The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart Page A

recognize it, but a hollow, computerized one. When I spoke, I sounded as strange and stilted as the recording. “Sonia, it’s Cameron. I’m bringing you a package from Oliver. I’ll be there in a few days.” I paused, and let the pause go on too long. I felt like I’d dialed the wrong number and somewhere a stranger was bent over an answering machine, listening to me breathe. I hung up without saying another word.
    From the backseat of my car I retrieved my battered old atlas, which I hadn’t used since a back-roads trip to see a newly divorced friend in Sewanee, Tennesee, two years before. Ruth and I pored over it at the kitchen table, plotting my route. It looked to be about fifteen hundred miles, passing through seven states in three days. In spite of myself, I felt the stirrings of a certain familiar excitement—the anticipation of departure. I was not looking forward to the arrival in Boston, and I didn’t know where I would go after that. But I knew how good it would feel to be driving into darkness, singing along with
Nebraska,
alone in a traveling world. With moving, I have always been partial to the in-between, the blurred highway outside the window, that suspended time when everything you were lies behind you like a molted skin, and everything you might become shimmers at the horizon. You might choose anything and make it happen, constrained by nothing but your own imagination, sure that not even gravity can hold you.
    Ruth tried to persuade me to wait a week or two. She said there was no need to pack all my things, that I could come right back and take my time moving out. But I knew, even if she didn’t, that once I was out of the house it would be anticlimactic if I returned. The single day I took to pack was far more time than was necessary, and so I paid many visits to the attic, looking over all the fragments of Oliver’s history I would never see again. On my last trip up, after some deliberation, I added the sad-eyed picture of Billie to my box of photos. When Ruth came over the next morning to say good-bye, I asked her if I could have the picture, and she said of course, she had no idea who the girl was. I didn’t tell her. My request inspired her to offer me many more things. I let her press on me a carved box from Russia, a small framed copy of a portrait of young Oliver, a first edition of his first book, the value of which she dismissed with a wave of her hand. She kept insisting that I wait one more moment; she was sure there was something else Oliver would have wanted me to take.
    “I doubt it.” I did my best to smile. “It’s not like he wrapped anything up.”
    She sighed. We stood at the open front door. It was already early afternoon. My car waited in the driveway, the trunk full, Sonia’s package in a place of honor on the passenger seat. I was anxious to go, rattling my keys in my hand just like my father always did. I could hear him saying, “We’re burning daylight!” If I didn’t get moving, I’d soon be jingling the coins in my pocket in imitation of him, whistling under my breath.
    “I think,” Ruth said, “that it’s me I want you to take.”
    I looked at her in surprise.
    “My whole life I’ve lived here,” she said. She touched the doorframe as she spoke. “Sixty years in one town. Maybe that’s enough. Hell, I know it’s enough.”
    “I just can’t imagine that, living in one place your whole life,” I said. “You might as well tell me you’re from another planet.”
    She smiled. “I would consider you the space traveler. You and Daddy.” Her eyes went past me to the car, and for a moment she looked just like her father.
    “Come on, then,” I said, at that instant meaning it. “Let’s go.”
    She gave her head a regretful shake. “My dear,” she said, “I am surprised to find that I will miss you.”
    I laughed. “Me, too.” I bent to hug her. Another surprise—she gave me a firm, lasting hug, not the uncomfortable one-armed embrace I