Penelope refuses to look up at the rear-view-mirror as she's speeding down the two-lane highway divided by two simple yellow lines in the dark. The warm summer air is blowing in from the big windows of her truck. The steering wheel to her '78 Ford F-250 is vibrating in her hands while it's hugging the fickle road. She turns the wheel – back and forth; left to right; right to left – to follow the crooked smiles and frowns on the way to the California coast. The upholstery is stained from fallen beers, and the floor is dirty from muddy boots that have been in and out of the passenger side.
Even though Penelope enjoys a muddy truck, she is partial to romance, and she allowed herself to start a relationship with a man named Wyatt Stemple. Although he's the conventional looking type – in shape with light hair and a feverish smile – she enjoys the things that are overlooked about him. He is a thoughtful man, who will pursue anything that he wants. The kind of person that she wishes she could be. She wants that motivation. She wants to feel that ambition. And here she is, running away from him.
Now, truth is, Penelope has picked up and left Savannah, Georgia, and she has no intention of ever coming back. This act of defiance is not something to be forgiven, you could say. Wyatt and Penelope are perfect for each other in the grand scheme of things. At least, that's what Wyatt would pray is true. And it has to be true. To keep his life, it has to be.
Wyatt is constantly consumed by thought, but Penelope does just as much thinking. She has a beautiful mind in the sense that no one can understand it. She's the type of girl that will keep you guessing, because her simplicity is masked by an overwhelming perplexity.
Her phone lights up on the dash. For a split second, she thinks to herself, “Just ignore it. It's Wyatt. I don't need this right now. Commit, Penelope. Commit.” But then the vibrate on the phone kicks in, and it somehow exudes a real sense of urgency. She contemplates, eyes shifting from the phone to the road, with the same two yellow lines running identical to each other on the left, and a pretty dotted white line on the right.
Finally, she takes the phone in her hand. It's her father, Wesley. She hits the green button on the left and brings the phone to her right ear.
“Daddy?”
“Sweetheart! Oh thank god, you gone and gave me a firecracker in my chest. I thought you'd lose your old man to a heart attack before long,” He laughs out loud over the phone, but Penelope just stares straight ahead, occupying her face with a very concerned twist. “Where'd you go, darlin'?”
“I,” she begins to say. She stops saying anything. She looks around her. She hasn't looked away from the road for more than 5 hours. Where is she going? What the hell is this? What in God's name is she doing? “I – Daddy? I,” the tears fill her eyes at the thought of all this loss. The loss of her crazy future with the love of her life, Wyatt. The man that gets her the perfect birthday present every year. The man in which she shares an unspoken agreement with to never celebrate an anniversary. The only man that she could go to a movie with, and not feel like puking from the thought of being cliché. Wyatt was always new and exciting, and yet she chose to ferment a hate for him.
And why is she leaving her daddy? She's leaving Wesley, who is far from perfect, but is still a hell of a father. She remembers how he always makes rude remarks to the men that gawk at her, saying, “You think I look like a mean son-of-a-bitch now? Wait 'til her big ol' boyfriend gets back with my shotgun, ye little rats!” but then she smiles and wraps her arms around him, rendering him harmless. He relaxes, and welcomes her love with 100% attention. While the vatos stand there and talk shit back, Wesley and Penelope stand there with warm Georgia smiles on their faces.
“Sweetheart, talk to me,” Wesley begs. “Are you hurt? What the hell's all this silence about? Penelope!”
“Daddy? I ran away.” She manages to sob these words into the receiver. When she does, There's a second's pause while Wesley decides what to ask now.
A short chuckle comes out, and he says, “About time, darlin'. You're 24 years old and this is the first time.” It's easy to tell that he's only trying to cheer her up, but she's not taking the bait. “Does Wyatt know, sweetheart?”
Still sobbing, she says, “No, daddy. I ran away from him. He never once hurt me, daddy. I'm putting all the hurt in his heart. I'm breaking that beautiful heart right in half, aren't I?”
“I reckon you are, darlin', but that's not important right now. I been worried sick about you, and I got every cop in Savannah looking for you – ”
“Daddy!”
“Penny, I'm a police officer! You knew that was comin',” Wesley takes a deep breath. “The hell with Wyatt's heart right now, what do you plan on doin' about mine?”
“Daddy, I'm so sorry.” She's wiping away the tears and smiling now. Wesley always says the best things a dad could say.
“Look, I'm out in my patrol car now. Let me report to the boys that I found you, and I'll head on home. Meet me there, and we'll get everything sorted out, I swear it. Wyatt should already be there, I'll give him a call.”
“Okay, daddy. I love you.”
“I love you too, sweetheart. Now come home!”
She hangs up the phone and lays it on the dash. She does a wide U-turn on the empty highway that puts her off the road into the dirt. The force of the turn pushed that phone to the far right of the dash, and finally, on the ground under the passenger side seat. Penny decided to leave it there, muttering, “Aw, dammit! Oh – whatever.” She gets back on the road, and speeds toward Georgia.
******
Wyatt's got an avalanche going on in his head. He continues to focus on the corner where her mandolin had been. He does this to keep from losing himself. He certainly feels shameful as the setting sun allows the dark to consume the living room. The air is starting to cool off, but not enough to make Wyatt comfortable with sitting idle like he is. His Penny is gone. Who knows where she could be hiding from him? What if they never find her? He's concerned about the things that he hasn't had a chance to do with her yet; things like talking to her belly when its 6 months fat, while they enjoy sitting in the living room of a house without answering to a landlord.
After he mourns about his future, he begins to think about his past, of course.
When Penelope was frequenting Wyatt's apartment, her mandolin made itself a permanent statue in the corner of the living room. She had casually played it almost every time she happened to have seen it. They would wander off to bed at night, and when Wyatt would walk to the kitchen for water in the middle of the night, he noticed how loosely she had put it back in its place. It would sit at different angles against his record collection so that every time her mandolin was used, he knew about it. He thinks about how jealous he would get when she played it. She was never as happy as she was when she was playing that damned instrument.
When he first moved into the apartment, the mandolin was the last thing to be brought inside. Wyatt was moving the wooden end table when she kicked open the door and burst into song. Continuing what he was doing, Wyatt put on a smile with a laugh, and began to sing along with her:
Penny was the kind of girl the camera's liked.
She could play the part of poets kept behind the mic.
And whilst I've always dreamt of making it in Hollywood,
I know that if she had a second chance then Penny could.
And I did all that I could to help.
Yeah I've done all that I can to help.
He stopped singing with her now. He just stood still on the blue carpet of the living room, melting like candle wax, but sturdy as a tree trunk. Awful as it seemed to him, he was powerless against her, so he stood there and embraced the warmth of her voice. Wyatt enjoyed many aspects of Penelope's life – her cooking; her obnoxiously large Mexican family from El Paso; her distaste for the every-day jerk-offs that irritated him equally – but there was nothing like her mandolin playing. He noted her naturally lively personality, and how he was potential energy, and she was kinetic. He watched as she spun around, her skinny waist moving with the music. She was glistening with sweat from the Georgia heat. Smiling, he walked over to her and kissed her. They held each other's lips there, long enough to where he could smell her skin. After a measure, she pulled away from him with a skip and continued to dance in circles and sing, taking glances at Wyatt with her big, beautiful eyes.
Wyatt notices that the mandolin is bright when Penelope plays it, but looks old and exhausted when she isn't. It sits lifeless in the corner. The most beautiful thing about her, he thinks to himself, is how she can make you feel vibrant and exciting, even if he is a sour, cynical man.
When he's through thinking about who she is, he starts to feel a bit sorry for himself. He begins to think of the darker past, of course.
It is now four months into the lease. January in Georgia is a terrible time to be fighting.
We find Wyatt in that same living room, clutching Penny's hand, caressing the knuckles just hard enough to turn the skin white from moving the blood beneath it. “My, my. We've never been so far apart,” he says to her.
“Can't you just forget about these silly thoughts?” Penelope begs him. “I'm not being distant. I'm not being trite, short, long, or – whatever.” She pulls away from Wyatt now and looks at the wall in front of him with one hand clenching a fistful of her black hair while the other hand is hugging her just under the breasts. “I'm just being what I can, Wyatt. Somehow, what I am isn't good enough? Haven't we had enough of your bad mood? Come back to me, baby. Please.”
“It's not that simple!” He proclaims.
“Because you won't let it be.”
“What?”
“No. You heard me.”
“No, I mean, I know.” He sounds helpless now. “I – I know. I just – look – we have to understand each other – ”
“I understand you perfectly well!” she says to him. “I understand you perfectly well, and – and I've never been so insulted before!” Her face goes from helpless to angry. “I'm just not ready for it! You can't expect me to tell you overnight that I love you enough to just recklessly move in and forget everything else that I have!”
“What else is there, Penny?” his cheeks are getting rosy. He is practically screaming with frustration now. “Why not just tell me where this is all going? Why are we doing this? Do you remember what it was like before I proposed to you? Do you?” This piece of sentiment leads Wyatt to waltz towards her, demanding sympathy with his eyes. He slowly guides his palm to the back of her neck beneath her hair, and he clenched gently as he spoke. “We would talk all day about how great it would be to spend every morning together. I would tell you how I could make your coffee. I could drench you with memories, every day. We would be so much happier knowing where our lives were going. Wouldn't you like to know where your life is going?”
She looks up at his face as if he struck the only nerve left untouched. Her eyebrows pointed downwards as if they were arrows to her little nose. That's the nose that he has always complimented, and now it's all scrunched up in anger.
“Maybe I don't want to know where it's going, Wyatt. Maybe I would like to have control over my life for a bit longer! We're so god damn young! You turn 25 in a few months. Your life should simply not belong to anyone, and neither should mine.”
“You won't ever let anyone have your life, Penny! You would live completely satisfied if you were on your own for the rest of your life, and that kills me!”
“Then why don't you just give up on me, Wyatt!”
And now – right here – here it is. Here is where her face turns to sadness, and Wyatt loosens his angry expression. At first, he looks confused. In all her beauty, she begins to cry. And Wyatt? Well, Wyatt turns to smiling.
“You asshole,” she says to him in a whisper.
“Why, Penny – ” he says. “You done put your heart on backwards.”
She sniffles. “What?”
“You done put your heart on backwards. That way, even when you're looking at me, it's like you've got your back turned at the same time.”
She just goes on looking at the ground, and he doesn't move one inch. He just stares at her with a painful smile. Sturdy as a tree.
******
Six months later, things had not calmed down any. When the sleep had left him, Wyatt slowly lifts his eyelids. Wyatt's eyes are still adjusting to the light as they were searching for something familiar. He finds an alarm clock that reads 5:00 p.m. Today's the day that Penelope would decide to leave town, although no one spoke a word of it. When Wyatt attempts to leave the spot where he has passed out, there is no balance to rescue him. He stumbles clumsily toward the door. He mutters to himself and pauses with his right hand hovering over the doorknob. His stare is fixed upon its imperfect copper finish until he can regain his thoughts. He's in Wesley's room. It's funny what sleep can do to you.
He opens the door to the living room and finds Wesley sitting on the love seat, reading a book. He must be off duty already. He normally patrols the evenings in Savannah.
The dining room table was still positioned awkwardly from where Wyatt went on pushing it around, crying about his girlfriend. About his Penny. There was newspaper spread out on the floor in between the coffee table and the couch. The coffee table had on it a red lighter and a sterling silver fork with one tine bent far to the outside. Wyatt remembers stabbing the earth outside with the fork, screaming about Penny's absence from his life. He had taken the fork from the front porch, by the hammock. He assumed that she had eaten from it, and he was jealous of the damned thing.
“She's not up yet,” Wesley admits to him. “That was quite a show you put on there, boy.”
“I know. I'll bet it was – well – I'll bet it was something I don't even have words for, sir.”
Wesley has a smile on his face, but it looks like it is painful for him to wear it. The lines on his face show that he has forced many a smiles in his time. “Sit down on the couch, son.”
The house is so still and empty now. It's like every corner of the room is judging Wyatt. Every atom is saying, “Shame on you, Wyatt. Shame on you.”
He walks on over to the couch, gathering up the newspaper and laying it on the table before sitting down.
“Before you say anything,” Wyatt says, “I'm sorry for coming by and destroying your home. I don't know what's gotten into me lately.”
“Sure you do,” replies Wesley. “You're telling me you don't understand why you've gone and wrecked everything in front of you? It's habit, boy. Hell, I did it. All men tend to do it. Good ol' Renée up and left me 'cause of it.”
Wesley leans forward in his seat, his face looking old and concentrated. His grey hair is still full and slicked back like it was in the '50's. His elbows rest on his knees as his hands clasp each other. He continues, “But a man needs control, son. Don't you see? When we lose that control, we get to feeling lonesome, and we'll start to act all kinds of stupid. And women don't react well to those things. They have trouble understanding us, and we have trouble understanding them. This is why there are so many damn television shows about bad relationships. You notice that? They have sitcoms of families that are not perfect. But we laugh about it. We see how crazy parents are and we laugh at it. In real life, there's nothing funny about a broken home and exploiting some uncle or family friend that sleeps with women in front of a kid, takin' a charge at their innocence.”
Wesley takes a break to sip his bourbon. “Point is, kid, you're growing up. She's up and left you, you know. You're acting like this because you're realizing that you're without her now. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.”
Wesley stands up now. “As for my house? Straighten it the fuck up. That's all the hollerin' I have in me for a kid dealing with a heartbreak.” On his way to the hallway that leads to his bedroom, he turns around to look at Wyatt. “Tough break, kid.” He turns back to the hallway and disappears with a slam of the door.
He starts down the hall and knocks on Penelope's old bedroom door.
No one answers. “Man, I must have really exhausted her,” he thinks to himself.
He knocks on her door.
Nothing.
Wyatt opens the door without an invitation and realizes that her bed's been made. All of her things are cleaned up as if she thought long and hard about leaving before she actually did it.
The room is empty.
Wyatt rushes down the hall and asks Wesley when Penny left the house.
“Penny ain't gone nowhere since she told me goodnight after you passed out in my room.”
“Well, where is she then?” Wyatt asks, sincerely. Hoping that Wesley may still have the answer.
“Wyatt, you're not pullin' my leg now, are ya?”
Wyatt thinks about this for a second. “Sir, I've never been this serious about anything in my life. Where the hell did she go?”
Wesley rushes passed him to grab his cell phone. Just as quickly, he dispatches other police officers in Savannah to look for a '78 Ford F-250. Wyatt is told to stay there, just incase she comes home. “You better pray she's in one piece, boy. You stay here and don't do anything. I think you done taken it too far already.” He slams the door and leaves Wyatt without the ability to say a word.
******
Wyatt stares at the blank television screen. The new silence of the room is destroying him. Normally, he would find a way out of the silence somehow. He would run away from it. But today is different. Instead, he embraces that television. He feels like it has something to tell him.
So he listens, and the response that he gets back stings a little in his chest.
I personally don't feel that I'd be able to explain to you what the television is really saying to Wyatt. Not unless you've ever been in the state of mind that he is in. It took many months to get there – so many months of denying his problems with Penelope. So much lying that he no longer has feeling. Numbness is the greatest feeling Wyatt knows, because it is the only feeling. All this craziness has lead to this moment where he's listening to a T.V. telling him, “You're alone.”
The moisture on Wyatt's cheek hung heavy at first. And then he saw his reflection in the television screen. This is when he lost control.
He tries to remember the last time that he had cried. It was long before all of this had happened. It must have been something like 10 years ago when his mother had left him behind. Wyatt spent years taking care of his restless mother. They lived in 6 locations in 10 years when they were in California. He had to fight her awful boyfriends. Sometimes he had to use larger weapons – such as a broken broomstick in which he used to chase James with for five blocks after he tried to choke his mother in the garage. He had to use these large weapons because Wyatt was such a young man, and some of those 30 year old boyfriends thought that they were menfriends. They turned out to be sorely mistaken and spineless every time.
Anyway, the day that Wyatt cried was when he was 14 years old. He woke up to find that his mother's car wasn't in the driveway. His step-father looked upon him with sorrow as Wyatt stood in the road in front of the house staring at the hills of Pomona. They were in flames from a forest fire that was started by some hoodlum a few hours before. He just stood there, clenching his fists watching the hills burn on the other side of the peaceful lake that divided them.
None of this mattered to him right now, though. He couldn't stop. This moment is all that matters, because every atom in the room has shifted away from him. They are no longer watching in horror. They have left him alone. He is the only matter in the world right now, and he's forgotten how to bond.
Wyatt just thinks about everything that his pitiful life has come to, and he let it fuel his crying. He can't run from it anymore. He is becoming something awful. He sees Wesley in that television. He sees a failure in character. He is not Wesley. What the fuck is happening to him?
He finally pulls himself together. He wipes his face off with his forearms. His vision is worse now than when he woke up, but he still happens to see something in the corner of the room that he'd neglected for a long time. Finally, something that makes sense. Penelope has left her mandolin propped up on the arm of the couch.
Now, the mandolin that Wyatt has grown so fond of over the last couple of years is collecting dust under the strings on the body and the headstock. It's worst around the tuning pegs. The oil from Penelope's fingers was pushing its way into the wood on the fret board. Wyatt hated the idea of her using it without cleaning it, but it seemed that giving it attention was the only thing that mattered to her. The wood didn't have a shine to it anymore. The crack on the body of the mandolin from when her dog stepped on it doesn't seem to add character to it anymore. Wyatt starts to feel sorry for this guitar that was once very beautiful.
“What was that?” Wyatt thinks to himself. “I swear to God, it spoke to me.”
He slowly walks over to it and picks it up.
Wyatt's fingers begin to peel away at the clot around his heart. He thinks about everything that depresses him about the world, starting with Wesley, ending with himself. He directs it towards himself. He is dehydrated and annoyed. His dirty fingers are exhausted, but he doesn't run from it this time. He concentrates himself on a feeling. For the first time in a very long time, he is feeling something. He starts to sing:
She cleaned her act up, burnt her shackles and chains.
And she rid herself of men who use their fists for their brains.
And she cotched upon a couch within the neighbor's space
'Til she'd saved enough to pay the lease on her own place.
And I did all that I could to help.
Yeah I've done all that I can to help.
He finishes the song and puts the mandolin down. All he has left to do is tell Penelope that he loves her, hoping that he can be her man.
******
After he's figured out that he has been taking advice from the man that lost his wife to alcohol and his job, he pursues his shoes and car keys. If there is any hope that he'll be happy in his life, he needs to find Penelope for himself.
As he puts on his shoes, he dials Penelope. He doesn't expect an answer, but he expects that she will listen to his voicemail. He runs to the front door and slams it behind him. He runs from the porch to the lawn. From the lawn to the road:
A car was being naughty down a one way street,
And it crushed his brittle bones right from his head to his feet.
And as I knelt over his body and I prayed to God,
I lost faith in everything that has ever been taught.
But I did all that I could to help.
Yeah I've done all that I can to help.
******
After talking Penny into meeting him at home, Wesley pulls onto his block with a feeling of peace. This feeling flees from his body the second that he sees a peculiar sight tucked under a parked car across from his house. “That's Wyatt's car,” Wesley says to himself. “Oh my god. No! That's – That's Wyatt's body!”
Wesley and the boys get an ambulance readied in minutes. The paramedics come to the conclusion that Wyatt had been there for quite a while.
******
When Penelope is about 30 minutes outside of Savannah, she stops at a red light. After all her speeding, her phone has turned upright at the foot of the passenger side, and she notices that the light is blinking red. A voicemail.
She stretches down to grab it. The anticipation of Wyatt's voice excites her heart.
Penelope sees that the missed call belongs to Wyatt. She is beyond the point of speech because she is so excited. She can only smile at the thought of being near him again. Wasting no time at all, she dials her voicemail.
“Penny? Oh goodness, baby. You done nothing wrong, beautiful. I've been practicing witchcraft by trying to take you away from who you are. I can't – Ugh – Hold on, damn front door is stuck – Okay, there we go – Okay. Penny, baby? You know that I love you and I've got plenty to talk to you about now. Please, baby. Please, meet me at the docks. When you hear this message, I want you to go about driving down to – ”
“What the fuck?” She thinks out loud. What the fuck!
She hears Wyatt scream, “Ohhh, Shhhi – !” after walking in the middle of road toward his car, not noticing the man pummeling down the road going the wrong way down a one way street. She hears the metal crunch against Wyatt, and the phone smashing against the pavement, helplessly, much like Wyatt's body does as the car is screeching from the brakes being slammed far too late. A new screech is heard now, but it is a screech of perpetual motion, where the heartless bastard left the whole incident behind him. In a flash, the criminal was gone, and no one knows what he looked like or what direction he headed.
The next voicemail is from her father, but she doesn't bother to listen to it. She hangs up on her voicemail and calls Wesley hysterical, and he necessitates that she get her ass down to the hospital immediately.
“This boy needs you, darlin'. Get down here.”
******
It's month 1.
From the hospital room, he opened his eyes again.
Where would he be without the accident?
Did they find her?
******
It's month 2.
In his sleep, he saw things that spoke without moving their lips. They offered him candy from car windows. They gave him hope for comfort.
And then they pulled on his broken bones. They meddled in his brain. He was haunted by these ghosts. He couldn't scream, except in reality, and nothing in reality could save him from this place. He wanted Penelope. That's all that he wanted.
All the doctors can do is watch him writhe in pain. They think that he might make it. They don't know for sure.
******
I laid down my anchor,
And I said let's take a stand.
'Cause I'm leaving only when
I've done all that I can.
“Penny?” He thinks. He thinks he says it out loud. “Penny.”
******
The dreams continued for the next two months, though they didn't star the same spirits anymore. Now, he sees a woman struggling to find her limbs so she can safely climb ladders, only so she can jump back down and break again on the other side.
Eventually, he'll be driven mad with loneliness.
******
He opens his eyes. He sees no one at first. But when he lets out a moan, he can hear that someone is rustling from the other side of the operating room. They are rushing over to him. She is blurry, but he knows her by her smell. It's Penelope. That's when you know you really love someone, when you come to recognize them in all of your senses, especially in your coma while she is singing you the chorus of a beautiful song.
She embraces him as gently as she can. He is bruised everywhere. The last thing that she prayed for, she admits, was that she hadn't gone anywhere that night so many months ago.
“Penny, sweetheart,” he says to her, “I've just got to say something. I love your father, but if it weren't for spirits like yours, people like him would not be bittersweet. They'd just be god damned bitter.” He brushed her long, black hair out of her face, and took care of that lingering tear that hung from her cheek. “And for that matter, I would have broken every bone in my body looking for a girl like you to love any how.”
She came down for a kiss, and then laid down next to him, cramped on the hospital bed with her eyes calm and closed. He began to hum the chorus back to her:
I laid down my anchor,
And I said let's take a stand.
'Cause I'm leaving only when
I've done all that I can.
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