Running on Empty

by Don Aker

  His father was right. There’s always something else. Ethan reached across and put his hand on his father’s arm, squeezed it.

  Jack Palmer looked up. His voice like gravel, he said the last thing Ethan expected to hear. “Please forgive me.”

  “Your grandmother was a drunk, Ethan,” said Jack, his voice still husky although he’d managed to stop crying. “Even before Dad died, I’d find bottles in the washing machine. It was one of those old wringer models with rollers that squeezed the water out of the clothes before you hung them on the line. Dad had found it in a dump and got it working again. You’ve probably never seen one. My life was like those rollers, trying to squeeze out anything that might keep us going for one more day.”

  He’d been talking for a while now, sharing with Ethan the woman behind the myth he’d manufactured while both of them tried not to look at the clock on the wall, its second hand sweeping around and around.

  “I was the oldest. It wasn’t easy making people think everything was fine. She’d be in bed passed out half the time. When people from social services would come around, I’d tell them how she’d been up all night washing clothes she’d taken in from neighbours. But she never did that. I was the one who went around the village asking people if they’d like their laundry done. Begged them. The few who gave me theirs never knew that I was the one who washed it, hung it out to dry, folded it. They just knew I picked it up dirty and returned it clean. But the laundry helped make people think my mother was functioning like a regular person.”

  He paused, took a long breath before continuing. “I had my hands full making sure the house was clean and my brother and sister were fed. If I wasn’t home when she got the welfare cheque, she’d blow it on liquor, so I skipped school on the days the mailman delivered it. If she was out cold, I’d forge her signature and hike to Windsor and spend it all on groceries.” He shook his head. “It took me a while to learn how to put some aside for the power bill, clothes, everything else.”

  There were moments as Ethan listened that he thought his father was making it all up, giving himself something to say and Ethan something to listen to so they’d keep from going over to that nurse’s desk again. But then he’d realize that the thing his father had made up was hanging above the fireplace in their living room.

  “Of course, even if she didn’t spend it on booze, the welfare cheque was never enough. I did other jobs. Weeded gardens, chopped firewood, raked leaves, shovelled snow, anything that would bring in a few bucks. I’d hide the cash in a coffee can under the woodpile, dip into it when we needed it.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “I dreaded holidays that other kids looked forward to, like Christmas. I’d try my best to save a few dollars so I could put something for Carol and Paul under the tree.” He grunted softly. “Tree! More like a bush. If it grew in a ditch, I figured it was fair game.”

  His father stopped talking then, seemed to be picturing in his head bushes masquerading as Christmas trees. Or empty cupboards or a wringer washer with liquor bottles hidden inside. Ethan couldn’t stand the silence, needed to fill up the emergency-room waiting area with words that weren’t about Raye. “What did you do when you didn’t have enough money?” he asked.

  His father looked down. “It’s not what I did,” he said, his voice thick with disgust. “She’d walk into town and bring some guy home. Tell Carol and Paul and me to make ourselves scarce, which was easier if the weather was good. Harder when it was storming and you lived in a two-room shack. Those times, I’d get Carol and Paul to pretend we were camping and I’d string up a sheet like a tent. I’d get them under it, tell them ghost stories with lots of noises so they wouldn’t hear what was happening on the other side of the wall.”

  “They never knew?”

  “They were younger than I was, but they weren’t stupid.”

  “They never talked about any of this,” said Ethan.

  “I wouldn’t let them.”

  “Why did you …” Ethan didn’t know how to finish the question.

  “Why did I want you to think she was this amazing person?”

  Ethan nodded.

  His father looked away. “I had no one to look up to when I was a kid. It was important to me that you and your sister did.”

  Ethan noticed he’d said your sister and not Raye. Wondered if it was a conscious decision on his part, as if he were preparing himself for something.

  “I’d spent so much of my growing-up time pretending to be somebody else,” his father continued, “that I never really stopped. I was always trying to be more than who I was, more than the kid from a two-room shack whose mother whored herself for booze.”

  “But—”

  His father put up his hand. “Let me finish, Ethan. You need to hear this. And I need to say it.” He cleared his throat. “I did everything I could to escape that life—earned scholarships that helped with tuition, worked construction and took janitorial jobs for the rest. I told my university classmates that both my parents were dead.” He grimaced. “My roommate found a photo of the shack we lived in. One of my mother’s tricks had taken it. He’d brought a Polaroid camera with him and paid her extra, probably to take pictures of her naked. He took a couple shots outdoors, too, one of our house and one of my mother standing beside the sheets I’d just washed. I’d stuck both those pictures inside a dictionary. I don’t know why. It doesn’t matter. The photo of our house fell out and my roommate picked it up, asked me about it. I froze, told him it was a picture of our henhouse. He said it was the first henhouse he’d ever seen that had curtains in the windows. I tore it up the minute he wasn’t looking.” Turning away, he continued, “I should’ve torn them both up.”

  He took another deep breath. “I didn’t tell my mother when I graduated. I was afraid she might come to the ceremony.” He shrugged. “Not that she would have. She was never sober. The only thing she cared about was the cheque I’d started sending her every month. God help me, I was actually relieved when she died. I wasn’t her son any longer.”

  He stopped, buried his face in his hands so his next words were muffled. “But I was, as much as I tried to change that.”

  Looking at him, Ethan suddenly understood why his father didn’t drink: he was afraid he’d turn into the kind of person a son would rather pretend was dead. Would wish was dead.

  A moment passed, and Jack finally pulled his hands from his face, wiped his nose with a tissue Jillian handed him, cleared his throat again. “I think I went into law because it seemed like the farthest thing possible from that Hants County life I’d been hiding all those years. I thought maybe if I was somebody important, like a lawyer, it would finally be behind me.” He sighed. “Then, maybe if I was the best lawyer in the best firm, I could be happy. Or if I lived in the best part of the city, I’d be content somehow. But I wasn’t. So I thought maybe—” He stopped, his jaws clenching, and Ethan knew he was biting back another sob.

  “Maybe if he got elected.”

  Ethan glanced at Jillian, surprised by her sudden input, then turned again to his father.

  He nodded. “If people voted for me, then …” He paused. “It’s all about seeking approval. I’ve finally begun to understand that.” He looked at his fiancée, smiled wanly. “I started seeing a therapist in October, Ethan.”

  “A therapist?”

  “Jillian convinced me. Forced me, really. The day I took your savings to pay for the Volvo, she gave me a phone number. And an ultimatum.”

  Ethan looked again at his father’s fiancée, knew now that she hadn’t put her makeup on before she came to the hospital. She hadn’t taken it off, probably had driven the streets in search of him and his sister for hours. He could see lines around her eyes. It was almost morning.

  “She threatened to leave me if I didn’t,” his father said. He took another long breath. “I drove your mother away all those years ago, Ethan. I wasn’t going to do the same thing again.” He shook his head sadly. “And there was something I should have done. The
therapist gave me an assignment.”

  “Assignment?”

  “Homework, I guess you’d call it. He said I had to tell you and your sister the truth about your grandmother. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want you to know what a fraud I was.” He lowered his head, and his next words were addressed to his feet. “So instead I agreed to defend the kind of man who’d get behind the wheel of a car drunk. The kind of man who killed your mother.” His next words were barely audible. “I’m sorry, Ethan. I know I drove you to do whatever brought us all here. How you must hate me.”

  “There’s something else you don’t know, Ethan.” This from Jillian, whose voice was stronger than Ethan had ever heard it.

  “Don’t,” said Jack.

  She shook her head. “He needs to know,” and Ethan remembered the text she’d sent him. You don’t know everything.

  “What?” he asked her.

  She looked at Jack. “Don’t make me be the one to tell him.”

  He sighed, the sound ragged as if some interior part of him were separating, tearing away. “Your mother—” he began, then turned stricken eyes toward Jillian, who nodded encouragement. “Your mother was an addict, Ethan.”

  “What?”

  “Prescription drugs. It’s why I left her. I couldn’t put up with it. I wouldn’t. I loved her, but I wouldn’t go through all that again.”

  “No,” said Ethan, shaking his head. He had no memory of his mother like that.

  “She was good at hiding it. Better than most. It was when my career began to take off. You and your sister were both small and I was working eighteen-hour days. She was lonely, I know that. And overwhelmed. Who wouldn’t want something to make the days easier? It started with antidepressants.”

  “I don’t—” Ethan began, intending to say that he didn’t believe it, but what he could feel coming out was I don’t want to hear any more. Jillian placed her hand over his and squeezed. He didn’t pull away.

  “It was my fault,” said his father. “I was so focused on my work. When I finally realized what was happening, I tried to help her. Do you remember those extended visits she used to take to your grandparents’ and your Aunt Carol would come stay with you?”

  Ethan nodded.

  “Stints in rehab. She’d come home clean and promising this time would be different. But it never was.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?” whispered Ethan, his free hand tracing Beloved Mother on the cold, hard granite of his memory.

  His father stared at his feet.

  “Tell him,” Jillian said again. “He deserves to know.”

  “She—” He took a long, quaking breath. “Your mother was high the day she was killed.”

  “But the other driver—”

  “—was drunk, yes,” said his father, raising his head. “His autopsy proved he was DUI. But so did hers.”

  My mother? DUI? Ethan’s brain had no way to process this information. Instead, it searched for safer territory, leaping to the physics of that moment on the highway, conjuring the coefficient of static friction in relation to the normal force. And then, as if seeking that normalcy, his brain two-stepped again, clutching at the laws of averages and probability, wondering what planets had aligned, what forces had conspired to create the head-on collision of two cars driven by similarly afflicted human beings. It was too much. He shook his head, trying to clear it, trying to understand. “Then how—?”

  “I called in some favours, had that information suppressed.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t—” He tried again. “I didn’t want—” But he couldn’t finish.

  Jillian said it for him. “He didn’t want you ever feeling about your mother the way he felt about his own.”

  Ethan felt the numbness return. His head was suddenly too heavy for his body, and he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. He felt his father’s hand on his shoulder, heard him try to speak again but fail.

  “That’s why he got so upset at that reporter who came to the house,” said Jillian. She placed her other hand on his father’s arm, closing the triangle they made in that waiting room.

  Jack finally managed to force out words. “I didn’t want someone digging it all up again, maybe finding out the whole truth.” He shook his head sadly. “I know you’ll think I was worried about my image, but it wasn’t that. I just—” His voice broke but he struggled through it. “I didn’t want you and your sister to be hurt. I love you both too much to let that happen.”

  Ethan heard those words echo in his head as though coming to him from the end of a very long corridor.

  I love you both too much.

  I love you both.

  I love you.

  “Tell him the rest,” said Jillian.

  “That’s enough.”

  “No, it’s not,” she said, her voice firmer. She looked at Ethan, squeezing his hand more tightly. “He agreed to defend that politician—”

  “—because of my mother,” Ethan finished for her. What were his father’s words? He made a mistake! So had Olivia Leanne Cameron-Palmer, Beloved Mother.

  And so had Ethan. More than one. Too many to count.

  Something caught in his chest. There was so much he understood now, and so much he’d probably never understand. And there was so much he wanted to say. “Dad—” he began.

  “Mr. Palmer?”

  All three looked up at the doctor who loomed over them, his face ashen and drawn.

  Chapter 32

  The classroom buzzed with conversation. Ms. Moore had stepped across the hall to the AV equipment room to find a replacement bulb for the data projector, and most of the students were using the opportunity to catch up on gossip about the Senior SnowBall the evening before: who’d gone with whom, who hadn’t gone with whom, who’d broken up with whom afterwards. Many of them, though, were talking about who’d been seen making out in the teachers’ lounge, a tidbit of particular interest to the seniors since someone claimed to have caught Mr. Becker and Ms. Moore in a compromising clinch. Beaker and Moore-or-Less. Yet the world still spun on its axis.

  “I got a letter from my dad yesterday,” said Allie.

  Ethan looked across the aisle. It was still awkward between them sometimes, but they were getting beyond it. The hardest part was seeing her and Pete together. But they were good for each other. Good to each other.

  Ethan still loved her, still lay awake most nights cursing himself for what he’d lost. No. For what he’d thrown away. He’d come to realize how much he’d taken Allie for granted, how much of their relationship she had shouldered while he’d just been along for the ride. She’d put up with so much the whole time they’d been together. Allie was a person who remembered six-month anniversaries, bought just-right gifts, knew exactly what to say to boost his spirits when he needed it. Yet when she’d needed him most, he hadn’t been there. Not that this had ended them—she was the most understanding person he knew, and she’d been overwhelmed for him when she’d learned about Raye. But what she couldn’t put behind her was Ethan’s gambling, not after what it had done to her family. Twice.

  While Ethan had been busy shattering his own life, Allie’s dad had been doing the same, graduating from lottery tickets to the waterfront casino, spending his lunch hour playing first the VLTs and later roulette. He’d racked up thousands on his credit cards and, without his wife’s knowledge, had taken a second mortgage on their home. Which was why Allie’s mother had been at the bank. Tugging on her necklace.

  “What’d the letter say?” Ethan asked Allie now.

  She shrugged. “I haven’t opened it yet.”

  He reached across the aisle and put his hand gently on hers. “You will,” he said.

  Ethan could see Pete across the room watching them out of the corner of his eye, so he drew his hand back. Not that Pete had anything to worry about. Allie’s heart belonged to him now. Pete, too, was a person who remembered anniversaries and bought just-right gifts. In fact, he’d given Allie a pin yesterday
for no other reason than to mark the beginning of their second week together, and Ethan had seen immediately how perfect it was: a silver dancer whose arms and waist formed the letter A.

  With Allie’s help, Pete was passing physics. Actually, better than just passing. She’d somehow shown him how to tap into that mechanical ability of his, shown him how to use it to make the physics make sense. She was amazing. Ethan had known it all along, of course, but he wished now that he’d told her how special she was. Wished he’d told her again and again. Not that this would have saved them, but it might have given him some comfort as he lay looking at the ceiling each night waiting, hoping, for sleep to come. He knew now just how fleeting life could be.

  Pete, on the other hand, was the kind of person who never missed a moment to share how he felt with the people he cared for, telling Allie daily how much he loved her. Showing her. It was hard for Ethan to hear them, harder still to see them together. Outside of class, they were always holding hands. They tried to be discreet at first, their fingers brushing as they passed, but Ethan had told them not to be so foolish. They shouldn’t have to hide the way they felt. But he still had to look away when he saw them approach each other, couldn’t bear to witness what he himself now missed so desperately.

  He missed Pete, too. Pete had come right over the second he’d learned about Raye, his nose still swollen and one eye blackened from the punch he’d taken. That was the kind of friend he was. Ethan was sorry for the way he’d treated him that day in his driveway, but no amount of apologizing could lessen the shame and regret he felt over what he’d done. Of course, it was more than shame and regret that Ethan couldn’t get beyond now, more than shame and regret creating this distance between them. The rest of it was knowing how Pete had felt about Allie all that time. Thinking back, Ethan realized Pete’s feelings for Allie shouldn’t have come as such a surprise—Pete always hanging out with the two of them, Pete listening to Allie’s every word, Pete following her face with his eyes. For Christ’s sake, he’d even enrolled in physics because she was taking it.