ALRIGHT

• Sara Browne

It’s alright, servant to well-being and we don’t want to get into. More or less mentality of in-between irrelevance.

I’m alright, place-holder for all we want to sing and sputter. Substitutes fervor of feeling. Assuring your audience the fall was soft, somehow.

Unattainable, but spaces away is all right. An inconceivable genuity of simply well.

We go when the rest of our family is asleep. Sometimes he’ll knock gently on my door, or he’ll text me from the basement. Other nights I’ll wander down and find him on my own. We leave the lights off in the basement and slowly open the sliding door, careful to minimize the rumbling sound it makes as it is pushed along its track. Next is the gate leading from our yard into the side garden. I always go first, wrapping my fingers around the latch as I lift it to create a buffer, making sure that the metal doesn’t clang and wake anybody up. Tommy leaves the gate ajar, ready to welcome us when we come back. We pad down the driveway, still not letting our voices rise above a whisper in case a window is open upstairs. Our street is a quiet cul-de-sac, surrounded by woods that block out any sky that’s not directly overhead. The driveways are long and there aren’t many windows on the front facades of the houses, so that I never feel watched as we make our way towards the entrance of the neighborhood.

109th Avenue is never busy, and at midnight it is practically empty. The road is straight for 2 miles, which means that we can see any car coming minutes before it reaches us. We always turn left out of our street, walking towards the stoplight in the distance. The road cuts through a flat expanse of marsh grass. The woods skirting the fields are a couple hundred yards away, so that on the road we’re exposed. When my brothers come home from tangled Boston or mountainous Armenia, they always comment on how strange it is to see such a vast open space. There is no sidewalk, but the shoulders are wide enough to walk without fear of passing cars. If I happen to be barefoot, the lines of tar put down to repair cracks feel velvety underfoot, providing a reprieve from the gravelly pavement.

We call it sneaking out, but there’s nothing sneaky about it. I leave my bedroom door open and my string lights on, so that if my parents were to wake up they’d immediately know I was gone. Tommy leaves the gate open, even though I worry about deer coming in while we’re away. If a car drives by, I refuse to run and hide in the grass like my brothers used to before I was allowed to come along. Instead we keep walking, eyes up. I talk animatedly so any concerned driver would see that I am not distressed, just out enjoying the night. Tommy worries about being stopped by the police, but I remind him that we’re doing nothing wrong. I wonder what the drivers feel when they go past us. Concern? Fright? I think I would be scared to see us, two kids walking on the shoulder, a mile away from any neighborhood with nowhere to go.

Sometimes these walks are a celebration of sorts, a perfect end to a pleasant day. Sometimes they’re more therapeutic, taken the night before a test or as a break from writing. Other times they’re the way we say goodbye—a way to spend a final hour together, to leave a fresh memory of one another in our minds the night before he leaves again. Whatever the reason, the feeling is always the same.

The first time Tommy played “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac on one of these walks, I didn’t know how to describe it other than to say that it was perfect. The subdued chords and gentle croon of Stevie Nicks’s vocals sound, for lack of a better descriptor, like walking down 109th at one in the morning. The word I’d later settle on is “haunting”. Something about the breeze coming off the marsh, the vast openness of the area, and its propensity for fog lends itself to a ghost story. When the senior living center on the corner of the stoplight was still just a shell-less skeleton and construction lamps lit up its exposed insides, we speculated about what—or who—could occupy the building. Though I didn’t actually believe any of our sinister theories, I felt a surge of gratitude to be accompanied by my big brother.

I wonder what the drivers feel when they go past us. Concern? Fright? I think I would be scared to see us, two kids walking on the shoulder, a mile away from any neighborhood with nowhere to go.

“Dreams” is not the only song we’ve listened to on our walks, but we’ve agreed that it is decidedly the soundtrack of our sneakouts and, perhaps less explicitly, of our relationship as siblings. Since he first played the song for me, I’ve realized that in a way, Nicks is describing us. The song opens with “Well here you go again/You say you want your freedom/Well who am I to keep you down”. Out of my three brothers, Tommy is home the least often. After a few weeks, it’s not difficult to see that he wants to leave. I know it’s not personal—he has connections elsewhere and he feels restless being stuck in suburban Minnesota. I won’t be the one to hold him back, to keep him down.

The streetlight on the corner of Flanders Court and 109th Avenue casts a yellow glow onto the pavement. When we’ve walked out towards the stoplight and back, we pause on the edge of this glow to dance. “Dreams” is a song for walking—when it’s time to dance, he’ll put on something more upbeat—Bobby Darin, Maurice Chevalier, Charles Trenet. Neither of us is a good dancer, but it doesn’t matter on the highway in the middle of the night. We hold each other’s hands and spin around, feeling much more graceful than we must look. I turn under his arm, the music swelling and retreating as the phone speaker in his pocket moves around me. The song ends and he turns the music off. We turn silently back into our sheltered neighborhood. We plod back up the driveway and through the garden, the gate ajar exactly as he left it. I close the latch, careful not to let the metal clang and wake up our parents. We slowly pull open the sliding door, slip inside, hug goodnight, and crawl into our beds.