I imagined rigging up the radio and sending waves to the nearest police station or making her stop at a gas station and then using my blood to scribble a message on the bathroom mirror. I mouthed “help me” anytime we passed another car on the road, which wasn’t very often. It amused me for a while, but then I got bored. There were only so many ways I could think of to summon help, and it got harder to think about what I would do if I ever did escape.

Trees passed by in a green blur, moving me farther from my sister, so I closed my eyes to shut out the view and I thought about my grandmother’s yellow house. The one we grew up in with a staircase filled with photographs of my mother getting older the higher you climbed. The house that held no father, for me or for her.

It was the one thing we had in common.

I remember when my grandmother pulled me up those stairs and into her bedroom and whispered the story to me, as if overhearing it would somehow hurt my mother, as if she did not already know that she was in the middle of it.

That she had always been in the middle of it.

My grandmother dreamed of having a child. Every prayer, every birthday wish was the same and ultimately went unanswered. It was all she could talk about and soon my grandfather tired of her and began spending nights away from home. Eventually she gave up on both prayer and hope until one morning her passion for conceiving was replaced with a passion for consuming Hershey bars. From the moment she woke, all she thought about was Hershey bars, and finally, because she could not control her newfound obsession, she went to see a doctor. He ran some standard tests, but found nothing that a bottle of vitamins could not cure, so he sent her home and told her to get some rest.

As the months passed, she began to feel something inside of her. At night, she lay awake trying to figure out what could possibly be invading her body with such determination. She decided what was growing inside her was, in fact, a large and fatal tumor. She refused to go back to the doctor, convinced he would just confirm her fears, and secretly planned her funeral while adding Hershey’s with almonds to her grocery list.