20

8/50: OPERATING AUTOMOBILES

“SO YOU’VE never even been behind the wheel of a car before?” Jonah asked.

Esther was sitting in the driver’s seat of Holland Smallwood’s hideous squash-colored ’80s station wagon, refusing to start the engine because she didn’t want to a) kill herself, or b) get murdered by Jonah’s father. “I tried once, but I had a panic attack, so I added it to the list and never looked back.”

“Let me get this straight. As soon as you come close to failing at something, you decide to never do it again?”

“Exactly. Then I can feel really, really good about never having failed at anything. It’s all perfectly psychologically healthy. I’m a genius.”

“You’re gonna learn today,” he said, nodding at the gearstick. “Holland drives stick.”

“I cannot drive stick.”

“Man, my dad is halfway retarded and he can drive stick, so you can too.”

“You can’t say retarded. It’s politically incorrect. Besides, if I crash Holland’s car, he’ll kill me.”

“Nah, he’ll kill me. Then you. Then your family. So you got enough time to flee to Mexico before he starts hunting you. Start the engine.”

“No.”

“Esther, look at your costume. Look who you are today. Would Kill Bill have been interesting if the Bride refused to so much as drive a car?”

Esther looked down at the yellow and black leather ensemble she’d chosen for today and took a steadying breath. “Channel Uma,” she said with a nod. “Channel your inner badass.”

It didn’t go too badly at first, to be honest. Esther wasn’t as terrible a driver as she remembered being, and although she didn’t have even one-fifth of the coordination required to operate a motor vehicle, she didn’t crash into anything. Jonah kept her out of traffic and away from intersections so she wouldn’t have to stop and start too much. They mainly stuck to the smaller roads on the outskirts of town, ones that were long and straight and had no traffic lights or stop signs.

The day might have ended very differently if it weren’t for the erection of a mall out in the boondocks and the subsequent roadwork that was taking place to facilitate the white behemoth’s construction.

A woman in a high visibility vest brought them to a stop while a truck crossed from one side of the construction site to the other. Esther found herself at the front of a line of cars. While she waited, she adjusted her rearview mirror so she could count them all. There were six, with more braking behind her every few seconds.

“I can’t do this,” she said quietly as she made mirror eye contact with the man directly behind her. “Swap seats with me.”

“What?”

“There are too many people watching me. They’re all looking at me.”

“No one cares, Esther.”

“They’re all going to get angry if I stall.”

“Look, she’s telling us to go. Come on.”

And she was. The construction worker had flipped her STOP sign around to SLOW and was waving them through.

Esther shoved the car into first but let the clutch out too quickly and it lurched forward, stalled. The man behind them beeped. The construction woman took a step back and laughed.

“I told you I couldn’t fucking do it!” Esther said. The eyes of the drivers behind her were like a spotlight, heating up her blood.

“Yes you can, Esther,” Jonah said, and she must have looked panicked, because he was clasping her shoulder and speaking low and clear. Her skin strobed between warm and freezing. There was a familiar tingling in her fingers. “Listen to me. You can do this.”

The driver in the car behind them leaned on the horn again. Jonah rolled down his window. “You want me to come back there? I will come back there, asshole! She’s learning!”

Esther restarted the car and put it into first gear. A strap around her chest was tightening, squeezing her ribs smaller and smaller. She tried to ease the clutch out, but her legs were shaking and she was sweating inside her yellow leather outfit and the sun was beating down through the windshield, searing across her skin. There was no air.

The car jolted forward and the engine gutted out. A violent stall. Several drivers behind them beeped in unison. Esther didn’t realize she was hyperventilating until she couldn’t breathe. Her hands were shaking and she couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t breathe.

Jonah was already out of the car, leaning across her to unbuckle her seatbelt. The car was an oven and her skin was prickling all over and everyone was watching her, everyone could see. The tingling in her fingers rolled up her arms to her neck, where invisible hands clamped down on her esophagus.

You’re dying, you’re dying, oh God, you’re dying.

This was it. All these weeks they’d been looking for Death, and finally he’d decided to show up to the party, and all Esther could think about was what a stupid idea this was and how much she really didn’t want to die.

The car was moving then and her cheek was pressed to the hot, cracked leather of the back seat. She couldn’t remember how she’d gotten there. Time had warped. There came the sound of running water every few seconds, which she soon realized was her vomiting. There was no heaving. It leaked out of her without effort and trickled into the footwell.

You’re dying, you’re dying, you’re dying.

Then the car stopped and Jonah was pulling her out of the back seat. He left her under a tree.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she managed between sobs, but Jonah was already gone, and she wondered if he was going to leave her for dead like Bill had done to the Bride, which was fair enough, she supposed. She did vomit in his father’s car.

Actually, she was kind of surprised it had taken this long for him to get sick of her. There were only so many times you could have panic attacks in front of people before they wrote you off as a lost cause. Too fragile. Too much hassle. Too painful to be around. Hadn’t she done the exact same thing to her father? Why did she deserve any different?

Esther looked around, sure that Jack Horowitz would be there waiting to snatch up her immortal soul, and her panic folded in on her again.

But then Jonah was back with a bottle of cold water in one hand and a box of tissues in the other, and he sank to the ground beside her as she peeled off her yellow jacket and lay down in the grass and tried to slow her breathing.

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” he said, pressing the damp tissues to her forehead.

Maybe it wouldn’t be this time, or the next time, or the time after that, but Jonah would eventually get tired of her. Eventually get so frustrated by her inability to be normal that he would leave. Maybe if she was sexy, or confident, or her skin wasn’t covered in a minefield of freckles, then she could justify being crazy and broken and weird. As it stood, there wasn’t anything alluring enough about her that she could imagine making him want to put up with her bullshit for any great length of time.

People got tired of mental illness when they found out they couldn’t fix it.

“Your bedroom,” he said.

“What?”

“That’s number four. On the list of most interesting things about you. Your bedroom.”

“That’s really lame. You’re making this up as you go along, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Trying not to get too sappy with this shit either, you know.”

“Number one’s probably gonna be like ‘The shape of your toenails’ or something.”

“Nah, that’s number three for sure. You do have some lovely toenails.” When she finally felt well enough to sit up, Jonah said, “I’ll take you home.”

Esther shook her head. “Not home.”

“Okay. Uh . . . I showed you my favorite place. How ’bout you show me yours?”

They got back in the now vomit-smelling car (Jonah drove, of course) and she directed him to the parking lot of the local mall.

“Yeah . . . this is a parking lot,” he said as he parked.

Esther was still shaky and sweaty and generally a mess. Man, fuck panic attacks. “When we were eleven, Mom brought us here on Christmas Eve morning.”

“Last-minute shopping?”

“Not quite. She explained to us in the car that she hadn’t been able to buy us any presents that year. It’d been two months since Dad went into the basement, and Reg was already in Lilac Hill, and she’d been laid off from her job, and we didn’t have any money. Like, any money. Not even enough for food.”

“How’s this a happy memory?”

“We spent the whole day here together, just the three of us. We walked up and down the lot in a grid, going from level to level, picking up any loose change that we could find. We didn’t collect much, only a few dollars, but by the afternoon we had enough for a gingerbread man each. Mom didn’t have enough left over for herself, so she kept the two quarters she found; she said they were lucky. She wouldn’t even take a bite of our dessert, and later, when we went home, she cried all night.”

“Stop me if I’m missing something here, but still kinda struggling to see this as a fun time.”

“It’s the last memory I have of her being her. The last time we were really a family, you know? Even though Dad was in the basement, for some reason, Eugene and I really believed he’d come out on Christmas Day and surprise us. Dad loved Christmas more than we did, and he’d never missed one before. We didn’t care that we weren’t getting any presents, or that we’d spent Christmas Eve scrounging for coins, because we had Mom, and Dad was coming back to us the next day, and we got gingerbread for dinner. Life was pretty great.”

“Your dad didn’t come outta the basement.”

“I think that’s what broke her. Christmas Day. Waiting and waiting and waiting for something that wouldn’t come. We ate at my Auntie Kate’s every night for a week, and then Mom won three grand on a slot machine. The lucky quarters she found really were lucky. God, she came home with so many late Christmas presents: cell phones and books and a feast, everything she’d wanted to buy us but hadn’t been able to. The only thing she got for herself was a tiger’s-eye necklace for good luck.

“I don’t hate her for what she’s become. I want to, but I can’t. I love her too much. That’s the problem. That’s what’s wrong with love. Once you love someone, no matter who they are, you’ll always let them destroy you. Every single time.” Even the very best people found ways to hurt the ones they loved.

“The car accident my mom died in was just after Remy was born,” Jonah said quietly. “The day I disappeared from school. Valentine’s Day. That’s why I left. I got pulled out of school before recess. Everything fell apart after she was gone.”

“Jesus, Jonah. I had no idea. Shit. I’m so sorry.” All these years some dark little voice had been whispering to her that Jonah had left because of her. Because all the other kids had called her names and been so mean and he’d grown tired of being the only thing that stood between her and their cruelty. Of course that wasn’t true. Of course Esther had made herself the center of the universe. Anxious people always thought the world revolved around them, but knowing the truth didn’t make it any easier to stop believing the lie. “Tell me more about her.”

Jonah smiled. “She taught literature, but she’d always wanted to be an actress. That’s why she loved Shakespeare so much. Man, I swear, she was reading me Shakespeare before she was reading me picture books. And she bought me my first paint set when she saw that I was good at art. She was the only person who didn’t laugh at me when I told her I wanted to do movie makeup when I grew up. I told her about you, you know.”

“No way.”

“Yeah, I did. Told her about you being picked on at school, because it upset me. She sat me down and read me that quote, the one that says, ‘All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent,’ then explained what it meant and what I needed to do. I sat with you for the first time the next day.

“Ruined my dad, though, her dying. He was a good guy before that, but then I guess the grief turned to depression and the depression turned to booze and the booze is what makes him mean.”

Esther didn’t know what to say, so she did the only thing she could do: put her hand on Jonah’s shoulder and leaned her head against him.

“One day,” he said, “everybody’s gonna wake up and realize their parents are human beings, just like them. Sometimes they’re good people, sometimes they’re not.”

Before Esther and Jonah went home, they each bought a cookie from the same store Rosemary Solar had taken her children to six years earlier. Esther made a mental note to add gingerbread men to the roster of illicit treats she sold at school.

Near the car, they spotted a quarter glinting in the dark, but neither of them stopped to pick it up.

•   •   •

THAT NIGHT, Jonah decided to stay for his bro date with her dad, which she was, he informed her, invited to. Esther tried to talk him out of it—it wasn’t Jonah’s burden to carry—but he refused, saying he’d already promised Peter he’d come, and besides, he didn’t mind spending the evening in a musty basement if it meant he didn’t have to go home. Holland wasn’t cruel to Remy, Jonah said. In fact, he barely acknowledged her existence.

Jonah left around sunset and returned half an hour later with an expensive bottle of Scotch. Esther didn’t ask how he acquired it. Then he scooped up his cat and slung her around his neck like a scarf, like always, and they went down to the basement.

Once they were downstairs, she was glad Jonah had wanted to stay. The junk, normally stacked up in perilous columns, had been pushed to the sides and neatly arranged. The floors had been cleaned. A table had been set up with three chairs around it, a strip of fabric usually hung on the walls used as a tablecloth. Peter was shining, the petrified half of his body gleaming like polished wood in the low light. Esther could see the age rings that had formed beneath his skin, the opaline veins of white glitter that threaded through the darker wood.

Peter had washed his hair and trimmed his beard. He told them how he’d eaten nothing but beans and rice for four weeks so he could justify spending his carefully rationed savings on this one meal. Esther and Jonah offered to pay for the Thai food they ordered, but Peter wouldn’t hear of it.

They stayed for hours. Jonah was the Jonah she’d first seen at the nickel refinery, the one with a drink in each hand, telling some grand story to a crowd of people. The one who painted the brightness of the galaxy to hide the darkness that lived inside him.

Peter adored him, that much was clear. “We should do this again sometime,” he said, raising his good arm for a toast. “To new friends.”

They raised their glasses of Scotch too. “To new friends,” she and Jonah said together.

Esther thought, as she watched them, that perhaps she’d judged her mother too harshly for not leaving her father despite the constant pain he caused her.

Perhaps falling and remaining in love with people, even if you didn’t want to, was not the great disaster she’d always imagined it to be.