These Dreams of You

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When Parker was four, the age that Sheba is now but before she was born, his father drove him to preschool one morning and they came to a place on the canyon boulevard where a truck had spilled oil that slicked the asphalt. Their car spun out and another car spun into them colliding, and when the spinning was over and everyone stopped, Zan turned from behind the wheel to the four-year-old in back and said, “Are you all right?” Yes, the boy nodded in his stoic fashion. If he nodded yes, whether he was really all right or not, or whether he even knew he was all right, then in his own four-year-old mind he took some small measure of control of the chaos that just had unfolded.

Arriving in Paris on the Eurostar after its unscheduled pause in the Chunnel, leaving the Gare du Nord and crossing the rue Dunkerque on their way to the Gare de l’Est, Parker sees the taxicab heading toward him not at all in that slow-motion way that everyone says things like this happen. There’s nothing slow-motion about it; it all happens faster than the boy can compute before his father grabs him hard by the hand, so hard his hand crunches, and yanks him from the cab’s path. His father says, “Are you all right?” and Parker nods as stoically as if he were four; but he’s not all right. It’s not just that his hand throbs. It’s not even just the spectacle of the cab that nearly hit him flying into the limousine before it, then throwing the gear into reverse, then shifting into drive and slamming into the limo again.