Stray

by Stephanie Danler

  Where are we going? I whined.

  Dinner, she said.

  We never went out to eat. We didn’t have that kind of money. It was seven p.m., the time when she normally microwaved us fish sticks, or, if she was particularly spent, turned the car into the drive-through line at McDonald’s. It was almost time for our one hour of television.

  Somewhere on the 5 freeway she handed back two annual passes to Disneyland. They were a gift from my aunt. I think it so kind now, that my aunt had my mother give them to us. We screamed.

  We walked into the park, lights twinkling, walked down the vanilla-scented facsimile of America’s Main Street, veering left through Adventureland. We sprinted, knowing the layout by heart, the park crowds thinned out because of the lateness of the hour.

  We had a dinner reservation at the Blue Bayou, the restaurant inside Pirates of the Caribbean. It was a restaurant where it was always a humid buzzing night, fireflies and cicadas. Water knocked against the boats, a robot man rocked pensively on his porch, beyond that more silhouettes of placidity. I ordered a French Dip sandwich and French fries.

  I haven’t thought about this in years, I tell the Love Interest. I think of my mother sitting at her desk in the courtroom and calling. A private smile on her lips as she drove through the dark to get us. I think of the way the little anxieties of her day were nonexistent to us. I remember telling my elementary school friends about this dinner at the Blue Bayou as proof against our household’s brokenness.

  I held on to my mother’s hand as we exited, far past our bedtime, and I cried. Already conscious of how time wrapped around loss, I wailed. It was over and already fading. I would never get back that surprise and gratitude. When I cried as a child, I was sure it would go on forever, that no one and nothing could stop it, or I might not come back. I held tight to my mother and cried, That was the best day of my life.

  * * *

  How’s your mom? Carly asks. I consider telling her the truth.

  She’s fine, I say. The same.

  That is part of the truth. My mother is always the same. There’s part of the story that’s missing, part that I can almost get away with not telling. But then everything would continue as a half-truth, a not-so-accidental omission. And I will be just like my parents.

  Though they’d been together for years and had a child, Carly didn’t marry Alejandro until 2013, in a wedding under a spread of redwoods in the Carmel Valley. I flew in from New York, my brand-new divorce belied by my long hair cut into a severe bob. Before I drove up to Carmel, I decided to stay with my aunt for a night. And I asked her if she would drive me to meet my mom for a pedicure.

  My mother did get better in those intervening years. She walked without a cane or walker. She dragged her foot a bit, but she continued acupuncture. Her hair grew in and she could visit a salon to keep it blond. Around 2010, she was able to work part-time at Home Depot at the register—it only lasted about two months, but still. For a moment she was conversant with the world, could ask a coworker how the weekend was. She volunteered to hold babies at the hospital. She attended AA meetings, where she met Larry. She went to church every Sunday with my grandfather. After Home Depot didn’t work out, she stopped most of that. She pulled inward. She drank, then had her first spell in rehab post-aneurysm. But she still drove.

  During those strong years, my grandfather found a doctor who would sign off on giving her a license. My mother’s car was outfitted with the gas pedal on the left side because her right side was still extremely weak after being paralyzed. I suppose it was justified. She didn’t drive on the freeways. If she could run a cash register, she had the mental wherewithal comparable to the senior citizens who lived around Seal Beach and still lumbered their behemoth sedans around town.

  The day before Carly’s wedding, my aunt dropped me off at the nail salon on Main Street in Seal Beach. My mother drove herself to meet me. Though she had had her license for quite a few years, I had never been in a car with her. I refused. I openly criticized my aunt and grandfather for enabling her driving. But that day I conceded to have my mother drop me off at my aunt’s after the pedicure, so my aunt didn’t have to wait around for us.

  My mother and I sat in cracked old massage chairs getting pedicures and my mother held my hand. She was chirpy. She told the pedicurist that I was married, and I didn’t correct her. I’m waiting for grandbabies, she whispered, and giggled, covering her mouth.

  She had a really difficult time with the shoe on her right foot when we were trying to leave the salon. I saw a flutter of panic in her. Was it me? Just my presence? She had parked at a forty-five-degree angle in one of the spots lining Main Street. It required her to reverse out of the spot and then pull forward into the street. She was shaking when we got in the car with lacquered toes. She didn’t seem to know how to use the push-button ignition. I offered to get out of the car and guide her back into the street, to pause oncoming traffic for her.

  I stood in the street. There were no cars coming. I waved for her to back up. Her car shot into reverse, barely missing me. I remember thinking, Something’s gone wrong. The car flew faster, backward, picking up speed, down the street, before I saw my mother’s panicked face and watched her spin the wheel. The car careened sharply—backward—up the sidewalk, then through the plate glass of a floral shop window. The glass exploded and then came the crunch of metal as the car finally stopped. A second of quiet and blooms falling.

  No, I said out loud. Then again, No, no, no, no, no, as I ran. Pedestrians and people from inside other stores and coffee shops were shouting, rushing in from the street. Here it is, I thought. She’s dead.

  She wasn’t. She was probably going only twenty-five or thirty miles an hour. But as I ran up, a man was clutching his forearm, bleeding on the sidewalk in front of the floral store. He had been walking on the street, my mother’s car flying in front of him, but the glass had hit him. A surface wound. There were two women on the floor of the shop, holding each other and crying. Above them was the car. The way she backed into the place, the trunk of the car was almost vertical against the wall, the front of the car pointed down to the ground. And there was my mother, intact, flapping her hands in front of her horrified face.

  I climbed up on a table and undid the driver’s side door. I unbuckled her seat belt and pulled her down. Her legs gave out immediately, and I dragged her to the corner. I ran my hands over her face, her neck, her stomach for wounds, checking for blood.

  Oh no, she said softly. She repeated it. Her eyes couldn’t land on anything.

  You’re alive, I said. I held on to her hands and burst into tears.

  She looked at me and saw me, recognized that I was her daughter. She said, Do you think they’re going to take my license?

  Shut up, I said. I shook her violently. Shut up. I’m calling your sister.

  My mom bit on her cuticles, scared. Just don’t call Daddy.

  The woman who owned the store was hysterical. The car had gone above her—she had crouched down behind the register desk, which my mother drove over. It had forced the car upward as opposed to crushing this woman against the wall. The street was chaos. Ambulances arrived quickly, followed by the local news. The floral shop was new in Seal Beach, owned by a married couple. The husband had been getting coffee with his two children a few doors down. They had all been in the store one minute earlier. He ran in, eyes wide at the damage, then put his arms around his wife, pulling her off the ground to him. He found us, stood over my mother, and screamed. I don’t remember what he said, but I remember I was curled around her, hiding her from him, and his spit was falling on me, or maybe it was his tears.

  She’s handicapped, I screamed at him, keeping my head down. The only thing I remember him saying was that he was going to lock her up. I screamed: I’m going to put you in fucking jail if you don’t back the fuck up. He threw a gingham towel at the wall next to my head and w
alked away. His wife, the one who had narrowly missed a critical injury, came over and apologized. She held my mother’s hand and asked to pray with her. She rocked back and forth on her heels as she did.

  Then my aunt arrived with my grandfather. My mother was sitting in a corner of the store with a cup of water given to her by the paramedics. I went to my aunt, this woman who used to survey homicide victim photos with her coffee. She was the most shaken I’ve ever seen her. She held her hand over her mouth. My grandfather maybe blinked twice. He didn’t speak the entire time he was there.

  Did she hurt anyone? my aunt said quietly from behind her hand.

  No, I said. Just a scratch on that guy over there. The paramedics had already wrapped him up. But there were kids. In here. Just a minute before.

  I couldn’t look at the children. They were six and nine. They clung to their mother. They were captivated by the broken glass, by the wrecked furniture and flowers, by the vertical car. I had stopped crying at that point, but when I saw them, my stomach crowded into my throat.

  Then we’re saved, my aunt said. All practicality. She talked to the cops, then the owners, exchanged phone numbers, and she loaded my mother into an ambulance. Even as my mother was strapped in and given oxygen, she had no idea what happened. She couldn’t explain why she didn’t use the brakes or couldn’t remember how her car worked. She didn’t know enough to apologize.

  My aunt drove me to her house, and we didn’t talk for the short drive. When we walked in, my uncle poured me a gigantic glass of white wine though it wasn’t noon yet. I held perfectly still.

  I’m sorry, my aunt said. My uncle was speechless.

  No more, I thought. I can’t be accountable for my mother’s negligence, or for the benign neglect that we call care in this family. I skittered around my guilt, the thought of those children. I wanted to scream, I knew she shouldn’t be driving, but I would get no relief from being correct. Where are the adults, I wondered? I felt panic sitting in my aunt’s house as if I were lingering too long at the scene of a crime.

  I’m going. I finished the wine. To the wedding.

  I ran. I would not visit my mother in the hospital that afternoon. I would not stay in Long Beach another second. I took my grandfather’s car, which I didn’t know would be my car someday, and I drove six hours to Carmel. I collapsed on Carly’s hotel doorstep at ten p.m. and she put me in a robe and asked over and over, Are you okay?

  I don’t think so, I said. But I got out of there.

  Never mind that the small turn toward self-preservation was met by acts of self-destruction. I got so drunk at the wedding I vomited all over a Balenciaga dress that Carly’s sister loaned me. I continued to be so drunkenly sick that Alex had to skip the after-party and take care of me. I slept on the floor of the bathroom in Alex’s hotel room and promised to pay her back but knew I could never. All my ex-boyfriends were there and I flirted with them brutally, ignoring their new girlfriends or wives. Never mind that Brad had RSVP’d for the wedding with me but was no longer my husband, or that I was a waitress and a grad student with a part of a novel written and a shit ton of debt. One week prior I would have said that this optimistic leap into a new life was cause for celebration. Now I couldn’t remember why I had taken this senseless risk; it was a low I would never recover from. The bile stuck to my teeth tasted like failure. Never mind that all I could think on the drive to and from Carmel was that someday I was going to die and that day couldn’t come soon enough.

  I’m still on the phone with Carly, staring up at a line of grim eucalyptuses. I’m in Laurel Canyon. It’s 2015. I say, It’s unbearable, actually. My mother. The pain I feel thinking about her, let alone seeing her, is intolerable and I would do anything not to feel it.

  I wonder why you chose them, Carly says. Nancy and Stephen.

  I didn’t, I say. I didn’t ask to be born to them.

  We all chose our parents. They’re the first lesson we have to learn. They’re our teachers.

  You’re getting so weird, I say. But how deeply have I armored myself that something so obvious is shocking to me?

  * * *

  Here is one thing I know about writing: it sometimes happens that previously unconnected items seem to me connected (instinctively, definitively). I wonder how they got entwined that way. I try to identify these filaments between moments, which I believe will lead me to a conclusion, something satisfying for all. Every time I fail to answer whatever call first woke me in the night, and whatever my body knows remains mute to my mind, I am left with the moments, strung together with elliptical logic if any. The blind leading the blind, is how I feel when I am nursing my mother and when I am trying to untangle the mess love has made of me.

  God, how I envy my mother’s lack of memory.

  PART II

  Father

  Long Beach, California

  In the winter of 1983, my mother gave birth to me, clasped me to her chest, went blind with love, and called me Jessie. It was short for Jessica, the name she had chosen for me. She had told the family, If I have a girl, she’s going to be Jessie. There is—in the boxes in my garage—an engraved silver rattle that says Jessica.

  Outside the hospital room my father—who was at dinner when I came screaming into the world, fighting my swaddle from the first second—filled out forms, including my birth certificate. He named me Stephanie. After himself, Stephen. He had, after all, been hoping I would be a boy. Was he sober that night? Or was he, for one moment, just a father, bowled over by the phenomenon of childbirth? He let my mom call me Jessica for a full day before he told her she was wrong.

  Washington

  Right around the time I was moving back to California, my paternal uncle died under puzzling circumstances.

  It appeared he drove his motorcycle into a ravine in Washington State. Then that explanation seemed too simple and too brutal. There was a rumor that he was playing chicken with some men in a pickup truck. But what is a man in his late sixties doing playing chicken? There are skid marks, but what do they really indicate beyond hesitation? The official report called it an accident. The obituary said, Bill was certainly happy that morning when he took his motorcycle to the open road…

  Bill was my father’s older brother. They had a falling-out when I was sixteen and living with my father in Colorado. I rarely saw my uncle, though he lived near us. My father—in those years—had a lot of falling-outs with people. Supervisors, his longtime girlfriend, doctors, his sister who lived with us for a time. My aunt filled up her car and left, literally, in the middle of the night. I saw those breaks as a warning, a reminder to the daughter he left behind, that he could walk away from anyone and anything.

  There is a grave in San Pedro, California, marked with the name of my father’s younger brother, Phillip. He was one of six healthy, bronzed children born to Gloria and my grandfather Bill. By the time I was born, Phillip was gone and five siblings remained.

  I learned about grief that works like a cancer by staring at a photo of Phillip’s tombstone, surrounded by the hands of his parents and siblings, kept in my paternal grandfather’s house. Who, I wondered as a child, kept a framed photo of a tombstone? The photo was a laceration that could never be spoken of directly.

  When I asked my mother and aunt about him, they—who never hesitated to denigrate my father—just sucked in their lips and shook their heads. It broke them, my mother said, which was as close as she came to compassion for her ex-in-laws. I don’t know exactly what happened (Haven’t I asked before? When did I give up on figuring out the truth?), but I do know that Phillip was on the back of a motorcycle driven by his eldest brother, Bill.

  I know my father, Stephen, was in a car with my grandfather. Had they been racing, the car and the motorcycle? A whisper that Bill, driving the motorcycle, had been drinking. I heard once that there was an item (a hat? sunglasses?) dropped and Bill turned the bike around to retriev
e it. I heard my father saw the entire thing from the car with his father. That he could never un-see it.

  I know Phillip was sixteen years old when he flew off the back of Bill’s motorcycle and hit the freeway, dead.

  Bill was certainly happy that morning…Now when I ask my aunts and cousins what really happened, with either Phillip or Bill, I get a slightly different, sometimes a wildly different, story. This makes sense. No one wants to look directly at the trauma itself, only the shapes it makes.

  My sister is under the impression that we should try to go west for Bill’s funeral (not that we necessarily do it, but that we appear to be trying seems important). I am busy. I’m packing up my life in New York, I’m moving to Los Angeles, I have a wedding in Mexico, did she not remember that?

  Besides, I haven’t seen our father in six years, do you think it’s an accident? I ask her. It’s a rhetorical question. Historically, she’s been more forgiving of him. I think it’s because she doesn’t know him as well.

  The last time I saw my father was a courtesy to her: it was her wedding. To imagine sitting next to him at his brother’s funeral, having to witness the Catholic theatrics, being close to his pain again, a pain that is, in fact, endless, all the while pretending to be his daughter, is physically impossible for me. I skip the funeral, go to Mexico instead. But the spell is broken. I can feel him again. It’s in Mexico that I start writing about him.

  San Pedro, California

  The men came from San Pedro.

  My father, my ghost uncles, my aunt’s husband, Gary, my former stepfather, Richard. On the other side of the Palos Verdes Peninsula is the Port of Los Angeles, so industrial it looks postapocalyptic in places. There’s a point, driving on the Vincent Thomas Bridge, where the burned bark smell of the refineries used to creep into the car. Christina and I would scream and plug our noses. Rising above the bay where every freighter, cruise ship, ocean-bound import and export exchanged their identities, is a hill called San Pedro.