•

❝ every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end ❞

• •

s e m i s o n i c

• • •

I have never been so far from home. I guess I've never been so close either, because home as I know it isn't home anymore. The nineteen years I lived in that cramped - no, cozy - third-floor apartment in Queens was just leading to this moment: the moment I left.

I always thought leaving home would mean moving to college, that I would pack up half my life to cram it into a dorm room and my parents would drive me to my new life on a campus somewhere in-state. We'd have an emotional goodbye and then it'd be up to me to find my way. That future was hard enough to envisage.

I never thought it would be like this. I never pictured such a permanent farewell, reducing my life to a few boxes to drag halfway across the country with Mom asleep in the passenger seat next to me. Never did I entertain the thought that at some point, the last time I said goodbye would really be the last time, or that I wouldn't even remember it.

It always used to be so black and white in my head: you say goodbye when you leave. Mom and I said goodbye to the apartment when we shut the door; we said goodbye to New York when we crossed the river.

But I can't recall the last time Dad said goodbye. He hated the word. He said it was too final, so he always said see you later! or I love you or some variant on the sentiment, as though every farewell was a colon, the first half of a sentence waiting for the next clause. He saw life for the ongoing narrative it is, each day a new paragraph, but he left the world hanging halfway through a sentence.

Now Mom and I are the ones leaving. A planned relocation rather than an unsolved disappearance, but it still hurts so much that I had to pull over on the New Jersey turnpike when I was sure the searing pain in my chest had to be a heart attack. Mom said it was probably just heartbreak, and she turned away when she cried.

This morning, I had barely left my neighborhood, let alone my state. I had never crossed the Hudson or even made it to the end of Long Island, but now I've driven across New Jersey and through Pennsylvania and into Ohio. Today alone, I've seen more of my country than ever before but it's all wrong. It doesn't feel like an adventure.

All I can think is that with every mile that passes, I'm further than ever from Dad, and I never got to say goodbye.

•••

The road's beginning to blur. The sea of headlights bleed together through the rain slashing the windscreen and the wipers on Mom's old sedan are struggling to keep up with the onslaught. The weather was ok until we hit Pittsburgh but since then it's been storm city.

Worse than the rain is the exhaustion. I've had my license for three years but there weren't many chances to drive when we lived in Queens with everything in walking distance or just a few subway stops away. Last year, Mom and I went to Poughkeepsie but that was only a two-hour drive. It's already been twice as long since I last stopped, and thirteen hours since we got in the car.

There's a rest stop up ahead, the bright light like a beacon calling me home. Five Oaks, our new home, is only fifty miles away. It's nothing in comparison to the five hundred I've already driven but I feel like someone has replaced my brain with molasses and there's a watercolor filter over my eyes.

The burning at the back of my throat won't go away, radiating through my chest like a hot stake through my heart. It's a feeling I know all too well. I'm tired. No, I'm completely drained. My batteries are fried and I think my body must be short-circuiting if the stinging in my eyes and the fire in my gut are anything to go by.

Mom stirs when I come to a stop but she doesn't wake up, only presses her cheek against the cold window. The glass fogs up with every breath. Her purse is on her lap, her credit card poking out, so I take it for gas. The car's running low on fuel and so am I.

The stench of diesel turns my stomach, rainbows swirling in the puddles that settle in the dips of the forecourt. This last hour feels unattainable. I just want to get there, but I don't want to be there. I'm a city girl. New York is home. Five Oaks is ... well, its name sums it up. Mom told me the town got its name from its five oak trees, and she laughed when she said there are only four left.

I wanted to cry.

The gas station food looks even more depressing than I was expecting, a sad selection of limp sandwiches and off-brand chips and broken candy bars, but I'm ravenous so I dig through chicken and beef and pastrami until I find a tuna salad sandwich that I pray won't poison me, and I grab a Twix for Mom and a double espresso to keep me going.

I hate espresso but if I don't shake the cloud in my head, we'll be sleeping here tonight and that would be so much worse than the temporary assault on my taste buds. The cashier barely looks at me when I ask for forty dollars on pump three and I add a pack of Starbursts at the register. He doesn't bother to check my scribbled impression of Mom's signature on the receipt. There's nothing to say I'm not Mrs. Dzsenifer Sovany.

Mom's awake when I get back in the car. She greets me with a tired smile and rubs my arm, and it makes me realize how lonely I've been with her sleeping next to me. She drifted off before we even got to Pittsburgh, back when it was light and the rain hadn't hit.

"We're about an hour away," I say, sensing the question on the tip of her tongue.

"Already?" She rubs her forehead and sighs. "I'm so sorry, Storie. I didn't realize I'd been asleep so long. How're you doing?"

"It's ok. I'm pretty beat." Forcing a smile, I raise my paper cup and try not to choke on the bitter coffee that tastes like a bad decision. I lived off the stuff in my senior year but I never acquired a taste for it.

"I'm so sorry," Mom says. "I wish I could take over."

I want to say me too. I want to cry from the monotony of the drive. I want to lie down and be transported back a couple of years. But I smile instead and break open my disappointing sandwich and say, "It's fine. We're nearly there."

She sighs. "I know. I just..." Her eyes are wet when she trails off. "I know this really sucks and I'm so proud of you, Storie. We're going to get through this. We just have to get there first."

"I know."

"You're such a trooper, bogárkám," she says, and I don't know whether to smile or cry.

Dad always called me that. It means my little bug, and it makes up a shamefully large percentage of the Hungarian I know. Dad moved to New York when he was five; Mom came over with my uncle when she was eighteen. My whole family is fluent and native, except for me. Mom wanted me to be as American as possible, to fit in, but I wish I could speak her language.

We sit in silence for a minute or so, until Mom tears open the Twix and we turn on the radio for a little background music, though the rain drowns it out. I can hardly stomach my sandwich. It's dry and tasteless and hard to swallow, though that's due in part to the ache in my throat that I can't budge.

"Love you, Mom," I say when I manage to get rid of the stubborn mouthful. We're both staring out of the window at the trees that back right up to the gas station. It's been dark since I crossed over the Pennsylvania/Ohio border but that doesn't hide the fields and trees, the rural life I've never experienced before.

Mom takes my hand and holds it in both of hers, and I know without looking that she's trying not to cry. I've become a lot more intuitive about that since the night Dad never made it home from work.

"I love you so much," she says, her voice thick with tears and slightly accented. She's a master of accents. She can do any in the world, and no-one can tell that English isn't her first language until she gets mad or upset and the façade slips away.

"Don't cry," I say, a pathetically weak protest when I'm on the brink of a breakdown. I pull her into an awkwardly-angled hug across the center console. We've got a lot closer the past couple of years. Not that we weren't close before because we were, but I was always a bit of a Daddy's girl.

He was my best friend. Sometimes I forget that he was her best friend too.

"Right." She laughs and dries her eyes on her sleeves, fanning her face for a moment. "This is no good. There's no use sitting here crying. Sorry, honey."

She always apologizes when she cries, as though being an adult and a mother means she's not supposed to have emotions. When I was little, it freaked me out if I ever caught her crying, until I grew up and realized how crappy the world can be. It turns out that the older I get, the more there is to cry about.

In an hour, we'll be home. An empty shell of a house I've never stepped foot in; a state I've never been to. In three months, I'll start college a year later than I planned to, at a college I hadn't even heard of when I first started thinking about applying. Back then, I only looked at universities in New York.

After years of worrying about it, I had psyched myself up for the change and I wanted the authentic college experience, dorm life and all, but my scholarship only covers tuition. I was devastated when Mom first mentioned commuting from home, at least an hour's drive from Five Oaks, but now that it looms closer on the horizon, I'm glad I'll be living at home. I'm not ready to leave Mom.

• • •

Driving makes Mom tired, even though she's not behind the wheel. When we come off the I-90, I have to shake her awake: we're nearly there and I need her help. Five Oaks is a small town - tiny, if its eponymous oak trees are anything to go by - and my phone's map gets shockingly unreliable once we leave the highway.

"The home stretch," Mom says, glasses perched on the end of her nose as she zooms in on the map, following the blue dot as we bump down a quiet road surrounded by fields. When I open the window to clear the air, I'm hit with the scent of rain and farmland. It's a far cry from the metallic tang of the stuffy city air I'm used to, but I kind of like it.

Part of me wants to just enjoy the air and let it refresh my lungs but I can't loosen the rope tightening its hold around my gut and choking me out. My heart is on fire and each time the enormity of this change hits me, it takes everything I have not to descend into a panic attack.

I hate change. I hate the slightest edit to my plans, an unexpected vistor enough to throw my whole day off kilter, so this kind of change is more of the catastrophic variety, tearing away the home comforts I've spent nineteen years collecting. Up until now, I've been taking it one day at a time but that's going to be hard when today comes to an end and life restarts in a new town.

As though she senses my mind beginning to spiral out of control, Mom squeezes my knee and the lump in my throat somehow simultaneously thickens and shrinks back. She's good like that. Sometimes I think she knows me better than I know myself and as close as Dad and I were, Mom has always been the parent who gets me more.

The summer before starting high school was the first time I heard the word autism applied to me and as much sense as it made, like a curtain had been lifted, I freaked out and Dad was upset on my behalf. Not Mom, though. She jumped straight into coping strategies. She has never made me feel weird or different.

A couple of years ago, she told me that was the day she really started to understand me, after fourteen years as my mom.

It's funny how much power a word can have. To me it was a new lease on life, a eureka moment I didn't know I needed, but to others it was a slur, an excuse for making no effort to be my friend. I learnt pretty quickly to keep it to myself. People who don't know can't tell, and the last thing I want to do is hand out ammunition that has more strength when I use it myself.

"Storie?" Mom looks at me. I glance at her, hardly taking my eyes off the road for even a second. Today has been enough of a test for a nervous driver.

"Mmm?"

"You just seemed deep in thought," she says. She does that sometimes, reaching out to me just in case I need a hand to pull me out.

"I'm ok."

I know I will be. If the past few years have taught me anything, it's that I can handle life's curveballs better than I thought, even if they blindside me in the moment. Moving to Ohio is terrifying but it can't possibly be worse than losing my dad, and we're still going. Just about.

That's the only place Mom and I don't see eye to eye. It's been twenty-one months since Dad disappeared. I'm coming to terms with his death. I have to. It's the only way I can deal with what happened. But Mom's convinced he'll come back.

• • •

A little more than an hour west of Cleveland, fourteen hours after bidding farewell to Queens and hitting line after line of red lights, we pass a battered sign that reads Welcome to Five Oaks above a carving of the five trees. Beneath one, someone has scratched R.I.P. into the wood.

My heart's in my throat as I slow down to fifteen. This is such a disconnect from life in the city. The houses are actual houses, spread out across green land with gardens and fences instead of townhouses squashed together like lemmings and split into apartments, too small and too many.

"We're 15210 Erie Close," Mom says. "Take the next left."

The town center is straight ahead, an intersection of quaint buildings. I turn left in the middle of Five Oaks, past a post office and a convenience store and the independent bookstore, A Page with a View, where Mom starts work in a week. I catch her gazing at it as we pass.

"Excited?"

She nods and smiles. After Dad went missing, we tried to keep his bookstore open but after nine months, Mom was forced to sell the business that they built together. In the year since, she stuck to her side-job as a freelance bookkeeper for several businesses back home. I know she wants to do that here too. She's crazy smart and she's always saying she'll lose her mind if she doesn't keep it busy.

I get that. Sometimes I feel like I need a break from my own brain when it starts to feel like an imposter sapping the life out of me, as though my brain and I are somehow separate entities. I'm fairly certain my mind has a mind of its own.

Mom taps her window. "Take a right here. We're fourth on the right."

My heart beats faster and faster, pummeling my ribcage so hard it feels like it's trying to burst out of my chest. This is it. This is real. My headlights catch the sign on the mailbox outside a dark house. 15210. Our house.

Mom grips my hand when I pull up in the driveway. A whole house, just for the two of us. There's even an attic with a skylight; a garden full of trees; a fence separating us from our new neighbors. I guess we're the new ones.

I feel sick. Totally disoriented. My stomach churns and growls. My head feels light. The movers won't be here until tomorrow so we just have the essentials in the car, an airbed to share tonight. I already know I'll hardly sleep.

"Come on." Mom squeezes my hand. "Time to face the music."

One step at a time. I get out and stare up at the house. My gaze shifts to the house next door, a few meters away. The lights are on. The front door opens and a shadowy figure appears. The porch lights flicker on and when my eyes adjust, I see an Asian guy with a smile, graying at the temples. He waves and comes over to us and a lanky guy follows him.

"Hi!" He shakes Mom's hand and then mine. He has a soft grip and a kind face. "Tadayoshi Ono," he says. "Call me Tad."

"Hi, Tad," Mom says with a winning smile. "Dzsenifer Sovany - Jen is fine. And my daughter, Astoria."

"So nice to meet you guys," Tad says. He looks over his shoulder at the guy behind him. "This is my son, Graham. Gray, these are our new neighbors, Jen and Astoria."

"Just Storie," I say. I don't hate my full name as much as I did when I was a kid - and it might be better now that I don't live five minutes from Astoria - but I've been Storie for as long as I can remember. Graham smiles and waves. He's my age, I reckon. Maybe a bit younger.

"I don't want to impose and I bet the last thing you want to do is socialize after your journey, but we were just about to sit down for dinner and there's more than enough if you want to join us," Tad says, one hand in the pocket of his jeans.

My stomach rumbles as if on cue. I don't want to eat with the neighbors, not after sitting in a car for more than half a day, but I'm starving and now that the house is right in front of me, I don't know if I can face stepping into somewhere so dark and empty yet.

Mom and I share a look. She raises her eyebrows; I dip my head and give her a half smile. She turns back to Tad and beams. She's practically had a full night's sleep already so she's on top form, whereas I could curl up and sleep right here on the driveway if it wasn't so wet.

The Onos have a nice house. It gives me hope for ours, if we can someday make it feel as warm and inviting as theirs. Downstairs is mostly open-plan, a generous kitchen with huge windows that look out onto their garden. Tad assures us that on a clear day, we'll be able to see Lake Erie from our backyard.

I like that. I love water. Back in Queens, I could see the East River from my bedroom, but I could also hear the constant thrum of takeoffs and landings at La Guardia. It's so quiet here, the silence striking me like a punch as soon as I notice it. There are no planes overhead, no constant light of an airport illuminating the sky.

I'm half-asleep as we eat and Mom makes most of the conversation, skipping over the worst parts of the past two years when she explains why we've moved out to the sticks from the buzz of New York. Gray tells me that he's just graduated high school and just like me, he'll be starting his freshman year at South Lakes University in August.

The evening passes in a blur. I can hardly keep myself off the floor when Mom and I make it past our own threshold and as soon as she's blown up the airbed in the middle of the living room, I crash onto it. I'm too tired to change. Mom takes off my shoes for me and sits on the edge of the inflatable mattress, her hand on my back.

I watch as Mom runs her thumb over the cross she wears around her neck. I'm delirious with exhaustion, my eyes swimming and my head swirling, and I'm already beginning to drift off as she speaks. Her hand is still on my back. I don't want her to move, her presence a comfort, and as I let the night wash over me, I hear her fading words.

"This is going to be great for us, bogárkám," she says, her voice like a lullaby. "This is going to be the change we need. It has to be."

• • •