I.
If turquoise looks like any one thing to me, it looks like the ocean beneath the Florida Keys’ Overseas Highway. Traversing this road via bicycle was my big brother Brian’s* extravagantly strange idea. He’s always been magnetic, intimidating, gregarious.
When we planned our trip. I didn’t know that those 113 miles of highway produced the highest rate of fatal car accidents in Florida. Or that residents wearing Bermuda shorts would lean against their fat-tired bikes and tell us we were insane for riding from Key West to Key Largo. While the guardrail provided the illusion of safety, it felt like riding in the air balanced on a sliver of concrete.
Brian was 14 when I was born, off to college and the Army by the time I was in kindergarten. My handful of memories of him from early childhood: Lanky legs in overalls poking out from under a car in the driveway. Tanned arms gathering me up in a blanket, swinging me high in the air as sunlight broke through the Navajo-style print. A stranger with a buzzcut, fatigues, and a duffel bag home from boot camp.
We’d never gone on the same vacation, had shared only five Christmases.
Biking together for a week sounded like fun bonding. It didn’t occur to me we’d never be side by side. For over one hundred miles, I followed my brother through the detritus people flung out their windows: cups and wrappers and bags. Bits of tire, headlights, and bumpers. Dirty diapers, torn shorts, a stained flip flop. Traversing the swampy mangroves and sandy beaches, I had only my loud thoughts to keep me company, punctuated by whooshes of air as trucks blew past us.
I felt alone above the most perfect blue water I’d ever seen. For years after the trip I stopped in the hardware store paint aisle, searching for the chip that could replicate that color.
II.
If I had to say what turquoise tasted like, it would be Key lime pie. At our first dinner in Key West, Brian folded his 6’3” frame into a chair and said, “We should have Key lime pie at every meal.” We loved our mom’s lemon meringue, so I agreed.
There isn’t one single Key Lime Pie recipe. In most, sweetened condensed milk, egg yolks, and Key lime juice gel via chemical reaction. I see now that I’d hoped my relationship with my brother would be sweeter and firmer than when we started.
We tried pie at every restaurant, occasionally at breakfast: custardy, translucent, creamy—in flaky pastry or graham cracker crusts—dolloped with whipped cream or covered in meringue and baked to the hue of a golden Keys sunset. The fluffy puffs of topping floated like the clouds above the azure water at the end of the dock.
Brian would rub his belly after we’d finished and say, “That. Was. Tasty.” Then without missing a beat, he’d pop up out of his chair, “Ready to go?”
We hoped biking 30 miles a day would be enough to burn off the pie calories. That wasn’t the case. We both weighed in heavier at home than when we left, a worthwhile price to pay for time with my brother.
III.
Turquoise feels like thick, scratchy cotton that barely breathes in the hot sun. Before the trip I’d decided we needed commemorative shirts. Brian had vetoed purple, suggested manly navy. I countered with turquoise, more flattering to my freckled pale skin and red hair.
A month before we left I hand-cut intricate stencils, then squeegeed black ink across the fronts in my friend’s Chicago basement. Pulling off the screen revealed the crisp design: Two cartoon sheep speeding along on bicycles. Military-style block lettering proclaimed Black Sheep Bike Tour 1995.
As I rode, the floppy shirt billowed out, making my ass look twice its actual size in any photos Brian snapped from behind.
Every morning I rubbed capsaicin cream onto my left hip. The Florida sun reacted with the ointment as I pedaled, setting my skin on fire. The pain radiated down my left leg, made bearable by the medicine.
I wouldn’t learn for another eight years that my back was actually broken, a stress fracture from a roller-skating fall in my twenties. I’d become acclimated to the pain, the numbness in my leg, the moving-every-few-minutes to get comfortable. It never occurred to me it was anything more than the sciatica a doctor had named it, that I was destroying a disc as I rode, that I’d eventually need a fusion surgery to lock my spine into place. What I knew was that pain was a constant in my life but I biked anyway. Pain was a constant in my family but I tried anyway. I was determined to keep up with my big brother.
Every night, stiff and sore, we’d find a motel and wash out that day’s bike shorts and t-shirts. Brian taught me to roll them in our motel bath towels, stomp on them to extract every scrap of water, and hang them to dry in the balmy breeze. As we danced our towel dance I imagined that this was what family felt like.
IV.
Does turquoise make a sound? In Ayurvedic medicine the color represents wholeness and open communication, symbolized by the throat chakra. When free and unblocked, this vissudha chakra allows for authentic expression, helping people verbalize their needs and share their truth.
At age 34 I couldn’t verbalize my needs, although I’d shared my truth two years before the bike trip, confronted my parents about my childhood sexual abuse. For years afterwards, my dad accused me of being under the spell of the therapist, suggesting I was suffering from a brain tumor, calling me a liar.
My therapist hadn’t hypnotized me. I didn’t have a brain tumor. I wasn’t lying.
Once my truth was out there in the turquoise, I couldn’t relink my shattered family.
When I’d started therapy in the early 90s, Brian and I found common ground. We wrote long letters to bridge the gap, trying to figure out who this person was who was family-yet-not-familiar. I talked about losing my Christian faith. He told me about the New Age church he liked. I worried I’d never find love after being abused. He’d gone through a string of serious but unsuccessful relationships. We made the occasional pricey long-distance phone call. I’d visited him in Colorado to mountain bike, hike, or ski. Each time I went, another likeable girlfriend. On the next trip, another nice woman. Was it better to be alone like me or experience heartache after heartache as he did?
He’d call his last breakup “Another F*cking Growth Opportunity.” We’d laugh about the AFGOs life kept throwing our way: him being abused by our dad’s uncle, me being abused by our dad. And because we talked about it and no one else would, we were flung out of the family. Black sheep we called ourselves.
When he said he thought it would be fun to ride from Key West to Key Largo, I made shirts for our team of two, fantasizing this trip would bring us even closer.
V.
If turquoise had a smell it would be a blend of salt, sea, and Coppertone. I smelled it most strongly crossing the 7-Mile Bridge. If I’d bought a guidebook or done some research, I would have been more prepared. In the middle of the seven miles, the structure rises nearly seven stories above the Gulf of Mexico, a majestic span allowing tall boats to cross under. As we approached it, tired from relentless headwinds, it looked like the longest, highest hill I’d ever seen.
“Not gonna make it if I dog it,” Brian shouted over his shoulder as he took off, lean legs cranking like pistons.
In the months leading up to the trip I’d worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up with him, training every night on a stationary bike in my cold Chicago living room, riding hard and going nowhere. Our mom had a saying, “You can’t get there from here.” She’d repeat it every time our camper broke down on vacation, or when she’d have to rip out a seam sewn wrong, a sleeve knitted improperly.
I stood in the bright sun by the side of the highway, catching my breath, Brian now a tiny figure far ahead. It was up to me to make it up the Seven-Mile-Bridge. I put my head down and pedaled into the sky, surrounded by blue, feeling like I was barely moving. By the time I’d crested the top, Brian had caught his breath and was ready for the fun of riding downhill. Instead of waiting for me so we could race together, off he sped. I watched him get smaller and smaller as I stood astride my bike, alone above the glassy turquoise sea.
*Name changed to protect privacy.
Stephanie Weaver is the author of four non-fiction books. She lives in Oceanside, CA with her husband and their Golden retriever Daisy. She is working on a memoir about family estrangement. www.StephanieWeaver.com.
Wanderlust 