Ghosts Are Only Real If You Say Their Name
Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn
I learned to drive by steering from the passenger seat of a moving car. A boy would say, Hold this, while he cupped one hand around the flame of a lighter as it met the soft white end of a Parliament, and I’d lean over and grab the wheel. The roads in northern Virginia are winding and loop around hills; in most places, the speed limit is below 35 mph. Traffic lights with cameras now stagger the roads for those who ignore such warnings. But back then, and out in Vienna, where it was still mostly oak and pine trees and deer, there was a two lane, unlit stretch of asphalt where the football players liked to play Chicken and race and die.
One night, that boy said, Get in the car, and though he was angry, I did. When he turned from Maple onto Beulah I knew what was coming. The orange needle swung smooth to the right. The car slid to the left over the dashed yellow lines. And though my knuckles turned white I did not say, Stop, and so I walked up my driveway and back into my house later that night on coltish legs feeling like I had won.
Twelve years later, the man I love takes an exit off I-66 and turns to me. Do you know where we are? My response, a hissed, Yes, cuts through the air in the truck. His face says that he asked the question sincerely; he is lost, reliant upon the GPS. He knows my mind and the way it works but, despite the ring on my hand, relatively little about how it got that way. I begin narrating, and it takes only three blocks till we reach an impasse: We pass the school where my mother worked; we pass the shopping complex with a liquor store and a KFC whose back alley I’d ridden down in a blue Jeep Cherokee going 45 miles an hour, careening around speed bumps, holding onto the oh-shit handles with all the strength in my amphetamine arms; we pass the metro stop; we pass Scott’s house—Who is Scott? your son asks. I shrug, say, No one.
