SEVENTY THREE-- AWAY FROM HOME

Hmmmmmmm. I was quiet throughout the ride away from Kangaroo Estate, and its environs. Mom was a little too aggressive at the wheel, she hit some bumps like three times, and almost knocked down a frail woman at the zebra crossing. She was very impatient and I saw her stare at the side mirror a number of times. Someone needed to tell her to calm down. Someone like Jack. I myself badly wanted to hug her and whisper sweet nothings to her ears, and tell her to be calm, and get a grip, but it was silly, so I decided against the prospect. I wondered if she remembered she had three kids in the back seat. Her own kids. My twin siblings were snoring off the whole time. I wonder how toddlers do it. How do they sleep when there's chaos everywhere? A lot of things were running through my mind but I couldn't talk to mom. She seemed to be in a hurry to get us out of there. I was sure she had a lot in her head and she looked like she could do with some long-sought sound sleep. Mom played some music to ease the air, about an hour into the journey. She even clenched her muscles and breathed out multiple times as she drove down the street. She slammed the track playing in the background after only few minutes because it started to freak her out, despite that it was her favorite song. We stopped to fill her tank once on the way, but then we still ran out of gas at a point. It was half past 9pm and we were still on the road. I wonder what was going through mom's mind when she led us all into the car and drove madly away at quarter past seven that evening. I had no idea where we were off to, and I couldn't talk to her for fear of being shouted down. She could, in her exasperation because I saw her give the guy at the gas station the up and down look when he teased her with a hike in the price of gas, before accepting the dollar bill she offered. The guy noticed her bad mood immediately and stopped smiling sheepishly. Poor guy. I didn't know if I should ask him to help us, or just get mad at him for infuriating mom more. I felt like mom needed a control or we'll all fall into a ditch and get an accident. I was starving and I had a throbbing headache from all the dramas of the day, so I started to drift into a nap. The faint imaginations of my previous anxieties came to mind again. I don't know whether to term it a panic terror. I saw Jamie's body again, battered and gored, her splattered blood dotting my face, I know because I saw my reflection in the remains of the sideview mirror, my own legs are stuck in a seat, mom's face buried face down under our somersaulted vehicle. I didn't realize I was already deeply asleep until I heard a jolt in my seat which pushed my weight up the ceiling of the car and knocked my head on mom's shoulder. Bump. It was a huge ditch. But, we didn't have a major accident. Whether it was that, or the panic terror, I had sure been awoken by either of them. Mom pulled the brakes, and turned back to look at me. It was the first time she'd do that since our rough ride out of Cameron's estate. "Ariana, are you..are you ok..okay?" She stuttered, amidst uneven breaths. There was a line of blood dripping down a corner of her mouth. She had a small bump on her forehead as well. Luckily, my baby sisters were safe in their cots. They opened their eyes and shut them again. One of them started to cry. This shrill cry that sounded very annoying. "I'm okay. Are you okay too?" I asked her calmly. Except for the increasing palpitations in my chest, and my nerve-wracking headache, I was fine. She got down the car, coughed up some blood and fished a bottle of water from her seat almost immediately. She chugged it very quickly and then came in to sit by me. She picked up the crying baby and breastfed her. Luckily we were stuck at the side of the road very close to a park. Safe enough. "You sure you're okay?" She whispered, her voice shaky. She rubbed my body and kissed me every now and then. I held her hands and massaged them. "Are we stuck in here, mom?" I asked, directly staring at her worried round face. "Hopefully not. The car won't move though" she said, sighing. I asked her to lay her head on the seat and get some sleep. "Can we push it then?" I asked anxiously. Outside didn't look so inviting to me. There were very few people walking. "My tank is empty I think. Don't worry, Fredericka's house is around the corner. I have texted her." I didn't bother to ask who Fredericka is. Should be one of her colleagues at work. The said Fredericka, a rather elegantly framed woman soon arrived in her own Benz, and she helped all of us get in her car. I realized I had a slight limp, and mom saw the bump on her head. The twins were fine. The woman was very affectionate. She kept showering us with so much love but it seemed mom wasn't ready to talk to her about her problems. As soon as we got to her place, which was practically her aged parents' house in town, I was fast asleep again. I only woke up hours later, in a rather large, not-too-cosy king-size bed, with mom sprawled like a log beside me. With a large dinner of chicken casserole and cheesecake burgers and spinach(I wonder who ate spinach with cheese) and a very decent strawberry smoothie drink, plus a large dose of warm affection from the friendly strangers whose house we were borrowing for the night, my first night away from home was not all that bad afterall, not as terrible as I had envisaged. That night, I watched mom sleep so soundly and i couldn't feel more peaceful. When in the morning Fredericka asked mom the details of what happened, and why her whole family was on the run, without Cameron, and why it was so urgent that we had to get out of the house at a quarter past 7, mom was silent. It was 5:30am but i was up, pretending to be still asleep "Ruby, talk to me please" she pleaded. Today, when I think about it, I wished I could turn back the hands of the clock and made mom talk to Fredericka when she asked what's going wrong with our family. Maybe she'd have helped us. Maybe she'd have prevented more insane things that happened from happening to us. Maybe we wouldn't have ended up this way at all. But mom was hellbent on staying on her own, and she refused to talk to anyone about her problems. That was where her problem started from. Perhaps she thought she could handle the chaos in her life on her own, but It was soon going to make her lose her mind. Almost totally. "Everyone is the same, Nora. Everything, everyone. Same old story. You promised I was going to be happy and free once I divorced him , but in its stead, I feel guilt, loneliness, anxiety and apprehension rise in me like a dough, everyday after my divorce. My life's crumbling in my very face and I can't do anything about it, look at me, I'm alone once more. Even Jack's gone. I don't where to begin again, I don't even know if I want to begin again. I don't think I want to talk to anyone about it anymore. Maybe I need some space, Nora" I once heard mom say this to Nora on phone, this was after we got settled in Germany, our first settlement. The place we soon ran away from because of all the pains it gave us. The same place we returned to, after many years to settle in. That same day, despite the Fredericka's family's pleas to make us stay with them a while longer, mom took us out of the house. Mom explained that we had a lot of settling down to do, and we'd better start in time. They didn't understand. They thought we were going to set up a tent for an holiday camp or something. As soon as we got our car fixed and fine, we were on the road again. I asked mom where we were off to, and she responded, "I don't know". I wanted to yell "You don't know, mom? You don't know where we are headed? Really?" But I kept mute. Maybe she was pulling my legs. Or maybe she indeed didn't know, and was just trying to figure out where. Or maybe there were many bad options, and she was trying so hard to pick the seemingly manageable one to settle us in. "What about Jack?" I asked quietly as she drove on the road. The drive was smooth and slow. She was more in control of her body now. Mom didn't respond to my question. Instead, she shook her head and swerved left. That was when it dawned on me that she had probably broken up with him. FLASHBACK CONTINUES