by Dan Chaon
I sat there for a long time, looking at the trees outside the window then down at the rows of photographs in the book. For that night, anyway, everything was still in order.
ACCIDENTS
Charlie got his first car while his mother was still in the clinic. If it hadn’t been for that car, he was sure that the dread of her eventual return would have driven him crazy. He might have just locked himself up in his room and never opened the door.
But driving was like a fever. After school, he would leave St. Bonaventure in a rush, passing trailer courts and truck stops that were clustered on the edge of town, pushing past each changing speed zone sign, out toward the country. Everything took on a kind of jittery excitement—the skittish horses along the fence, nipping each other playfully; the sudden yellow green of the ditches and the shimmering green rows of winter wheat; even the ghostlike, uneasy stares of white-faced Hereford cattle. His father’s farm was about seven miles west of town, and by the time Charlie was out on the highway, he would have to keep glancing down at the speedometer, and, finding himself going seventy, seventy-five, eighty-five, slow with effort back down to fifty-five. While he was driving, all those thoughts about his crazy mother in the clinic could be brushed over while Charlie concentrated on enjoying the speed and his own vague recklessness, racing until the landscape blurred around him.
His red Mustang was a wreck. There was a spidery-thin crack that ran the length of the windshield. Shallow valleys of dents sloped their way across its body. The gas cap was missing, left in one of a dozen possible gas stations and never retrieved. He had been in several small accidents with his car in the four months that he had had his driver’s license. He’d bumped into a lamppost and knocked it over, and quite a few times he’d backed into other automobiles. He could remember his father’s icy, understanding voice as he stood trembling into the pay phone after he had missed the entrance to an alleyway and hit the side of a building. His father had pulled up in front of the courthouse after Charlie had filled out the accident report. Charlie had run out and got in on the passenger side. When he remembered this, Charlie felt almost sick—the way his father just glared, not saying a word all that drive home. His father had turned up the radio, and humming, looking straight ahead, had pretended his son did not exist.
On the day that his mother was to come home from the clinic, Charlie had another small accident.
He was driving home as fast as he could, having succeeded in putting any thoughts of his mother out of his mind—it was the first genuinely beautiful spring day, and the smell of the air, the taste of it, had Charlie quivering. It felt as if a storm were coming. It brought back fond memories of other summers, memories of early childhood. He could remember watching the combines move across the long stretches of yellowed wheat as he stood along the dirt road by the mailbox, waiting for his father to come and pick him up, to take him in the truck or the cab of the combine. He remembered running a few steps, waving his arms over his head as his father rushed past him in the pickup, pulling a plume of dust around him. In the distance, he could see thunderclouds gathering.
Everything was being drawn into sharp vertical and horizontal lines: the cut wheat met the uncut; the road met the field; the horizon met the sky.
Then the sky grew dark. Great blue-black clouds rose like smoke, up out of sight. The thunder boomed once. A breeze rushed across the stillness with a drawn-out hiss. The wheat rippled, seemed to fatten. The combines looked as if they were rising, roaring, like sea monsters from a yellow water. Far away, Charlie remembered seeing what looked like a gauzy curtain billowing toward him; but before he could move, the hard rain and then the hail began hitting him—and then he was running, covering his head at first but then just holding his head up and squinting his eyes, laughing—there he was, he could remember the feeling, out there alone, the world moving fast, almost out of control.
It was disappointing, he recalled, that the hailstorm passed as quickly as it had arrived. Everything in the landscape was left quiet and noncommittal, even more so than it had been before.
What he had forgotten, while he was thinking of all this, was that his father’s car was parked at the end of the long driveway. When he looked up again, he realized too late that he was going very fast—he stepped on the brake and heard an involuntary cry come from his mouth as the car impacted on the rear fender of his father’s Buick, making a whumph sound that seemed horribly loud despite the fact that he was sure that he didn’t hit it that hard. For a moment, it seemed to him that he was outside his car, looking in, for he clearly saw an image of himself tipping forward and then lightly back, like a dancer.
But the worst part, the most dreadful thing, was that his father was coming out of the barn just as it happened. He could hear, even as he stepped on the brake, his father yelling: stop, Stop, STOP, STOP!
Charlie’s mouth hung open, and he sucked in breath. He tried to put the car in reverse, and then he realized the car had stalled. He turned the key and heard a grinding sound.
“This is the last time you ever sit behind a wheel,” he heard a voice say. He looked up and was startled when he saw his father peering through the window at him. He nearly fell out as his father yanked the door open.
“Just what are you trying to prove?” his father breathed.
“Nothing,” Charlie said. Already he was probing his mind for an excuse. “Dad, I didn’t even see the car there, I don’t know, I think there’s something wrong with the brakes because I really wasn’t going that fast, and I was trying to stop.”
“Back it up,” his father said, his voice hushed with rage. Charlie turned the key several times and got only a grinding sound. I’ve broken it, he thought. His father scowled in at him. “I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” Charlie said, shaking his head at his father. Then he noticed that the car was still in reverse. He pushed the gear stick back to park, smiling and trembling and stuttering: “Oh . . . uh . . . hm . . .” He started the car and slammed into reverse. The quickness with which the car sped backwards, toward the ditch, surprised him. He slammed on the brakes again, flushing when his father called after him: “How in the hell did you get your driver’s license?”
His father stared down at the Buick’s fender, looking from it to Charlie as if Charlie would suddenly attack it once again. Charlie ambled cautiously toward him, nodding his head as if to shake excuses out of it: “I’m sure it’s okay. It was just a little tap, you know, I guess I wasn’t watching, you know, I must’ve just turned my head for a minute . . . .”
“Here’s the scratch,” his father said.
“I’ll pay for it,” Charlie said. “I’ll pay to have it fixed.” He looked eagerly at his father and received a cool smile. His father’s calm withered him.
“Pay with what?” his father asked politely. “With your good looks?”
“I’ll get a job!”
“Oh, really,” his father said. He took a step toward Charlie, showing his teeth. “And how do you plan to get to this ‘job’?”
“In my car,” Charlie said lamely.
“Charlie-O,” his father said, “I wouldn’t trust you with a tricycle, let alone an automobile!”
The excuses started to slip out of his mouth again, uncontrollably. “Dad,” he said, “I was distracted. Just a minute. It could happen to anyone.”
“But it always seems to happen to you,” his father said. “Now I wonder what could have distracted you? The scenery, maybe?”
“I was thinking,” Charlie said, and then a sudden flash of brilliance came to him. “I was thinking about Mom, and her coming home and all.”
It was almost a pleasure to watch the smile on his father’s face droop. “Oh,” his father said.
Eventually, the damage evaluated, his father went back into the house. As the screen door closed, Charlie had the sinking realization that another lane of communication between his father and him had been permanently closed.
He stood for a moment, staring out at the interstate that divided the
ir property. Sometimes, it was hard to imagine the world beyond except as lines upon lines, the rim of sky underlining the flat stretch of horizon. He could stand at one point, and out there in some other place was another point where he could be standing, and in between those two points was an infinity of points which were places he might have been. So why was this place, out of a million possible choices, where he had to be? Some days, he wished he was going away, not driving off to school again, but out onto the interstate, headed off toward one of those points, or all of them.
Nothing ever changed. There was something maddening, hopeless in the sameness—the miles of flat horizon, the endless drift of his father away from him. Every time, it seemed, that there was a chance for them to finally be close, another door would shut, and his father would be as far away as ever.
And then there was his mother. She would never change. And it wasn’t even that she was crazy—there was something unpredictable about real crazy people. But with her it was just that determined glaze, tracing over the same routines until they didn’t mean anything to anyone. How many times did she think she could run off to the Greyhound depot with her grocery bag full of hastily packed clothes and expect them to go trailing after her? She would never really get on the bus. He could remember how she kept calling and calling, one night when she had left, his father had gone out searching for her, and Charlie was alone in the house. Every time he picked up the phone, it was that nasal, uninflected, insistent voice: “You’d better say what you have to say to me now, because you’ll never have another chance.” He would just let the phone fall back onto its receiver. Then it would ring again, and after a while he would know it was her even before she opened her mouth. He’d hang up before she said a word. When he woke up the next day, there she was, wearing the same clothes she’d had on the night before, smoking cigarettes and letting the ash grow so long that it dropped off and lay like a caterpillar on the table, on the rug, on the stove. It was that look of dull triumph—as if she expected him to run and catch her in his arms, as if she expected him to be happy—that made him hate her.
The second time she came back from the clinic, she told them never again. “Oh, I’ll never let that happen again,” she said.
And now she was going to be home again. But he could still remember that puckered smile as she told him, mornings before school, that he better take a good look at her because she wouldn’t be there when he got back. She was always smiling, as if she were about to get some kind of well-deserved revenge, holding her long-ashed cigarette between her fingers like a movie star with a long cigarette holder. So what could he say to her now? “Of course I still love you,” he would tell her. But the real thought was the one that kept turning over and over in his mind: “You’ll never change. You’ll never be any different.”
Trust, Charlie thought, watching his tennis shoe toe the gravel. We should have never taken her back. No more chances. He watched as cars rushed by on the interstate, passing through their plot of land, becoming dots in the distance. I wish I were leaving, Charlie thought, I wish I were going somewhere, just like them. Then he turned and went into the house.
“Charlie-O,” his father said as he came into the kitchen. “What do you want for supper?”
“I don’t care,” Charlie told him.
“Hamburgers okay, Charlie-O?” he asked.
“Fine.” His father always called him Charlie-O or some other nickname. There were dozens of them—Chip, Chas, Charles, Broadsides (after he started wrecking his car), Chally, Char, names that no one but his father called him. Sometimes Charlie thought it was because his father really wished that he were a different person; by calling him by a different name, he could somehow change Charlie himself. He knew well that his father tired quickly of people. His father had lots of friends, and they would come over almost every weekend for beers and cards, but the friends were always different. It was mysterious that he had remained so constant toward Charlie’s mother.
“You don’t know anything about me,” Charlie had once said, when his father, trying to get Charlie to mow the lawn, had gone into a calm, smiling tirade about how irresponsible Charlie was.
“I know all I need to know,” his father had responded. That had stuck with him, as if it were an accusation, proof that his father had found that bland sameness in Charlie himself.
“Dinner’s ready,” his father said, and Charlie looked up.
The argument came easily during dinner, in between small talk about the weather and football. “How many minutes do you give her before we have to ship her off again,” Charlie asked his father. One of those calm discussions ensued; Charlie was a smart-mouth, his father told him, it never failed, he was always disrespectful and he should take a moment to be thankful for what he had. Count your blessings, his father advised, and Charlie, by this time so worked up that he wasn’t even afraid of his father or worried that his father would suddenly quit loving him, looked into his father’s face and counted each blessing: “Zero,” he said. Then he got up and walked out.
He sat in his car, with the doors locked, and the exhilaration of telling his father what he thought wore off quickly. He began to wish that his father would come outside and say, “Charlie-O please come back inside, let’s talk this through, please, Charlie,” but he was becoming more and more sure that his father wouldn’t come outside at all. In fact, he was beginning to think that his father didn’t care whether he came in or not. He felt as if he might start crying.
Why did you do that? he kept asking himself. So often, so often, he just kept his mouth shut; all those wrecks, with their subsequent discussions in which his father told him over and over: “You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, Charlie-O,” or “I think you are the most irresponsible person I have ever known.” Charlie had been quiet, penitent. “I’m sorry, Dad,” he kept saying. “It won’t happen again.”
Charlie looked out the windshield. He could see the dark shape of the barn, hunched indifferently against the sky, as the last orange glow of sun disappeared behind it. He could see the blinking lights of an airplane moving across the surface of the sky, and below it, the red taillights of autos passing in the distance. It’s her, Charlie thought. If it hadn’t been for her coming back, I wouldn’t have gotten so worked up, I wouldn’t have said those things. I wasn’t yelling at him, I was yelling at her. Oh, Dad, you’ve got to believe me, he thought, I won’t be a smart aleck anymore. It’s her. Don’t you understand that you can’t trust her?
He pictured his mother’s face in his mind. I hate you, he thought, but the image kept smiling at him, and he felt suddenly very sad. He could remember a time when they used to be close. When he was little, they would spend hours alone together—she would read to him, or they would stay up late watching scary movies, her laughing suddenly at the climax, so he wouldn’t be frightened. Even after her first time at the clinic, they remained close. When she would ride over for her weekly visits with the doctor, he would go with her, to keep her company on the drive. But after the second time, they had drifted apart. I love you so much, she would say, even though you really couldn’t believe anything she said. After an argument, she would go to him with the same stories: “So and so is talking about me behind my back, this person is rude to me for no reason, that person is sure acting funny lately. But you wait. I won’t be around much longer, and they’ll be sorry.” Then she would stroke his hair. “You are my very special one,” she would say, as if she were talking to herself. He was irritated by the way she still sometimes touched him as she would a baby. “You’re just like the rest of them, like all of them,” she yelled at him once, when he didn’t feel like going to the doctor and waiting in the waiting room all afternoon. He had ridden away on his bike, leaving her standing in the driveway, those words “all of them” lingering as he pedaled past the trees and the mailbox, to the road.
Charlie got out of the car and stood for a moment, regarding the yard and the house, lost in the twilight shadows that reached across t
he grass, creeping along the circle of light made by the porch lamp. The living room was lit with the pale blue light of the television. He could see his father in his easy chair, staring toward the television’s dim glow.
Charlie raised his head and looked out toward the elms that lined the driveway. The rustle of branches and leaves mixed in a sudden gust of wind with the rattle of paper skittering along the sidewalk. A storm is coming, Charlie thought. Then all the sounds stopped, as if they had been startled. In the distance, he could hear a car approaching. The flicker of headlights moved briefly through the trees, and Charlie shrank up close to the house, out of sight.
The headlights swept against the side of the barn, two circles of light that pinned the shadows of trees and weeds starkly against the surface of the barn. He glanced around the corner and saw that it was his mother’s car. He heard the motor die, and then the headlights went out. He heard his mother’s footsteps on the gravel. The screen door banged.
Charlie hurried around the side of the building, stopping short at the edge of the kitchen window. He could hear their voices through the glass, and he peered nervously over the rim of the windowsill. Maybe they’re talking about me, he thought. He was surprised suddenly by a flash of lightning in the distance.
His parents were embracing. His mother was kissing his father, and then his father was telling her how glad he was that she was back, how things were going to be better from now on.
Outside, the rain appeared and beat on the windows. Charlie wasn’t sure why he had suddenly turned and run to his car, or why he had roared the engine and driven slowly down the road to the mailbox and then out onto the highway. There had been a sudden rush inside him—he had to get away, just to clear his head. Maybe this would show them, he thought. Why aren’t they following me? he wondered.
At first, just a few drops of rain hit the windshield at random points, but soon it was coming down faster and faster, until it was not separate drops but a single sheet of water across the window. The wipers thrust apart, endlessly sweeping back the water, but it just kept coming. He felt like the rain was burying him. He couldn’t see. The wipers were fluttering like big black wings, and he couldn’t see anything but the dark beyond the hazy curtain of rain, no road, no trees. Even the headlights only illuminated the tangled lines of falling rain. There was a static hiss around him that grew louder and louder—Charlie felt first a bump, and then the slow tilt as the car began to spin. It was almost an afterthought, realizing that he’d gone off the road. And then he just let it go, a slow, inevitable release as if into a dream. He closed his eyes lightly, feeling the car lift and him with it, rising, nothing outside but darkness. There he was, he knew the feeling, out there alone, the world spinning around him, almost as if it wasn’t there, as if it had blurred and disappeared.
