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After he was gone, Sosa Elesee found that she couldn’t stand to stay in one place anymore.
He went out one day in early January 1961 and never returned, and when he didn’t contact her again, either directly or through a representative of some sort, by default she kept the ugly yellow stucco bungalow and the light pink 1958 model Chevy Impala. She’d been glad for the freedom the car would give her but had no desire to continue on in that house.
She didn’t want to pull Donna out of school in the middle of a semester, so she waited until late June, then packed up their lives for what would be the first of many, many times, settled her eight-year-old daughter in the passenger seat of the Chevy, and drove away from Fort Irwin, California forever.
On the trip across the country she mostly stuck to the highways, wishing to avoid smaller towns, and she preferred to camp whenever possible rather than check into a motel, unless they were in a city. Camping generally felt more private, and Donna loved that it was dark enough in the wilderness to see so many stars up close. Sosa always pitched the tent, but when it was warm enough they lay in their sleeping bags side by side out under the open sky and named each visible constellation. Donna had already announced that she wanted to be an astronomer when she grew up - on a spaceship if possible - so she enjoyed this game much more than the ones they played during the daytime drive, like counting all the red cars or calling out when they spotted different kinds of animals. When the campgrounds were full, which happened often in the summer of ’61 – there'd been a big boom in family road trips and camping that summer – she drove off the beaten path and found an unofficial patch of land to pitch their tent on if she thought she could get away with it. She wanted Donna to be happy.
Not that Donna was unhappy, exactly. She hadn’t complained at all about leaving home or about the long, often tedious drive, and she didn’t have nightmares anymore. She laughed and smiled throughout the trip and clearly enjoyed herself. But from the moment they’d left Fort Irwin behind, Sosa had been waiting for her to ask how Daddy would find them if they weren’t there anymore. She never did, just like she’d never once asked where Daddy had gone or why, or when he was coming back (and at the end of that summer when Sosa enrolled her in the new school in New Jersey as Donna Elesee instead of Donna Wojohowitz, she didn’t utter a peep about the name change).
It was obvious from her complete silence about it that her little girl had been wounded by her father’s abandonment, but Sosa didn’t know how to open up the conversation with her, or whether she even ought to, or if maybe he’d said goodbye to their child in private and given her some sort of explanation before he left.
So they laughed and played games in the car when the scenery got boring, and stargazed at night, and when they stopped in larger cities they went to museums or swam in the municipal pool, ate corn dogs and ice cream cones, did all the things they both loved together. They reached New Jersey in late August, a town called Patterson, and Sosa took Donna to see the nearby waterfalls at the Passaic River, talked to her with enthusiasm about the new place they would live in and the new friends she would make at school.
They left after only one semester and moved overseas just before Christmas. Her sister, who she hadn’t seen in three years, had invited them to come live with her in Paris, and Sosa took her up on it. It was a chance to finally be with family again and an opportunity for Donna to get immersed in another language. Donna was smart, picked up languages easily, and she’d always excelled at school. Someday there would be many more opportunities and open doors for her daughter, and Sosa had made a resolution that wherever they went, for however long, she would give her the necessary tools and education for when that day came.
“Will we have homemade baklawa at Christmas?” Donna asked when Sosa broke the news that they would be going to France for Christmas and staying there for a while. Other than this concern, she seemed excited about visiting her Aunt Rafqa and unperturbed that she wouldn’t be seeing her schoolmates in Patterson again.
“Of course,” she assured. “It’s an Elesee tradition. The three of us will make it together.”
The holidays were lovely that year and they had a good life overseas. Sosa had always loved Paris and she cherished the time she had with her sister. Donna remained somewhat of a loner, but she seemed happy, got along with the other children, did well in the Paris school, and she became fluent in French. They lived there longer than any other place.
But in the end, even in a city that she liked, contentment eluded her, and after less than two years, Sosa and Donna said goodbye to Rafqa and moved again.