Driver's Education (34 page)

FM: (
Silence
)

RB: I remember about a year and a half before all this happened. His granddad was still living in Westchester and I went with Finn to visit him on some Sunday afternoon. I sat in the background and I listened while they perfected that story about Charlotte Sparrow. The one about flying planes. “She was beautiful,” the granddad said. “More beautiful than you'd ever believe.” Finn leaned in. “Would you say she was so beautiful she glowed?” “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think I would.”

FM: It was just more compelling that way. If she was brighter than the moon.

RB: But this is how it happens, right? A story outgrows its original owner, and eventually it has to leap into the mind of someone who can tell it better. I can see how the whole ordeal would be seductive to you—knowing that a person's past is in your hands. I mean, I can see how you got so caught up in it. Particularly here, with this story. The idea of this old man dying. The idea that he's twisted the truth so many times that he can't remember what it looked like in the first place. The idea that at the moment of his death what actually happened didn't matter so much as what was actually remembered. That the realization of that would help you to grow, to change, to complete your arc as a character. (
Pause
) But the fact of it—I mean, the cold hard fact of it—is that you're still a liar. We're both still liars.

FM: We're done here.

(
Interview ends. 1:27 of blank tape.)

At 1:28:

RB: (
Standing; off camera
) How was that?

FM: (
Off camera
) It was perfect. Just as we discussed.

RB: (
Off camera
) It wasn't too mean? Like, I didn't get too harsh?

FM: (
Off camera
) No, no. It was great. (
Pause
) Dalloway dying—that was fantastic. I didn't see that coming.

RB: You played along really well. I was worried you were going to be too thrown.

FM: Never. (
Pause
) Ha. Ha ha. Dalloway actually dying.

RB: (
Off camera
) She's never going to die.

FM: (
Off camera
) She'll fucking outlive us all.

RB: (
Off camera
) You know the red light is still on, right?

FM: (
Off camera
) Shit.

RB: Whatever. We'll just cut it out.

Right Now

By Colin A. McPhee

The hospital has sent in a bereavement nurse. She's young—maybe in her midthirties—and she carries herself softly, like there's a cushion of air between her and everything else. When she first came into the room, she pulled up a chair next to mine, and she took my hand in hers. She sat with me quietly. She didn't correct me the three times I called her Ann, even though her name tag very clearly reads AMY. She rubbed a thumb between two of my knuckles and she breathed steadily, practiced. My guess would be that these meetings usually last for fifteen minutes—maybe twenty minutes, at most—but she's been here for the past two hours; my father just won't die. Or, maybe more specifically, we just won't let him.

At first it was a matter of waiting for Finn.

“He should be here to say good-bye,” I said to the attending doctor. My voice was half drowned out by the dozens of machines that he's hooked up to—things that beat his heart, and inflate his lungs, and fill his stomach.

And then eventually, more honestly, “Really, I'm just not sure I can do this alone.”

But Finn arrived an hour ago. I knew it was him before I saw him, because I heard him trotting as he raced down the hall. He's done it
since he was a kid—trot. While most people run at a steady pace, his gait is just noticeably uneven. A three-quarter count instead of common time. When he skidded into the room his eyes were ringed and he looked thinner. There was a backpack and a video camera slung over his shoulder; he had dirt on his elbows and he was covered in cat hair. It hung like cut threads from the sleeves of his shirt, from his shorts. He stopped me from standing and kissed the top of my head and then sat, very slowly, on the other side of the bed, nearest a window that overlooks the parking lot.

He pulled one grey strand of cat hair out of the corner of his left eye.

“Mrs. Dalloway was freaking out when we drove across the bridge,” he said, moving. “She wouldn't get off me.”

I asked, “Who?”

That was twenty minutes ago, and we haven't moved since. Each time a member of the hospital's staff asks if we're ready, one of us will say no—no, not quite yet. We'll say how we haven't quite decided on the person we want him to be.

The nurse is being as patient as she can be, but she's reaching the end of her rope. I can feel it. I can tell by the way she's standing—arms crossed, slippers turned in toward each other. She clears her throat. Asks Finn if he's thirsty.

“Do you have any scotch?”

The nurse smiles. “This is a hospital.”

“So do you?”

Now she pulls the corners of her lips wider, tighter, before letting the grin drop. She clears her throat. She presents a clipboard and clicks open a ballpoint pen.

“Mr. McPhee.” Then, again: “Mr. Mc
Phee
.

“I heard you the first time.”

“I'm going to need you to sign these forms. Take your time.” She shifts her watch—a black plastic Swatch—on her wrist.

Finn looks at my father. At the way his hands are folded on top of each other. He ducks his head through the wires and tubes and cords
that extend like marionette strings from my father's arms, his face, his heart. He presses a wet cheek against his chest and I watch his head lift and fall as his lungs are filled and emptied.

“He's still breathing,” Finn says.

“There are machines doing that.”

“And I can feel his heart.”

I say nothing, but the bereavement nurse adds, “There are machines doing that, too.” Then she squeezes my shoulder. She points to the forms she's given me and continues, “Right there, Mr. McPhee. And your initials too.”

Finn lifts his head and looks at her. “Given your job, I'm sure you're well aware of this,” he says. “But someone's fucking dying here.”

•  •  •

There are a few things I forgot to tell my father. Like:

He always burnt the toast.

He was a horrible driver.

I'll always save a seat for him at the movies.

The bereavement nurse clicks her jaw. She looks at my son, and then at me, as if to encourage me to correct him, to scold him, and when I don't she tells me that she needs to step out for a moment. That she needs to make copies of the administrative forms.

Finn walks to the other side of the bed, next to which is a small side table where I've set the stack of my memories—these hundred-odd pages that I've been writing over the past six days while listening to my father watch television from the spaces between the floorboards. He thumbs through them, flipping their corners.

“What's this?”

“It's for him,” I say. “It was for him.”

He keeps flipping the pages. I imagine him reading one, then five, then ten, then fifty. He bends the corners; he rests all five fingers upon them. “And now?”

I say, “And now I guess they're for you.”

•  •  •

“I don't think this is the ending he wanted,” Finn says.

“What?”

He's removed a signed baseball from his backpack, and he slowly passes it back and forth between his hands.

“I'm just saying—I don't think this is the ending he wanted. The one he envisioned for himself.”

This is true: if there was one thing my father taught me, it's that endings never work out the way you want them to—that they're terrible, and this one is no different. They're like the last drops of wine, the final puffs of a cigarette. They're Sunday nights, or the last afternoon of summer. They're flat tires and wet pairs of socks and cold dinners. They're the sort of thing that—no matter the effort, no matter the discipline—no one can get right.

With endings, a person's fucked.

“No,” I said to Finn. “No—it's not the ending he wanted at all.”

I look around me at this blocky hospital with its white, sterile floors; this room with its single square window; this bed with its sandpaper sheet and foam pillows. And then at my father. Fading within it all. My father,
not
surrounded by a pack of lions on the broad, lush face of Kilimanjaro. My father,
not
using his walker to fight off bands of machete-wielding pirates along the Barbary Coast. My father,
not
banking Lucy around the razor turns on the cliffs above Monte Carlo.

“We'd spring him out if we could,” Finn says.

And yes, yes I think we would: if the doctors and the nurses weren't huddled so closely around him, we would have extracted the tubes and wires from his arms, and lifted him onto my shoulders, and we—him, Finn, and me—would have escaped out onto the open road, where we would've done this the right way, the way he deserved, the way that—I'm sure—he'd want the story told.

The doctor returns, followed by the bereavement nurse.

They ask if we're ready and we say that we are. They begin to remove the machines.

But we ignore them as best we can. Standing on either side of my father's body we begin to conjure, to concoct:

“What about a house fire in Savannah?”

“Or maybe something tragic on a frozen lake in Michigan.”

“Or, no. A violent exchange with Incan descendants in Peru. Over Tupperware.”

I watch my son the editor pull at the bristled ends of his long hair. He says, “I think we can do better.”

“Tell me.”

“Fishing. In Baja. There was a story he told me about fishing in Baja.” And then—then there's that familiar glint in his eye, which I've seen in my father's eyes so many times before.

He says, this time more confidently, “Yes, fishing.”

“Okay then.”

“Okay?”

“Let's give it a shot. Let's come up with something better.”

Right Now

By Finn McPhee

Once, in 1974, my granddad went fishing in Baja California, that skinny sliver of land that hangs on maps like a forgotten piece of Mexico. He'd been in San Diego the week before—this was in the summer, when the sun gilds the Pacific with copper-capped waves—and one afternoon he just decided to drive south. He said to himself, to Lucy,
It looks like we've reached the end of the road, old girl. Which I figure means it's about time we find a new one.

They took Mexico Route 1 across the border, past the cardboard shantytowns of Tijuana, whose roofs appeared as rolling meadows of corrugated steel. Outside of Rosarito Lucy kicked up brick-red dirt along the highway. He rubbed the chalky flecks from the corners of his eyes as they undulated along the
vados,
the treacherous dips in the road that, in the wet season, fill with deep pools of rainwater. For the most part the highway was deserted. The only real traffic they faced was the periodic crossing of small herds of cows, who chewed on the dry, thorny brush as they labored across the pavement. Actually, that might not be true. Once, maybe, they came across a donkey. At night they'd sleep in Baja's flickering villages, in El Crucero and Mulege and Santa Rosalía, and in the morning, before the earth began to bake, they'd drive onward, south, to the point where the road might end.

He never got there, though. Afraid of what a terminus might actually mean, my granddad veered onto a thin dirt lane about a hundred miles out from where the highway ends in Cabo San Lucas. The sun burned his back while he followed the lane eastward past scorpions, and snakes, and scarlet-splashed rocks, until it eventually dumped him in Bahia de Palmas—a remote fishing village set along the Sea of Cortez. It was dark when he arrived. And the way he used to describe it to me—he said that there were so many stars, just so many of them, that it seemed like the night was filling the space between them instead of the other way around. He found a small cantina, where he ate a plateful of tortillas, and beans, and he drank a half-cold beer, and because there wasn't a hotel or anything (the village had a population of about a hundred people), the bartender offered him the back storage shack, outside of which was chained a spotted pygmy goat that stood three feet high.

“Did you sleep?” I'd always ask. “I really don't think I'd be able to sleep.”

But he did. He'd become accustomed over the years to sleeping in new, strange places, of waking up to that terrified excitement of not knowing—if only for an instant—exactly where he was. He listened to the goat's baying, and the click of its heels as it moved about in a dream, and his eyes fell shut. And he slept, soundly, until light rushed in from the cracks in the wall and his ears began ringing with the shouting of men.

It was early, and they were prepping their boats before heading out to trawl for big game fish. They strapped thick poles to the sterns of the single-motor vessels, working silently but for one exception: at the end of the village's pier were two men whose voices cut sharp and loud through the dawn as they yelled at each other, back and forth, next to a boat called
El Pequeño Soldado
. My granddad slipped on his pants. He pulled his arms through the sleeves of his shirt and—because he was this sort of person—he walked toward them.

Someone had fallen ill. This is what he learned during an exchange of broken English and more-broken Spanish. It was one of the anglers. Without him,
El Pequeño Soldado
wouldn't be able to head out that day, and the men who crewed it would lose a day's pay.