It was autumn, and the bright red-orange-and-yellow-turning leaves fled past like broad strokes of paint as the road thrummed out a course beneath their car. Jen sat in the back seat, behind her mother in the driver’s seat. Dylan, her mother’s boyfriend since the previous April, occupied the passenger’s side in front.
“Do you want to listen to some music, Jen?” her mother asked.
“I dunno,” she replied softly. She sat slumped down almost as far as was possible, with her legs up on her mother’s seat, her socked toes hooking the edge of the seat-pocket. Her head leaned backward to rest on the soft-gray seat back, and she watched quietly the near-motionless sky beyond the rapid motion of the trees.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” her mother queried.
Her gaze remained outside. “I dunno. I just don’t know.”
“Dylan?”
He shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”
“Would you get the CDs?” Jen’s mother asked. “They’re under the center here.”
“Yeah, sure.” He began to dig around underneath the tray-cupholder complex between them.
“So, Jen,” her mother began, “you must be excited to see Nana?”
“Yeah, I guess. It’s been awhile.”
“Yeah, it’s been what, four years?”
Jen nodded first. Then, realizing her mistake, she answered verbally. “Yes.”
“I’m glad it’s happening on your birthday, too,” her mother commented.
Dylan poked his head up. “Yeah, how old are you turning?”
She turned briefly from the window to meet his gaze. She did her best to give off an air of indifference. “Fourteen,” she answered.
He went back to digging out CDs from the small compartment. “Oh, nice. Yeah, fourteen’s a good age. Okay,” he continued, drawing out the stack of CDs he had been amassing. “I don’t really know most of these.”
“Jen, do you want to pick?” her mother offered.
With one finger, she began to rub at the soft area on her seat that was next to her pocket. “Sure.”
“Why don’t you read ‘em out loud, Dylan?”
He nodded, and began to rifle through the CDs. “Okay. Greetings of Anima.” He paused to let Jen respond.
“Keep going,” she said.
“Okay.” He slid that CD to the bottom of the stack. “I’ll just read ‘em all. Stop me if you decide on one.”
She nodded.
“Fahrenheit,” he continued. “Nine Healthy Sins. Open-Jawed. Litmus. Each and Every One. Rich-tus.”
“Rick-tus,” she corrected, hardening the ‘ch’ in the title.
“Oh.” He looked back at the album cover. “What does that mean?” She gave him a shrug, and he turned to her mother. “Liv?”
“I’m sorry,” she answered, her eyes on the road. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
“What does ‘Richtus’ mean?”
She shook her head. “I think it’s just a name.”
“Oh.” He turned back to face Jen. “You want that one?”
She shook her head.
“It’s got a bunch of bird sounds on it,” her mother explained.
“Okay. Weird.”
Jen turned in from the window to clarify. “It’s good,” she said, “but I don’t think I want to listen to it now.”
“All right. Then we have third incension—jeez, what are these titles?”
“That’s a good one, too,” Jen muttered, as if speaking to the sky outside.
“What?”
She raised her voice. “Nothing. Go on.”
“Okay. Pine. Half-of-Eden. And… this last one’s just a yellow square.” He flipped it over to check for the title. “It’s the same on the back.”
“That’s Daisy,” Jen’s mother explained. “By The Treecutters. You want to listen to that one, Jen?”
She shrugged. “I don’t mind.”
“We used to play it in the kitchen, when we were cooking. It’s so good,” Liv explained to Dylan. “She loves that album.”
“You and Aaron?”
There was a long silence. “Yeah,” Liv finally responded. Jen turned in from the window to look at Dylan, who hadn’t seemed to notice his error.
“Well, you wanna listen to that?” he asked.
“Sure,” Jen replied, biting her lip. She turned back to face the window in an effort to hide the action, but Dylan hadn’t noticed. He popped the CD open and slipped it into the player in the dashboard.
After a brief, quiet whirr that rose in pitch steadily as the player accelerated, the first track began to play. Short, almost staccato chords on both guitars and piano counted out the beat softly—one, two, three, one, two, and again. Dylan shifted in his seat after putting the rest of the CDs back under the center tray. Out from a tree in Jen’s view, a red-tailed hawk swooped over the road and curled back in on its path. In a flash, it was gone. Then, as if out of nothing, a few notes on an organ rose—single notes played one after the other, starting and stopping off-beat, each lasting for several seconds until the next one took its place. They seemed to dance up and down in pitch in refusal of melody—then suddenly the underlying beat dropped away, the organ faded, the drums rolled, and then all of it came back again as the first verse started.
Blue drifting in my eyes Taken over by exemption A fact’s a fact, and I Can’t say a word against him I’d lose my head if I Were any less a fool I’d crumple up the world If you’d come back to me If you’d come back to me Sky wanders underneath Even friends don’t last sometimes If the embers don’t survive What will it matter? It hardly matters. And I just want to let the petals fall Just want the ashes of our former day Just want to hear you say it Just want the world to stop for once And let the rest of us turn, turn, turn. Silk, threads of elven gray In time you won’t remember why They spindle woven lies of love I once believed. If you don’t lie to me Who will? I never wanted All this blue. I wanted you To watch me dance To watch me sing To watch me breath. And I just want to let my hair down Just want the sun in my eyes again Just want to hear you tell me Just want the world to stop for once And let the rest of us turn, turn, turn, And let the rest of us turn, turn, turn…
The music faded slowly, and Dylan shifted in his seat again. “Huh,” he said.
“What?” Liv prompted.
“I don’t know… it’s just interesting. Is the whole album like this?”
She glanced over at him briefly. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know… it just seems kind of bare, that’s all.”
“You think it’s underproduced?”
Jen glanced away from the lacy clouds to peer at Dylan’s face for a moment.
“I didn’t say that,” he answered carefully. “I just don’t know about it.”
“Well, we don’t have to listen to it if you don’t want to.”
“No, that’s okay. I don’t mind.”
Jen turned back to the window to look at the trees outside. The album’s second track burst out of the speakers with a brief count-in and a jagged riff, and to Jen it seemed that the car’s pace had quickened, and that the trees now fled past with even more resolve.
The last song of the album wound down as Jen’s mother pulled into the rest stop. She turned the car off and arched her back, slipping the keys into her pocket. “Okay,” she said, “wasn’t that cool? Meet back here in five minutes.” Dylan checked his wristwatch, pocketed his cell phone, and began to get out of the car. After a pause, Liv turned back to face Jen. “You should get out.” Dylan’s door swung shut with moderate speed.
“I don’t have to go,” Jen replied.
“You should get out anyway. Stretch your legs.”
“Fine,” she answered. She tugged on the door handle and the door began to slide open.
“I’ll be right out.”
“See you.” Jen slid out of the minivan and pulled the door handle again. She slipped her hands into the front pocket of her sweater and began to walk around the empty space adjacent to the car. She hated rest areas. The bathrooms always smelled terrible, and the drone of the highway interrupted her thoughts.
When Liv returned, the two of them leaned against the car and waited for Dylan. After a moment, he emerged from the vending area with a candy bar in his hand. He stopped at the water fountain for a moment, and began to chat with another man who was there.
“Why—?” Jen began, staring out at the little brick building with its brown metal, corrugated roof.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
“I said it’s nothing.”
“Hey, look at me.” Liv turned her daughter’s face towards her. “What’s wrong? You’ve been acting sour all day.”
After a long pause, Jen answered. “Why do you like him so much?”
Liv sighed. She gathered her words carefully before responding. “I know you miss Dad,—”
“This isn’t about Dad.”
“Look, I know you don’t like Dylan, but he’s right for me, okay?”
Jen scowled. “He doesn’t like the same music you do, he doesn’t watch the same movies you do, his phone background is a picture of himself eating a burger. He didn’t even know who Victor Hugo was.”
“That was an honest mistake.”
Jen rolled her eyes.
Liv sighed again. “Look… sometimes, people have differences, and that’s okay. Not everyone has to like the same music to get along.” She looked back at Dylan and sighed. “He cares about me. And that’s what I need right now. You’ll understand someday.”
When he returned from the water fountain, Jen gave him a brave glare which went unnoticed. The three of them got back in the car and Liv turned the key in the ignition. “Do we want to listen to more music?” she asked.
Jen was silent. “I’m okay with whatever,” Dylan offered.
“We don’t have to,” she replied. The car rolled out onto the freeway and began to grind gently against the road once more. The trees raced by, and in the relative silence inside, Jen began to think about the road they were taking to her grandmother’s house. Then her thoughts shifted to the world beyond that road, slowly, steadily, and invisibly pushing them along. She began to feel—vaguely, and in a way she did not understand—that their path through the universe traced out an arc which could not be moved easily. A memory came to her of her father, playing catch with her in the yard. Then she thought of Dylan again and scowled. She pushed her thoughts away, trying to focus on the world outside the car—there was another hawk, perched high atop one of the pines; it was visible an instant, motionless like a single picture in a running reel of film. Eventually, the words from Daisy Sky drifted their way back to her, as if they had been floating out in the open air, and had only just slipped through the edge of the car window with great effort and burrowed themselves in her mind:
And I just want to let my hair down
Just want the sun in my eyes again
Just want to hear you tell me
Just want the world to stop for once
And let the rest of us turn, turn, turn,
And let the rest of us turn, turn, turn.