Leaves Piled High

“Please don’t go, Scott.” Diana pleads standing on the suburban street next to his motorcycle. The leaves are piled high just under the wires.

“I can’t take it if you leave me again. For how long this time? Do you even know?” Scott is zipped in his jacket, helmet and riding gear.

“Ben haunts me, Di. It’s not you I’m leaving, I swear.”

Scott fires up the bike, both of them now straining to hear.

“He haunts me, too,” Diana implores. “But you’re still alive.”

He revs the engine as a lonely tear runs down his check. She grabs his arm.

“I have to go, baby.”

“No you don’t. Come with me to college. We’ll get an apartment.”

He stares with eyes wide as if his helmet might crack in two. Neither of them wanting to part, yet he revs the engine louder looking down the block to the house he grew up in: where his younger brother no longer lives.

Shaking his head back and forth, he grabs the clutch, shifts into gear, kicks the stand with the back of his boot and says, “I love you too much,” then shoots into the night.

“I won’t die on you,” she shouts, but he had already gone.

The bike screams winding out first then second gear as the black Suzuki 1100 gets instantly absorbed by the first fold of darkness. Two breaths of cool air are all it took as Diana watches her breath dissipate into the nippy fall evening. She watched even after Scott had gone- his taillight at the stop sign, then nothing.

She tugs at the bottom of her tan LL Bean jacket sinking further into her brown boots, feeling heavier from the talk and vacuum pulling in around her. Now alone, she’s leaving for college in a few days a little more scared.

A bandana sections off her thick, curled hair as an unattended Camel burns down to her knuckles. She watched his taillights disappear and bolting taillights don’t love or sing, or leave a trace, for long.

Ever since his brother died over a year ago he’s left when things got strained and pressure built. Diana hates it. She knew he wasn’t going off to college with her, but it was worth the try.

She shrugs looking down the cold street. She shakes her head flicking the cigarette butt then watches the embers burn out on the cement. She walks onto her lawn and up the walkway towards her mother making a late dinner.

Is this Scott’s way of dealing with things? Well, it isn’t enough. She almost said it while he sat on the bike. With thoughts spinning, he also knew that it wasn’t enough, yet it didn’t stop him. It couldn’t.

He rides out of their suburban development onto the main street with a stun gun at his back, lodged in his heart. He passes the Circle K and small broken parking lot where he and Ben had walked during many a snowstorm.

Turning the corner, he thinks of destinations and the freedom of having none, of just riding mile after mile after mile.

The world mocks him. His voice is muffled in the wind and guttural howl of the bike.

            Where do you want to work, Scott? What are your future plans?

He mocks the world back with his only defense revving the bike out in third up to sixty. Everyone had been asking the same questions, including Diana’s mother, but never Diana. She knew with his brother gone, he didn’t have any answers. Not today. Not yet.

His younger brother, Ben, had been a lefty pitcher for the high school baseball team. He was a good kid, always had better grades than Scott, nicer to people and their parents. He was stabbed in NYC while walking with a couple of friends. No rhyme or reason to it, no answer as to why.

Without slowing, Scott leans hard turning the corner a few blocks from the Taconic Parkway, then instinctively turns north onto the entrance ramp, away from NYC, heading up to I-84, then it will be west into PA.

            Where do I want to work, huh? He twists the throttle harder, slamming it back, jumping onto the roadway seventy then eighty miles per hour, all in a second’s time and short breath of anyone watching nearby.

The movement of the road, the openness of thought and exploration, he needs, without walls or judgment. He drops into fifth gear taking bumps, bending with turns, absorbing dips, breaking through the walls and conventions of his mind, trying to outrun the pain that rides up fast behind him like a storm.

Coming over a small rise he passes a large family of deer eating along the grass fields, walking closer to the uneven road, now only a few feet from the lane.

 

“Where’d Scotty go, Di? I thought he might stay for dinner.” Her mother asks absently from the kitchen. Mrs. Crowley was kind-hearted but dull of wit, lacking imagination as soap bubbles float near her arms while cleaning a sauce pot.

“He took off, ma. What do you think?”

Diana knew on their suburban street that he was leaving before she could, which gives her some solace. Both tried to hold on once more as it slipped away. Neither said a word about that as life pulled their already unraveling threads. He had to leave because it got too serious. First his brother, and in some way, now she was leaving him.

“I thought he might stay this time or go with you.” Mrs. Crowley shakes her head, placing the pot into the dry rack. “Such a shame.”

Diana looks outside the living room window after a car pulls up. Cracking the blinds with her finger, it was Pete Hurley from the football team who lives across the street. Good old All American Pete slipped a Roofie into her drink in junior high and almost raped her. She shivers trying to forget that night, what she can remember. Good old Pete’s dad, All American county court judge, helped him get away with it.

“Di, did you hear me? I thought Scott might go with you.” She says raising her voice across the room.

“I did hear you, ma. Guess you were wrong.”

“He’s gonna have to stop running sometime.” Mrs. Crowley says attempting to comfort her only daughter.

“What do you know? Maybe he doesn’t.” Diana’s words drop knowing she’s being nasty to her mother. Mrs. Crowley continues with the dishes, trying not to push her daughter further, knowing she’s leaving, and scared that Diana will forget her and leave her alone like Mr. Crowley does on many nights.

Di switches back to thinking about Scott who had been her protective blanket.   Whispering to him across the winds, down the roads, through all the bullshit of this world, “Be safe my love. Benny, protect your brother. He needs you now.”

 

Earlier yesterday walking past Ben’s room flipped a switch and set Scott off. While his father was at work his mother cried all day trying to hide it, thinking no one was around. When Scott asked, she denied it, and went back to cleaning and cooking.

“Talk about Ben already, Ma!”

She shook her head weeping. Her thinning hair shifted with watery sobs.

“I can’t. I worry so much about you, now. Can I make you some lunch? Please?”

“No mom. You can’t.”

Scott couldn’t take the silence anymore. His parents are quiet and unassuming. Now they seldom speak, and if they do, it’s usually surface discussions about food, weather, ballgames, but never about Ben. The thought of him lingers in the air of their living room like a toxin while they sit silently watching crime shows on television. They had adopted the two brothers after their parents had abandoned them. They had not been able to have children.

Suffocated by his brother’s death, the growing demands of the world, and his adoptive parent’s inability to talk about it, Scott had to leave. No one else was his family. Yet Scott is old enough to remember vague images of another lifetime.

His head tight in the helmet remembering the cruelty all of them have suffered losing Ben. He revs the Suzuki up to ninety then a hundred on the dark empty road checking his side mirrors for what may be closing in behind him. His helmet and head bounce from the wind and road.

 

Two days ago he and Lady Di danced in the Rite Aid parking lot off North Avenue after a day at Jones Beach with the open air and after a seafood dinner. They danced slowly to the Muzak pumped blandly into the parking lot for sedate shoppers.

Her eyes twinkled with love. “You think you don’t have anyone now, I know.”

“I have you, Lady Di.” He smirked slyly.

She nodded. “Good, I want to be your family.” then stared at him seriously.

She unzipped her white and pink motorcycle jacket, moved closer to hold him once more, but equally so he could hold her. As they embraced swaying to the music with her head on his shoulder, she sighed the words, “I’ve always been.”

 

This image slides into Scott’s head on the road in front of him against the black road surface. Scott releases the throttle slowing the bike.

Doing 80mph in Pennsylvania off I-81, Scott takes the exit for the next rest stop and pulls into a spot. He can’t go another mile. He can’t leave her. Ben won’t let him as he hears Ben muttering in his head to go back. To stop. To stop running.

He gets off the bike and paces the almost empty parking lot. A few cars with towels and shirts hang from car windows blocking the light. He paces the spot some more, looking down the straight stretch of road that leads into the darkness ahead. Nowhere. He turns to where he has come from then stares up into the vast night sky. He wants to keep riding but can’t. He looks down at his legs that feel heavy like wood posts buried into the earth.

The phone rings at the Crowley residence waking up the household. 3am.

“Mr. Crowley, it’s Scott. I must speak with Diana. I know it’s late and I’m sorry.          But I must speak with your daughter right now.”

“Scott is that you?” He says with agitation. “What do you want?”

“Sir, I must speak with your daughter. I’m sorry to wake you, but I must.”

“Ok. Ok. Hang on one moment. Jesus, Scott.”

Diana picks up the phone with sleep in her eyes. “Scott, why are you calling so late? Is everything alright? Do you need me to come out there? Please tell me you’re safe and not hurt.”

Scott sits down on the parking lot curb smiling at her warmth and love pouring through the phone. He shakes his head and smiles in the moment knowing what he must do.

“I’m coming home Lady Di and I will never leave you again. In fact, I’m taking you to college and am living with you. Maybe I’ll enroll. But there’s no way some college A-hole is getting anywhere near my girl.” Diana lays in bed speechless smiling up at the ceiling. Scott hops back on the bike and finds the first illegal u-turn “For Emergency Vehicles Only.”