Intentions (21 page)

But first I have to see how bad the damage is. Maybe it sounded a lot worse than it is. I pray to the God I’m not sure exists.…

“Please let it be nothing. Please, please, please.”

I open the door—it opens fine!—and walk around the front of the car to go around to the back left side, where it hit. I walk around the car this way to put off seeing the damage. Giving me a few seconds of hope. I pray some more. I bargain.

“I will go to Morrison’s if you let this be nothing, just a little scratch,” I say to God, who must certainly exist. “Please let it be a teeny-tiny scratch. I swear, I will make everything right. I will. I promise.” What if God has only one favor for me? It
should be that Grandma not die, not this. But I don’t really believe—

“Please, please, please,” I whisper to the dark night air. Hey, maybe I’m dreaming! I can definitely lucid dream my way out of this. I jump into the air, like you’re supposed to do to figure out if it’s a dream or real. If it’s a dream, when you jump, you fly.

I do not fly. I land, hard, on a driveway rock, in my flip-flops.

“Ow! #%*@###!” I make up a curse because nothing else is strong enough.

I hurt so much I don’t delay the inevitable any longer. I look.

Oh, God. You dirty rat.

Oh, Rachel. You stupid jerk.

My mother’s beloved Prius has a huge dent, plus a smashed rear light and a broken hatchback window. There is glass on the ground.

A light goes on inside our house.

What about the Japanese maple? Dad planted it the week after I was born, in celebration. We have all these pictures … every year on my birthday.

I force myself to look, and it is still standing, but that is all I can tell.

They are going to kill me.

I need a plan. I have to get out of here. Where will I go? I have nowhere to go.

I hear a car door slam. “Evie! Evie! Oh God!”

I turn around, and there’s my father running toward me. His car is parked way down the street, down the hill from our house. That’s where he goes?

When he gets close enough to see it’s me, he cries out,
“Rachel, oh no, Rachel! Honey, are you OK?” and then he runs faster and he’s there and he’s giving me a hug. Not what I expected. And his face is wet. He’s crying. Is he crying because he was worried, or was he sitting in his car crying?

Or both?

“Are you OK?” he asks me.

“Are you?”

And we both shake our heads.

“Dad—” and “Rachel—” we say at the same time, but then, “What the hell is going on?” Mom. “What was that noise—is the car …? Rachel? Dan? What the HELL is going on?”

And before either of us can say anything, she sees the car inserted into the tree and she lets out a bloodcurdling scream.

“Shhhh!” my father says. “The neighbors are going to call the police!”

“Good!” she says, glaring at me. “Was this you? What were you thinking?”

Dad starts to talk, but I speak over him. “I was looking for Dad. I was
worried
about him.”

She turns and hurls at Dad, “It’s all your fault!”

“What?”

“You taught her to back out of the driveway!”

Dad laughs. He laughs? “Well, obviously not very well.” He’s laughing hysterically now. I think. Maybe he’s crying.

“Oh!” she says. “I’m going to kill you. Both of you.”

“Are you thinking you have no part in this?” he says to her.

Go, Dad.

“What are you talking about? I was inside!” Mom yells.

“He was crying in the car!” I shout. “Right down the hill. You drove him out and he was crying in the car.”

Dad does not deny it. No one says anything for at least a minute. A minute that seems like a year.

Does my saying it make it worse? I want to take it back. Not name it. But I also want to yell about what else happened in this driveway. But then Mom moves toward me, grabs my arm so it hurts, and says softly and slowly but distinctly, “Rachel … go … back … inside … and … go … to … your … room. We will … talk … about … the … consequences … in … the … morning.”

“But …?” I look at Dad. He’s no help. His head is down.

“Go. Now,” she says.

“Go, Raebee,” Dad says, and so I walk backward up the driveway, very slowly, figuring they can’t kill each other as long as I’m watching.

CHAPTER 29

LIGHTNING

Dad and I are sitting in the waiting room, waiting for the moment of truth. Not in the hospital but in the Crunch-A-Bunch Auto Repair Shop. I am terrified to hear how much it’s going to cost to fix Mom’s car. It’s all on me.

My life is going to suck, but I deserve it. After a long lecture and many tears (mostly, but not all, mine), they decided that I would do whatever chores they asked me to do at home now, and also babysit, and then get a job this summer, to pay off the bill. They don’t want to go to the insurance company because it’ll raise their rates, especially since I’m about to come of driving age. Oh, and I can’t get my license until I’m seventeen. I begged and pleaded and cried, but I got nowhere. And I’ll get nowhere that I can’t get to on my bike. But that’s OK, because I have no friends. And I’ll be working so hard to pay off the bill, I won’t have anywhere else to go but work.

My fingers itch to text someone—Jake, Alexis, one of the girls, even Adam, but no. This is where I am now. Alone. Alone in a car repair shop with my dad. And since I’m about to get bad news anyway, and Dad’s miserable as all get-out, I figure what the hell, let’s spew all the shit at once.

“Dad—I … Can I …” He’s reading
Men’s Health
and doesn’t look up. Must be that cover story I saw, “Your Prostate and You.”

I sure do hate to interrupt. Must be captivating. “Dad!”

“Rachel?” He gives me a half smile.

“It’s not about this—this car thing—but I have to tell you something.”

He puts down the magazine, takes off his reading glasses.

My heart lurches. I love him, my Daddy, and I’m probably about to ruin his life—if I go that far, which I decide right now I won’t. I don’t have to. I’ll only tell him …

“What is it, Raebee?”

I don’t look at him. I look over his shoulder to a poster on the wall. There’s a big-boobed blonde in a bikini standing next to a red car with yellow lightning bolts painted on it.
GIVE YOUR CAR A BOLT AND ELECTRIFY YOUR LIFE
, the headline says. Oh please.

“It’s awful, icky,” I say.

“About you?” Dad asks. His voice sounds so scared. I was going to tell him about Morrison’s. I was, I was. But I can’t.

“No, not exactly. I mean, I—Can I just tell you?”

He nods.

“Dad, back in October I—Oh, Dad, I heard something. I don’t know how to say it.”

“Do the Band-Aid thing, Rachel, just rip it off quickly—”

“Still hurts when you do it that way, you know. I’ve been meaning to tell you that for years.”

“I know, honey. It’s not that it hurts less, it hurts for less time.”

“Well, OK. But it’s going to be hard. To say and, I think, to hear.”

Dad swallows. I see his Adam’s apple bob up and down. “I may already know,” he tells me.

“I doubt it,” I tell him, but I wonder what he’s thinking he knows.

“Go on.”

“So, one night I went early to confirmation class because you and Mom were fighting.” Oh, why did I have to say that? I’m a chicken, a blamer, making it his fault, their fault, which I now realize I’ve always thought it was, without really knowing it. If they hadn’t been fighting, I wouldn’t have left early, I wouldn’t have gone into the sanctuary, I wouldn’t have heard.…

“We’ve been doing that too much lately,” Dad says. “Fighting in front of you. I’m sorry about that.”

I have to keep going. “So, I got there early and I sat in the sanctuary and—” I shake my head, no, don’t. I can’t tell him. Dad touches my arm, pats me. I forge ahead.

“I heard the rabbi.” Band-Aid. “I heard the rabbi having sex. Right there in the sanctuary, Dad. And it—the woman wasn’t Mrs. Cohn. It wasn’t his wife, Daddy.”

I look at my father. He’s looking at me expectantly, fearfully. I wait for him to say something, anything.

And then he does. “Was it Mom?”

CHAPTER 29A

LIGHTNING II

“Mom? How could it have been Mom?” I say. “She was home with you, fighting. That’s what I said. Why would you say it was Mom?”

“I don’t know. I know. I’m just … I’m so confused, so scared,” Dad says, and he is crying. Right there in the stupid auto repair shop. I had been planning to tell him about Mom and the rabbi and the kiss in the driveway, but no way, not now. And then Bob, the mechanic, comes out, wiping his hands on his coveralls.

“Dad,” I say, nudging him. “DAD!”

My father looks up, doesn’t even wipe away his tears.

“I’m afraid it’s going to be a lot,” Bob says, looking at me, not at my father.

I nod. “Tell me,” I say.

“OK,” Bob says. “To repair all the damage, replace the light, and paint it—we’ll have to paint the whole back end so that it looks good and even—” He stops.

“Band-Aid,” I say. “Just rip it off.”

Bob laughs, ruefully. “Two thousand, maybe more, give or take.”

I wait for my father to argue, bargain, cajole, or tell me I don’t have to pay it all. He says nothing.

Bob goes over to the counter and writes on a sheet of paper. I clear my throat to speak, but then I don’t. What can I say?

Bob comes back, hands my father the paper.

“Two thousand?” my father says, looking down at the numbers. He stares at the paper for a while, but I can tell he’s not really looking at the particulars. He picks up his head and looks at me. “OK?” he says to me.

What am I going to say? It’s like when you pay for something in the store and the electronic screen says, “The amount is $26.09, is that OK?” and you want to say to the screen, Well no, not really, I’d rather pay a lot less. How about $12.95?

“OK,” I say. “OK.”

CHAPTER 30

FLYING SOLO

The more I pedal, the better I feel. And the worse, which is the point. It is cold out, but I am in fleece, and I am sweating. It’s the middle of the day, so no one is outside.

I am feverish. Fluey. Or maybe it’s just emotional. Who knows? I am not going to the hospital, in case I’m contagious.

When Mom left to go sit with Grandma, she made me promise to stay home. Why would she think I would leave?

But she was right.

I’m going to go confront the rabbi. Finally. I am going to confront the rabbi. I’m sure this is what I have to do. He’s what started my whole slippery, careening downslide, and I think the only way to commence to begin to start to try to climb back up is to go back and do what I should have done when I first heard what I heard. I can’t do anything to save my grandmother. I can’t bring myself to upset my parents more and confess at Morrison’s right now … so.

Or—and this thought occurs to me as I near the temple—I could make it all worse. Oh God.

Oh God, I am so mixed-up. Oh God, I wish you were still here.

I don’t think God disappeared when I heard what I heard or because of it. I think He (or She) was gradually disappearing already, fading from my life like the people in the old photographs in Grandma’s living room.

God used to live on my bedroom ceiling. (This was after I figured out that Rabbi Cohn wasn’t the same as God. As if.) I used to have conversations with Him most nights as I fell asleep. God was also in temple on Friday nights, but that was really a different God, a public God, the God I shared with everyone else. The God on my bedroom ceiling was my own personal God. And I depended on Him.

Then, when I was in sixth or seventh grade, before my bat mitzvah, I realized that I was thinking of God as She. Not that He had had some kind of transgender issue, a transsexual sex-change operation. Just—God was definitely a woman. And then, I don’t know, after the bat mitzvah, after a while, I stopped talking to Her. To God. I realized She couldn’t be on my bedroom ceiling only at night, and I knew She wasn’t there during the day. So then I thought maybe God was inside me or floating around, but I only really thought about God when I needed something, like an A on a test, or for someone not to die, or at Yom Kippur when I had to tell God all I did wrong that year. But if I am honest with myself, now I think of God the same way I think about the tooth fairy.

I seek out the hills. I struggle up the steep ones and then turn around to fly down them. I am not suicidal. I am wearing a helmet.

But I would like to end up really sick in the hospital, down
the hall from my grandmother, so that everyone would worry about me and stop being such idiots. Mom and Dad would stand by my bedside holding hands. The rabbi would realize his mistakes, and Jake would forgive me. He would love me. And maybe Alexis would, too. If I almost die, everybody will love me. I will make everything all right.

I remember when I got pneumonia in third grade and was in the hospital for two weeks, missed six weeks of school. I don’t remember being scared, but I did think I might not ever get better. Mom told me later that I almost died.

She sat with me all night, holding a cool washcloth on my head. There were hushed conversations by my bed between her and Dad, her and the doctors. I remember when I got hungry for the first time in weeks and craved McDonald’s french fries, Mom ran out and got them for me at ten o’clock at night.

But mostly what I remember is how close Mom and I were. When your nose itches and you can’t scratch it because you’re holding something, you ask someone to scratch it for you, but it never works. They can never scratch it in the right place, the right way. Well, one day Mom scratched an itch for me.

When I got home from the hospital and started feeling better, all I really wanted to do was to fly that great kite I had gotten for Hanukkah. But I was still too sick. I could barely move. One day the weather was perfect: a late March afternoon, clear sky, windy but not too much wind, just the right amount. Mom wrapped me up in a blanket and put me on the screened-in porch at the back of our house. She got out the kite—a huge bird, black and red and yellow, about six feet long.