Camille answered the door with a smile, and Jake fell back into immediate infatuation. There was just something about his father’s domestic help. A spiritual connection that transcended current circumstances. Before Jake could ask, Camille reached into the pocket of her blue apron and produced the keys to the one hundred thirty-one thousand dollar automobile.
“I believe you have come for these?”
“Thank you,” Jake said as Camille placed the keys in his hand. “How have you been?”
“I’m good, Jake. How about you? How’s work with your father?”
“Work with my father?” Jake asked pensively. “Something tells me you already know the answer to that question.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Jake.”
“In that case, I guess there is no reason to tell Reina thank you.”
“Like I said, Jake, I don’t know what you’re referring to,” Camille repeated.
Both knew the conversation Jake wanted to have wasn’t going to take place. He smiled. Camille smiled. And with a silent understanding, Jake stepped off the porch. “I’ll open the garage door for you,” Camille said, as Jake walked down the stone path in front of the house.
Jake sat in the car, still safely parked in the garage. He rubbed his hand across the top arc of the wheel, depressed the clutch, and ran through the gears of his father’s candy-apple-red Porsche 911 Turbo convertible. He turned the key in the ignition with a mix of excitement and trepidation, and the four hundred forty-four horsepower engine came to life. Jake felt the vibrations rumbling through the seat and immediately understood German automotive engineering. With wheels still frozen to the pavement, one thing was already clear—the beast was built for business.
He eased the car into reverse and down the driveway. The large ceramic brakes were powerful, and the sudden grip of the brake pads on the rotor pushed his skull into the headrest at the end of the driveway. Definitely not the Subaru, he thought. Jake chugged out of his father’s neighborhood in first gear, the engine purring, begging for more.
Jake toured the winding roads near Georgetown Pike and cruised the quiet streets of Great Falls that were a dime a dozen among the woods that overlooked the Potomac on the Virginia side. At the entrance ramp to the GW Parkway, Jake needlessly checked the blind spot over his left shoulder, and punched it. The difference between a decade-old, four-banger station wagon with all wheel drive and a German sports car was measured by Jake’s white-knuckled grip on the wheel. He hit fifty before shifting out of second and passed eighty-five with the turbo kicking in. A hundred and ten was fast enough to scare him for the day, and he settled into the traffic at an uninspiring seventy mph in a car that cost more money than he had made thus far in his life. He turned the radio up, looked for someone to impress, and kept pace with the lower forms of automotive life.
He zipped across the Key Bridge against the evening rush hour traffic, thousands of cars straining to ooze out of the city on every available road. He made one trip down M Street and turned a few heads at a safe, almost-stalling speed of twenty-five. Just another young entrepreneur, lawyer, or son of a diplomat showing his worth. He turned toward home. One stop and then it was off to see Kate. Enough was enough. He missed her. He needed to tell her the truth. What better way to make a lasting impression than in a Porsche, he thought. It should have been the car company’s advertising slogan.
Jake turned left just beyond the fire station and drove by the sparsely populated parking lot on the far side of the three-story brick structure. Kate’s Lexus was there, next to the lone picnic table where they had had lunch weeks before. Jake was tired of calling, tired of leaving messages, tired of thinking that he had lost his girlfriend because of an annoying Turk named Hasad and his ambition with two strippers. Kate may not have wanted to see him, but he was giving her no choice.
A block from one of the main traffic arteries, the fire station stood in relative isolation. A string of small shops lined the street across from the station, next to a library that had been slated for destruction in favor of a more modern, more audacious building to store books. Jake paused at the stop sign, took a last look around for other cars or pedestrians, and hit the accelerator. The car lunged forward and picked up speed until the thirty-six hundred pounds of moving metal was halted by the laws of physics.
The eight-man fire-and-rescue team inside the station sat down for dinner for the third time. A two-alarm house fire had interrupted their first attempt at a hot meal. An octogenarian with a system full of Viagra and a twenty-three-year-old wife kept them away from their plates for a second time, as normal dinner hours for the rest of the world flew by.
The unique sound of crunching, twisting metal is rarely heard by fire and rescue personnel. They deal with the aftermath—the bloody faces, the missing limbs, the unidentifiable remains in an unidentifiable car. The accident scenes they knew were filled with screams of hysteria and cries of pain.
With the crash in their front yard, the firehouse sprang into action. There was no need for anyone to call 911. No need for a dispatcher to give them the address. The accident had come to them. As the professional men and women of the life support and rescue team prepared for work, the question on everyone’s mind was whether or not to get in the truck. The fifteen-foot doors to the station opened and the rescue team poured out across the driveway to the concrete utility pole. The candy-apple-red Porsche was still a Porsche, but its status as a legal street racer was going to depend on a very good mechanic.
Kate’s supervisor, the resident expert on accident extraction, reached the driver’s side first. He surveyed the damage to the inside of the car and calculated the possible injuries and potential exit strategies. The steering wheel rested within inches of the victim’s chest. The deflated remains of the car’s airbag hung like an unrolled condom in the space between. Another airbag dangled from the ceiling above the door. Hidden beneath the encroaching dashboard, the condition of the victim’s legs was unknown. He flashed his ever-ready penlight into the eyes of the victim and gauged his alertness. The victim looked back with lids wide open.
Orders filled the air. Crow bar, neck brace, stretcher. The twenty-five-foot rescue squad vehicle finally rolled from its parking bay and stopped at the end of the station’s driveway, setting a record for the fastest response time in regional rescue history. The head of rescue looked at the victim and scratched his head. The accident was a two on a ten scale. He had pulled far more endangered victims out of far more mangled pieces of metal.
Kate was on autopilot. After more than a hundred accident scenes, the car half-enclosed around the concrete pole at the end of the drive was nothing more than scenery. Irrelevant background information. Kate, her basic rescue kit in hand, headed around the rear of the car. She approached the driver’s side door, looked in and spewed words her mother didn’t know were in her daughter’s vernacular.
She didn’t bother with the latex gloves—she had exchanged more bodily fluid with the man behind the wheel than she cared to admit. The victim’s pupils were normal, his pulse was strong. The extraction team peeled the driver’s door back like the top on a tuna can. They removed the victim and placed him on the stretcher. Kate moved over Jake and checked for injuries. She unbuttoned his oxford shirt like she had so many times in the past months, passion now substituted with professionalism. She opened the shirt and cursed again. The head of rescue looked over at the victim.
“What the hell is that?”
“It’s a note.”
Across his Jake’s chest, in dark indelible ink, were the words “I am innocent. Let me explain.”
“Kate, you want to tell me what this is about?”
“Do I have to? It seems pretty obvious to me.”
Jake smiled.
“You’re an asshole,” Kate said quietly.
“Sometimes it takes an insane act by a sane person to prove a point.”
Kate tried not to laugh, but a smile formed on her face. Her words were being thrown back at her in the most ridiculous of circumstances.
“You can let me off the stretcher. I’m fine,” Jake said as he was rolled toward the ambulance.
“Sorry, Jake. You’re going to the hospital whether you like it or not. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep you for psychiatric observation.”
“How’s the car?”
“I take it that was your father’s?”
“Yes. My first time in a Porsche. The power got away from me.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Jake.”
“That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Is it drivable?”
“No,” Kate answered looking at the wreck. “How pissed is he going to be?”
“He’ll get over it.”
Peter went straight from the bar in the clubhouse to the hospital. Jake was in the recovery room, the healthiest patient in the D.C. metro area. He had endured the cursory exam, a standard chest and neck x-ray, and a stern consultation from a young District-licensed psychiatrist who determined Jake to be as mentally sound as anyone he met in his line of work. In fact, his last patient of the day was in better mental health than most of his stressed-out medical colleagues.
Jake flipped through the outdated Sports Illustrated magazine for the fourth time, having already burned through three issues of Reader’s Digest. Peter met the nurse at the recovery room door, her station a single white table with a chair on wheels.
Dressed in his favorite golfing shorts and shirt, accentuated with a healthy tan, Peter performed his first fatherly duty in twenty years. “My name is Peter Winthrop. I am here to pick up my son, Jake Patrick.”
The nurse didn’t get out of her seat. “Last bed on the right, next to the window.”
Peter walked past the curtains that divided the eight-bed room and stuck his head around the corner.
“Jake?”
“Dad.”
“How are you, son?”
“I’m fine. Caught a little airbag in the face, but nothing’s hurt except my pride.”
“And the car?”
“It may need a little work,” Jake said, putting on his best look of shame.
“You know, I was on a six-month waiting list for that car,” Peter said, switching concerns.
Jake didn’t know if his father knew about the note on his chest, and he wasn’t about to volunteer that small detail. He kept up the charade as he got out of bed, and stood. “Dad, I’m sorry about the car. You were right. It was a little more power than I was ready for. I should have been more careful.”
“I’m disappointed, son.”
Peter was disappointed, and not just because he would be without his favorite toy for a while. He was disappointed for another reason. In the midst of the standard hospital formaldehyde scent, he smelled bullshit. The same bullshit he was famous for shoveling. This time it was coming from his son.
He hoped he was wrong.