaking world-making awards. The brain that sees Princeton on the horizon in the glare of the white light, but it can’t see past the hill. The hill is all it can spot from its telescope; it doesn’t see the black-blooded veins under the castle, the crumbling foundations.
Mom can’t fix Dad’s brain. You glance at Dad, who is humming still, the same tune, the same beat, the same noise, the white noise, off in the background, always the same timing, the same rhythm that can’t get around the backpack, the papers, the folders in his head that he can’t let go of. Live the day, live the same day tomorrow, live it yesterday, live it into the sunset, hand out a paper, grade a paper, hand another out, he shakes his head, shakes a hand, sleep, wake up, hand out a paper, grade a paper, sleep, wake up, wake up, wake up—
But most of all, Mom can’t fix her own brain, because she can’t get out of her body to see her own brain, or she’d be dead. She is in the in-between. She is in the time between dusk and twilight, when the sky is an earthy reddish-purple that you want to dip your finger into and the stars are just blinking up. Her heart is cracking, knees breaking, and she can’t stand any longer; she loves her job but she can’t stand the standing, she can’t stand, she’s falling, losing her grip, it’s simply too much: the needles, the sterile smell, every day, every day, and she’s forgetting what it means to sleep, to live, to love, to laugh. The in-between is too much.
Dad is in the in-between.
Emily is in the in-between.
And you.
You are in the in-between.
by HALEY CREIGHTON