It was on one of those recidivist cold days that I turned sixteen, an event marked by almost no one. I had told Lola my birthday was in July (Cancer, she’d said skeptically. Weird) to avoid the brownie-and-Rice-Krispies-treat tower, the You look like a monkey and you smell like one too that was a birthday at Lola’s lunch table. My dad had arranged to pick me up after school and take me to the DMV for my driver’s test. As I walked toward the line of waiting cars—strange to see my father’s silver Taurus there—loud footsteps approached from behind. It was the heavy noise of running, and when I turned around, David Nelson was almost upon me, skidding to a stop.
“I wanted to catch you,” he said, panting a little. “I looked for you at your locker. What are you doing out here?” By here, he meant the school’s west entrance, the domain of underclassmen with parents willing to play chauffeur or at the very least arrange carpools. I imagined these also to be the parents who peopled the PTA and volunteered to pass out the juice cups at the blood drives. Normally I left through the front entrance to a waiting bus.
I pointed to my dad’s car across the street, half a block down. David waved, though we were far enough away, I couldn’t see if my dad was waving back through the windshield or even looking in our direction.
David said, “I would be cool with going with you to look at the Fairfield police mug books sometime. I think that makes sense to do too. Covering all the bases.” He’d left me a message saying as much a few days earlier. He’d left an earlier one about a book he’d started reading on forensics, how elements of crime scenes can be inadvertently preserved for years, especially when cold is involved.
“Listen,” I said. “I’m done with that.”
“Done with what?”
“The investigation. It’s fucking stupid.”
He looked a little like I’d slapped him. “The investigation to find your brother is stupid?”
I didn’t know how to explain. Not to him. “Listen, I gotta go.” I waved in the direction of my dad’s car.
David’s mouth hung a tiny bit open. A bustle of people filed past us on the sidewalk. Kids opened passenger doors. Parents started up cars, trying to ease backward and forward out of their tight spots. It was a bleak day, the sun shrouded behind clouds, the sky looking small and forbidding, as if it ended just above the treetops. David’s nostrils flared, his eyes widening. He looked unsatisfied, in need of something more. Him being in need of something more made me hate him a little. I shrugged, for lack of a better response. He busied himself rummaging through his backpack and I told him again that I had to go.
“Wait!” he said with unusual force. When he was finished rummaging, he handed me a card, not even looking at me anymore. Bering, it said along the envelope in his small, precise handwriting, a nickname from my straits period. It surprised me and made me feel like a heel; a small, tight, blockish thing traveled up through my chest. David Nelson had always made me handmade birthday cards on his computer, with inappropriate quotes (one year, the front read: “Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 2,0th century.” —Alexander Solzhenitzyn) or with pictures of fractals or nebulae.
“Thanks,” I told him, training my voice to sound nicer. I thought of other things to say, about being sorry or taking things back or was there anything I needed to look out for on the driving test, but I didn’t want to keep my dad waiting, and I didn’t want David to watch me read the card. He was squinting at me now, his face a question. I squeezed his shoulder. It felt weird squeezing his bony shoulder through his coat, felt a little like I could snap him apart right there, like he might let me. I thanked him again and called things over my shoulder as I ran to my dad, about later, about good, about bye.
The woman who took me out for my road test snapped her gum and drummed the end of her pen against her clipboard. She gave out every direction as if my presence were an imposition: Come to a full stop. Make a left turn. Merge with the center lane of traffic. I scraped the back wheel against the curb while parallel parking, gunned the motor once when accelerating from a red light, turned on the brights when I’d meant just to use the left turn signal. I’d barely driven since being pulled over, and now the slick roads made me go slowly; my dad had warned ominously of black ice on the way over. But shortly into the test, some sort of autopilot seemed to kick in, a calmer, more competent part of me that knew how to steer the car within a lane, how to scan the traffic around me, how to check my blind spot without even really having to think about it. I did not cross a yellow line. I did not exceed 25 on residential streets. I stopped at the pedestrian crosswalk.
The end came without flourish. Instead of congratulations, the woman handed me a pale yellow slip of paper to take to the counter, then ushered me back into the lobby, where I waited for my number to be called and my father paged through the Spanish-language version of the driver’s manual (he didn’t speak Spanish). We waited a long time. I watched the flashing red numbers of the NEXT sign. I watched a woman breastfeed a squawky baby. Eventually I pulled David’s card from my bag.
It turned out to be store-bought, with a pastel drawing on the front of deer in a field. Inside was a printed poem following a basic meter and simple rhyme scheme (The seasons are turning, one line read; which means you are growing and learning, read the next). At the bottom David had written simply Happy Birthday and signed his name. I was a little surprised. Had he meant it, I wondered, as a bit of a dig? Did he think me now the sort of person we’d always made fun of, the kind who liked this Hallmarky sort of bad poetry?
I ran my fingers over the picture of the deer, the grass embossed with a scaly pattern. The card seemed a concession of sorts, a signal of some newfound resignation from David Nelson, as if at least some of the fight was going out of him. And for that I felt both a little sad and cautiously relieved.
Finally the man who worked the camera called my name and posed me against the white backdrop. “Smile, beautiful,” he said, the same thing I’d heard him say to the humpbacked old lady before me. The red still lingered in my left eye, making me look tearful in the picture, or possibly drunk.
In the parking lot, my father tossed me the keys, the gesture so uncharacteristically playful (“Heads up,” he said), I didn’t protest, even though I felt suddenly like I wanted to retain my status as simply passenger. The act of getting my license hadn’t brought the heady buzz of accomplishment I’d imagined, but instead a slightly achy and uncertain feeling as I stepped blindly into … what? I couldn’t see what. That was the problem. When I told my dad “Thanks,” and walked to the driver’s side door, my voice came out dense and gummy, a sound that would’ve embarrassed me if I’d thought he noticed.
By now the sky was fading in earnest into night, the sun casting its last sliver of light just above the horizon. It was after five and the swell of rush hour was crowding the road, an exponential increase in traffic since my test. My headlights cast faint pools of pale light, and it was hard to tell the difference between wet spots and ice. My dad grew quickly tense in the passenger seat, gripping the door handle and starting forward whenever I tapped the brakes.
“Signal,” he told me in a clipped voice as I veered into a left turn lane. “Slow down,” he told me half a block before a stop sign. He shared, it seemed, my almost instantaneous regret at this shift in power.
I tried to remember how much I’d enjoyed driving the previous summer, the soothing way it had forced me to focus my attention, filtering out everything but the most essential bits of information. I tried to look only at the taillights of the car in front of me or the dotted yellow line in the road, but I had a hard time letting my gaze focus on any one thing, sure I was about to miss something elsewhere. My breathing was audible, shallow and reedy, my awareness of it bringing quick shame. When I looked at my father, he was steeling himself the way roller-coaster riders did as they crept up the rails before the first descent.
“Sorry,” I said, about nothing, everything, trying to regain the calm autopilot of my
road test.
The lights of the car behind me shone blindingly into my mirror.
“Are that guy’s brights on?” I asked.
“He’s just high up,” my dad said, giving me directions on how to adjust my rearview mirror to dull the shine. I pressed on the tab the way he told me, but it only seemed to flash the lights even more directly into my eyes. Nearby a car honked, and I jumped in my seat.
“It’s not working,” I said as I continued to fight with the mirror.
My dad grabbed the mirror and yanked it around in an unhelpful way. When he was done, it seemed to be focused on the cushions of the backseat.
The back of my neck ached from the strain of sudden concentration. Stimuli flooded me: the taillights brightening ahead of me, the endless signs (MERGE, CURVE AHEAD, LEFT LANE ENDS), the loud, wet noise of cars passing on either side. As I tried to ease into the seat, tried to breathe from my diaphragm, we hit a patch of ice, and suddenly, without warning, the car was possessed, jerking violently in a long, sharp series of stutters. The steering wheel pulled quickly through my fingers. The front of the car swung wildly into the left lane.
I screamed. The noise was so piercing, so entirely without thought, it shocked even me. Car horns screamed back.
My father yelled, a stream of surprising shits and goddamnits, and in what seemed like slow motion—I was sure we were going to jump the curb and fly into the grassy island between us and the oncoming traffic—he grabbed the wheel and steered us fully into the left lane, to more angry sounds of screeching brakes and car horns.
With one of his hands still on the wheel, my dad kept yelling, “Gas, you need to give it more gas! Look in front of you! Pay attention!” It was not until he said, in a voice straining against anger and fighting for calm, “We’re okay. Stop crying,” that I realized I was, that I felt the coolness on my cheeks and tasted the salt on my lip.
“Pull over,” he said. “Pull over onto the shoulder.”
Slowly—putting the blinker on, checking over my shoulder again and again—I merged into the center lane, then the right one, finally pulling the car onto the gravel and bringing it to a stop. My fingertips burned. My ears buzzed. I couldn’t stop shaking.
It was there, in that car—and in later cars, as I imagined my doom at the hands of drivers who could careen blindly out of alleyways or run a red light or veer across the double line into my lane—that fear caught up with me. Starting in that moment and continuing into the years that followed, it would not be while walking alone in the dark or sitting in doctors’ offices awaiting biopsy results or on blind dates with aggressive, grabby men that I would feel the deep, sickening fear of a world without parameters, a world where all bets were off. It would occur, inexplicably and potently, while I drove a car. Whenever I was granted respite from the knowledge that my brother had one day gone missing—such welcome moments of forgetting—it would never be while behind the wheel. When I drove, I saw the world in its undeniable state, as a place that protected no one, that held nothing sacred, that pitted all of us against each other.
“Let me drive,” my father was saying, his voice still firm but nearly his own again. He unclicked first his seatbelt and then mine, opened his door, came around to mine, told me I could go sit in the passenger seat. “Come on,” he said, placing a hand gently on my head, smoothing my hair. “It’s okay,” he said, more softly now, the last hints of impatience gone. For a second he touched my shoulder, ever so lightly kneading the muscles with his fingers. “Come on,” he repeated, guiding me out the door, and for the first time in a long time, I remembered a little bit that he loved me, so I loved him a little bit back.
It was not long after, during the first tentative days of April, when the daylight stretched just past 6 p.m. and the sun stayed visible for brief handfuls of days in a row, that Lola cajoled me into going with her to the Pep Recognition Dinner and Awards Ceremony. The PRDAC, as she called it, or Predac. The lunch table had been a-twitter about the Predac for weeks. What were people going to wear? Who was taking whom? It was a big deal for them, complete with dresses and invitations and statuettes. Months of fundraising car washes and bake sales served as a run-up to this one night: a rented room in the back of an Italian restaurant, a portable microphone and dais, recognition of the best of the flag team, dance team, and pep squad. I tried to feign polite attention through the endless conversations, though even that proved a challenge; they ran the topic into the ground with even more gusto than their typical fare (boys, purses, diets).
The biggest upside to Predac, as I could see it, was that it trained Lola’s attention away from matchmaking and onto something that had nothing to do with me. I was going only because Lola had handed me an invitation with unexpected solemnity and said, “Please come. You’re my best friend.” I felt sorry for her then. What a cruddy lot that seemed for someone as bright-eyed as she.
The restaurant was the kind with red velvet curtains draped over the windows and gold-painted candelabra overhead, flame-shaped light bulbs flickering their synchronized flicker. The servers held white napkins over their forearms and the busboys wore bowties. The place, appropriately, tried too hard while still missing the mark. The breadsticks in the basket were slightly stale, the air smelled pungently meaty and insufficiently ventilated; the flowerpots on the way to the restroom were filled with obvious fakes.
But the night turned out to be not terrible, offering the same cordial, benign escapism as events like basketball games and parties. Lola was full of her usual good cheer, though for once I didn’t feel cowed by it. It was a bit like watching an animal in her natural habitat. All night, girls from the pep squad and the dance team came up to compliment her on how great the flag team was doing this year, how much they liked her new choreography. I hadn’t realized Lola did the choreography, hadn’t realized either that she was particularly respected among her peers. I had come to assume she was well enough liked though naturally seen as something of a joke.
During dinner, Bayard amused the table with his imitations of an American accent: “Eye aynt gaht noe tayme fur yer crap.” The la -sagna wasn’t bad. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to a restaurant, the last time I’d used a salad fork. People made fun of Diana for the dollop of honey mustard dressing on her chin, though not meanly. We weren’t allowed to order alcohol, though thick-thighed Rochelle started a trend of Shirley Temples, which were sweet enough to at least bring a quick, sugary rush, especially when drunk very fast.
For the awards, the teams’ parent sponsors and faculty advisers handed out certificates and plaques and trophies for everything from most improved dancer to best song choice. When Ms. Lefton, family and consumer science teacher and flag team adviser, called out Lola’s name for the Brenda K. Jenkins Leadership and Team Spirit Award, I assumed that, given the lateness of the evening and the length of the award name and the loudness of the cheers (Beth and Penny were up from their seats, hands over their heads), and the deep, deep red spreading up Lola’s neck and cheeks, this was a very big deal. She hugged Ms. Lefton for a long time. When she stood at the dais, she held the microphone too close to her mouth as she talked of honor and hard work and pride in her team. The words came out loud and squelchy, and I kept waiting for Ms. Lefton to adjust the mike. But instead she just stood beside Lola, a huge grin on her face. Other people were enthralled. Diana murmured assents and Rochelle clasped her hands together at her neck, like she might break out in song. Lola’s voice cracked with emotion near the end, and she kept sputtering Thank you, really, thank you, thank you. People clapped and hooted as she finished; I whooped a low whoop.
When she came back to the table, I hugged her. She was warm with excitement. I could feel her shaking a tiny bit. I whispered in her ear, “Great job. Great job,” and held on longer than usual, thinking to myself that a life could be made of such moments, bearing witness to other people in their small, silly happinesses. It wouldn’t be so bad.
• • •
When I got ho
me, Denis’s car was parked out front, the driveway blocked by a police cruiser. It was as if the still sugary taste in my mouth and the lingering remnants of the night’s unexpected goodwill made me temporarily dense, because I barreled inside, half curious, half uncaring, half wanting to tell a loud, braggy, partially true story about the good time I had had with my friends at Predac, because what mattered to me most still was proving something to Denis. It seemed as if nothing would ever matter more.
There was a tableau in the living room: Denis and two officers lined up before the mantel, performing a show, Denis’s arms slicing through the air while he spoke, the officers nodding along, their hats in their hands, Kimberly standing a few steps away, staring at the floor, her fingers worrying the hem of her blouse (I had never seen Kimberly fidget before), my father tilted forward in his chair, his face a strange color, a green-gray, the joking shade of a cartoon character who pinches his lips together as his cheeks fill with vomit, my mother contorted, both arms wrapped fully around her head, her head dipping into her lap, her whole body hiccuping in a series of tiny convulsions. For a moment they stayed fixed like that, before the dogs barked at my entrance, and in that blink of time I thought of the stiff napkin that had just been in my lap, the heavy crystal water glass, the pink stir stick of my Shirley Temple. I told myself, even as Olivia bounded over, followed quickly by Oliver and Poppy, all three yapping loudly, the point at which everyone turned their heads and looked, their faces so pallid and drawn they might have been staring at me from the gallows, that I had already made it through the aftermath. I had already arrived, bruised but intact, at the other side. I was, I told myself (the voice in my head calm, modulated, like the narrator from the filmstrips in social studies about the Yanomami Indians or the rainforests in Costa Rica), already done.
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