Na’dayah Pugh (’25), Staff Writer
You haven’t been home in a month and a half, but it’s the first break you’ve gotten in a while and your 2001 Camry is rolling you down the driveway like it’s known this gravel forever, like it’s a celestial chariot and you’re a fallen star that it’s rescued, that it’s finally bringing back home, returning to its place among the rest of the cosmos.
When you burst through the door, your younger siblings run into your arms. Your little brother is three, now, and your little sister is five. They were three and five the last time you saw them, too, but now they feel taller, older than you remember. He started playing football, and he shows you his new muscles, flexing with a tiny fist. She’s moving up in the world of ballet and demonstrates a pirouette in the middle of the kitchen, and a jeté across the tiles—both new moves she learned last Thursday at the weekly four p.m. rehearsal. You knew all of this before—your mom sends you all the pictures of the games and the recitals. She floods your messages with grainy images of your kid siblings while you’re in class, at club meetings, or navigating the dining hall. You’ve saved each image to your camera roll and studied them, but you still feel like you’ve missed something.
You pick them up at the same time. You lift your brother onto your shoulders, and your sister clings to your front. You say hold on tight! and hold your arms out to the sides, and they hang onto you like a jungle gym. You move through the house as a tangle of arms and legs and limbs, like trees growing together. Your branches in their branches, sharing sunlight, basking in golden rays, roots holding hands, laughter echoing as you conquer the oak floors.
You fly through the house, sliding down the hallway and careening around corners until you end up back in the kitchen, drawn back by the aroma pouring from the oven. You find your mom at the stove, wooden spoon in hand. She flashes you a smile as she moves towards the sink, so you know she’s making your favorite. The kids spill gently from your body, laughing in tiny heaps on the kitchen floor until your sister tells your brother that they should play tag, and just like that they’re running through the house again.
You wander closer to the stove and lift up a lid because the buttery clouds of steam that roll out are well worth the inevitable slap on the hand. Don’t touch my pots if you’re not helping me cook, your mom says, but when she takes the lid from you and puts it back in its place, she’s smiling nevertheless. She’s making your favorite foods, like she always does when you’re coming home after a while, which is every time, now—weeks in between each visit means you know the yams are waiting for you when you come back. You and your mom are the only ones who eat the sweet potatoes, but she makes enough to fill the whole casserole dish anyway. She tops them off with brown sugar and cinnamon, and you know that if love was a combination of spices it would be this—sweet, buttery darkness melting in your mouth. She always makes eggrolls, too—she makes fun of you for loving sweet potatoes and eggrolls because they don’t even go together! but she makes them for you anyways.
One time, she tried to get you to learn to make them. You can do it, it’s not hard, she said, and then she walked you through the steps as you huffed and puffed about it. Don’t turn the heat up too high, she’d said, because you did any time you cooked anything. Dip your fingers in the water to seal the edges. You did as she told you, and the eggrolls turned out fine, but something was missing—the mother’s touch, the mother’s love, the mother’s delicate hand. You haven’t made the eggrolls since, but your mom doesn’t seem to mind.
They’re almost done, she says to you now. Your dad’s outside working on the car—can you bring him a bottle of water? I’ll make you a plate when you come back in. You nod, and she sends you on your way with a kiss on the cheek and a tender smile.
You grab a Poland Spring and slip on a pair of sneakers, then head outside. The breeze caresses you as you step onto the deck, soft and cool against your cheeks. You make your way down the stairs and across the lawn, to where your dad is working on the car. He’s elbow-deep in the engine, but he looks over as you approach, and his eyes brighten. Hand me a wrench, he says, pointing down at his toolbag.
You smile as you set the water bottle down and rummage through the bag. This feels like a promotion—you remember when you were little and your only job was to hold the flashlight for him. He’d wield the drills and pliers against the jurassic Ford pickup your family used to have, and you’d watch him with awe. One time, the space was too small for him to reach into. Here—give me the flashlight. I need you to reach in there. See? You’d plunged your thin eight-year-old arm into the nook and grabbed the fallen bolt, felt it slick and greasy in your fingers, and when you’d presented it to your dad he’d beamed at you like it was a diamond. You were proud. You felt the same way then as you do now, handing over the crescent wrench. When he takes it out of your hands, you look down at your palms. They are too clean.
Your sixteen-year-old sister’s room overlooks the driveway, so you hear her loud and clear when she opens the window and yells out: come up and watch a movie with me! Your dad gives you a knowing smile—you’ve been summoned. Before you leave him alone with the wrenches and the rest of the tools, you open the water bottle for him, so he doesn’t cover the cap in oil. You hand it to him. He chugs half the bottle, then wipes his shining forehead with the hem of his shirt. You give him a kiss on his clammy cheek, then head back inside to answer the teenager’s summons.
Your sister is waiting for you in her room. She hijacked your TV a few weeks ago, and now it’s been promoted from the carpeted floor. It sits on her dresser instead of yours, and though you hate to admit it, you know it looks like it belongs. Your sister sprawls across her bed, so you take the massive beanbag chair. You sink into it—it swallows you whole. Your sister puts Across the Spiderverse on. She lays on her stomach on the bed, chin resting on her hands. You think about how when the family dropped you off on freshman year move-in day, she cried. She had never cried before, not over you, at least. You two don’t hug, but you did then. You’ve been fighting to let go ever since. She sits now, watching the movie, but you just watch her.
Later that night, you sit at the dinner table with your family. Your two tiny siblings throw peas at each other until your mom tells them to stop. She and your father talk about bills. Your teen sister asks when she’ll be getting a car, and goes on about the green Ford Bronco of her dreams. You like listening to this—the normal conversations you don’t have with your family anymore. Every phone call is full of big news—I’m making a movie, I got accepted into this program, I’m thinking about studying abroad, should I get my masters? You aren’t just in elementary school anymore. No more school buses or field trips. No more recess. No more saving chocolate milk cartons to make graham cracker gingerbread houses in the auditorium. No more Mother’s Day cards or Father’s Day ties. No more times tables. No more color by numbers. All of it left behind, in a past you’ll never touch again. Your past self is a shell you’ve outgrown, an old skin that you can’t slip back into. You aren’t eight years old anymore. You’re Icarus and this town is the moon.
But you don’t want to think about that right now, because it makes your chest ache and your eyes prickle. So instead, you sit at the table, eat your eggrolls, listen to your family, and pretend that this moment will last forever.
