“William T.?”
“How’s your driving coming along?”
“It’s not.”
“Well, it better. I got you an appointment for a road test.”
“You what?”
“You heard me.”
“William T., I can’t take my road test yet. I don’t know how to drive!”
“Learn, then. Because the appointment is three short weeks away. Get on it, Younger. Hop to it like the bird of the day — a greater yellowlegs sandpiper — would hop to it, trim and alert and dashing about in shallow waters.”
I roll my eyes.
“What?” William T. says. “You got something against sandpipers?”
I turn back to the manual.
“‘Chapter Eight: Defensive Driving,’” I read to Ivy.
“Always drive defensively,” William T. agrees. “That is rule number one. Drive as if the other person is crazy. Or drunk. Expect the unexpected.”
“What are you, the peanut gallery? I’m not reading this to you, William T. Go back to your sandpipers.”
“I’m finished with sandpipers. On to pewees and tyrannulets, drab flycatchers that perch upright.”
“‘Almost all drivers consider themselves good drivers,’” I read aloud.
“But when you come right down to it, Younger, most of them are piss-poor drivers.”
“‘To avoid making mistakes yourself or being involved in a traffic crash because of someone else’s mistake, learn to drive defensively.’”
“Didn’t I tell you? Rule number one.”
“No, you didn’t tell me. The manual told me. ‘The defensive driving rules are simple. Be prepared and look ahead. Maintain the proper speed. Signal before turning or changing lanes. Allow yourself space. Wear your seat belt. Do not drive if you are very tired, are on medication, or have been drinking alcoholic beverages. And finally, keep your vehicle in good operating condition.’”
“‘Keep your vehicle in good operating condition,’” William T. repeats. “Excellent advice.”
Excellent advice? William T.’s own truck is a mess. The passenger door doesn’t open; the heat doesn’t work; the horn mews; and even after you fill it up, the gas registers perpetually empty. I give him a look. He shrugs.
“Do as I say, not as I do, Younger. Who the hell’s perfect? Not me.”
Not me either.
“The hell with the driver’s manual.”
“Younger, did I just hear you curse?”
“No. I would never curse.”
“Younger, are you being sarcastic with me?”
“No. I would never be sarcastic with you, William T. Nor would I be acerbic or mordant.”
“Mordant? What the hell does mordant mean?”
“I’ll tell you what mordant means if you tell me what the hell we’re doing here, William T.,” I say. “What the hell are we doing here with Ivy? In thirty years, will we still be here?”
“I hope so,” William T. says. “I hope that thirty years hence, I will be sitting in the back seat of a car in good operating condition that my Younger will be driving defensively, and my Elder will be sitting up front next to her, and we’re looking back on this time and shaking our heads that we survived it all. That’s what I hope.”
That’s the kind of thing that, once in a while when you least expect it, William T. says.
“Driving is easy, Younger, and so is driving stick,” William T. says. “All you have to do is think like a truck.”
We’re sitting in the truck in the parking lot of the Rosewood Convalescent Home. We’ve said goodbye to Ivy and Angel. William T. wants me to practice my driving. Now.
“It’s not possible to think like a truck,” I say. “Trucks don’t think. Trucks are not sentient beings.”
“Sentient? What the hell does that mean?”
“Look it up.”
“You’re a tough customer, Younger.”
“Not when it comes to driving.”
If trucks were sentient beings, they would want to move. That’s what wheels are for. That’s what a gas pedal is for, to urge it forward; that’s what windows are for, to open on a summer day so that the summer wind can blow clean and wild through a truck moving fast and far.
“Think like a truck anyway,” William T. says. “Think like a truck would think if a truck could think.”
“How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” I chant.
“Don’t change the subject. To live in this world you must know how to drive, Younger. Let me give you a lesson.”
“No.”
“Because I could, you know. I’m a damn fine teacher.”
“No.”
“I taught my son to drive,” he says. “By the book, too. Hands at ten and two, seat belt fastened at all times.”
William T. hardly ever mentions his son. I look at him, but he doesn’t look back at me.
To live in this world you must know how to drive.
After dinner, spaghetti that I make for my mother and me, I walk out to the end of the driveway, where the Datsun is parked. The driver’s manual lies open on the seat next to me.
What should you do if you hear a siren nearby but cannot see where the emergency vehicle is? How far before a turn must you signal? When preparing for a right turn, should you stay as close to the center of the lane as possible? Where should you position your vehicle when preparing to make a left turn from a two-way roadway onto a one-way roadway?
Every time I try to advance, the truck stalls on me. How can I blame it? The screech and whine of tortured metal are almost too much for me too. Easy on the gas; let up slowly on the clutch — both actions simultaneously.
William T. has drilled that mantra into me, but I still can’t get it right. Every time my right foot starts to push gently on the gas pedal, my left foot comes up too fast on the clutch. And every time I actually get going and need to upshift, my right hand shoves the stick too fast, before the clutch is “fully engaged.”
Not good.
None of it good.
After a while, the truck has jerked across the road right into the corn field itself. The hell with it. I sit in the truck, both of us beings — one sentient, one not — in the field of young corn, soft green leaves caressing each other in the breeze. If at first you don’t succeed. My right hand clutches the top of the gearshift. If each finger clenches as tight as it can possibly clench, then that will be the focus of my concentration, and I can resist shoving up on the knob too soon, before the clutch is fully engaged. That is my plan.
Right?
Wrong.
Before the accident, my sister’s hands were always in motion. Like birds flying. Words came more easily for her when her hands were moving. The phone would ring for Ivy, and she’d start talking, holding the phone like an ordinary person. Then she would shift the phone to the crook of her neck, between her jaw and her shoulder. When her hands were free to fly, she relaxed. She would wander from room to room talking, hands flying.
Think like a truck? Trucks don’t think. Trucks move. Trucks slide. A light blue truck slid toward me and my sister.
A long time ago, in the haymow, Ivy and I were playing truth or dare with Joe and Tom. Ivy lost and Joe gave her a dare. Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough for Ivy.
“You call that a dare?” she said to Joe. “I sneer at thee.”
“Okay,” Joe said. “Then go stand in the window.”
She hesitated. Ivy hated heights. We all knew it, but would she admit to it? No. Beyond us the paneless window gave onto the hill where the blackberries grew. The paneless window was more like a door. It began at the floor of the barn. It had been open as long as I could remember, a sheer drop to the hill below, with its blackberry canes and their thorns, and the rocks that surround the springhouse. Nothing to break your fall.
“Go on now, then,” Joe said. “Stand in the window for ten seconds. I’ll time you.”
“What are you, man or mouse?” Ivy said. “More.”
/> “More?”
“More. Give me your best shot.”
In the darkness, Ivy and Joe looked at each other. My sister Ivy with her one fear: heights. Afraid to climb higher than a six-bale-high fort, afraid to swing on the swings at school, afraid of stairs without railings, the bald top of Bald Mountain. Every time I think of that night, that night in the haymow, it seems darker. I watched Ivy the way you would watch a stranger in the darkness. She was no longer a person with outlines and boundaries. She was only a being, a being wary of heights.
“Swing on the rope swing, then,” Joe said to Ivy.
That was something she’d never done. The rope swing, a thick braided rope hung from the highest rafter, was my delight. I loved it, its freedom, the swish of the air on my face, my closed eyes as I leaped from the tallest stack of hay bales and swung, and swung, and swung, a human pendulum, until the rope slowed and I dropped from it onto the pile of hay. I love height. Mountains. Tall buildings, the way they rise straight from the solid earth, laddering themselves skyward as if trying to touch heaven, whatever heaven might be.
“Grab on to the rope swing,” Joe said, “and swing right on out that window. Let’s see you do it.”
Ivy was silent.
“Time’s a-wasting,” Joe said.
Ivy stood there, a presence in the darkness. Beyond the small circle of the four of us, the paneless window was a rectangle of indigo in which stars were beginning to appear.
“Afraid?”
I reached out in the darkness to find my sister. I knew how much she hated heights.
“Ivy, you don’t have to,” I said.
She turned to me in the darkness.
“Ivy,” Joe said. “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”
That was years ago. That was before Joe and Ivy were boyfriend and girlfriend, but long after the time when my mother stayed in bed, the time when William T. started making scrambled eggs for us and checking on us, the time when we were still children.
I sit in the truck and gaze out the windshield with its shivery line where a rock flung up from the pavement hit it. Think like a truck. The corn field is silent. Patient. The paneless window glimmers in my mind. Joe Miller teases my sister about being afraid. The waters are rising within me and want out. Out. Out.
Out of the truck. Dusk has gathered over the Sterns Valley. I start walking up 274 toward Remsen, and Gray’s Automotive, and Joe Miller, Joe Miller who loves my sister.
By the time I get to Gray’s, it’s closed, but I tap on the window until Joe looks up from stocking the candy counter and comes around and shoves open the door for me. Something I want to say to Joe Miller, although now that I’m here, I don’t know what it is.
“She’s not officially brain-dead,” I say. “She still has a respiratory drive.”
Joe says nothing. The last of the sun plays through the smeary windows, sinking fast.
“A slight one,” I say.
They turned the ventilator off and waited.
Waited.
Waited.
Waited.
And then she tried to breathe.
My mother, my thin, nervous, finger-tapping mother, carried my sister inside her for nine months and then pushed her into the world. My mother who spends her days righting bottles, bringing order to disorder in a twelve-foot-square patch of the Utica Club Brewery. Who cried to the doctor that she could not lose her daughter.
“They should’ve let her die,” he says.
Joe stands behind the counter, giving me that look. I had thought that walking to Gray’s Automotive, five miles north, would calm the waters. But no.
Ivy and Joe were moving water, and they moved together, and their bodies flowed toward each other, and they didn’t stop to think, they didn’t stop themselves, they wanted to move and move together, and they did. And Ivy came home late on summer nights and lay in her bed and fell into her easy sleep, her soft breath rising and mingling with the soft summer air, and I in my bed on the other side of the room was not free, was not part of the world the way she was, the way she always was. She was the Sterns Gorge, rushing and tumbling, dark shallow water in a hurry, and I am Hinckley Reservoir, contained and still.
Once there was a night when I watched Joe Miller bend over Ivy’s foot. It was another night in the hay barn, and Joe was teaching Ivy and me how to drink from a beer bottle like a guy. We were sixteen and seventeen.
“You don’t want to drink like a girl,” Joe said. “A girl tips her whole head up.”
He demonstrated. So? What was wrong with tipping your whole head up?
“You want to drink like a guy,” he said. “Watch.”
He tipped the bottle up while his head stayed put. One tan hand tilted the bottle, and the beer flowed steadily into his mouth. I watched him swallow. I watched Ivy watch him swallow. That’s the thing about Millers. You can’t not watch them, watch their bodies, watch their muscles and bone as they move their way through the world.
“Try it.”
He passed the bottle to me.
“No, you’re still tipping your head. It’s the bottle you want to tip, not your head. Let Ivy try.”
I passed the bottle to Ivy.
“Good.”
Ivy took another swig and smiled at him. Joe smiled back the way he smiles — only one side of his mouth goes up. I watched her watch him, and I watched him watch her back. He bent his head and then he picked up her foot. Her bare foot with the purple toenail polish she used to brush on. Every Sunday night: off with the old, on with the new. His fingers circled her foot and he held it in both his cupped hands, as if her tan bare foot with its chipped purple toenail polish were something beloved.
After the accident, Joe Miller went crazy. Crazier than the Miller boys go is where Joe went. I remember looking up from the green counter in the kitchen where I was making coffee for my mother and there was Joe, standing on the porch, looking in at me through the window in the door. It was early morning. It had been only three days. They had just done the tests.
He pushed open the door and came in and stood on the boot mat. Waiting. As if his body wanted to be on to its next movement but he must first wait for it to finish this one.
Joe looked at me. The kind of look a muskrat caught in a trap might have. Looking around at the trees and the grass and the creek, everywhere he wanted to be, and nowhere he could run to — and when he looked down for some relief from seeing all the places he couldn’t go, all the places he had taken for granted, there was the steel trap on his leg. You could see why the muskrat would want to chew his leg off.
Joe Miller would chew his leg off.
“How is she?”
He was waiting in the way that he waits, which is all muscles tensed, all muscles ready to move. He looked at me across the kitchen and didn’t blink. He waited. I stood there. For three days I had been sitting by my sister’s bed. I had been holding her hand; I had been smoothing her hair back from her forehead, the part that wasn’t covered with the bandage.
How is she?
Joe and Ivy had been together three years.
I shook my head. And then Joe Miller was gone, out the door and into his truck, body moving into the motion it longed for.
The bricks of Sterns High School are warm against my back. It’s almost the end of the last day of school. Almost time to go home. Almost time for William T. to pick me up. Almost time to drive down to Ivy’s room, where I will read to Ivy from the driver’s manual. I pull my knees up and clasp my arms around them. And the scream rises within me, electricity prickling up and down my arms and legs, stabbing my heart with its tiny exclamation points. How did I get here? How did it happen that time picked my sister and me up last March, and stopped for a while, and then set me down again, here in June, just me, Rose alone?
To live in this world you must drive. But I don’t drive.
Down at the Rosewood Convalescent Home, a ventilator pushes air into my sister’s lungs: wishhh, wishhh, wishhh.
&
nbsp; “They should’ve let her die,” Joe Miller said. “They should’ve let her go.”
Sometimes I can feel it all, all the hurt of the world balled up inside me. And when it comes over me like this, I am my mother hunched over her potholders; I am Joe Miller, who would do anything; I am Chase Miller, who never found his way home from Vietnam; I am William T., who lost his son; I am a tiny untouchable garden; I am a girl hovering over herself down on the rocks of the gorge with the boys; I am a ball of girl held tight, clenched, and the water is rising within, overflowing. Nowhere to go, nowhere to spill to, no river to tumble down, no ocean to disappear into —
A flutter of white drifts up into the sky. The fifth graders down the hill in Sterns Elementary are releasing their balloons. Balloons with notes inside them, bound for wherever they will end up, in hopes that someone, somewhere, will wake one morning a few weeks hence to see a balloon drifting downward. The balloon will come gradually to rest on the windowsill of that someone, that foreign someone who will release the tired old air from the tired old balloon. Rest, balloon, you must be worn out from your journey. What have we here, the foreign someone might think in her foreign language, and who might it be from?
Did the mother of the baby in his rush basket in Pompeii leave a note? Did she pause? Jot a few words in Latin for someone she loved to find later?
The white balloons tremble into the sky, higher and higher. At first they cluster together. Then the wind catches one, and then another, and off they go.
That night in the haymow, Joe Miller urged Ivy on.
“What are you, chicken? What are you, afraid?”
She jutted her chin out at him. This was years ago, when we were younger, when Ivy and Joe had yet to know what they came to know about each other, and about themselves together. Before I learned about the Higgs boson, and Pompeii, and the town of Hinckley, and dark matter. Outside the paneless window, the sky was nearly purple, a bruised plum. And the moon hung high and white.
“Don’t be a jerk!” I said to Joe. “She could break her leg if she fell!”
“Ivy,” Joe Miller said. “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”
And then she was running, and Joe was up and tossing the rope of the rope swing to her, and then she was swinging. She didn’t have to, but she did. How different Joe Miller and I were. How different Ivy and I were. How different, how different, how unfair, how unfair.
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