It’s the city in Florida, somewhere around the millennium, where a small family rides through their townhouse neighborhood. It’s a wife sitting passenger and a young man always in control of the wheel, their two children watching from the backseat—their youngest, age five perhaps, pulled up to sit on his lap. It’s steamy summer air sliding through the open driver’s window, curling around the neck and pressing tight like the cage of a lover’s hands, the elementary school up the road, the stolen mornings before work, the hushed groans just beyond their door when they were a family of two. It’s sago palms and pricked fingertips, orange blossoms and good fortune. “This Will Be” at the end of The Parent Trap. Unseen crickets and toads, their chirps like warnings on the air. Tiny hands at the steering wheel, her eyes flickering first with concern and then laughter as the sun spreads its warmth over everyone like vulture wings cutting through the clouds. It’s what she’ll tell their youngest years later (You loved your daddy once), and how confusing that’ll seem. Mostly, it’s sunset, that loveburst tacked onto the horizon like a promise, because even though they didn’t have much they had each other, which is all the glue a family needed to stay together.

But it’s also the place she fled a thousand miles to, the place he followed her to, where it became long nights of yelling and even longer sleeves by sunrise. Coronas bursting on the wall. “You Oughta Know” and clumps of her sable hair between his sad and sharp fishing line fingers. It’s his fear of abandonment, and her desire for their children to have a dad. It’s that time they sat parked in front of the townhouse, in that maybe-Toyota, not the van—how the sun hid behind the clouds while the horizon called like a hungry fish and received only rain—that time he called her a bitch and reached across the console and slapped her and tore her glasses off and flung them from the open driver’s window (so that’s why, that’s where all the love went), their children watching from the backseat, that time their youngest hid in their bathroom, the screaming just beyond the door; gratitude, sick and low, that it was her instead. It’s what she’ll say to their youngest years later, about that night he curlicued his hands around her neck and pressed her into the mattress until she almost fell into the sky. It’s the moment their youngest accidentally tugged the steering wheel while the van’s tires on the right side lifted and whirled as if to fly away. Mostly, it’s the guilt of now revisiting that moment of then, of a child with the power to save its mother from a man determined to keep her.

And it’s that place that follows: their youngest, a thousand miles elsewhere, now twenty-five. A strange reunion; the friend request and message on Facebook, the icy dread spreading around the neck like talons and down to the fingertips, the young man’s words perched behind the glass: You look beautiful I love you so much as always. Happy birthday. The glance at the bedroom door, as if being found wasn’t anything but a matter of time. The burst of envy for her glasses (at least something got away from him), the sad lure bobbing within these fragments, the truth rising like steam—that he’d never let this place become a memory, that he’d always come back, that the yank at the wheel wouldn’t have yielded anything the young man hadn’t already been driving them towards, that it’d only have finished what he started. Mostly, it’s the what if of it all: if the van hadn’t righted itself in time, would he and their youngest have been flung through the open window, who would’ve been left to clean up the twisted metal and ruined glass, how long until there was nothing to see, sleeved behind sunset; a family sundered in the street, the once shimmering spill now a dull and sticky stain protesting nightfall like a gentle rocking murmur, as if to say: Don’t go, not yet, not just yet.