Jill Talbot’s column,The Last Year,实时追踪女儿离开大学的时刻。该专栏的每个星期五在11月,1月和3月运行。它将在6月再次返回。

I’m pulling onto I-35 North. It’s morning, and my daughter, Indie, is in the passenger seat. The sky’s a soft blue, as if every cloud has somewhere else to be. When I put on my blinker and move into the right lane, Indie tells me that I-35 runs from Laredo, Texas, to Duluth, Minnesota, something she learned last year in school. I ask her how far that is, and she taps her phone. 1,568 miles. Today we’re only traveling forty.
Indie and I watch the news at night. We see the empty streets of New York City. We listen to the stories about San Francisco. Texas moves at a slower speed, and the only sign our world is changing is in the empty grocery store shelves. But we feel it coming, especially when Indie worries that all the ceremonies of her senior year will be canceled.
I had a plan, something we could do before we couldn’t do it anymore: get in the car and go far enough to leave everything behind, if only for a little while. Last night I asked Indie if she wanted to get up early and get on the road and cross the Oklahoma border. No stops, no gas stations, just there and back. Her face lit up. We set our alarms.
我的女儿在I-70和I-84和I-90的高速公路上长大,当我们从州到州搬到州时,在乘客座位上聊天或沉睡。每次我们越过边界时,我都会鸣喇叭。这条高速公路I-35越过六个州。今天我们只越过一个。
I don’t like to admit this, but I don’t always know what Indie needs when she’s upset, when she folds into herself or drives the streets of town with no direction or when I hear a catch in her voice over the phone. In those times, I feel useless and sad and lost.
Last week I was running around the lake when I saw a young woman in a clearing off the path. She had a blue backpack, a dark coat, and lavender hair. Indie put pink highlights in her blonde hair a few weeks ago. I love them. She loves them.
If you grow up always going, it’s hard not to want to always be gone.
The sign says twenty-one miles to Gainesville, the last Texas town before the border. Along the way, Indie points to cows in a field, a dilapidated horse ranch, an empty mansion with window frames but no windows. I tell her she can turn on her alt-rock station, but she says what’s playing is fine. The Doobie Brothers, “Minute by Minute.” We sing along.
在第二次绕过湖上的过去,我看着薰衣草女人在圈子中移动,而一根魔杖则徘徊在她周围的空中。她用手指导它。魔术,我想,她正在练习魔术。
We’re approaching the city limits of Gainesville. I turn down “Sister Golden Hair” to ask Indie where she would go if she could go anywhere. Boston, she says, because she had a layover there when she traveled to her university’s visitation day last November, and from her plane window, Boston looked beautiful.
A few days ago, the president of the university she will attend in the fall sent an email with these words: “The campus, at the moment, is absolutely still. The shadows remain long at dusk and dawn, east and west.”
Up ahead, we see a large bright sign between the north and south routes of I-35. Oklahoma. I speed up a little. I honk the horn. Indie raises her arms and lets out a long whoop.
在两天内,我们县将宣布现场庇护所。在那之后的四天,我们将按照全职订单。
But for now we pass grassy fields and wooden fences, an abandoned single-story motel with diamond-shaped windows, and one gas station after another. My daughter and I talk the way we always do on the road, a conversation that hovers between what we dream and what we remember.
在回去的路上,我想到了清理中的女人,她的魔杖漂浮。我希望她能说出会倒退时间的单词。
Read earlier installments ofThe Last Yearhere.
Jill Talbotis the author ofThe Way We Weren’t: A MemoirandLoaded: Women and Addiction. Her writing has been recognized by the Best American Essays and appeared in journals such as阿格尼,Brevity,科罗拉多评论,DIAGRAM,Ecotone,长读,普通学校,The Rumpus,andSlice Magazine.