By the time I delivered my mother back to her house, it was after eight o’clock. I was exhausted, but too pumped full of adrenaline to stop now. I couldn’t imagine stopping at a hotel room, pacing anxiously within four walls. No, sitting in a hotel room wasn’t going to cut it. I couldn’t stop—I needed to keep going, to drive as fast as the Explorer would take me, straight through the night, even if I arrived in Oberlin hours before daylight.
I’d forgotten how long it took to get around Chicago. More than once traffic came to a complete stop, and I banged my fists against the steering wheel in frustration. I was driving toward Robert Saenz and away from my father at the same time. I was fulfilling my childhood fantasy, the one where I packed my troubles in an old backpack with a broken zipper and never, never came home again. I’d managed to make that escape as an eighteen-year-old and stay away for more than half of my life. My father was dying, and that should have made me happy. How many times, in how many ways, had I imagined the moment? Take your pick: falling off a bar stool and hitting his head. Picking a fight with the wrong person, someone who could actually fight back. Drinking himself to death, plain and simple. I had prayed for acts of God, like tornados or lightning strikes. I would have been happy with a beam falling at a construction site, and my father being squashed like a little bug beneath its weight. Ironically enough, I’d prayed for a car accident, something quick and simple and final. If the world had any fairness at all, it would have been my father and not my son who was killed by Robert Saenz, by the truck clipping the sign, and the sign bearing down upon him.
But the world wasn’t fair. Daniel was long dead, and my father was still all too much alive, living out his last few days—hours?—with a small staff catering to his needs, with my mother worrying over the position of his bed pillows. My father had the luxury of making final pronouncements, of handing down advice and apology, of saying goodbye. Daniel, who deserved that and more, had never had a chance.
You can do right by him.
What the hell did he know? What right did he have?
I released my hold on the steering wheel, suddenly aware that I was gripping it with a painful intensity. Relax, I ordered myself. The traffic thinned, Chicago was finally behind me, and I still had another five hours to go.
It was small consolation that there would be few people on the road other than the tired, possibly drugged truckers pushing against time to make it to their destination for the night. Robert Saenz had been one of these men on his way home that night, too tired and doped up to know that he’d killed someone.
I kept myself busy by flipping through stations, catching a song or two before the music buzzed into static. In Sacramento, our house was cluttered with CDs. Daniel’s room held hundreds, and I’d burned myself copies over the years, labeling them with a Sharpie. Why hadn’t I brought more of them with me? God knew there was room.
I got gas near Gary, Indiana, and gave in to my need for caffeine—although it meant I would be stopping more often en route. The girl at the register, her hair a series of gelled spikes, was absorbed in a magazine and jumped, startled, as I entered.
“Is it pretty cold out there?” she asked, taking the two dollars I slid across the counter.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, and she glanced at me quickly, then down to the cash register, fingering my change.
Was it cold? Hot? Wet? Dry? Did it matter? In my mind I was miles away, already lacing my way through Oberlin, past the conservatories and the brick buildings on campus, past front porches and picket fences. I was only dimly aware of what was actually happening around me.
“Okay, then, you have a good night,” the girl said, depositing the change in my open palm. I fingered it idly, as if I’d lost the ability to count, to name things.
“You have a good night, too,” I mumbled.
Outside, the sky was made even darker by the absence of stars, obscured by a low gray haze of cloud cover. Even the stars have gone, I thought, senselessly—and realized I was barely hanging on to sanity. I wasn’t the father of Daniel and Olivia anymore. I was no longer Mr. K, the goofy teacher who posed for his yearbook photo in a white lab coat, holding a beaker of green liquid. I wasn’t the young man who had fallen in love with Kathleen. I was now a desperate man, or his shadow. Suddenly I remembered a hand-painted sign that Kathleen’s father had hung in his garage: When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. I was at the end of the rope. I had tied a knot. I only had to hang on a little longer.
Every few miles—and I knew, because I was watching for the reflective mile markers with an almost religious fervor—I found myself thinking about Olivia, or about Kathleen, or about Olivia and Kathleen, the two of them finding my note. Olivia would be hurt and furious, although maybe not surprised. What had Kathleen known, what had she suspected? Only last night we’d made love as if it would be the last time, as if the world had ended and we were the only people left. Kathleen, Olivia—I had to force them out of my brain, like physically slamming a door. Think about Robert Saenz, I reminded myself. I remembered his mug shot—the disheveled hair, the dead eyes, the slight upward tilt of his chin: What the fuck are you going to do about it? Remember how he killed Daniel and drove away.
If I could, I’d get a punch in first. I don’t think I’d ever thrown a punch in my life, although I’d been on the receiving end often enough as a kid. But I needed my fist to land squarely on Robert Saenz’s upraised chin.
“That’s for Daniel,” I imagined myself saying as Saenz fell backward, a twin to my childhood fantasy—my father falling backward, felled by my powerful blow.
Funnily enough, it was Dad’s voice that kept popping into my head: Do right by him.
Yes, but I’ll do right by you, too, Dad.
Kill one, let the other die.
Indiana passed in a dark blur of asphalt and semis and road signs. I stopped once for coffee, stopped twice to piss against fences that seemed to border nothing. When I passed the giant sign welcoming me to Ohio, it felt as if a bell should have sounded, one loud enough to be heard by the whole world. I sat up straighter, drove faster, resented when I had to stop again for gas. A sprinkling of rain fell, spattering the windshield. I finally knew the answer to the cashier’s question back in Gary—it was cold outside and growing colder. Here and there the ditches were dotted with the crusty, stubborn remains of snow heaps that hadn’t received the message about spring.
I took the exit for state route 58 toward Amherst/Oberlin, forcing myself to keep to the speed limit; that was all I needed, a speeding ticket this close to my destination. I could imagine the conversation with the officer. What’s a guy from California doing out here after midnight? You have business in town, buddy?
I had moved beyond tired to a strange place where adrenaline kicked in, defying normal human powers. I’d heard stories of men who lifted cars off of trapped victims, who scaled impossibly high fences to escape a charging animal. I could feel a pulse thrumming in my fingertips, my neck, my thighs. Was he asleep already, passed out, dreaming his last dream?
I tapped the gas and eased up, tapped and eased, tapped and eased.
Soon, it would all be over.