Past the next cornfield is a stand of trees with a creek winding its way among them. The wire fence that sits between the fields and the road is sagged and broken here, which to the neighborhood kids is the equivalent of a formal invitation to come in and explore. The creek is often little more than a trickle, but today the rain has made it loud and ambitious, and it rushes past my feet on its way to the drainage tunnel under the road. I break a big stick into bits, tossing them in and watching them swirl away like so many plans.
Even Dad got to drive.The very last time my dad drove a car isetched in bold in my memory, like my brain outlined it with a Sharpie and then put three big exclamation points afterward. I was twelve, which means my brother was only six, and we were all headed downstate to visit my grandma in north Jersey. I was sitting in the very back of our minivan in my usual spot, doing my best to ignore my brother, who was telling me knock-knock jokes that he improvised on the fly and that therefore made zero sense. The fact that I had not said, “Who’s there?” even once had not slowed him down in the slightest. He simply whispered the responses to himself to keep his rhythm. In fact, the only way I knew I was involved in the game at all is that he was completely turned around in his seat, his head hanging over into my space, his bright eyes examining me intently for any sign of amusement after each pathetic punch line. I tried to rat him out to my parents for his technically unsafe position in his booster seat, but that had only succeeded in straightening him out for about thirty seconds, then he was back in my face.
As he was giggling at his own hilarity, I stared intently out the window into the woods lining the highway. The embankment leading up to the tree line was overflowing with electric green—ferns and wildflowers and weeds bursting with the kind of life plants only get in places where it rains every freaking day. I had been trying to imagine I was out there in the forest, to escape the monotony of our ancient, stale-smelling car, when my parents’ conversation unexpectedly intruded into my thoughts.
“I’m serious, Dave. I think it’s a nerve thing.” My mom’s voice was loud, not loud enough to be considered yelling, but loudenough to easily reach me in the back. “The pain is shooting right down my leg.”
“It just strikes me as interesting that this always happens when we’re on our way to seemymom, and never when we’re going to seeyourmom,” my dad said, his tone faux detached, as if he were comparing the migrating habits of two species of butterflies.
“I hope you’re not suggesting I’m manufacturing it,” she said. He wasn’t wrong about the timing of these attacks, but still, calling it out like that was pretty harsh. I tensed my jaw. My parents always claimed they didn’t fight, they “had discussions,” but some of their so-called discussions would make a five-hundred-pound gorilla back quietly out of the room.
Even so, I was not prepared for where this one would go. All of a sudden, as if it were no big deal and he wasn’t the person who constantly had a twisted ankle from falling off curbs or missing that last step, my dad said, “How about I drive?” My dad had not driven the car in months, presumably because his vision had declined to the point that it was impossible, so this was an alarming offer.
He must be joking. And even if he wasn’t, Mom would refuse, right? Wrong. In an impressive display of how immature two mature adults can be, my mom pulled over like she was going to prove a point by having him kill us all in a fiery crash, and my dad was too proud or too delusional to back down. Without either of them looking back at or consulting with their precious children for a hot second, the switch was done. And at first itseemed like I was the one being silly, because it was actually fine. We were in the right lane, maybe going a little slower than usual, a little under the speed limit, but that was no big deal. For a few minutes it seemed like a real victory, that he could see a lot more than I had imagined. I almost felt a little tricked, like he’d been hiding this secret ability.
Then the diamond-shaped orange signs with a silhouette of a man digging started appearing every twenty feet or so. We were approaching a construction zone. The left lane disappeared, blocked by a string of orange barrels. The air seemed to drain out of the inside of the minivan, but we wouldn’t have needed it anyway because all four of us were now holding our breath. Next, the shoulder to our right disappeared, replaced by a long, semipermanent cement barrier.
“Uh-oh,” my mom finally said, but I don’t think she knew she said it out loud.
Our speed dropped to about twenty miles an hour, which still felt impossibly fast with that cement wall looming on our right. I willed the cars behind us not to honk, not to pressure us into going faster; the tensed tendons on Dad’s neck seemed to be all that was keeping us from pinging around inside the lane like we were in bumper cars. There was nowhere to pull over, no way to cry uncle, no room for error. Then my mom, in a hoarse whisper, started giving instructions. “A little to the left. Good. Hold there. Curve to the left coming. A little more. No, more. Okay, good.” Oh my God. It was like they were playing Hot and Cold like we used to do during Easter egg hunts.
Speaking of God, I hadn’t really prayed since first communion, but now I was silently praying a furious mantra:please God don’t let us die please God don’t let us die please God.My brother had silently situated himself back in the correct position in his booster seat. I was glad he couldn’t see my face because he probably would have burst into tears.
Finally, the cement wall ended. My dad didn’t wait for an exit, just said, “Can I pull over here?” and when my mom gave the all clear, he pulled just out of the lane and stopped, so he had to hug close to the door when he got out in order to not be flattened by the impatient caravan of cars that now accelerated past. When he got to the passenger side, he took out one of the tissues he always kept in his pocket, wiped his forehead, and blew his nose. Then he said something under his breath and my mom laughed. Pretty soon they were both cracking each other up.
Looking back on it, they had both just been relieved, the pent-up energy of adrenaline and fear coming out as laughter. But at the time, I had been so angry, and the anger still crackled around the memory. How could they think it was funny? He almost killed us; we almost died. All so he could be the big man. They were the parents—they were supposed to be responsible.
I will never drive. In a way, that will make me more responsible than my own father. And more powerless.
I reach into the water now to pull out a handful of pebbles and hurl them into the stream as hard as I can. The roundness of the plunking sounds they make as they break the surface is strangelysatisfying. It releases a valve inside me, and the tears start to stream down my face, mixing with the sweat from running and landing double salty on my lips. I’m about to grab more rocks when I see someone standing on the bank out of the corner of my eye. I am not alone.
A startled sound escapes my mouth as I quickly wipe my face with my sleeve and turn, almost falling into the freezing water. Nothing. There’s no one there. I’m positive someone had been standing just behind me to my right, but there are only scrubby bushes and maple saplings. I sit down, take a deep breath, try to steady myself.
The idea that the RP could be responsible for these visual hallucinations I’ve been having occurs to me for the first time. The doctor mentioned floaters as one of the RP side effects, and I thought I knew what she meant. Sometimes it looked like translucent caterpillars were wiggling midair in front of me. It felt weird to admit that I had experienced floaters to Dr. Porter. I’d never even admitted it to myself before. I’d written them off as dust until she gave them a name. Could these visions of Mason just be giant floaters?
As if to answer the question, the figure appears again, looking very un-caterpillar-like. If it’s a floater, it’s a floater doing an excellent Mason impression. He walks down the bank, crunching through the leaves, and stops next to me.
“Hey, Murphy, long time. I’d hug you but you look really sweaty. Like, you-might-want-to-be-checked-for-a-gland-condition level sweaty.”
My eyes get wide. Floaters don’t talk. And visual hallucinations are just that—visual. This … whatever this is … is the whole package.
“Hello?” he says. “What’s this, the silent treatment? What’d I do now?”
I take a deep breath. Mason looks the same as he always did, all elbows and limbs, piercing gray-green eyes, and freckles on his earlobes, except for one thing. He seems to be ever so slightly illuminated from the inside, like those glow sticks that make a crackling sound when you bend them.
“Mason?” I finally manage.
“Christ, it took you long enough.”
“What … what the actual fuck?”
“What the actual fuck what?”
Where to begin with this question. “What … what are you doing here?”
“Well, the angels said I had to save the person in my life who had wandered the farthest off her fated path, and then I could get my wings.”
I swallow. Holy shit. “Really?”
