The Runaway
“You may start at the beginning,” said Amanda.
Dolores’s mind flitted, scanning through the memories. There had been many beginnings for the Montez family—she didn’t know which to choose. When she told this to the therapist, Amanda then suggested she start at whatever beginning she felt safest sharing. What mattered was getting Dolores to talk and share at all.
“You’re here because you experience severe anxiety, and a pervasive fear that you can’t explain. If there’s any beginning relevant to this, you may begin there. Or if it’s too early, we could begin with the earliest memories. That way, I can get to understand your formative experiences, and how they’ve affected you. Based on what you said on your intake appointment, I believe that exploring your childhood we could better understand this fear of yours.”
Fear. Dolores thought of fear like one thinks of an old friend you’ve outgrown; stunted and reckless and too familiar. She often mused on the subject, trying to decode her unique blend of emotions. There are all kinds of pains and fears, all manner of sufferings to be experienced by the human animal. But hers was an unusual kind of fear—one she rarely glimpsed in other people. It was deeper; a sort of existential vulnerability revealed ever so subtly in the quiver of an iris. She had begun to call it, in an artistic vein, the eyes of the witness.
The witness, at some point in his life, has been confronted with a kind of senseless cruelty. Something he saw or did haunts him. He replays the scene in his memory. Images, of both real and imagined intensity, flash behind his distant gaze. He cannot bring himself to blink and yet every fiber of his being begs him to turn away. It’s too late. It is done. He cannot unsee and he cannot undo and he cannot make sense of the senseless.
Dolores recognized early in her life what those eyes looked like—in her twin sister, her face pale and lifeless as she gazed into the lion’s den. She found herself years later haunted not by the bloodshed that took place there, but by that span of time between her sister’s shock and her eventual reaction. The memory of her little face, a carbon copy of Dolores’s own, devoid of all color, was held like a breath. She thought of it now, but quickly her mind moved on to brighter things. This was not her beginning.
In the beginning was heaven on earth. This heaven rested in the embrace of a serene Mexican sierra and upon the shoulders of a restless Mexican man. Her father, with nothing but a furrowed brow and a mustard seed of faith in his pocket, had moved mountains to build his kingdom from the ground up—turning what once had been a barren field into the Montez family’s own patch of paradise.
The ranch bordered on the town, facing the dirt road streets of the little village on one side and acres of their land on the other. But once inside the ranch, it was easy to forget the world outside even existed. Everything that mattered, every beautiful thing to behold, lay inside the gates.
Animals of all kinds, domestic and exotic, roamed their property. Ostriches pecked at the workers, peacocks strolled the gardens proud to showcase their emerald feathers, and horses ran freely in the prairie. It was an oasis in the desert, imbued with the tropical air of a jungle.
In the middle of it all was Dolores’s home—a big yellow house with a grand double staircase and an impressive chandelier that could be seen from the outside through a large arching window. It was a majestic yet unrefined palace, born of the grandiosity of new-money dreams. All the same, vines sprouted from the dirt and climbed the columns, wildflowers peeked through the fractures in the concrete, and nests of birds and critters made themselves at home between the bars of the balconies. Nature demanded her presence be seen and heard and known.
Dolores and her sisters grew up imbued with the wild spirit of their way of life. There, they were creatures among creatures. Little bare feet pounded against the rain-soaked earth. Their early memories drenched in sun and light and warmth. The world was slow, but the girls were fast. They’d run until their lungs gave out, collapsing onto the grass to watch the sky shift above them. Some days, Dolores would press her ear to the ground, beads of sweat running down her temples, and she could hear a heartbeat. She could hear blood pumping through veins, through the roots of every weed and the cracks on every stone, clear as day. The place was alive.
“That sounds lovely,” said the therapist, her kind blue eyes resting on Dolores’s hands, their palms smoothing over the seams of the couch in repeated motions.
“I don’t understand,” said Dolores, stilling her restless hands when Amanda noticed.
“What don’t you understand?”
“Why I am this way.”
Dolores took a breath and let her mind wander.
“Have you ever read Eva Luna? By Isabel Allende?”
“I can’t say I have.”
“Well, Eva, the protagonist, had a hard life and grew up in a dreary old mansion her mother worked in. The boss was an old Englishman who made his fortune with a new method of embalming, and kept preserved cadavers in the house—sometimes as decoration. But Allende says that despite growing up in such a melancholic place, it didn’t make Eva so. She was too full of life. She was bright and optimistic regardless. So you see what I mean...”
“Why don’t you go ahead and tell me what you mean.”
“Well, I didn’t grow up in a melancholic place. La Casa Grande was full of beauty and wonder—my childhood was too. But despite it, I didn’t grow up to match its spirit. I’m melancholic and melodramatic and most days I feel like life has bled out of me and I can’t face my own existence. I envy Eva. I’m not as resilient.”
Amanda went on to explain that real life was complex, and droned on about adverse childhood experiences. But Dolores had grown attached to her comparison, and was too busy musing on the irony of it all.
Amanda noticed, and broke the silence with a heavy question.
“Dolores, you ran away from home. Could you tell me why you felt the need to do that?”
Dolores squirmed, looking down at her shoes. “I don’t know. Something came over me. I don’t know.”
“We’ve been having these sessions for a while now, but we’ve never dealt with what brought you here in the first place. I hope you know that this is a safe place.”
Dolores trusted the therapist. Amanda reminded her of the nice, upbeat white girls she met in Colorado but was always too shy to befriend. Her office was full of artworks of her clients as she often did art therapy with them. Dolores had fantasized about making her a painting, but feared her work was too gloomy compared to the hopeful, inspirational tone and messages lining her walls. The place looked warm, bright, and welcoming—but still, Dolores felt that no safe place existed in the world.
She hesitated and then asked, “You can’t tell anyone anything, right? You can’t tell my parents or the police? My parents can’t understand and the police won’t believe me.”
“I can’t tell your parents anything,” Amanda responded, “and you’re not in trouble with the police. They only went to your house to check that you were still okay. I only report to them if abuse has been committed against you or if you plan to hurt yourself or others.”
Dolores nodded and took a deep breath.
“It started on our family vacation. Suddenly, I was happy. That happens sometimes—I get so, so happy. And then I get scared that I’ll never be happy again. So I make plans to stay that way. But I always revert back to being miserable anyway. Well, I made a plan, and I tried to follow through. My dad told me the story of how he left home when he was my age, and something about it made me want to do the same.”
Amanda listened silently...
She had envied her father, as she had envied Eva Luna, for his resillient nature. But now that time had settled the dust, Dolores’s memory surfaced another glimpse of the eyes of the witness. Her father’s eyes, too, were leaden with that same existential fear—though unlike Dolores, he hadn’t the patience for rumination and obsession. Long had he borne the cruelties of life, and he knew the battle for hope was a bloody one uphill. He had been fatherless, essentially motherless, and it was up to him and his sister to hold their family together. So he’d sharpen his gaze and pose like a lion, a master, a man.
But throughout the years, Dolores had seen the witness behind the windows—his tired eyes boring through.
“I’m a lot like him,” Dolores whispered. “I can see myself in him, and he can see himself in me.”
It was this fact that forged their unique bond. There was an underlying sense, a kind of deeper understanding, that they were both different in a similar way. Sensitive. Sentimental. Chaotic. In a way others couldn’t quite capture or understand. Words, sounds, thoughts could send them spiraling. They were restless and felt deeply. Dolores and her father did not merely hurt—they bled.
In a way, her father loved her for her weakness. He wanted to protect her in all the ways he hadn’t been protected himself. He knew that for people like them, it was always fight or flight. And he never blamed Dolores for choosing flight.
Perhaps, Dolores thought, he believes he can fight hard enough for the both of us.
For a long time, Dolores sensed none of his weakness—he was her father. In the eyes of a spoiled little girl, every father is Odysseus: master, navigator, a powerful man. Dolores was simply special, and for that reason alone, she was deserving of all of his doting. He had spoiled her sisters rotten with toys and knickknacks of every variety, but what was reserved for her and only her was an endless reserve of affection and her father’s most scarce resource—patience.
“What about your mother? Can you see yourself in her too?” asked Amanda.
A silence befell Dolores, and she looked at her hands, rubbing one over the bones of her knuckle.
Her mother was a patient woman, so it was painful to see any tolerance she once had for her daughter run dry. She had come to see Dolores as an attention-seeker—someone who could not take responsibility, refused to be strong, and always had her father to whisk her away.
“No. I mainly see myself in dad,” She said.
Her father would often spare her from any consequences her mother had in store. He couldn’t bear seeing her punished. Even when she ran away from home, years later in her adolescence, he never once chastised her.
Her mother railed, as she had after every one of Dolores’s breakdowns. As she had when Dolores begged to go to therapy. She had called her selfish, ungrateful, even evil. And when Dolores couldn’t gather the will to get out of bed the morning after her runaway attempt, she shook her head no. No nonsense. She was going to shake her out of it one way or another.
She raised her resolute brow and dragged her out by the hair, shoving her into the shower with her clothes still on. Dolores was shivering from head to toe—despite the water being warm. She couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t pick up the soap. She stood there alternating between sobs and dissociative silence. Her mother, exasperated, grabbed the shampoo and washed her hair in a frenzy.
When she stepped out, she handed her a hairbrush. It felt impossibly heavy. She closed the girl's palm around it, screamed at her to brush her hair. Nothing. No response. She ripped it out of her hand and brushed it herself, reminding her she’d be late to school. She asked a question, but it fell on muffled ears. Dolores felt as if she were underwater—but without the lightness. She had gone deeper. She was sinking.
Her father finally dragged her away, away from her mother’s clawing hands. Once again, saving her from the consequences of her actions. Only when they were alone did she slowly float back to reality. She could feel her hands and feet again. He led her into the car, and as soon as the door shut, Dolores crumbled. She was a weeping mess, begging for his forgiveness. She was only brave enough to ask because she knew, deep down, that she already had it.
His gentle brown eyes lowered to the steering wheel of his truck. He nodded and drove off.
The tires bumped down the winding, unkempt roads of their neighborhood, light trickling in through the windows, blinding her. She closed her eyes and let the rhythmic hum of the truck lull her.
“Are you taking me to school?” she asked weakly.
He shook his head. “You can’t go to school.”
Just as he’d done before—after the fight about therapy, the breakdown at the theme park, the panic attack at the Walmart—he pulled up to the nearest IHOP. It was a ritual at this point, to cry over pancakes with her dad.
He’d been stoic until the food arrived. Then Dolores saw it—flashes of him, in his tired expression. The witness.
He apologized. Dolores couldn’t understand why. She wondered now, if he was sorry that he couldn’t, after all, fight hard enough for the both of them.
They talked for hours. The fog lifted. Tears turned to tales about his youth—his misadventures. Dolores lost herself in his stories.
“It’s Dad’s gift,” she said to Amanda. “He can always tell a good story. He gets so animated when he talks, tapping you on the forearm to keep your attention, pausing for effect.”
She thought back to that day. She had found herself smiling, ear to ear, as she took her first bite, her appetite waking up. It was as if he walked into the void and led her out, word by word.
She told him she was terrified of going back home. She told him she couldn’t face her mom or her sisters. Couldn’t face what she was doing to them.
“We need a change,” he said simply.
Instead of going back to the house, he drove her to school. The pendulum had swung back, and Dolores—with pristine posture and the dignified way of speaking she emulated from adults—asked to be withdrawn. She was going to live with her dad in New Mexico. And by the last bite of pancake, she’d decided: she wouldn’t come back until she was a new person.
Dolores never did become that new shiny person. She couldn’t see it clearly at the time, but this was just another repetition of a recurring pattern—one that would follow her for years.
Fail. Run. Rinse. Repeat. She was a runaway.
“I can’t feel happy unless I’m running. I’m used to it. As soon as I stand still, my thoughts get louder. So loud they suffocate me. Sometimes I miss my childhood in Mexico, other times, I miss the childhood I spent living out of motels after we left. Every move was a grand adventure, as Mamá put it. Even when we got a house, or enrolled in school we kept moving constantly—one house, one school, one “adventure” after another. I didn’t fully grasp that we were running, or what from. But life took on a transient nature. And it’s that which I crave now.”
La Casa Grande had a life of its own—an identity, a soul. It was a place that belonged to her. But now north of eden, everything was foreign to her, but kids were quick to remind her that it was she who was the foreigner. Even though she taught herself the language and worked to scrub her accent clean, she always felt like an alien. School, friends, roots. Everytime her family tried to settle down, the peace unsettled her. It felt unnatural. It demanded too much of her. Peace was chaos.
Motel life was slow, steady, uncomplicated. She would spend her days making dolls out of tissue paper, telling tall tales to the cleaning ladies, floating in the pools, picking at popcorn walls. There was something soothing about how meaningless her days were, as there’s something soothing about being a child strapped into a car without knowledge of the direction.
Amanda nodded in understanding.
“It makes sense. It was destabilizing, but it also meant there was nothing to plant, nothing to grow, nothing to maintain.”
“Maybe that’s where I get it from. We’re a family of runaways.”
“How did you feel before you left? Did you feel like you were back in that transient space?”
“Yes. But then I felt so much wonder,” she told Amanda, “like a deep love for life and the people around me. I was full of sunlight. Beaming. Grinning. Brimming with energy.”
Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling, but Amanda’s were on her face, watching it glow with yearning.
“I talked to everyone I could about anything I found interesting—which, in that state, was just about everything. We were on vacation in Las Vegas, and something about being in a place where no one knows me tends to make me happy like that. My parents stayed behind to spend time with family. My twin sister and I flew back home in time for school. But I had already made plans to stay happy.”
“What was the plan?”
“Well, in my dad’s story, he had ventured out as a child, determined to navigate the world on his own. He left the chaos of his home to provide for the family. His mother had about ten children—five by the time he went off to work in the mines. He took on as much responsibility as he could, coming back from the grueling work with small gifts for his siblings.”
Hearing that story after a long bout of depression and self-loathing planted a seed in her mind. That’s just what she had to do. So, as soon as her sister went to sleep after the flight, Dolores packed her bag, following an internet article on how to run away from home as a teenager. When the sun rose, she did just that. She turned off her phone—planning to get rid of it once she reached the city—and walked for ten hours to Denver. No sign of the little whisper of death. She was beaming, excited for the adventure.
“Little whisper of death?” Amanda asked gently. “What do you mean by that?”
Dolores caught her breath. She hadn’t meant to go down that rabbit hole. “It’s just what I call it. The fear.”
Amanda nodded but didn’t interrupt.
“It feels like someone whispering on the back of your neck,” Dolores said, “except the breath is cold.”
“Do you think it’s cold because death itself is whispering to you?”
“Well—no. I don’t really think it’s death. It just feels like it is. But I know it’s just anxiety.”
“Okay,” Amanda said, jotting something down on her notepad. Dolores’s stomach dropped a little, but she reminded herself this was part of the process.
“What was your plan after that?” Amanda asked.
“I don’t know,” Dolores said. “I guess I wanted to take a new name and live on the streets until I managed to get a job.”
She had felt a conviction that day would be the first of a new life. She imagined she would work, rest, figure life out—all on her own. With no one to disappoint. Nothing to prove. But of course, she had everything to prove. She needed to overcome her weakness, and this was the way.
