The Driving Lesson

by Ben Rehder

  “Don’t you think it would’ve been better if you’d just walked away?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Was the police chief right about the other part? About that being a reason you came with me?”

  “No way. I didn’t even know the police knew about it. I even told Matt to return the drill to the realtor lady who came by our house.”

  I told Opa about the visit from Cathy Abbott, and how Mom immediately suspected I was involved, and how Dad tried to step in, probably feeling sorry for me, because we’d just had that talk about Opa’s condition. And, yeah, I even told Opa that I denied everything. I lied, in other words. But I wasn’t going to lie to Opa, just as he’d promised that he’d never lie to me.

  I said, “The whole thing was really stupid, and I knew it from the start. That’s why I told Matt to return the drill. I figured if he did that, that would be the end of it. But I guess not.”

  Opa nodded and sat there for a few more seconds. Then he raised himself off the bed, patted me on the shoulder as he passed, and went into the bathroom. I heard the shower come on. It appeared our conversation was over.

  10

  My English teacher, Mr. Gardner, was always encouraging us to expand our vocabulary and use more expressive words. Be colorful! he’d say. Paint a mental picture! So here goes.

  Stunning. Awe-inspiring. Intimidating. Jaw-dropping. Unbelievable. Rugged. Immense. Sensational. Breathtaking. Incredible. Astounding. Overwhelming. Epic.

  The Grand Canyon was all of that and more. It was, without question, the most amazing sight I’d ever seen with my own eyes. Opa was right. Photos on the Internet couldn’t even begin to compare. Not even videos. You had to see it firsthand.

  We were standing at an observation station called Mather Point, which was right near the main entrance, not far from the visitor center. A trail ran in two directions from Mather Point to other points along the south rim of the canyon.

  Before we’d gotten out of the car, I’d said, “Should we be doing this? Everybody’s looking for us.”

  “Probably not, but we’ll wear hats and sunglasses. It’ll be fine. People aren’t very observant. No way you’re coming all the way to the Grand Canyon without getting the complete experience. Some things are worth the risk.”

  So here we were, just past ten in the morning and the weather was perfect. Not a cloud in the sky. The temperature was a little chilly, but we were both wearing jackets. And because it was a Wednesday, the crowd was sparse. That was lucky.

  “Impressive, huh?” Opa said.

  All I could do, for the moment, was nod my head.

  “I first came here in 1959, when I was a kid. Your great-grandparents brought me here one summer. At that point, all those years ago, it was just a big ditch.”

  I grinned at his joke. I was glad he wasn’t making me feel bad about the conversation we’d had last night, about the burglary. He hadn’t even brought it up. We’d left the motel in Flagstaff bright and early, and it had taken about an hour to reach the Kaibab National Forest, then about another hour to reach the south rim of the canyon. When we’d first arrived, I’d wondered whether Opa could handle the walk from one of the parking lots to the viewing areas. Then he surprised me by popping the glove compartment and pulling out one of those disabled parking permits you hang from your rearview mirror. That made things easier. The walk was a little shorter.

  “Check it out,” Opa said now, pointing at a nearby sign. It said the Grand Canyon had something called a cell phone tour. Just dial a number from various points along the trail, enter a corresponding code, and you can hear a series of recorded two-minute messages from a park ranger.

  “Give it a try,” Opa said.

  I whipped out my new cell phone — my first time to use it. I dialed the number and heard the voice of a man called Ranger David. He told me it was ten miles across to the north rim, that it was almost a mile down to the Colorado River at the bottom of the inner gorge, and that it had taken six million years for water to carve the canyon. He said that Arizona had once been covered entirely by a shallow sea. I hadn’t known that. Or maybe I’d learned it and forgotten. Ranger David went on to say that the layer of rock that formed the “basement” of the canyon was 1.7 billion years old. If my mother were here, she’d be upset, because she was convinced that the Earth is only six thousand years old. It has to do with that part of the Bible with all the “begats,” where you can trace Jesus’ ancestry all the way back to Adam. If you add up all the years, from each generation to the next, you get about six thousand years. But that’s not what we learned in science class, and that wasn’t what Ranger David was telling me. I tended to side with Ranger David and the scientists.

  The message ended and I hung up.

  “That’s pretty cool,” I said. “You should try it.”

  Opa shrugged.

  “You don’t want to do it?” I asked.

  Two older women, maybe retirees, were passing by on the trail behind us.

  “Not really,” Opa said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I don’t want to sound like a braggart, but I already know everything there is to know about the Grand Canyon.”

  I heard one of the women giggle. Opa was showing off for them. He was using that tone of voice where you know he’s kidding around. I was hoping he wouldn’t draw any more attention to himself, but he kept going, tapping the side of his head with one finger and saying, “Every last fact, every last detail, right in here. Go ahead, quiz me.”

  The women had stopped about ten feet to Opa’s left and were enjoying the view. They didn’t seem to be paying attention to us, so that eased my nerves a bit. The hats and sunglasses were working, along with my short hair. Besides, who comes to the Grand Canyon expecting to see a couple of fugitives?

  So I said, “Okay, you see the layer of rock at the very bottom?”

  “Yep,” Opa said.

  “How old is it?”

  “Let’s see. A little bit older than I am. Not quite two billion years old. One point seven, I believe.”

  What a smart aleck. And he was speaking louder than normal. Flirting with the old ladies.

  “Lucky guess,” I said, but I knew it wasn’t luck. I looked past Opa, toward the women, and this time one of them was looking in our direction.

  Opa said, “It’s mostly granite at the bottom. Above that, you’ve got sandstone, and higher still, at the top, it’s limestone, which is about 275 million years old. Shall I go on?”

  I was trying to play it cool, but now both of the old ladies were looking at us. Not just looking, studying. I realized right then that they knew exactly who we were. They had seen the news reports. They had identified us.

  “Opa,” I said under my breath, but he didn’t hear me.

  “Here at the rim,” he said, “we’re at eight thousand feet above sea level. The river is about five thousand feet lower.”

  The ladies looked away, but they were only pretending to be interested in the canyon. It was obvious from the expressions on their faces. One of them snuck another quick sideways glance in our direction. I was starting to panic.

  I leaned in close to Opa and spoke softly. “Play along,” I said.

  He looked at me, unsure what I was getting at, or maybe he hadn’t heard what I’d told him.

  “Okay, Uncle Joe,” I said in a normal voice. “We’d better go. We’re supposed to meet Danny at the car in five minutes.”

  For just an instant, I thought Opa wasn’t going to understand the situation. He was going to blow it. He was going to say, Danny? Who the hell is Danny? And then the little old ladies would know they were right.

  But what Opa actually said was, “And we know how cranky Danny gets when he has to wait.”

  Perfect.

  We turned together and headed for the car. I fought the urge to hurry. I couldn’t anyway, because Opa could only go so fast with his cane. He was moving along pretty good, though. Halfway to the car, I couldn’t stand it an
ymore. I turned around, as if I wanted one last look at the canyon, and searched for the two ladies.

  They were gone.

  “Relax, Bud. Take it easy.”

  He was right. I was driving through the parking lot way too fast. Opa had his right hand on the door handle, bracing himself. But I wanted to get back on the highway as quickly as possible.

  “They knew who we were, Opa!” I said. I had visions of park rangers pulling us over and putting us both in handcuffs. We’d get tossed into separate patrol cars and be hauled off to jail.

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “I could tell. They were looking right at us.”

  “Well, I’m a handsome guy. They couldn’t help but stare. You shouldn’t hold that against them.”

  I couldn’t believe he was still kidding around at a time like this.

  “They could be calling the police right now,” I said.

  Opa let out a sigh. “Yeah, okay, they could be. I don’t think they are, but if you’re right, there’s not much we can do about it now. We might get caught, Bud, but we’ve known that all along, and I’m not going to let that ruin our time together. I don’t want to keep looking over our shoulders every time we stop for a hamburger or check into a motel. If they find us, they find us. In the meantime, let’s not worry about it. Okay?”

  I eased up on the gas pedal. I took a deep breath. Maybe I’d overreacted.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Take a left here.”

  “Don’t we want to go north?”

  “We have to go east first. Have to go around the canyon, until they invent hovercars. We’ll take this over to 89.”

  He didn’t sound so hot. I looked over at him, and he seemed tense, like he couldn’t quite relax back into his seat.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “I pushed myself too hard. It wore me out.”

  I drove another mile. “Do you need your pain pills?” It was the first time we’d talked about it. He had to know that I knew about the pills — because, both nights, he’d left them right on the vanity in the motel room — but we hadn’t discussed it.

  Opa seemed to wrestle with the answer for minute, then he said, “Yeah, that would probably be best.”

  I parked on the shoulder, popped the hatch, and quickly found the prescription bottle in the suitcase. I got back in the car and opened the bottle.

  “One?” I asked.

  Opa nodded. He was unmistakably in pain.

  I shook a pill into his hand and he swallowed it with some water from a bottle. “Thank you.”

  I swung the lid of the armrest upward, revealing the little storage compartment underneath. “I’ll put them right in here.”

  He nodded again.

  I had questions, but I didn’t know if I should ask them or not. I decided I should.

  “Do you feel it all the time?” I asked.

  “The pain?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, not always. There are highs and lows. Sometimes I need to take something for it, sometimes I don’t. Other times, it’s just a sense of fatigue. No energy at all. But I might wake up the next morning feeling pretty good. I try to take advantage of those days. Unfortunately, the highs aren’t quite as high as they used to be, and the lows are getting lower.”

  Thirty minutes later, he was fast asleep. Less than an hour after that, we came to Highway 89, just south of the little town of Cameron. I hadn’t seen a cop yet, and now we’d be mingling with other traffic, not just vehicles coming and going from the canyon. I finally felt like I could breathe a sigh of relief.

  While Opa continued to sleep, I followed 89 north up to Marble Canyon, where the highway made a big U-turn and headed southwest. I could tell the direction by a little electronic indicator on the dashboard. Southwest was no good. We didn’t want to go southwest. I almost pulled over to study the map, but I didn’t want to wake Opa, and eventually the road started going west. I figured west was okay. Northwest would be even better.

  A little while later, we entered the Kaibab National Forest again. It was, in its ways, every bit as epic as the Grand Canyon, though I was still too rattled by our close call to come up with a long list of colorful adjectives. I remembered from looking at the map that morning that the forest surrounds the canyon on both sides. So now we were north of the canyon, which meant I was on the right track.

  We crossed into Utah and made it to Salt Lake City about an hour after sundown. Earlier in the afternoon, Opa had woken after several hours of sleep, and I could tell he was still very uncomfortable. I’d recommended stopping for the day at one of the smaller towns we’d passed through — Kanab or Cedar City or Parowan — but he’d said no, he wanted to keep moving.

  We’d also had a conversation about our route: Stick to the interstates or take smaller highways? Or did it even matter at this point? The cops might be looking for us on the interstates. On the other hand, if they thought we were smart enough to know they would be looking for us on the interstates, then we might take the smaller roads, so they’d look for us there. In the end, we figured they were probably looking for us everywhere, so we decided we should just take whatever route we wanted to take. It was a lot easier that way.

  We did the same thing we’d done last night: Found a mom-and-pop motel and Opa managed to check in without a credit card. I guess he has a face that people trust. I know I trust him.

  Opa was sleeping again.

  I was in bed, lights out, switching back and forth between the major national news channels. If you’d told me a week ago that I’d be watching CNN and MSNBC on a nightly basis, I’d have said you were on crack.

  But I wanted to know what was happening. If those ladies had really recognized us at the Grand Canyon, it would probably make the news. Or, heck, I guess there was the chance that we were already old news. Maybe we’d already been bumped from the headlines by bigger stories. I watched for an hour and didn’t see anything about us.

  I woke sometime later and the TV was still on. Lying there, drowsy, I thought I heard Opa’s name. Then I heard it again. I sat up, now wide awake. There was an older man on the screen, apparently in the middle of answering a question.

  “...and it is, of course, a very divisive issue, but this situation with Henry Dunbar emphasizes how important it is for terminally ill patients to have the right to die with dignity. These ridiculous laws should be struck down and assisted suicide should be an option in all fifty states. It’s astounding to me that the government thinks it’s their job to intrude on Mr. Dunbar’s life and make healthcare decisions for him. Just as they can’t force an adult to accept treatment, they shouldn’t presume to have the power to deny this option.”

  Now the screen split, revealing a younger woman in a different location. This wasn’t just an interview, it was a debate. I thought about waking Opa, but I decided against it. Better to let him sleep.

  The young woman said, “As you can imagine, I disagree with that entirely. Assisted suicide is a vulgar cheapening of life and it goes against everything the medical establishment stands for. Doctors are supposed to help people, not kill them.”

  The man attempted to say something, but the woman kept going.

  “These laws are in place to protect people with disabilities, people with depression, and those sorts of things, because those are the types of people that would be victimized the most by assisted suicide. It truly is appalling, because we should be offering them the resources and solutions to deal with their health problems, not putting them to sleep like the family dog. And how long will it be before we start prescribing suicide for people who haven’t asked for it, simply because it’s the cheap and easy way out? Morbid is the only word that describes it adequately.”

  The man was shaking his head vigorously. The interviewer, off screen, said, “Jack, I’ll let you have the last word.”

  The older man said, “Rachel is building an en
ormous straw-man argument and I’m pretty sure she knows that. Nobody is suggesting that assisted suicide is appropriate for people with treatable conditions such as depression, and the idea that assisted suicide would ever be forced on anyone is a total misrepresentation. That wouldn’t be suicide, that would be murder, and I don’t know anybody who would ever support that. To the contrary, assisted suicide gives real human beings the ability to die with peace, rather than with needless pain and suffering. It allows individuals who are facing certain death to take some control and end their lives on their own terms, and I think that is the most compassionate thing we can offer them. Henry Dunbar is forcing all Americans to come to terms with this issue, and in my view that makes him a true hero.”

  11

  I guess I was pretty tired from all the traveling, because I slept until nearly nine o’clock. First thing I did when I woke up was look over at Opa’s bed. He was still asleep. No snoring this time. The TV screen was dark, so he must’ve gotten up sometime during the night and turned it off.

  I settled back into the pillows.

  What day was today? I’d lost track. Opa had picked me up at school on Monday, then we’d stayed one night each in Amarillo, Flagstaff, and now Salt Lake City. So today was Thursday.

  On most weekday mornings, Dad would be at work by now, assuming he was still going in each day, instead of waiting around for me to come home. Mom, if she was following her routine, would be working out at the gym, and then she’d stop at the grocery store to pick up some things for dinner.

  More likely, though, she was sitting in front of the TV, watching the same news channels I’d been watching, hoping for some new bit of information about her baby. Probably with a box of Kleenex on the table beside her. She can be pretty melodramatic that way. But, I have to admit, lying there in bed, I began to feel ashamed for what I was putting my parents through. I knew — and I’d known from the beginning — that I was letting them down. Even though I felt I was doing the right thing, I was still disappointing them, which really sucks, if you think about it.