Drives Like a Dream

by Porter Shreve

But Jessica couldn't erase the picture of Norm sleeping in her mother's bed, clearing out all the closets in the house, tossing clothes, mementos, photographs into boxes and stuffing them in the attic to make room for his things. He'd move in his oversized coats and furniture, clear out Jessica's room to set up his own private office.

  By the time she brought this up with Davy, he was already into his third glass of Pinot Noir and asking if next time he visited they could go out to wine country. "I could get used to these Oregon wines," he said. For the rest of the evening he continued to shut down, as if preparing himself for what he knew he'd have to face tomorrow, back in Chicago.

  After Davy left, Jessica felt at a loss, as though she'd missed out on a chance to really talk to her brother. When she called home, Lydia reported that Norm had bought planters for the front walk, repaired the backyard fence, and was priming all the downstairs rooms to repaint. She e-mailed news of other projects, too: replacement pipes for the shower, a new transmission for the washing machine, repairs and new fixtures, and soon it occurred to Jessica that in fact Norm was not moving in. Worse than that. He was sprucing up the house to sell. He'd fix it up, put it on the market, then somehow take the equity and run. Jessica had seen stories like this on the six o'clock news. Sure, the victims were usually grannies, but the rest of the warning signs were all there: the charismatic seducer, the hasty affair, the lonely, smitten divorcée.

  Then one morning, less than a week after Davy had gone back to Chicago, Lydia left a message on Jessica's answering machine: "Things have been so hectic here, I almost forgot to tell you—Norm wants to elope."

  Jessica had just returned from her morning walk with Bedlam, but when she tried to call back, telling herself, Don't panic, Lydia wasn't home.

  A minute later she tried again. No answer. She kept hitting redial until finally she left a message. "I'd love to hear from you." She kept her voice at an even pitch. But Lydia hadn't called back by the time Jessica had to leave for work.

  All through her slow Sunday shift stocking shelves and bagging groceries at Oasis, she worried. She had left messages for Davy and Ivan. On break, she tried her mother's new cell number, but a phone company recording said the person she was trying to reach was "out of the Michitel calling area." She thought of her father, who used to work for Michitel, even considered ringing him in Arizona. What did it mean exactly that she was "out of the calling area"? Had Lydia left town? Had they eloped already?

  When Jessica returned to her apartment at seven o'clock that evening, her mother still hadn't called. It wasn't like her to go anywhere without telling one of the kids. Ivan hadn't heard from her either, but he was taking it all in stride. "On her message she said Norm wants to elope," he reassured her. "That doesn't mean they ran off together. She'd never do that, Jess."

  "Then where is she? It's past ten o'clock Detroit time. She's never out this late."

  "Maybe Norm's using a power sander on the kitchen walls and they can't hear the phone."

  "I've been calling pretty much on the hour."

  "Stop getting hysterical."

  But nothing Ivan said made Jessica feel any better. And Davy was no more helpful. They're out to dinner. A movie. She hardly knows how to work a cellphone. You know how it is when you fall hard for someone—you forget about everything else.

  "We're talking about Mom here. This is the woman who would rush us to the emergency room at the slightest fever, who made us call from parties to say we'd arrived safely. She never takes chances."

  "Our mother has not eloped," Davy said. "And she hasn't been abducted, either."

  But by nine o'clock—midnight in Detroit—Jessica was not so sure, and she was exasperated with her brothers for taking it all in stride. After walking Bedlam around campus, she furiously cleaned her apartment, imagining the worst. This grifter had taken all he'd wanted from her mother and was now looking for a way to get rid of her. Perhaps he'd lured her over the border and the next time the phone rang it would be the Ontario police saying they'd found a station wagon registered to a Lydia Modine. Or maybe Norm himself would call from a pay phone saying he wanted ransom money within twenty-four hours. But Jessica couldn't pay ransom, nor could her brothers. Where would Norm get the idea to kidnap their mother, anyway? What, exactly, did he want from her? She thought of the vast wilderness of Canada with so many places to hide a body, thought of her mother leaving home to "elope," unaware of what was coming. Sitting on the deck looking up at the ash gray sky, Jessica wished, for the first time since she'd moved to Oregon, that she weren't twenty-five hundred miles away.

  At ten o'clock, she picked up the phone and dialed Huntington Woods 911.

  Twenty minutes later, Lydia finally called. "What exactly were you thinking, Jessica? I'm in my nightgown, for Chrissake!"

  "Why didn't you return my messages?"

  "I didn't check the machine. Do you know what it's like to see the police at your door at one A.M.?"

  "We were worried about you."

  "You worried about me? What do you think went through my mind when I opened that door? Don't you ever scare me like that again!"

  "Look, I've been trying you all day."

  "Well, I was out. We had errands."

  "Do you realize you left a message this morning and said you were eloping?"

  "I didn't say that." She lowered her voice, as if she didn't want Norm to hear. "There's been talk, but no plans have been finalized. Is that what this is about?"

  "I'll tell you what it's about, Mom. You're not yourself. This guy is taking over your life. Have you ever considered that you're moving too fast?"

  "Is this your concern?"

  "One day you're the smart, sensible mother I've always known and the next you're throwing yourself at the feet of an Internet loiterer. Yes, it's my concern."

  "I don't have to listen to this. You're way out of line."

  "I just want to know what's going on. Are you eloping? Are you selling the house?" Jessica could hear the sound of rustling sheets on the other end of the line. She pictured a big ape of a man sprawled across the mattress where her father used to sleep. He'd reach for the phone, urging her mother to hang it up and come back to bed.

  "Not right now, Jessica. We'll have to talk tomorrow." Lydia's voice lowered to a whisper.

  "Fine," Jessica snapped, but when she hung up she did not feel fine. Her relief that her mother was safe quickly gave way to the steady dread she'd had ever since Norm stepped foot in the house.

  That night she slept fitfully. In the morning she waited for the fog to burn off, but the clouds only settled down further over the western ridgeline. The smell of burnt pulp from the Weyerhaeuser mill seemed particularly sharp in the dewy air. She walked down to the Buzz Café, logged on to the Internet, and searched for discount airfares.

  She wasn't sure how long it would take to figure what Norm was up to and sort things out with her mother. The ticket, costing more than she could afford, was a one-way flight leaving in a week and a half, the last Friday in June.

  She had planned to tell Steve, her hippie-techie manager at Oasis, that her mom was sick with an undiagnosed stomach ailment. In fact, Lydia had sent the kids an e-mail just a few days ago reporting that at long last the doctor had given her a clean bill of health. But sitting down in Steve's office, Jessica could tell that he wouldn't mind her absence. The summer had been slow, and he'd been in a good mood lately. So, she told him the truth. She explained how her mother had been acting freakish, and said she had to go home to see what was up.

  "Sounds like she has symptoms of early onset Alzheimer's," Steve said. "Inattention, shift in personality. She could be right at the front of the curve." Alzheimer's was like a life in reverse, he explained, a speeded-up backward fall that ended with a literal second infancy, the patient helpless, empty of thoughts, with no control over her functions. "It's why I got into homeotherapy. If it happens to me, I can self-prescribe." He listed the anti-inflammatory drugs and new treatments on the market when J
essica interrupted him: "Thanks, but I don't think my mom has Alzheimer's."

  But riding the bus back to her apartment, Jessica allowed that it might be possible, that anything was possible at this point. She realized that the longer she went without seeing her mother, the more her imagination would look for new terrors. She couldn't get home soon enough.

  Her excuse when she e-mailed Lydia to tell her the plan was that she wanted to sort through her things, just in case her mother decided to sell the house. At the current pace, she thought, 309 Franklin would end up on the market in a matter of days.

  "Great!" Lydia had replied. "We've been sorting through your stuff anyway. Norm thought it would be a good idea if we had a yard sale. But you shouldn't put your life on hold," she added. "Still, I'm always glad to see you."

  What life? Jessica wondered.

  At the checkout on her last day at Oasis she finally talked to Void, whom she'd been dodging since the sea lion fiasco. He tried to apologize for that weekend—they hadn't spoken since—but Jessica brushed it off. Too little, too late. He looked regretful, told her he wished he could see her again. "I'm sure I'll catch you here or there," Jessica said. She hadn't missed Void exactly—maybe his company, anyone's company. But this pallid figure seemed even more remote to her now than Blane.

  Later that evening, she sat down at the Buzz Café and surfed the web for information about graduate schools. The most interesting programs happened to be in Norm's field of environmental planning. Here was a way to make cities and roads work with the natural world. She ordered a dozen catalogues, mostly from West Coast schools. Walking back to her apartment, she was struck with the feeling of having something of her own to look forward to.

  From a window seat of the 757, Jessica thought of Bedlam in his cage in the belly of the plane. She had asked a flight attendant to check on him during the Salt Lake City layover, and a baggage handler on the ground reported back that the dog seemed happy and hydrated. Now they were flying over the northern Midwest. "If you're on the left side of the plane you'll see the Badlands in the distance, thirty miles to the north," the captain announced. But Jessica sat on the right, where tiles of yellow and brown Nebraska plains stretched endlessly below her.

  Earlier in the week she had called Blane at the monastery to tell him about the trip, and he had gone into one of his twenty-four-hour sprees of great resolve. He said he would leave the retreat and fly to Eugene to help her get ready. He told her he loved her, had been thinking of her for months, and he claimed to have had a vision that Jessica would soon be leaving Oregon. He said he'd been uneasy. "I knew something had to be going on with you."

  Jessica had heard it all before; his predictability irritated her. It was hard to believe that she had ever wanted him back. She asked Blane if he'd be willing to take Bedlam for a while. He was his dog after all, and she worried that an oafish German shepherd-collie mix would make a poor houseguest when there was so much work to do. At first he agreed, but by the next day Blane's enthusiasm had waned, and he launched into a long complaint about the price of the plane ticket, the press of obligations at the monastery, the impracticality of it all. "They have a no-pets policy here," he said.

  She didn't have the energy to fight with him. "Don't worry about it, I'll be fine." She knew she wouldn't hear from him until the next incarnation.

  To Jessica's surprise, her mother said she didn't mind her bringing Bedlam along. They'd only had one dog growing up, a terrier named Triscuit who mysteriously vanished one day. Someone in the neighborhood swore she saw him in the zoo, so the rumor went around that he'd wandered into the polar bear's den. Afterward there was much talk about getting a new Triscuit, but Lydia always said no.

  A couple of Christmases ago, however, the kids thought enough time had passed that they could try again. They picked out a chow with a leonine head and a black tongue, but when Lydia found out about the plan she was hurt. "A dog for the lonely woman?" she said. "Something to keep me company?" Jessica decided it was just as well. She could almost hear the phone calls: the dog had cut her mother off at the knees, knocked her down, torn after a bigger dog at the park and wandered away—a foil for her self-dramatizations. "I have a better idea," Jessica had said to Davy and Ivan. "Let's get her a stuffed animal or, better yet, let's get ourselves unlisted numbers."

  But lately something had changed for Jessica. Cy's bon voyage announcement had been a turning point. Since that moment at the wedding reception it had dawned on her that she'd just lost one parent, and she ought to be good to the other who remained. Later that afternoon outside the museum in Ypsilanti, when she had seen her mother in profile, looking so pensive and alone, she had felt close to her for the first time since before college. She had thought there might be a chance, once and for all, to banish the trouble between them.

  When at last the plane descended over Lake St. Clair, where tiny sailboats angled through the wind-rippled water, Jessica looked up the shoreline for the lighthouse where her father had proposed to her mother more than thirty-five years ago. She had seen it before, but today was overcast and she could make out nothing beyond the mouth of the Detroit River and the near shore of Grosse Pointe.

  Once, on a family picnic at the lighthouse, her father had explained how the different light filters on his camera worked and why it was so important to show up at the right time of day. It was midsummer, warm and tranquil. Ivan and Davy tossed a Frisbee, while Triscuit ran himself ragged. Their mother, in a straw hat, sat up against the dunes reading a book. Jessica was still young enough then to believe what her father said that day about the nature photographer Eliot Porter, who had quit his teaching career and dedicated his life to close observation. "You just have to commit." Cy had adjusted his aperture. "The rest is easy."

  A flight attendant, an older woman with silver hair, came by making final checks. She gave Jessica a maternal smile, then continued down the aisle to her station. Jessica set her watch ahead to East Coast time and looked out the window. Below her was a series of subdivisions, white houses laid out in neat rows. She closed the window blind, shut her eyes, and waited for the plane to touch ground.

  PART THREE

  My father had not lost his romantic urgency—only the object of his affection had changed. He was in love with cars, had poured all of his restless energy into helping create what many still considered some of the finest unions of beauty and machine: the 1951 Buick LeSabre; the 1953 "Blue Flame" Corvette; the 1955 Bel Air convertible; and the 1957 Chevrolet Nomad, "the Beauty Queen of All Station Wagons."

  —From Dream Machines: My Father, General Motors, and the Golden Age of Car Design by Lydia Modine

  17

  LYDIA SAT at the kitchen table amid the paint rollers and drop cloths and waited for her daughter to come back from walking the dog. That afternoon Jessica had looked shocked when they pulled up to the house, in its half-finished state. A crew had painted the back and sides of the exterior bright yellow and touched up the white trim, but the front was still a dingy gray. Jessica couldn't believe that they had left their ladders leaning against the house. "It's an invitation for someone to climb into your bedroom window."

  "We have an alarm system," Lydia reminded her. "And Norm only left town yesterday."

  Lydia hadn't seen Norm since their disastrous afternoon together. She had planned never to see him again. But just after she'd told Jessica, now almost a month ago, that there was a new man in her life, she realized she would need to find a way to keep Norm in the picture. The day after their date she wrote him an e-mail:

  Dear Norm,

  I wanted to apologize for what happened yesterday on the People Mover. I don't know what got into me. I must be too defensive about my hometown. I guess it comes from living in a place so many people leave. The truth is, I had a nice time meeting you, and I hope you didn't take my running off too personally. I've been going through a difficult time of late. Perhaps we can try again soon.

  Yours,

  Lydia

  I
t still surprised her, how the words He's planning to move in had tumbled out. Even as she spoke she recognized there was no going back. What could she have said? Just kidding, Jess; there is no man after all. If she did that, her family would think she'd gone insane. They'd never trust her again. No, what Lydia had said was irreversible. What's more, she wasn't so sure if she even wanted to take it back.

  After sending Norm's e-mail, she took a long walk through her neighborhood. The sun had slipped through the elms and firs, and the air smelled of cut grass. She passed mothers returning home in minivans with their children and felt a creeping guilt about the plan to which, in her mind, she had already committed.

  Perhaps the words hadn't slipped out by accident—in a way she had been scheming something like this all along. That stomachache, all the chances she'd had to tell her children that it had gone away and there was nothing to worry about. But she'd kept mentioning the pain and had even spoken of doctor's appointments. She'd played that card for weeks, and had only let it go when something better came along. Now she'd laid down her new card—Norm—on the table.

  The farther Lydia walked, the more it all made sense. She would create a relationship, a whole new life. She'd call a handyman to fix the things around the house that hadn't worked in years—the ceiling fans, dimmers, jammed doorknobs, and loose gutters. Tiles would be replaced, new fixtures and fittings installed, accents added in every room. She'd have the floors stripped and stained, bring in painters to redo the interior rooms. She'd tell the kids that Norm had done most of the work himself, and when the place was ready she'd call Jessica to say that the house was about to go on the market; so if she wanted to sort through her stuff, the time was now.

  As she passed through Huntington Woods's tiny town center—police department, fire department, town hall, all quiet-she guessed just how far she'd have to go with her plan. She was sure that at least one of the kids would return to help pack up. Davy certainly, probably Ivan as well. Jessica might need some finessing, but one way or another, she believed she could bring her family home. What they needed to do was spend time together, going through boxes, laying claim to what was theirs, revisiting their family history, in the very house where they had spent the greater part of their lives. There are times, Lydia thought, when a person needed to stop everything and sort through the past. Her children would not have to wait, as she had, until their parents were no longer alive. They could come home now.