Every Part of Me

It had been two days when she got the call.

Jessica had left home two days ago. This time she was more prepared. She left with money, not food. She left her toys at home and called a taxi. By the time her phone started buzzing, she was one state over and ready to make it two.

She declined it the first time, watched it ring out the second, and threw it across the hotel room the third.

It wasn’t until her fourth day, skipping from motel to hotel, that Jessica noticed the envelope floating at the top of her phone’s tiny screen. She stared at the yellow square until she saw purple ones wherever she looked.

She ignored it for another day, another week.

When Jessica started drinking, she started staring again.

Jessica had already changed her phone, gotten a new number. But she still held onto her old one. Still slipped it into her picket whenever she moved on. And when she came to the next hotel it went into the drawer by her cheap bed and collected a new layer of dust.

Days turned into months and Jessica was apparently forgotten. Her parents hadn’t managed to find her, Skylar had never called even when she could have, and Jessica had found an apartment. It wasn’t a home, but it was a bed. It was a kitchen, food, television.

She hadn’t met anybody. She never planned to meet anybody. And Jessica was always about sticking to a planned routine.

When she was gone a year, Jessica slid the drawer of her nightstand open and she stared. She had tried to forget it, but she could never force it from her mind. The purple square was always in sight when she let her eyes touch a white wall, the white towels in her bathroom, the pale sidewalk outside. And the yellow envelope was still there, still waiting.

It took Jessica five tries to remember the passcode to her voicemail. When she remembered to put in his birthday, he congratulated her himself.

Her name was the first word in Jessica’s ear.

“I’m back now,” John told her from a year ago. “I made a mistake and I’m back.”

But she wasn’t there. Jessica knew he would say that before he did.

Jessica hadn’t been there when he had come back. John had left her standing there, but he had always expected her to be there when he came back. And Jessica knew she should be. She would have been. Because she knew John better than anyone else knew John. She knew he would come back. It would take him three days, she had predicted so she had left on the second.

John had come back in two.

But Jessica couldn't face problems.

Jessica listened to the message and cried with John. She felt the hot water coating her cheeks as he whispered he loved her, sucked in shaking breaths when he begged her to come back, and she dropped the phone when John told her he would wait.

Jessica doubted he had waited a year. She guessed he had run just like she had. She thought maybe he had ran towards her, but the likely answer was that he had ran from her. He would be gone by now.

Jessica left her old phone on the floor; let it continue to ask her decision on the message that she hadn’t finished listening to.

She wrapped her fingers around her new phone and hit the familiar digits.

“Mom?” She choked out.

The answer came before she could ask.

She could come home.