Jill Talbot’s column,The Last Year, traced in real time the moments before her daughter, Indie, left for college. The column ran every Friday in November, January, March. It returned in August as Jill and Indie took one last cross-country road trip together to drop her off at the dorms. This is the final installment.

每次我离开旅行时，我都会想到它的结局。将我的手提箱拉开并将其滚到门口后，我转身看着空房间。封闭的百叶窗，沙发枕头，深色厨房。我关上门，想象我会回来的那一天，转动钥匙，将手提箱放在里面，然后翻转厨房的灯。这些回报的时刻总是多么普通。

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当您不让自己考虑它们时，结局突然来了。就像一列火车从车站拉开一样，速度比您承受的速度快。Read More

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。It returns for a final month this August, as Jill and Indie take one final road trip together to Indie’s campus.

© Matthew Lee High

Summer slips away, like so much else this year. It’s late August, midafternoon, and I’m sitting on a porch in upstate New York. This is the final week my daughter, Indie, and I have together on our cross-country trip to her new college. These days are the last ones before we say goodbye at her dorm, before we begin to unfold the pages of our separate lives.

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Not long before we left Texas two weeks ago, I asked Indie if she’d like to take me on a tour of her favorite places in high school. She grabbed her keys and drove us to a doughnut store, to the turn she took so many times on Crescent Street, past her school parking space under a tree, to the restaurant where she had worked for over a year, to Sonic Drive-In, space 23, the one she and her best friend pulled into every time, and to the band practice field, telling me stories the whole way. At the Dairy Queen on University, she told me it had the slowest drive-through in town, but the best mint Oreo Blizzards.

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At the final custody hearing in Boulder in 2003 (Indie was sixteen months old), the judge ordered the only visitation Indie’s father requested (five days every summer). He left the courtroom without a word. My parents had flown in from Texas, and together we watched him walk down the hallway and step into an elevator. As the doors closed, my father said, “Well, you’ll never see him again.” He was right.Read More

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。It returns for a final month this August, as Jill and Indie take one final road trip together to Indie’s college campus.

“最终，记录的不是事物本身，而是看到的方式，即注入主题的对象。”— Mark Doty

我的女儿独立酒店睡在乘客座位上时，我正在阅读I-44东部的广告牌。今天是我们在纽约大学旅行的第二个七个小时的车程。我们星期三离开德克萨斯州，并通过俄克拉荷马州和密苏里州取得了成功。现在，我们已经穿过印第安纳州的一半，在那里我经过了一个脚高馅饼的标志。独立搅动并坐起来，告诉我她想开车。

We talk about that difficult year often now, turn its pages. For years we didn’t. Maybe it’s because she’s leaving, but for the past few weeks we’ve been trading stories about all the places we’ve lived, and that one comes up more than the others. What we carry from it.

Over the phone, the landlady had described the couch, the coffee table, and the desk that would be in the basement apartment before we arrived, but the day we opened the door to our new home, we found a twin bed against the wall. For a year, Indie slept on the mattress on the floor, and I slept on an air mattress on top of the box spring. Our small dining table, the only furniture we brought, took up most of the kitchen and became my writing desk.

那一年，独立街区走了两个街区，到了角落的小学。六年级。我会和她一起走一个街区，然后站在人行道上，看着她走过大门。回到屋子里，我爬上地下室的台阶，为我在市中心的一所大学教授的两个课程写作或准备。在一楼租用房间的那个人的脚步很沉重，令人不安。房东没有提到他住在那儿。

We cross into Ohio, glide through unwavering greenery and billboards for antique stores. Indie passes a flatbed truck stacked with bags of grapefruit. I snap a photo.

那年每个月的第十五个月，我的母亲给我发了一张支票来帮助，她给独立寄了一小堆单美元的账单。在我们最后一次离开那所房子的一个小时后，我检查了后视镜，以确保市区的建筑物在我们身后几英里。

But there was beauty that year: The tree outside our landlady’s front yard—she paid me forty dollars a month to buy seed and keep the birdhouses full. All the hours those birds would flit and fly outside the window as I wrote. The sidewalk one morning after Indie and I had taken our nightly walk as she pulled petals from red tulips between our steps. The days we took off for the beach, Indie riding her scooter while I ran behind. The bookstore.

Every time we went, Indie and I’d go straight to a book she found in the children’s section. It was Jon Klassen’sI Want My Hat Back，一个插图的精装书，正面有熊。这本书开始说：“我的帽子不见了。我要回来。”当独立翻译页面时，我会小声阅读。我们喜欢熊如何问狐狸，青蛙，一只乌龟和一只兔子（戴着红色帽子），蛇和其他一些生物，同样的问题：“你看过我的帽子吗？”尽管他们都没有声称看过帽子（甚至没有兔子），但我们最喜欢的回答是神秘的生物：“什么是帽子？”我们会在过道中咯咯笑，然后将书放回架子上，很抱歉将其抛在后面。

那年年底，我们搬到了三天的新墨西哥州。第二天，在我们离开德克萨斯州阿马里洛的La Quinta之前，Indie给了我我的生日礼物。它被包裹在看上去像古董地图的纸上，还有她写在半纸上的笔记，好像她在折痕后小心地撕下了它一样。笔记装饰着愚蠢的脸和心脏和棍子（我们握手），I love yous.

当我拉回包装纸时，那是 - 封面上有熊的书。

Back home, I keep the book on an end table in our living room. The wrapping paper’s still inside, along with Indie’s note. I’ve always thought of the book as a map, an answer to the question, “What is a home?”

As we pass silos and barns, the miles speed by.

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.

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。它返回今年八月的最后一个月。

贝克酒店

贝克酒店rose above the Texas trees so straight ahead we didn’t trust the turns we were told to take. I pulled off I-20, and my daughter, Indie, read directions from her phone. I took a left, away from the building that loomed like a castle in the distance. It felt as if we were going in the wrong direction, until we turned onto Oak Street. As we got closer to the fourteen-story hotel (abandoned since 1970), we leaned down to marvel at the top-floor balcony, at all those empty rooms towering over the small town of Mineral Wells, fifty miles west of Fort Worth.

The state reopened in May, and the makeshift sign that had been hanging on the side of Applebee’s (OPEN TO GO) came down. For forty-nine days before reopening, the state of Texas had been limited to essential businesses, and while Governor Greg Abbott declared a statewide emergency, he never issued a formal stay-at-home order. All that time, I only went to the grocery store or 7-Eleven, darting with a Pac-Man savvy down aisles, away from the maskless. Only on July 2, after the reopening of Texas proved to be a disaster, did Abbott mandate the wearing of masks.

When Indie began her senior year last fall, she was gone more than she was home—band practice and contests, game nights, working until oneA.M.有时，在她的餐厅工作，和朋友一起出去，在他们的房子里闲逛。我知道这是一个前奏，一个缓慢而又越来越多的分离使我们为她离开。突然，我们俩都在家里，在新的方向上航行。

It’s hard to tell when spring turned to summer, every day the same, and for so many of those days I wondered if Indie’s last year at home would turn out not to be the last year at all. But when her university announced in June that they would hold classes on campus in the fall, I wanted to make these very last days something we’d both remember.

我们称之为半箱油旅行,因为这是足总r as we go, half a tank. We never leave the car, and we’re back home within an hour or two. Indie prefers I surprise her with the direction and destination, so it’s only after we leave—about once a week—that I tell her where we’re headed.

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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.

Jill Talbot’s column,The Last Year,实时追踪女儿离开大学的时刻。The column ran every Friday in November and January. It returns through March, and then will again in June.

It’s the middle of the night, or maybe it’s just dark in my memory. I’ve already put my daughter, Indie, to bed. She’s ten, maybe eleven, and we’re living in northern New York. I’m standing in the living room, hitting my palm against a wall and shouting, “Something has to change. Something has to改变.”

不久前，我问独立，她是否记得那天晚上。她说她没有。但是我仍然可以召唤房间，仍然感觉到我胸口的捏。我的疲倦。我不记得了，但是我可以猜到这是关于邮件的延迟支票，或者找不到永久的大学职位，或者可能是四月份的雪落在窗外的雪。

In our memories, there are rooms we’ll always be standing in, saying one thing or another. Or not saying what we should.

In high school, before I had my driver’s license, I snuck my father’s Olds 98 out of the garage. I wanted to borrow an outfit from my friend, Amy, an outfit my mother would never allow. I can still feel the rush of rounding Riggs Circle, the windows down, the radio up. Later, when my parents pulled into the garage in my mother’s Cutlass, my father noticed pens and a notebook on his floorboard. I had forgotten to put the seat back (and turn down 97.1 FM, The Eagle). In the living room, I sat on the brick ledge of the fireplace, watching him yell. At fifteen, I was growing more defiant, more confident in my rebellions. “When you leave this house,” he raised his arms, “you’re going to go wild. Wild!” I stood up, arms by my sides, fists clenched. I yelled back, “I already have!”

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