Dear Esther: Chapter 1
Dear Esther is an exploration of home, hope, and reconciliation. In Chapter 1, we see the beginning of her journey.
Dear Esther is a novel that was written in a single month, start to finish — it is one of several projects I experimented with in my twenties, and have come back around to. It is messy and imperfect, but I hope you find something you resonate with here. This chapter will be accessible to everyone, but the remainder of the novel will be for subscribers only. Please consider joining our little family here at head beyond home.
Chapter 1
She slams the trunk of the car.
“Eliza!”
She turns, her hair falling over her shoulder as she leans against the back of her car to wait for her friend. It’s going to be hot out today, Eliza realizes belatedly. Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to wear a T-shirt after all.
“Shelly?”
“Of course it’s me, you idiot.” Shelly parks herself right beside Eliza, standing almost a foot taller than her. Her stare is imploring—something Eliza can never escape from, especially if she has something to hide. “Who else would you expect to see you off at this time of day?”
It’s nine in the morning.
Eliza rolls her eyes, flipping her keys over in her hands. Everything is packed, she knows, but she runs her fingers over the solid metal, thinking about what she may be missing. She has everything she needs, even if it is a long drive to the South. She never planned on making the trip in the first place, but something changed in the past year even if she can’t quite pinpoint what, exactly, it is that’s missing. Maybe it’s the gaping hole where her best friend used to be. Maybe it’s the lost connection with her parents. But no, it couldn’t be that, Eliza tells herself flippantly. Just the pressing existential dread that’s beginning to consume her twenties.
“Of course you think it’s early in the morning—you don’t wake up until one, as per usual,” Eliza quips as she decides on the final items she left upstairs.
“Hey, working the night shift is killer, and I’d like it better if you kept your opinions to yourself,” she replies good-naturedly.
The silence stretches as Eliza just stares at her car.
“Nervous?”
A belated response rises up her throat. “Yeah.”
“It’s a long drive,” Shelly says, her voice softer now. “You have a lot of time to prepare yourself.”
“I don’t think anyone is really ready to face their parents after a seven year silence.”
“No,” she hears. “But you don’t have to be alone.”
“No,” Eliza agrees readily, “I don’t have to. But I think I need to face this alone.”
“Are you really that scared?”
Eliza turns to look at Shelly more closely.
They snuck their way up to the roof of their dorm after packing the car, and now sit side by side, cross-legged near the edge of the building to look up at the rising sun. It’s become their routine for whenever either of them is stressed—to sit outside and realize the insignificance of one single problem helps, sometimes. But this time, the problem doesn’t feel small.
It sits in her chest, unmoving and unrelenting. It’s not so much a problem as it is the dilemma of not falling in line with the norms of the society her parents inhabit—the debutante balls, the homecomings, the white-picket-fence future her parents planned painstakingly for her to take over. She’s let it sit in her chest for years now, buried and tucked away, and only the people she surrounds herself with now—Shelly, John, Genna, and at one point in time, the lovely Dorothy. But all of it never really had the ability to fill the family-sized void left from the scars of her childhood, ones she accepted long before she met them all.
Eliza thinks about it.
She hasn’t been home in seven years; that much is true.
She doesn’t know if Catherine will allow her in the house after such a long time without so much as a call home. She isn’t sure about Jake; in fact, she isn’t even sure if Jake is still around, even though she has the mind to guess he would stand by her mother no matter what. That’s what husbands are supposed to do, after all, but it wouldn’t surprise her if her step-father flaked. She isn’t even sure about Trevor, but then again, no one was ever sure of him in the first place. He hadn’t even tried to reach out after high school graduation and their blow up fight in the parking lot.
“I’m terrified,” Eliza admits at last. She feels Shelly’s warm hand at her back, cementing her in the present. “I’m terrified because I haven’t spoken to them in seven years, and I’m not sure if they’ll even welcome me home.”
“Why go back then, if they haven’t even made the effort?”
“I have to try, Shell. In some way, I’m also to blame. I haven’t even tried—I’ve been too scared of rejection, and I think that’s why it’s so hard for me to leave.”
Her simple touch turns into a hug.
“It’s hard,” Shelly agrees, “to go back to people you fear will reject you. I’m just not sure why you’re trying so hard to prove yourself to people who have shown how little they care to reach out.”
“They’re the only ones left.”
“We’re your family now, Eliza,” Shelly insists, her voice pleading. “And I know it’s not the same as blood relation, but we care about you just as deeply.”
“I know.”
They stare at the sky as the red bleeds into the gold. It’s peaceful like this, Eliza thinks, where no one exists but the bond between people. I could stay like this forever, thinking of you, she reasons. If only we had more time.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah.”
“Why now?”
Yeah. Why now?
The question echoes in her head, ringing like a church bell. Why now, after an entire year, down to the day, is she leaving? Why now, has she decided that something needs to change? Why now, has she told herself she needs to unearth the years of hidden unhappiness she squirrelled away during her childhood?
“A whole year,” Eliza starts, taking Shelly’s hand as she would somehow be able to show her without words. Her fingers itch with a phantom touch. “A whole year has passed since she left, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wish she were here to do this with me. To hold my hand and tell me that we’re in this together. But she’s gone, Shell. She left a hole where her laughter was, and it aches even now.”
Shelly doesn’t respond in words, but instead squeezes her hand.
“We all miss her, but I know you’ve missed her the most.”
Eliza closes her eyes, and takes a depth breath, trying to center herself.
“I miss her so much, Shell.”
“I know.”
“I know she wouldn’t want me to be scared, but I am, because I have to do this on my own. I have to make the effort because she would want me to, and that matters more to me than comfort or fear of rejection.”
“I know.”
“And if I don’t do this now, I feel like I’ll never stop grieving. I’ll be in an endless loop of loss, hoping that she’ll walk through our door again, and—”
“I know.”
Eliza doesn’t realize that a few stray tears have rolled down her cheeks until Shelly is already wiping them away for her. Shelly takes her face in her palms, looking at her more seriously than she has in a long time.
“I love you, and John and Genna love you. And you’re going to make it through this even if I have to fly across halfway across the country to drag your ass back home. You have people in your corner, El, who don’t want to see you hurting the way you are now.”
Eliza smiles through a few more tears, this time wiping them away herself. “Thank you, Shell. I appreciate that a lot.”
“Now, before it gets too late, you need to head out.”
She finds herself back behind the wheel of her car, pressing her palms against the steering wheel and hoping the drive will go faster if she wills it to be so. She never intended to get there in record time, nor does she want to. Instead, she planned some detours to visit a few places before making it back to Texas, so that she had time to prepare herself for the worst, if that were to happen.
Shelly doesn’t need to know.
“Text me whenever you have to stop for the night—I want to know you’re safe, El.” Shelly is leaning against the side of her car, her head hanging into Eliza’s space. “I’m serious. I’d rather not cry myself to sleep not knowing if you’re safe or not.”
“Thanks,” Eliza rolls her eyes, a bit more confident with the humor coming through Shelly’s tone. “I’ll be sure to share my location with you, too, so you won’t have to freak out unnecessarily.”
“Thank you!” Shelly kisses her cheek quickly before Eliza can protest. “Now, don’t be afraid to call me or John if you run into any trouble. The most we’ll miss out on is work, and you’re more important to me than the monster we call American consumerism.”
“Get out of here!” Eliza laughs.
“You’ll never get rid of me,” Shelly sings at her before taking her hands off the car window. “Be safe. Love you, baby doll—now get out of here!”
“See you, Shnookums,” Eliza sings back as she blows a kiss in her direction.
She rolls up her window as she hears Shelly’s snarky reply, “See you on the flip side, you dork!”
Eliza peels out of the parking lot, adjusting her rearview mirror as she pulls out onto one of the major roadways. This place has become her home in a lot of ways, the buildings towering above her as she passes by the city, and the roadway leading into the highway skirting the most populated areas. More importantly, the people here have become her home, leading her into new discoveries about herself and her surroundings. Opening her up to the wider world and all it has to offer.
These people, out of everything she has ever known, have become her home.
And she’s become so incredibly grateful for it.
She doesn’t plan on leaving the county quite so soon, especially because she has a specific place to stop by before heading over the state line. So she stares out of the window as traffic slows to accommodate rush hour. The West Coast is nice, she thinks, in all of its ridiculous, steel desert glory, but there isn’t quite anything like home.
Or, she stops herself, what was once home.
Instead, her home is buried in a plot of land about ten miles up the road.
And she has to see her off before facing the fire.
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