Raising the ramp, I circle the van and fiddle with my cell phone for a minute, biding my time until the others are out of sight before I begin creeping purposefully up the lane in the opposite direction, stooping close to the bumpers to avoid detection. I have no intention of losing my temper. This may require some diplomacy. But I’m determined to get to the bottom of it. When I reach the Skylark, the driver is still in the car, rifling through a shaving bag. My knock on the window startles him, though his surprise turns quickly to alarm when he sees it’s me, the guy who tried to tackle his car at twenty miles per hour. I must be even scarier with all this gauze and a neck brace. He reaches for the ignition, but I halt him with a one-handed yield gesture.
“Please,” I say.
I take a step back from the car, where I beckon him to roll down his window. Warily, he obliges.
He’s even more stubbled than before, wearing a Mariners cap that looks like someone kicked it there from Seattle, and the same loose-fitting shirt with ukuleles and coconuts on it. At a standstill, I can see the sunbaked crow’s-feet bookending the sides of his face, and I can tell he’s led an uneven life—good times and bad but not a lot of middle ground. He looks like a sportswriter who overslept his deadline.
“Look,” I say calmly. “I know who you are.”
“She told you, huh? That’s a surprise.”
“No, I just figured it out. It had to be Elsa.”
He looks at me blankly. “Who’s Elsa?”
“The woman who hired you.”
“Nobody hired me.”
Searching his face, I find genuine confusion there. “Who sent you, then? Janet?”
“Nobody sent me. I sent myself.”
“Why are you following me?”
He squints at me, flexing his crow’s feet. “I’m not following you. I’m following her.”
“Peaches?”
“Dorothy.”
My first thought is perv. “What do you want with Dot?”
“What do you want with her?” he says. “You some kind of pervert?”
“I’m giving her a ride.”
He gives me a long steady look, until he seems satisfied with the explanation. “I’m Cash Callahan.”
He gives me a moment to let the information sink in, but it doesn’t.
“She’s my daughter.”
My mind scrambles to make the connections. “Wait. But how . . . ?”
“I’ve been trailing her since she left Tacoma—she sure as hell hasn’t made it easy. I’ve lost her twice already, and it’s a miracle I didn’t lose her in Missoula. I’m sure she’s pissed as hell at me, but what’s new?”
“She knows you’ve been following her?”
“She left me no choice, bro. I’ve got no control over her. Not that I ever did.” He climbs out of the car and leans against the Skylark. Scanning the huge parking lot, he heaves a sigh.
“You smoke?” he says.
“Nope.”
“Me neither. Sometimes I wish I did.”
“Me too.”
He scrapes absently at some rust under the door handle, stops himself, and jams his hand in his jeans pocket. “I can’t tell her to quit smoking, bro—I’ve tried. She just smokes harder. I can’t tell her who to date. I’m not even allowed to call her Dorothy anymore. All I can do is keep an eye out, and that’s no small job. Christ, I slept in my car the last three nights. You got kids?”
“No.”
“Hmph. Well, lucky you. It ain’t easy, bro. Especially not teenage girls. But who am I to say? I’ve got no control of what Dorothy does in Denver. But the hell if I’m just gonna let my kid hitchhike halfway across the country. Just because she won’t ride with me, doesn’t mean I’m gonna let her out of my sight.”
Cash kicks a little stone with the toe of his sandal. The pebble skitters a few feet across the pavement, takes a big hop, and clinks against the Range Rover parked next to him. He looks up at me thoughtfully, as though he’s about to apologize for something. “So do me a favor, bro. Let me stick to you. Keep me on your radar, okay? I’ll stay out of your hair, I promise. You won’t even know I’m there. I don’t wanna lose her.”
He looks back down at his flip-flops and shakes his head. Talking to the ground, he says, “If anything should ever happen to her, bro, I’d . . .” He trails off.
I don’t know anything about this guy beyond the fact that Dot’s mother called him a deadbeat and that Dot says he’s immature. When you get down to it, I don’t know anything about Dot, except that her mother died, and Dot doesn’t dress warmly enough. All I know is that this guy is willing to drive to the ends of the earth so that he doesn’t get stuck holding the groceries, and I’m not going to stand in his way.
He’s back to chipping away at the rusty Skylark. “The truth is, I lost her a long time ago, bro. I fucked up.”
“It happens.”
“Yeah, well I made a real fucking mess. And I may never get the chance to clean it up, and I can’t blame Dorothy for that. Best I can do is not make it any worse.”
Scraping at the rust, the poor guy looks abject with his stubbled face and his rumpled party shirt. You get the feeling he might blow out his flip-flop with the very next step.
“She used to think you were pretty cool,” I offer as a consolation. “You know that, right?”
He looks up hopefully. “She said that?”
I nod. “She still wears the bracelet, doesn’t she?”
“That turquoise one? Yeah, I noticed that. Darlene must’ve given it to her.” He smiles and shakes his head again, and his smile fades immediately. “Or left it to her, I guess. I got it for Darlene in the early nineties. It was gonna be like an engagement thing. Bought it from some tripped-out desert sage at Burning Man. Dude had bones through his nipples and two different color eyes. Hmph. Seems like forever ago. So, what’s your deal? You just drive around picking people up? You sure you’re not a pervert?”
It’s my turn to kick pebbles and shake my head. “Look, I didn’t plan any of this, Cash, believe me. Not this trip, not these passengers, and definitely not what I left behind. I planned like hell for something else entirely. All this just happened.”
Cash pats me on the shoulder. “I feel you, bro.”
you don’t understand
Listen to me: everything you think you know, every relationship you’ve ever taken for granted, every plan or possibility you’ve ever hatched, every conceit or endeavor you’ve ever concocted, can be stripped from you in an instant. Sooner or later, it will happen. So prepare yourself. Be ready not to be ready. Be ready to be brought to your knees and beaten to dust. Because no stable foundation, no act of will, no force of cautious habit will save you from this fact: nothing is indestructible.
Even if you glance over your shoulder in time to glimpse its arrival, if you manage to drop your groceries and throw yourself headlong at the destruction, you will be powerless to stop it. It will bear down on you like the devil until you feel your shoes surrendering their purchase on the grit of the driveway, until you shear the side mirror clean off the car with the force of your efforts. But the car will keep rolling. And you’ll watch helplessly as the back wheel pins your daughter’s red cape to the pavement, even as she reaches desperately to save her brother, who will disappear beneath the rear bumper. You will hear his frantic wailing as you attempt to wedge your own leg beneath the front wheel in an effort to stop the terrible thing. But you will not stop it. Instead, you will watch everything you love most in the world dragged over the edge of the incline with a terrible scraping, an irreversible yawning. And when you hear the sickening metallic clangor of impact, you will begin to forget everything you ever knew.
Afterward—how much time, ten minutes, an hour?—when the others have arrived in droves to see what your failure has wrought, you will pace and reel in utter confusion like a man struck by lightning. You will not comprehend what has happened. Any attempt you make to order the universe will be desperate and laughable.
“I’m a stay-at-home dad,” you will keep telling the gap-toothed EMT or the cop with the hairy knuckles or anyone else who will listen. “You don’t understand,” you will tell them, tugging desperately at their sleeves, and blocking their way. “I . . . I’m a stay-at-home dad.”
“Sir,” the hairy-knuckled cop will say. “We need you to calm down.”
“But you don’t understand. I—I’m . . .”
“Sir. I need you to sit down.”
“The fingers.”
“Sir.”
“My wife will be home. We need the fingers.”
“Yessir, we’ve contacted your wife.”
You will grab him by the lapel and cling to him. “I-I didn’t know. I-I . . .”
“Yessir, I understand. It was an accident. We all understand.”
“No. You don’t. The fingers.”
“We’ve located the fingers.”
“But I—I’m a stay-at-home dad.”
And when he looks at you this time, you will see in his eyes that you frighten him, but you will not know why. Then you will get down on your hands and knees and begin to order the groceries, setting the cans right, gathering the wayward apples. You will retrieve a tube of Jimmy Dean sausage, which has rolled down the driveway and lodged itself beneath the hydrangea. You will see Janet at the curb, talking to a fireman with her hands covering her face. And before you can get to her, she will have left you already.
something else entirely
Having assured him that he’ll stay on my radar, I bid Cash adieu and make my way at a leisurely stroll toward the geyser in search of Trev and the girls. Old Faithful is two minutes overdue by my clock. When I look back at Cash, he’s rummaging around in the trunk of the Skylark, stowing a pillow, squashing down his sleeping bag, fishing out a backpack. I wonder if he’s actually living out of his car.
When I look back a second time, the trunk is closed, and Cash is holding a flip-flop in his right hand, fiddling with the toe harness. Disgustedly, he hurls the sandal to the ground, just as a squat brown-haired family of four is passing. They cut a wide arc around the Skylark. Cash tips his dirty baseball cap at them, but they’re all looking straight ahead, except for the little boy with the ice-cream cone that’s too big for him, who gazes curiously back over his shoulder. Cash flips the kid off. The kid flips him off back.
About fifteen seconds later, a distant chorus of oohing and aahing rises from beyond the visitor center, as Old Faithful gushes with a rumble and a hiss. I can just barely see the plume over the peaked roof of the visitor complex. Beside me, the squat kid begins screaming and crying to beat the band. He’s dropped his ice-cream cone, and his father is dragging him along at a trot.
Greeted by a gust of sulfur, I reach the sparsely wooded visitor area in time to see the geyser’s gurgling retreat through the trees. No sooner do I begin cutting a diagonal path through the trees toward the viewing area than I see Dot break suddenly from the crowd and stop to periscope her head around the periphery. She spots me from thirty yards just as I clear the tree line, and she sprints the distance between us. She grabs me by the hand and pulls me desperately toward the crowd.
“Hurry,” she says. “Something’s happened.”
volumes
Okay, so I’m the one not letting go of anything, I see that—do you think I don’t see that? But somebody has to not let go. Somebody has to stay behind.
Here is Janet in the kitchen, clutching a single carelessly stuffed canvas bag amid a chaos of uneaten casseroles and unopened cards and half-packed boxes of children’s clothing. It’s ten days after the disaster, six days after the service, five days since her last shower. Her thick hair hangs greasy and lifeless. The pouches beneath her eyes droop clear to her cheekbones. She’s been on the phone with her sister in Portland all morning.
“Where will you go?”
“Away,” she says, as though from a great distance already.
“But you can’t just . . . What about—”
“What about what?” She levels the question at me like a challenge. “There is no what, Ben.”
But what Janet doesn’t know could fill volumes. She doesn’t know that the last look on her daughter’s face was an entreaty. She doesn’t know the confusion and panic that filled Jodi’s brown eyes as he choked on his final breaths. She didn’t touch them, damnit! She didn’t lie to them! She didn’t kneel beside their broken bodies and tell them everything was going to be all right, knowing that in a single bat of an eye the whole universe had jumped track, and everything was spinning inexplicably, hopelessly, irreversibly out of control. She was not forced to stand helplessly in death’s way. She did not beat her head on the pavement, claw at her own eyes, scream herself raw, press her mouth to the slack jaw of her dead daughter, and try desperately to fill her lungs with life. She knows neither guilt nor blame nor the terrible truth. There is a what, there’s always a what, and there will forever be a what as long as one person is left standing.
I’m certain now Janet started walking away long before the disaster. God knows, she yearned for more. I wonder at what point Bernard and Ruth began removing all evidence of me, striking me from the walls of the den, cutting me off at the shoulder? A week? Two weeks? A month? Some people fled quicker than others. Our friends with children wasted little time in effecting their retreat. Every casserole was like a good-bye—they didn’t want their pans back. They didn’t want to reckon with the ugly truth every time they packed a lunch box or buckled in their children. Up and down Agatewood, the neighbors heaved a collective sigh when the house went on the market. Nobody mentioned the moving trucks. Nobody inquired as to futures. Nobody even said good-bye. So what’s holding me back? Why am I still standing in that driveway, still living in the hour of my destruction, when everybody else has left the scene? I’ll tell you why: because what happened in the driveway was a revelation. In all the waking moments of my life, the disaster is the one thing that ever truly happened. Everything else is a lie.
“Sir, I’m going to need you to calm down.”
“But you don’t understand . . .”
“I’m going to have to ask you to step—”
“No, listen, I’m a—”
“Yessir, I understand, sir—you’re a stay-at-home dad.”
out of the frying pan
Sir, I’m gonna need you to calm down, sir,” says the medic. He’s a giant, maybe six foot seven, lightly stubbled, with a granite chin.
“Do you feel like you have to push?” he says to Peaches, flat on her back atop a space blanket with her knees in the air. She’s panting, as the giant works her jeans over her ankles.
“I need you people to back off,” he says, over his shoulder. Then, back to Peaches: “Do you feel like you have to poop?”
Before she can answer, she suddenly goes goggle-eyed with another contraction.
The giant eyes his wristwatch, then checks her pelvis and sees that she’s bulging already. “Game on,” he says. “We’re not moving her. This kid’s in a hurry. Are you full term?” he says to Peaches.
“She’s due in eighteen days,” I say.
“You the father?”
“No.”
“Have you had prenatal?” he says to her.
“Yes,” she says, wide-eyed. “The last was at six months.”
“Is everything okay?” I say. “Is she all right?”
“Everything’s fine, sir, under control.”
“She’s gonna have the baby now?”
“Yessir.”
“Here?”
“Yessir. Could you hand me those blankets on the tailgate?”
“Isn’t there someplace indoors we ca—”
“No time, sir. I’m gonna need you to calm down. Could you get me those blankets? And back these people off.”
I think he’s just trying to get me out of the way, because the people are already backed off to a forty-foot radius, except for a guy in a Marlins hat who beats me to the blankets on the tailgate and str
eaks toward the giant with them. Trev’s on the perimeter with Dot, looking paler than I’ve seen him in months.
This is happening way too fast. Something must be wrong. Nobody has a baby this quickly. Piper was thirteen hours getting past the cervix—like she’d lost her nerve. Jodi was about half that, but every minute of it hard fought. Little Elton is a sprinter. Hardly have I knelt back down in the shadow of the giant before he’s crowning.
Peaches is stoic. Or maybe this is easy for her. She’s sweating like Sonny Liston after the twelfth round, but she doesn’t look frightened or in pain as she clutches my hand fiercely and pushes with all her might.
“Keep pushing,” says the giant.
“Is everything—”
“Everything’s fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sir, I need you to calm down. What’s your name, sweetheart?”
“Peaches,” she says.
“Peaches, I need you to push—I mean really push, okay? When I count to three, I want you to push.”
She bites her lip and nods.
“One, and two, and push!”
Peaches grits her teeth and pushes with all her might, but the baby makes no progress.
“Okay,” says the giant. “We’re going to try it again, Peaches. Even harder this time, okay?”
“Push like you’re angry, Peach. Scream when you do it.”
“Just like he says, honey—go ahead and scream. Okay now? Push as hard as you possibly can. One, and two, and . . .”
Again, she pushes, half grunting, half hollering, her face beet red with the effort, her knees trembling. But still the infant makes no progress.
“Okay, I need you to breathe, Peaches. Big breaths, okay, sweetheart?” I can see a glint of fear flash in his eyes. His wheels are spinning fast. He’s talking faster. What if something goes wrong. What if he has to perform an emergency C-section with that puny kit of his?
The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving Page 22
