Passenger Seat
By Alexa Johnson-Gomez
My dad speeds down the country road, hitting all the bumpy bits, and he is taking me to school like always. It is a Friday in October. He sings loudly along to the radio even though he doesn’t know the words; this always makes me laugh. In my head, I repeat to myself, “Mom’s leaving you today, and she’s taking me with her,” but I can’t say it aloud. I can’t betray my mom and dissolve our bond of trust, breaking the ten years of secrets I’ve kept for her. “We’re not only mom and daughter; we’re best friends” is her oft-repeated mantra. People don’t tell their best friend’s secrets, right?
Let’s rewind to the summer. I’ve turned fifteen; now the Friday in October is two months away. My friends and I go to the drive-in more nights than I can keep track of, hiding someone under blankets each time to save money. I kiss my crush, a silly and too-tall football player, and he becomes my boyfriend. It is the most archetypal high school summer I can imagine, and I love every second of it with my silly teen heart. As the weird artsy drama kid, I haven’t ever had this sense of belonging before, but I know what’s looming behind every sunset. The thought of letting this summer go is icy inside me. Soon, it’s early September; I approach my mom. “School starts on Monday,” I tell her. “We can’t wait any longer.” We sit down with a school counselor, and we don’t tell her my mom has been waiting to get up the courage to leave my dad, but time has run out, and summer is over. It wasn’t part of the plan that I’d still be here when the school year started. My counselor gets me into all the junior-year AP classes I want to take. “You’re behind with the AP English summer reading, though,” she warns. I pick up copies of the books and blaze through my schoolwork. I’m happy; I’m in denial; I’m deluded.
School moves along. October is two weeks away, and I tell my sweet, cute, football player boyfriend that I might be moving to Oklahoma, but it’s complicated. “Complicated how?” he asks. It is complicated because even I don’t know when or if it will happen, complicated because every day my mom tells me we’ll leave soon and then we don’t, complicated because my dad doesn’t know my mom is planning to divorce him by way of escaping in secret with their stuff and his daughter across state lines. I perform our first assigned piece of the year in drama class, a sort of confessional about our true selves and the current state of our lives. I tell my class—my friends—my mom might be leaving my dad and taking me with her, and I cry in front of everyone. I never cry, but in this moment, the dam fractures.
The following Monday, my mom tells me this Friday is it. For real this time. I roll my eyes, brushing it off. “I mean it,” she says. “I’m booking the moving truck today.” The part of me that has been ignoring my dread opens in me like a knife. I go to school and tell my friends and boyfriend that on Friday it’s really going to happen. Two days before, I’m still doing my homework; why am I doing homework? I’m fooling myself, trying to hold onto normalcy.
Thursday. My mom lets me spend time with my friends after school until late. I never get to do this on a school night. We walk the streets of suburban homes until there is quiet darkness, permeated only by our laughter. My mom picks me up, and it is midnight. We drive; she’s talking logistics, and I am unable to feign interest. We pull into the driveway, and I lose control. “I don’t want to leave!” I scream at her. She’s shocked. More than shocked, she looks like I broke a tiny piece of her. This is unprecedented for me, the obedient daughter who goes along with whatever she says. I’m the good kid; I get A’s, and I have pretty, long brown hair she won’t let me cut. I don’t cuss, I go to church, I clean my room, I don’t have sex, and I do what I’m supposed to. “I just don’t want to move,” I say. “It’s too late, Alexa,” she says plainly. “It’s just too late.” We fight for ages, parked beside the house I’m about to leave, maybe forever, and I mention how unfair it is to rip me away from the place I’ve grown up in right before I finish high school, but she thought this was what I wanted, because from the time I was six years old, she would whisper to me, “One day, we’ll leave Daddy. He isn’t good to us,” and I would say, “Let’s go somewhere beautiful and green.” Why did it have to take her so long to finally do it?
It is Friday. My dad drops me off, and I say goodbye. Walking into school, I feel the weight of our complex relationship more than ever. Because sometimes it’s him singing along to the radio and me laughing, but other times it’s him missing my recitals, or him out doing who-knows-what till four a.m., or him screaming at my mom in front of me. All day, my friends and I share wary, grim looks. In the afternoon, my mom pulls me out of class. I go to where the drama room is—where all my friends are during this period—and we cry and hug and cry, and they make tasteful jokes to my mom, who is a few feet behind me, about how they’ll keep me in their closet if she’ll let them. My mom wears a sad smile as she sees for the first time in full Technicolor 3-D what my teen girl world looks like. In this moment, I feel she is an intruder.
Back home, movers are working. My dad doesn’t get home from work until about five or six o’clock; my mom’s clever plan is to leave by four. We finish. My mom pulls our moving truck out of the driveway, towing our van behind us. Less than five minutes into the trip, my dad calls. I can hear what he’s yelling even though the call isn’t on speakerphone. He knows. His brother saw the moving truck in the driveway. My mom pretends we’re long gone. He says, “Come back,” and she says, “No.” He says, “Let’s talk about this; we haven’t even talked about this,” and she says, “No.” He says, “You can’t take my kid from me,” and she hangs up. We drive thirty minutes back to town, where all my friends live, where my high school is, and we check into a hotel so we can leave early in the morning. My mom parks the moving truck behind the hotel so there’s no chance of my dad seeing it. I find this night in the hotel particularly cruel, hyper-aware of the proximity to my dad and my friends. My dad calls again; he doesn’t understand why she left without any hint. Yes, they haven’t been happy or in love for twenty years of marriage. Even so, why now? “I’m finally done,” she tells him. “But why leave like this?” he asks. “I was afraid you’d get violent,” she says. “I’ve never laid a hand on you, never; I’d never do that,” he tells her over and over. He doesn’t remember her two ex-husbands before him— before me. She left in the night so they couldn’t beat her to death. It’s her calling card.
Our drive to Oklahoma takes three days. I sit in silence and read, or I do nothing but cry, and she tries to feebly reassure me we’re doing the right thing. “I’m doing this for you,” she says to me at one point. Bullshit. This isn’t my story; it’s her story. I know that much. A few times I yell at her, but she can’t hear me. She's too wrapped up in her version of what’s happening, but so am I. Then it’s over; it’s done. We’ve moved to Oklahoma. We unload our stuff into storage and move into the guest room of my mom’s friend’s home. I begin attending my new school. At a point undetermined, I stop fighting. I shut off and become numb. My mom does not notice. I talk to my dad on the phone sometimes, but I can't tell him what I really want to say. I can't release the guilt that is in me like a sickness, can't finally surrender the ugly truth. That I knew what was coming and I couldn't stop it. I pity myself, or sometimes him, or sometimes her. Two people who never were right together, and me, tethered in between.
The school year passes. It’s June when I go to spend a few weeks with my dad. I haven't seen him since October. I’m surprised to see how the months have shifted him. I confide in him how torn I was when we left; I extricate myself of the guilt I still hold. I didn’t want to go. It's surreal to be in his passenger seat again, laughing while he tries to sing along to songs he doesn't know the words to. I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard. I call my mom to tell her our time in Oklahoma has been fine, but I’m finally deciding for myself. I’m moving back to Idaho for my senior year, and I’m going to live with my dad. She screams; she cries; she laughs at me for thinking he can take care of me. “He’s been humbled,” I tell her. “I’ll teach him how to be a better parent.” I return to Idaho, feeling more than a year older after my time away, and I cut my hair off.
Alexa Johnson-Gomez
10/18/2020
My name is Alexa Johnson-Gomez and I’m a fourth year Communication major at UC Davis. My academic interests include the law, criminal justice reform, philosophy, and public policy. In my free time, I love to get crafty in as many ways as I can; knitting, crocheting, quilting, weaving, sewing, etc. are all my favorite ways to get creative and destress. “Passenger Seat” is a portrait of me as a teenager during one of the most pivotal events of my life. I know that narratives about being a child of divorce can be a bit melodramatic or tired, so it was important to me to consider why this experience was particularly transformative and meaningful. I ultimately realized that no matter how I approached this topic, I was always a secondary character in the story that my parents were writing together; it was when I embraced my role as a “passenger” that the piece came together.
Cover photo by Andrew Charney
