The day before my father returns home, my mother drives us to the hospital. Our radiation ceremony goes as usual: my mother disappears down the white corridor; my brother tries to flirt with the black-haired nurse; if anyone asks, I say our neighbor is giving us a ride.
My mother looks healthy when she comes out to the waiting room. I can almost remember what she looked like before the summer started.
In the parking lot, she tells us she’s going to take us for pizza. My brother and I love the thick slices they sell at the mall near the hospital. From the driver’s seat, she smiles at me in the rearview mirror. I smile back.
She puts the van in gear and presses on the gas. Our vehicle lurches back, and for a second, her face goes blank. Our back bumper strikes another car. My mother stamps the brake pedal. A look of recognition flashes in her eyes. Without speaking, she opens her door and gets out of the front seat, looking around the parking lot. She doesn’t inspect the damage. No other cars move through the lot.
She climbs back in the car, shifts into gear and starts driving. I look back and see the front bumper hanging off a white sedan.
“Let’s get pizza,” my mother says. Her voice shakes. From her purse, she exhumes a half-smoked pack of cigarettes. Since she started smoking again I haven’t seen her smoke in the car, though I’m sure she has. It occurs to me that she’s keeping secrets from all of us. When I thought she was only smoking in front of my brother and me, it was thrilling to be part of her transgression. But now that I know she’s keeping secrets even from us, I’m terrified for what this might mean.
She tries lighting a cigarette, but her hand trembles and she drops the lighter. It rolls under my foot in the backseat. I pick it up and hand it to my brother sitting shotgun. He flicks the lighter and holds the flame up to my mother. She leans toward him and breathes the cigarette to life. While she smokes, I yearn for my own cigarette. I’m sure my brother does, too. I imagine all three of us smoking cigarettes while we drive away from the scene of her crime. My mother takes small drags from her cigarette and blows the smoke out her window. When she’s smoked half the cigarette, she flicks it onto the road and straightens up in her seat.
The food court at the mall is mostly empty. While my brother and I eat slices of pepperoni pizza, my mother pulls the pack of cigarettes from her purse. She removes the remaining cigarettes from the pack and lays them out on the table in a row. With her index finger, she counts the cigarettes out loud. “Seven,” she says. She counts again, “Seven.”
My brother and I share a look. At the table next to us, an elderly woman with blue-gray hair stares. She leans away from us in her chair, fearful of what might happen.
“Seven cigarettes,” my mother says. She lifts a cigarette and snaps it in half with one hand. Brown tobacco spills from the wound. She drops it on the table. “Six,” she says. She picks up another. Breaks it at the center. “Five,” she says. She continues breaking the row of cigarettes, until she says, “One. One cigarette.” The woman next to us watches wide-eyed. I want to yell at her to look away. In front of us now, next to unwanted pizza crusts, are six broken cigarettes. Loose tobacco leaves pepper the table’s gray surface, giving off a sweet aroma.
My mother rolls the filter of the last remaining cigarette between her thumb and forefinger. “One cigarette,” she says. With her free hand, she produces the lighter from her purse. Her thumb spins the lighter’s spark wheel and presses the plastic fuel lever, igniting a flame.
“Ma’am, there’s no smoking in the mall,” the woman says. When my mother doesn’t acknowledge her, the woman repeats, “Ma’am.”
“Don’t,” I say to the woman, delirious with the moment.
In an act of defiance against a world trying to annihilate her, my mother places the cigarette between her dry lips and lights it in the middle of the food court, taking a long, satisfying drag.
XIX
The night it happens, it’s raining so hard my father has to pull to the side of the road with his emergency lights blinking. The sound of quarters thumping the metal roof vibrates the car. Up and down Main Street, the blurred bodies of unmoving cars and trucks flash their emergency lights.
My father turns the wipers up, but they can’t slap the rainwater off the windshield fast enough. So we sit, idling on the side of the road, waiting for the rain to pass. Home for the weekend from Tennessee, he wanted to pick up ginger ale for my mother, and I offered to come along to escape the wet heat of our house and the smell of cat piss that returns when it rains. At the store we wandered the aisles together without talking, not buying any of the products on the shelves, content to be out of the rain. The radiation appears to be healing my mother. Her doctors are hopeful. With my mother feeling better, there isn’t a frenetic rush to get home—there’s a strange letdown to her healing. When my father paid for the generic two-liter bottle of ginger ale with food stamps, I pretended not to notice as I thumbed through a tabloid magazine.
Raindrops smear the world outside our windshield into a dream of lights from idling cars and street lamps. My father squints at the windshield as the wipers screech over the glass. He sighs and shuts off the wipers.
We hear the sirens before we see the flashing red and blue lights. It’s a low wailing at first; my father clicks off the Christian talk radio station. Smudged lights flash inside our car. A cavalcade of fire trucks, police cars and an ambulance streak by us, spraying water on our windows.
My father makes the sign of the cross and begins the low prayer he always says in these moments: “Lord, please protect the people who have been injured and the people trying to save them.”
I’m secretly happy that the emergency vehicles aren’t careening toward our house. I’ve often prayed for our misery to be transferred to someone else—anyone else.
My father finishes his own prayer with another sign of the cross. He taps the St. Jude medallion on the dashboard. The emergency vehicles turn out of sight in the direction of the polluted lake. After a few moments, the rain slows and my father starts the wipers, clicks the radio on and puts the car in gear.
Traffic is stopped at the bottom of the hill by the lake. Emergency vehicles flash their lights, blocking the road. A firefighter ignites road flares and lines them around the scene.
My father slows our car. I crane my neck to get a look at the scene. Behind a fire truck, a black car with a crumpled hood rests against the metal guardrail flattened from the impact. I roll down my window and stick my head out. The smell of burned rubber and gasoline stings my throat. I squint at the black car through the rain, trying to place where I’ve seen it before.
EMTs reach into the broken window of the driver’s door with an oxygen mask and thick bandages. They yell at one another, though I can’t hear their words.
I sit back in my seat, thinking about the black car. I don’t whisper my prayer for others to suffer instead of my mother, from the scene in front of us, it’s clear the misery has shifted—for now at least.
As I consider the arbitrary distribution of pain, a white object on the yellow line of the road catches my eye twenty yards from the black car. Flashes of blue and red from the emergency lights work over the object that I now recognize as a shoe. The image snaps a memory in my mind, and my eyesight becomes so acute I can make out the faint brown stain on the toe of the white shoe, the rubber sole worn at the heel, the frayed cotton laces. The air is sucked out of my lungs. I can’t take a full breath.
“No,” I say, snapping my father out of his hushed prayer.
“What is it?” my father asks. When he sees me struggling to breathe, he yells, “What?”
Without answering, I push open the door and run out of the car. My father shouts something, but I’m sprinting to the shoe. Before I pick it up, I know it’s hers. My lungs feel as though they’ve collapsed. A police officer walks toward me—her mouth moves but no noise seems to come out. A violent ringing sounds i
n my ears. I cradle Taylor’s white shoe against my chest. Rain falls from the sky, soaking my clothes, but I don’t notice. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot three EMTs standing over a body. A hand clutches my shoulder, but I break free and race to the lifeless frame lying next to the guardrail. An EMT kneels next to the small body. The galvanized steel of the guardrail is smeared with blood. When I’m a few feet away, I notice the overall jean shorts she’s worn all summer. My legs give out and I collapse, my face smacking the wet pavement. Lights flash around me and I’m disoriented, until I catch Taylor’s unblinking brown eyes staring in my direction, neck twisted unnaturally on the pavement, hands out at her sides. Raindrops splash on the road between us making tiny Os in the puddles like little mouths upturned to the sky. I’m waiting for Taylor to blink. Her brown eyes reflect the lights from the emergency vehicles. Her black pupils are wide, unnerving. A refrain of she’s going to blink, she’s going to blink, she’s going to blink rolls through my head like the endless raindrops slapping my face. She’s going to blink. I’m delirious with the chorus. She’s going to blink. I look away from her eyes for a moment and catch the tangle of flesh below her waist. I gasp. Smoke rises from the crushed hood of the black car a few yards away. One headlight still works, pointing out into the darkness of the polluted lake beyond the guardrail. I try again to make out Taylor’s legs. Through the chaos of rain and emergency lights and road flares and EMTs I discern black skin, wine-red lacerations, fragments of bone. The ringing in my head becomes so loud, I’m forced to squeeze my eyes shut.
Before I can open them to look back into Taylor’s brown eyes, I’m being lifted off the ground by my father and a police officer. I fight against them to run to Taylor, but they clutch me tight. A group of emergency workers surround Taylor so I can’t see her. One of them covers her body with a yellow sheet. I’m shouting and crying with such a profound rage that I finally understand the power of the Holy Spirit. The ringing gets louder.
When they’ve dragged me to the edge of the scene next to a line of road flares, my father has to hug my shoulders against his chest to keep me from escaping back to Taylor. He clenches me so hard that I can hear him grunting. An officer shouts something at him. The yellow sheet glows near the guardrail.
A crashing sound breaks my concentration on the sheet covering Taylor’s body. Firefighters huddle over the crumpled car as one of them works a large tool at a crack in the driver’s door. Metal snaps, glass smashes as the hydraulic tool bends the car frame. The crushed door is pushed back, revealing the driver hunched over the steering wheel. Blood stains the driver’s white T-shirt in a morbid halo at the neck. A firefighter pushes the limp body of the driver back in the seat. When the head hits the headrest, it turns in our direction, and that’s when I see that it’s Shane Donaldson from the neighborhood. The car is his mother’s—the same make and model of the car his father used to own. Like the one his father crashed before he died, the one from the junkyard. I try to suck air into my suffocating lungs. The ringing in my head gets louder and louder until I go limp in my father’s arms.
* * *
The next morning my brother is sitting on my bed when I wake up. He looks stoned, but serious. He’s turning over a few stray beads in his palm he must have found on the floor from my broken rosary. I don’t know how I got in my bed last night. My head aches. I touch my temple where I hit the pavement next to Taylor and wince.
“The trailer park girl,” he says when he sees that I’m awake. “Dad told me.”
“Taylor,” I say. I don’t like when he refers to her that way. Her relentless brown eyes flash in my head. The ringing returns.
“Yeah, Taylor and that freak.”
“Shane,” I say, and he nods. “He was driving his mother’s car. I saw him.”
My brother sighs. “That’s fucked up,” he says.
“Where are Mom and Dad?” I ask.
“Mom took Dad to the airport, then she has radiation,” he says. “They didn’t want to wake you. Dad slept on your floor last night. I’ve never seen him so worried. What did you do?”
When I don’t answer, he says, “Mom and Dad said I have to stay here and babysit you.”
“You don’t have to fucking stay,” I say, angry. My temple pulses; I touch it carefully with my fingertips.
“I know,” he says, but he doesn’t get up from my bed.
* * *
I race my bike through the woods at the end of our neighborhood down the path Taylor once took from the double-wide trailer she lived in with her mother and her mother’s ex-boyfriend. I scour the dirt path for imprints from her white sneakers. The trail ends at the small lot of the double-wide. I have the urge to knock on the door, but Taylor hasn’t lived here for weeks. The vet who lost his left leg in the desert war lives here now.
I stare at the double-wide, not quite sure what I’m doing here. When a dark face peers out from one of the windows, I pedal out of the driveway. I ride down the street to the store where my brother and I bought fountain sodas and baseball cards as kids. I jump off my bike outside the blue clapboard store—the back wheel is still spinning when I push through the door, jingling the bells.
Snatching a newspaper from the stack beside the front counter, I flip through the pages, searching the headlines until I see it: Two Teens Die in Car Accident.
“You going to pay for that?” Mr. Fournier, the owner, asks. I look up and study the red lines that spiderweb across the man’s face from years of hard drinking, as my father once told me. My father hasn’t liked Mr. Fournier ever since he tried to get the storeowner to stop selling porn magazines. Our church was on a crusade to rid our town of pornography. I’d stood behind my father, eyeing the baseball cards when Mr. Fournier had laughed and said, “You Catholics buy more of those magazines from me than anyone else. I wouldn’t want you buying them from my competitors, now would I?”
I dumbly study the lines of Mr. Fournier’s face on this humid morning. “Those newspapers aren’t free,” he says to me.
“The accident,” is all I can say.
“Accident?”
“By the lake,” I say.
“Oh yeah. A bad one,” he laughs. “Tragic. A girl from the trailer park was walking on the shoulder of the road when that kid hit her—”
“Taylor,” I interrupt, “and Shane.” But Mr. Fournier doesn’t seem to hear me.
“They say the kid stole his mother’s car. Only twelve. He used to come in here sometimes. Nearly split the girl in two from what I hear—one of the cops who took the call is a regular, comes in every morning. Said the car really butchered her. Her legs were ground meat. His words.”
“Taylor,” I repeat.
“What?”
“Her name was Taylor.”
Mr. Fournier looks at me confused, the red lines on his face glowing. “They think the kid just lost control of the car in the rainstorm—wrong place, wrong time,” the storeowner continues. “His feet probably barely reached the pedals.”
Mr. Fournier shakes his head and eyes the newspaper still spread open in my hands. “You going to buy that?” he asks again.
I scan the article. There’s a quote from Shane’s mom that she doesn’t know why he took her car. He left a note saying that he was going on a pleasure cruise.
I drop the newspaper on the floor.
“You need to pay for that,” Mr. Fournier says. Inspired by my anger, I grab a box of baseball cards next to the cash register and heave it across the store. The shiny packs fly through the air.
“You little shit,” Mr. Fournier says, but I’m out the door and on my bike, pedaling under the blue sky as puddles of rainwater from yesterday’s storm steam off the surface of the road from the heat.
At home I steal a pack of cigarettes from my brother’s room and smoke them in the woods behind our house. When I finish one cigarette, I light up another. My senses are impossibly alive—the
crackle of burning tobacco echoes in my ears. On the ground, slumped against the trunk of a maple tree, images of Taylor in her rain-soaked denim overalls play through my head. Her lifeless brown eyes. The confusion of her mangled torso and legs. A ringing noise echoes in the front of my skull. I wonder why she was on the road in such a bad storm. It had been threatening to rain all day. Was she hitchhiking to Florida? I should have been with her. I wonder if her mother’s boyfriend had returned, if he had tried something. Maybe she was straddling the white line, ready. And Shane. Was he on a death cruise like his father when he was dying of cancer? Did he see Taylor? At church, before he disappeared without warning, Father Brian had preached that God has a holy plan for everything that happens. “If you turn the letters in the question Why? around,” he had spoken with youthful conviction from the wooden pulpit, “the letters make Y-H-W—Your Holy Will. God always has a plan.” But what is His plan now? What kind of loving God allows this? My chest tightens as a crack spreads over the marble foundation of my childhood. Taylor and Shane, my mother, the war—none of it can be tortured into the faith I’ve inherited. If there’s truth, the answers are not here. I take hard drags from my cigarette to stop the image of Taylor’s unblinking eyes from flashing in my head. I keep trying to place my finger on the design behind His psychotic plan. Nothing comes.
When the sun sets, I hear the snapping of dry branches and my brother’s voice saying my name. He finds me sitting against the maple tree where I’ve been all day. The crushed soft pack of cigarettes on the ground. Spent filters silhouette my body.
“Mom’s getting worried,” he says, pushing around the empty cigarette pack with the toe of his sneaker. “You should come inside,” he says when I don’t answer. “Mom’s at church right now—she won’t try to talk to you.”
Soon the Light Will Be Perfect Page 16