Run for the Hills

by Kevin Wilson

“One day,” her father suddenly said, “you’ll be making syrup with your own kids.” “You’ll be making syrup with my kids,” she told him. “And I’ll be in bed and you’ll bring me pancakes with sorghum.” “Oh, okay, that works, too,” he said.

“One day,” her father suddenly said, “you’ll be making syrup with your own kids.” “You’ll be making syrup with my kids,” she told him. “And I’ll be in bed and you’ll bring me pancakes with sorghum.” “Oh, okay, that works, too,” he said.

She didn’t consider the future that much. She would get older, and her life would change, and she got bored thinking about it. She was more interested in right now, finding the exact moment where things changed or you finally understood that they were important. She liked the present. The past wasn’t that far away and the future seemed undefined, so she sat with her father and focused on this moment, the chickens clucking, scratching at the ground, and the steady breathing of her and her father.

She didn’t consider the future that much. She would get older, and her life would change, and she got bored thinking about it. She was more interested in right now, finding the exact moment where things changed or you finally understood that they were important. She liked the present. The past wasn’t that far away and the future seemed undefined, so she sat with her father and focused on this moment, the chickens clucking, scratching at the ground, and the steady breathing of her and her father.

Mad was thirty-two now, and she realized that her mom at that age was about to have her husband disappear and leave her with a young girl and a farm to run. Mad had avoided being left, she supposed, by not having anyone arrive.

Mad had avoided being left, she supposed, by not having anyone arrive.

This wasn’t supposed to be how a family worked. Family was just there when you appeared in the world, waiting for you. Each new addition after that, you had time to prepare, to make a place for them in your heart. The only danger was reduction, the numbers thinning out, people leaving. You weren’t supposed to suddenly get a new family at eleven o’clock on a Saturday after you’d sold out of eggs.

This wasn’t supposed to be how a family worked. Family was just there when you appeared in the world, waiting for you. Each new addition after that, you had time to prepare, to make a place for them in your heart. The only danger was reduction, the numbers thinning out, people leaving. You weren’t supposed to suddenly get a new family at eleven o’clock on a Saturday after you’d sold out of eggs.

She wondered why she was thinking so much of doing violence to this recently discovered sibling. There was all the psychic weight, sure, but it was also just that he was a guest, and she didn’t have many of them. Because, she reasoned, they were usually an inconvenience. They showed up and created work for you. They asked you about your feelings, your day. They asked if you maybe had a beer in the fridge. They asked if you could adjust the air-conditioning just, like, two degrees. They asked if you knew the location of any legal papers that might speak to the true identity of the father you had not seen in over twenty years. And you just had to nod and smile, because this was hospitality.

There was all the psychic weight, sure, but it was also just that he was a guest, and she didn’t have many of them. Because, she reasoned, they were usually an inconvenience. They showed up and created work for you. They asked you about your feelings, your day. They asked if you maybe had a beer in the fridge. They asked if you could adjust the air-conditioning just, like, two degrees. They asked if you knew the location of any legal papers that might speak to the true identity of the father you had not seen in over twenty years. And you just had to nod and smile, because this was hospitality.

“Oh, yeah,” he replied, smiling like he’d forgotten his change at the store, “you have no idea where I came from.” She thought that sounded ominous, but then she remembered that, wherever he had come from, he’d been conveyed by PT Cruiser, and she felt less worried.

“Oh, yeah,” he replied, smiling like he’d forgotten his change at the store, “you have no idea where I came from.” She thought that sounded ominous, but then she remembered that, wherever he had come from, he’d been conveyed by PT Cruiser, and she felt less worried.

“Well, you are very interesting and super capable and quite pretty, so I think you should get online and find somebody.” “I will never go online and find somebody,” she replied. “I’d rather just be a farm witch.

“I keep people at a distance, I know,” he said. “I guess I do, too,” Mad offered, but it was easy to do that when you lived on so many acres that you could barely even see your neighbor. But she knew what he meant. If a person wanted her, it made her suspicious, not flattered. It was a part of herself that she hated, to think that she was so deficient that someone was scamming her if they said she was interesting.

She says that he left me and my mom, and so I’m afraid that I’m gonna do the same thing.” “Or maybe you’re afraid someone will leave you again,” Mad offered. “That, too!” Rube said. “Yes, one or the other.”

Mad figured that most therapy consisted of focusing on how your parents messed you up, and then finding ways to keep that pain contained within your own body so you didn’t pass it on to anyone else or yell too much at the people responsible.

Maybe every single moment of loving someone you helped make was connected to this low-level terror that hurt your heart.

Mad still could barely breathe, her chest so tight, the sadness of not getting what you wanted, the acceptance that life goes on. It was a lot. You live on a farm your entire life, spending your life with chickens who have an interior life that is a mystery to you, and then you set off on a quest to find your missing dad and you feel the static electricity of touching someone who shares your DNA, and you maybe ruin their life, and you maybe ruin your own life. Isn’t that a lot? Isn’t that maybe too much for Saturday afternoon in the Frank Erwin Center in Austin, Texas?

You had to keep an open mind, not adhere too closely to what you thought was true, when it came to her father. You had to accept that your father might have been an ageless con artist who had sold his soul to the devil. Anything was possible.

Every single game, he told them, every moment of your life, is just putting in the effort so that you can hold on to what you love for as long as you possibly can.

You could expand your horizons as long as you occasionally got to run right back to the only thing you really knew.

To have died in the PT Cruiser? Good god, how humiliating. To have died on some stretch of interstate in New Mexico, in search of her missing father, would have been too embarrassing to mention at the wake, all three of them lined up in caskets at some nondenominational church, their father never even knowing what had happened to them, their moms trying to explain to well-wishers exactly what the circumstances of their deaths were. No matter how bad being alive could feel, it was way better than the embarrassment of death.

“You fell asleep!” Pep yelled. “No!” he replied, “I just told you. The engine went crazy. Did you not hear me say that? The engine went dead and I said, ‘What in the world is happening?’ to both of you. Do you not remember?” “I was asleep,” Mad said. “I didn’t hear anything except when you said ‘shit’ like a hundred times.” “I was asleep, too,” Pep offered. “But then I woke up and was like, ‘oh, we’re gonna die’ and I didn’t even have my seat belt on.”

the siblings marveled at the fact that, somehow, the Chevrolet HHR, which had been described as a “retro-styled, high-roofed, five-door, five-passenger, front-wheel-drive wagon” looked like a freaking PT Cruiser. “Oh, god, no,” Pep had shouted when the wagon pulled up. “This is a stretched-out PT Cruiser. How? How is this possible?”

That was the thing with their dad. When you imagined him in his new iteration, he was already gone, had moved on, so everything wavered in your brain like a ghost or a wisp of smoke.

She tried to convince herself that a life needed these moments, where you felt the split of who you were and who you became. Without those moments, what was your life? Just an unbroken line that went from birth to death? Though that actually seemed kind of nice, Mad admitted, how lovely the sound of that unbroken string would sound when you thrummed it, a single sound that died when you did. Wait, what in the fuck was she talking about? She couldn’t stop thinking of birth and death on this trip, but she needed to focus on the middle, which, you know, she was still living inside of.

she kept thinking he was much younger, but she remembered that he was eleven. He was a preteen, she thought, though she didn’t know the exact ages of that category off the top of her head. When she was young, you were just some dumb idiot child to the adult world until suddenly you were a teenager and an object of concern and pity.

Mad had never tried acid, but each new meeting with a sibling felt like a different possibility if you took acid.

What a strange thing to have denied herself, the pleasure of memory, of living inside a moment that, however mundane, held some piece of who you had once been. That chicken she had been holding, which she had not named or cared about more than any other chicken, was long dead. How lovely to see that chicken again. How lovely to see herself again.

Maybe the secret to pain was to acknowledge it, to admit that it hurt so bad, so you didn’t have to pretend that it didn’t. And maybe it didn’t go away. Maybe the secret to pain was to respond to it in ways that made the pain worth it.

To be left by your father, only to learn that he wasn’t even your father, Mad tried to imagine it. To have traveled so many miles in search of a person who hadn’t even made you. But maybe that was the point. How had he truly made any of them? He had left. His absence is what had shaped them, and maybe the actual biology of it was second to that fact. And what finally might have pushed Mad toward this possibility, to allow this young child to accompany them, was that, when he finally learned the truth, he would be less alone in the world because of this moment.

She stared out at the fields of alfalfa, marveling at the fact that she was riding in a Chevy HHR with her three siblings, farther from home than she had ever been in her life, somehow wealthier than she’d been before she started the trip. If they turned around right now, if they just put the car in reverse, dodging the oncoming traffic, all the way back to Tennessee, it would honestly have been enough for her. Everything in this moment was lovely, no harm done, but she knew it wouldn’t last. What else could they do? They had to push their luck.

“You have no ill intentions? You are not trying to hurt me?” Mad once more thought about Rube’s initial desire to kill their father, and she hoped, in his strange state, that he didn’t mention that he had only considered killing his dad, but that now he had no murderous thoughts toward him and that he’d never once, even in the early stages of the fantasy, thought about killing innocent bystanders. She prayed this did not happen.

“It’s an anxiety attack,” Rube said. “I get them all the time. Do you feel like you might be dying, but it’s low level and you don’t want to acknowledge that possibility because it will make you look weak and crazy and so that makes it even worse?” Mad took another shallow breath. “It does.” “That’s an anxiety attack,” he said. “Which is perfectly normal.” “Why aren’t you having one?” she asked, and he replied, “Because I’m on a lot of meds and I also took a Klonopin at the last rest stop. That’s why that narrow road on the edge of the mountain didn’t even faze me.”

Mad took a breath and realized how easily her lungs pulled air into her chest. She was ready for this. She would not mess it up. She had found her father. He wouldn’t get away from her again, no matter how hard he tried.

She didn’t know why it was so hard to look at him, nearly a stranger and yet so familiar to her that it made her want to cry, and just say, “You shouldn’t have left us. And if you were going to leave us, you shouldn’t have left us like that. And you should have written me a single letter in all these years to say that you missed me, and that you loved me, and that, even though you weren’t a part of my life anymore, you hoped that someday you could be again.” And then she realized that, actually, she had just said all this. Out loud. To her father. In that moment, he was only her father, not everyone’s but just hers. “I know, Mad,” he finally said. “I know.”

I tried something and it didn’t work and now I’m stuck. And it made me feel so trapped. And it made me―and I’m sorry to say this―but it made me angry. And then I started to imagine myself in a new way. I’ve always had this mind where I fixate on things and just kind of have an ability to pick up information and figure things out. And I don’t even remember why, but I got interested in organic farming and I started to think about a simpler life, and I read up on agriculture and it was exciting. I had this little life that I was living in my head while I was living my real life with you and your mother. And, eventually, that imaginary life was more important to me.”

I understood, as I was leaving and heading out farther west, that this was probably actually not going to be the last time I did it. I kind of admitted that maybe I was mentally ill and it was something that I was going to keep doing. No matter what I did, I could never become the person that I wanted to be. And I just shut off the part of my brain that thought about you and your mom and Rube and his mom and I just reset.”

Mad wondered, if they had come on a week when their father wasn’t watching Rooster, if he would have told them any of this, if he would have excised this new child and the sister heiresses from his narrative. She imagined that he would, how quickly he would shed people to create an identity that fit his needs. It was hard for her to hate him, even though he had hurt them all in such profound ways that were nearly impossible to explain to another person. Even now, she watched him trying to compartmentalize his brain and his memories in such a way that he could keep all of them distinctly separate, even as they sat around him as a unified front of resentment.

“I’m fine. I mostly don’t miss you.” “Okay, fair enough. I just mean that you seem lonely.” “I AM LONELY!” she shouted, finally giving up on politeness, of protecting him from her anger and confusion. “You left and never came back and I thought maybe you were dead, like you’d jumped into a lake with your pockets filled with rocks. I thought an alien had abducted you. I thought you were mad at me. You messed me up.” “Maybe I’d have messed you up if I’d stayed.” “Probably! You probably would have because you have this thing inside of you that makes you live outside of your own life and never fully be present, I guess. And that probably would have made me messed up in some other way, but that would be normal.

I could talk to other people and say, ‘My dad is a good guy, but he’s a little sad because his life didn’t work out, and sometimes that sadness makes my life difficult,’ and they would say, ‘Same here,’ and I’d just move on. But you disappeared, and how could I talk about that with people I’d just met? I had to erase you from my mind so as not to think that I’d failed you in some way.

Maybe the only way to keep living was to willingly forget large parts of the narrative of your life and then just live with what was left.

He looked so tired now, so old. After Rube had appeared at the farm and told her about their father, the people he’d left behind, the changing identities, she’d thought of him as selfish, narcissistic. But the way he talked about his obsessions, the lengths he went to in order to escape himself, she realized he had a mental illness. It had diminished him. She felt sorry for him, for maybe the first time since he’d disappeared.

That was all family had to be, at the most basic level, someone seeing you, even if you didn’t know what they saw.

That’s the thing with quests, she realized. You had to get back to where you started. And then you had to keep living.

“Do you think we’ll see each other again?” Mad felt shocked by the question. She had been living in the present, the absurd present that required her to block out the rest of her life. But now she had to imagine a future where her siblings existed but they weren’t in some car, being conveyed to their father. But, yes, she wanted to see them again. Maybe she only ever wanted to see them and no one else. She was too nervous to answer, afraid that Pep would be embarrassed by her need.

Their father, his absence, had shaped her life in ways both visible and invisible. He had left all of them. But he had helped make them. He had given them to each other. They were so unique, so strange, and they would now know each other for the rest of their lives, beyond their father, long after their father. It was, Mad realized, a gift she had never expected. She was a gift to someone else. She had never felt like that before in her entire life. Not once. She hugged her sister again. In this strange world, who else did they have?

You have the farm and the . . . chickens? All those chickens.” Mad did not like how much her siblings thought her life was entirely devoted to a bunch of chickens, no matter how true it might be.

This trip was the thing that would push her into the next part of her life. It was not the next part of her life.

She had thought about Rooster that morning. Of course, he was their brother, another sibling, but he had not been left. She would not wish that on a toddler, and it’s not like any of them had known their father would abandon them at some point. And then she realized that even if their father wouldn’t leave him for another family, he would die. Rooster would lose his father, though perhaps it would be more certain, a finality none of them had received. But when their father was gone, left this world for whatever was next, Mad would hold on to Rooster. That’s when he would need all of them.