The five of us drive four hours back from the clinic in Sioux Falls, switching the music from Hozier to Tracy Chapman to the Avett Brothers and pretending we’re on a road trip. We stop finally at the gas station outside of Gettysburg, the one next to Bob’s Motel, and I take a lap with Bre around the pumps, our sneakers kicking up thin trails of sandy brown dirt behind us. The air is hot and so dry that I feel the moisture on my face and still-sweaty palms evaporate. She doesn’t ask about the appointment and so I don’t bring it up and let my thoughts churn inside me instead, wondering if I’ll go back in seventy-two hours. Hunter comes out of the c-store and hands me an ice cream sandwich and says eat this, and Kayson finishes filling the tank and pays and motions for us to get back in the van, so we do.
I want to say thank you to them, for coming with me on this long trip on a Friday when they could all be working, but my throat is dry and the words stick in my mouth. We drive over the skinny truss bridge and then to the riverbank where we walk across the concrete slab and sit on the gravel on towels that Kayson tosses us from the trunk, and look at the white-hot sky around the sun, which won’t set for another hour and a half now, and the flat surface of the river in front of us and the rolling prairie hills on the other side. And we talk about things that don’t matter and pass around a bag of chips, until Marina asks me if I believe in God and I say I don’t know and think of the quote that Mr. Jay wrote on the board in high school from Life of Pi, to choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation, and I think that if I had to stay here forever, immobilized by my doubt, it wouldn’t be so bad.
Sarah McKinnis is a recent Yale graduate working in the nonprofit world and pursuing a career in law and policy.