The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (30 page)

He's back to chipping away at the rusty Skylark. “
Th
e 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?”

“
Th
at 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 do
n
'
t understand

L
isten 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.”

“
Th
e 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.
Th
e 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.
Th
en 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

H
aving 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.
Th
ey 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.
Th
e 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

O
kay, 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.
Th
e 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. “
Th
ere 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.
Th
ere
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.
Th
ey 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.”