Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [124]
Without these pressure-release strategies, things became steadily worse.
Emma had begun to ask him questions about his job, but, no longer able to focus clearly on the driving and the conversation simultaneously, Milo attempted to turn the conversation back toward Emma and get her speaking instead. He asked her questions about her writing career, discovering that she was a romance novelist as well as an advice columnist for her local newspaper and several online publications. Though Milo was intrigued by her profession, he knew that follow-up questions in this realm would lead to less of a narrative on Emma’s part, so he put them off in favor of subjects that would promote more long-form answers.
He asked Emma about her trip to North Carolina so many years ago, and here she offered up a story that carried him and his immutable demands for miles.
Milo had envisioned her hitchhiking her way to North Carolina, climbing into the cabs of trucks and into the backs of pickup trucks on her way south, but this proved not to be the case.
“Milo, I was thirteen, but I wasn’t an idiot. And besides, when you grow up with a father who is a monster, you don’t trust very many men. Even Uncle Owen and Uncle Paul made me nervous for a long time. Hell, I didn’t even start dating until after college, and that was after a shitload of therapy. I wasn’t about to climb into a truck with some strange man. Besides, if I was going to hitchhike, why would I spend all that time planning with Cassidy?”
Milo conceded the point and encouraged her to continue, busy as he was with waging a silent war in his head, and losing badly.
Instead of hitchhiking, Emma (Tess at the time) had walked, following a route of secondary roads that she and Cassidy had mapped out, avoiding highways for fear of the police or something worse. It took her a week to make it to Baltimore, one day ahead of schedule, where she used the allowance that she had saved, along with Cassidy’s forty dollars, to buy an Amtrak ticket to Alexandria. From there she returned to the road, where she tented in public campgrounds and in wooded areas just off the road as she made her way south. She ate at fast food restaurants and roadside vegetable stands, but mostly from the supply of candy bars, beef jerky, and dried fruit that she had packed for the trip. She filled a two-liter Coke bottle with water at every public restroom she could find and drank as much water as possible.
“The two-liter bottle was actually a bad idea. I can’t remember if it was mine or Cassidy’s, but I should’ve sprung for a canteen. It was impossible to fill the thing in restroom sinks because it was so tall and the sinks were so shallow. I ended up using a Pepsi can to transfer the water from the tap to the bottle. What a pain in the ass.”
Thanks to their planning, Emma knew the location of many public campgrounds, but her inability to gauge the walking time between them caused her to spend many a night off the side of the road in a copse of nondescript forest.
“I wasn’t ready for rain, either, and for two straight days, it poured like nobody’s business. I had no raincoat, so I was soaked for the entire time. This was just after I crossed the North Carolina—Virginia border, I think. I remember that I was so wet that I didn’t dare go into McDonald’s or Arby’s for fear of being reported to the police. I was shivering and cold and a complete mess. Even my tent was soaked through. It’s a miracle that I didn’t catch pneumonia.”
Emma explained that she eventually found shelter by pitching her tent under pine trees or stopping beneath bridges when the rain became especially bad. One night in Virginia, she slept in the toolshed of an abandoned farmhouse.
“It