Lone Wolf

23

I REMEMBER IT like it was yesterday.

I am twelve years old.

My mother is standing just inside the front door, looking back into the house, two suitcases packed and at her side, my father at the top of the stairs, saying, “Evelyn, don’t go.”

It is raining outside, and Mom is wearing her tan raincoat, with the long dangly belt that is always slipping out of the loops, over a blue striped dress, and if she had just come in from the outside, you might have thought those were two raindrops running down her cheeks.

I am standing next to my sister, Cindy, who’s fourteen. Mom looks at me and tries to smile and says, “You two look after each other, okay? Your dad’s going to be busy and won’t be able to look after everything.”

I am numb. What is going on here? Why does Mom have suitcases packed? Where is she going? How long is she going to be gone? I get this horrible feeling that if she goes, she is not coming back. That she is leaving forever. What has Dad done to make her so angry she has to leave?

“Where are you going?” Cindy asks. “Will you bring me something back?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” I snap at her. “She’s not coming back.”

Cindy shouts at me. “Shut up! You don’t know anything!” She’s so angry, she must have some idea that this is actually the truth.

Mom swallows. She is crying. “I’ll send you something,” she says. “And I’ll call you all the time.”

Dad shakes his head. “This is crazy. You can’t do this. We can figure out something else.”

Mom looks at him. “Arlen, I think you know why I have to do this.”

There are tears in his eyes, too. He turns away so we can’t see him wiping them away.

There have been arguments in the night. For a few weeks now, it seems. Sometimes, in bed, I pull the pillow over my head so I won’t hear their muffled voices through the wall.

I know Dad drives her crazy on occasion, but I’ve never thought his behavior would drive her out of the house. I mean, he drives me and Cindy crazy, too, but we aren’t leaving. It seems no more a choice for Mom than it does for us, as children.

It has not been that long since the infamous Emergency Brake Incident. Five or six months, maybe.

We have a white Volkswagen Beetle, with the motor in the back, and it distresses Dad to no end that his wife can’t remember to pull up on the emergency brake when she parks the car. She figures leaving the gearshift engaged holds the car in place, and on level ground, you can get away with that, I suppose, but there is a slight incline to our driveway, which means that if the shifter were to somehow become disengaged, our Bug would roll back and out into the street.

Dad reminds her time and again that she has to put the emergency brake on, and sometimes she remembers, but most times she forgets. Mom is a bit forgetful at times, easily distracted. She explains that she’s the one who keeps the house running, that she has a lot to keep track of, and if she can manage to make twenty-one meals a week and change the sheets and do the laundry, can’t she be forgiven if she doesn’t always remember to put on the emergency brake?

It doesn’t help that our other car, a 1965 Dodge Polara, has automatic transmission, and even Dad rarely bothers to shove the emergency brake foot pedal down in it. Mom must figure, if she doesn’t have to remember it in the Dodge, why does she have to remember it in the Volkswagen?

One day, Dad decides to teach her a lesson.

She’s returned from grocery shopping, and Dad slips out to see whether she’s remembered to put the brake on. He does this almost every time she comes home, and if she’s slipped up, he’ll come in right away and let her know. If she’s remembered, he says nothing. Sometimes, soon as Mom gets home, I’d slip out before Dad can and if Mom has forgotten to pull the brake on, I’ll do it.

This one particular day, I guess he’s had enough.

He gets into the Beetle and coasts it back, just far enough that the back end is hanging into the street about a foot. Then he slips it back into gear, resists the temptation to put the emergency brake on, and goes back up into our garage, where he finds Cindy’s red and white tricycle, which we still have, even though she hasn’t ridden it in six years or more. The garage is filled with stuff we’ve outgrown, including a turquoise pedal car I once used to tour the neighborhood and pick up hot four-year-olds.

Dad takes the tricycle and carefully wedges it, tipped onto its side, under the back of the car. The handlebar he links in with the bumper.

Dad has staged the event in such a way that it can be seen from our front door.

He comes back inside and walks into the kitchen, where I am making a peanut butter sandwich, and Mom is glancing at that day’s paper. He says, casually, “Did you hear something?”

Mom says, “What?”

“Out front. I thought I heard something a second ago.”

Mom decides to go check. I don’t think it even occurs to her that there is a problem with the car. Maybe she’s thinking Dad heard the mailman arrive. Dad waits in the kitchen. He’s grinning, and at this point, I have no idea why. It’s only later I learn how he’s set this all up.

So I have no idea why Mom is suddenly screaming, “Oh my God!”

I bolt from the table, ahead of Dad, and when I got to the front door I can see Mom running flat out to the end of the driveway. I see the trike jammed under the back of the car, and I recognize it as Cindy’s, and even though I know she doesn’t ride it anymore, I feel this jolt. I guess Mom felt it, too. I shudder at the thought of what else might be found under the car, in addition to a tricycle.

Mom drops to her knees, looks under the car, gets up, looks around, as if maybe she might spot some injured child attempting to crawl home.

Dad is leaning in the doorway, arms folded, looking unbearably satisfied with himself. As Mom walks back across the lawn, saying something about maybe they should call the police, there might be a hurt child wandering the neighborhood, Dad says, “Looks like maybe you forgot to put on the e-brake.”

That stops her cold. Not, I suspect, because she is trying to remember whether she did apply the brake or not, but because at that moment she realizes what has actually happened. That her husband has staged this event. That he has allowed her to think, if only for a moment, that she is responsible for a monstrous tragedy.

She walks up the steps to the house and, in a blinding flash, slaps my father across the face.

I have never seen my mother hit my father. Nor have I ever seen him hit her. For all his faults, he is not that kind of man.

This is not some little slap, either. It actually knocks him off his feet and into the shrubs at the side of the door. And then she goes inside, and doesn’t speak to him for three days.

Dad apologizes endlessly. It doesn’t take him long to figure out that he may have crossed the line here.

It is painful to recall this incident, not just because it shows my father, basically a good man, in such a bad light. It also shows how little we can learn from our parents’ mistakes, how we can know, even as children, that what they’ve done is wrong, and then, when we grow up ourselves, we go along and make the same kinds of mistakes. I had to make my own, with disastrous consequences, before I learned to tone it down.

Looking out the window of Dad’s cabin, one memory links to another, and then, suddenly, there is Lana Gantry.

Not outside the cabin, but in my memories.

The Gantrys live up the street. I hadn’t remembered it all that clearly when I’d been reintroduced to Lana earlier in the week, but now things started coming back. Mr. and Mrs. Gantry. His name is Walter. He works at the Ford plant. He’s the first person in the neighborhood to have one of the new Mustangs. My parents get together with them once in a while. They play bridge, or barbecue out back. One time, they actually play charades.

After three days, Mom starts talking to Dad again. It is summer, and they’ve already invited the Gantrys over for dinner that weekend, so some sort of peace accord is reached.

I see the four of them out back, Dad and Mr. Gantry with beers in their hands, laughing, the women shaking their heads and smiling, sharing jokes about their husbands’ foolishness. They are all friendly together. Mr. Gantry talking to Mom. Dad talking to Lana.

Sometimes, slipping his arm around her waist. Surely, I think, this does not mean anything.

And then, not long after, Mom at the door with her suitcases.

And not long after that, the Gantrys move away.

And the four of them never get together again.

But now, a decade after my mother’s death, here is Lana Gantry again. Back in my father’s life.

Living in the same town as a young man she refers to as her nephew. Orville Thorne. Who, I guess, is about thirteen years younger than I.

And who, I now realize, looks an awful lot like me.

It doesn’t seem possible that Mom would walk out on Dad for the better part of half a year over the Emergency Brake Incident. But I can imagine her leaving him for fathering a child with a woman from down the street.

The night before she leaves, I hear snippets of her argument with my father in their bedroom, snippets which, up until now, more than three decades later, never meant anything to me. I hear the name “Gantry.” And I hear the word “baby.”

“I can’t live here,” I hear my mother say.

“The shame,” I hear her say.

And then I pull the pillow down harder on my head so I won’t have to hear any more. There isn’t anything else from that argument to recall now.

She keeps her word, though. She does call all the time. She talks to Cindy, and then my sister hands the phone to me, and she asks me what is going on at school, and whether I am doing my homework, and what I am doing with my friends, and I tell her everything I can think of, about Star Trek and this episode where Kirk and Spock go back to Earth in the 1920s to find Dr. McCoy, who’s met this woman who will change the course of history, and I am ready to tell her every detail of the entire episode because I want to talk to her for as long as possible, but finally, Dad nudges me aside, mumbles something about long distance, because Mom is staying with her sister in Toronto, but what he really wants is to talk to her himself.

Once he has the phone, he asks me and Cindy to leave the kitchen, to go watch TV or something, but sometimes I hide around the corner and hear my father say, “I still love you. It’s my fault, not yours. I’m ready to start all over again. How are you feeling? Are you feeling okay?”

After six months of this, Mom comes home, and our house is whole again.

They are both different after that, but especially Dad. He still has his quirks and phobias. He gets the oil changed in the Dodge every four thousand miles, and if he’s even a hundred miles overdue he can’t sleep at night for fear the engine will seize up and cost him a thousand dollars to fix. He still drives me and Cindy nuts, but he is never so critical of Mom again. He lets stuff go. He even trades Mom’s Volkswagen in on a compact Ford with automatic transmission, doesn’t care anymore whether she uses the emergency brake. And maybe, after a year or two, they are signs that they actually love each other.

But there are also times when I notice a faraway look in Mom’s eyes, and I will ask her what she is thinking.

“Oh, nothing,” she says. “Nothing at all.”

It’s the day she leaves that stays with me. Her standing in the door, waiting to leave, the suitcases at her side. The rain coming down outside.

Cindy rushes to give her a hug, but I hold back. I am so angry that she’s going. That no matter what Dad has done, she can’t put it aside to take care of us.

“Zachary,” she says, “can you give Mom a kiss goodbye?”

I run to my room and watch from my window as Dad helps Mom take her bags to the car and toss them into the back seat of the Volkswagen. And then she gets in, Dad standing next to the car as though he expects her to roll down the window and say one final thing to him. But she does not.

The Bug comes to life with its distinctive, throaty roar. She puts the wipers on, then backs out of the drive.

That’s when I notice that one end of the belt to her raincoat has become caught in the bottom of the door, and is dangling down, swinging an inch above the wet pavement.

I run from my room and descend the flight of stairs in two jumps, burst out the front door, run past Dad standing in the driveway, and after my mom’s car, screaming, “Your belt! Your belt!” But Mom does not look back, and then the Volkswagen turns the corner and is gone.

Standing there, in the rain, I cry enough tears to drown the world.