14

Driver’s Ed had boasted several driving simulators, which I had never had a chance to use because they had been stolen the summer before. Instead, we had been taking quizzes on the California State Vehicle Code and watching films produced by the Highway Patrol, which included endless footage of car wrecks. Drivers in clothes that looked awkwardly out of style and pedestrians looking somehow historical lay bloody beside mammoth, by now obsolete, ambulances. The dated quality of the films made them less real, of course, but it also made them weigh in with a heavy, hard-to-shake-off message: dead then, dead now.

Sometimes someone would have trouble figuring out what a particularly awful burn victim was supposed to be; one or two looked like charred birds. “What was that?” I would hear whispered, or not whispered, but no one would respond. I think we were most of all embarrassed by all these victims. We had to look, but we hated it and liked it at the same time.

But the cars had arrived at last, new Chevrolets of a sort no one ever drove in Oakland, four-door cars that seemed destined to belong to chemistry teachers and Baptist ministers, solid, dull people in a safe place like Kansas or Iowa. These cars all sported a yellow triangle of wood, like the triangle you use to set up the balls in a pool game, but bigger and emblazoned: STUDENT DRIVER.

Mr. Milliken was going driving with me. He got paid extra for teaching driving, padding his wallet with a little excitement.

I only wanted to zombie my way through the day. This was not the time to introduce my practically auto-virgin self behind the wheel.

But he stood with a clipboard beside the Chevrolet. He waited at the passenger’s side while I fumbled with the car door. Two girls I knew only a little, Asian girls who regarded me with both charm and indifference, Dung and Tina, sat in the backseat, and I thought they might be pouting a little at having to wait.

“Mr. Milliken thinks I’m going to kill us all,” I said.

Tina chewed gum at me.

“I wouldn’t have even mentioned the word death if I thought there was any danger,” said Mr. Milliken.

Dung was from Vietnam. She was pretty, and little, so little you had to keep looking at her. She had the fine features and delicate jawline I associate with pictures of Egyptian mummies.

Tina was rough, gum-popping, and bored with me, with cars, with air. Although she had the crisp English of a gangster in an old movie, her native language was Mien. Tina heard my offer and curled a lip. “Doesn’t matter,” she said.

Dung laughed. No, no, I should go first. But she sidled her way into the front seat ahead of me.

“A drive to the park,” said Mr. Milliken, in the artificially cheerful tone of the narrator in a travel film.

Tina blew bubbles beside me in the back seat. Each big bubble grew huge, then grew lopsided, then collapsed and withered. She unpeeled it from her face each time and stuffed it back in.

“We should go over to San Francisco,” said Tina. “Have some fun.”

Dung drove looking up and over the steering wheel, as though she could barely see out through the windshield.

“Looking good,” said Mr. Milliken.

We drove up Park Boulevard and then really started to drive, picking up speed as Dung felt the command of the wheel and the accelerator suddenly hers.

“Gotta watch that limit,” said Mr. Milliken, pumping the brake of his controls. He had a gas pedal and a brake but no steering wheel.

I did not look off to our left, where the neighborhood of large, spacious houses began. I knew the house with green shutters was there, beyond sight, just as I knew I would have to visit it again.

When it was Tina’s turn, we were on Snake Road. She blew a bubble, jerked the car out of park, and whipped us up the two-lane road.

At Redwood Park, after Tina had negotiated the twists of the road with disdain, using two hands only at Mr. Milliken’s prompting, it was my turn.

“Into the Valley of Death,” said Mr. Milliken.

I had driven once before—my father’s Honda, which, since it is a stick shift, hopped like a rabbit every time I popped the clutch. I am a fairly athletic person, used to being able to come up with the ball one way or another, but I had decided to wait on driving until I got a car I could handle.

I could tell Dung and Tina were both relieved that they had made it this far, and were ready to be entertained by whatever blunders I might make.

“What kind of bombs were they?” I said, hoping to distract my nerves and Mr. Milliken’s humor with a little history. “The ones that burst in midair? You know—in the song.”

“Not car bombs,” he said.

The shift was a metal T, and when the transmission slipped from park into reverse, you could feel the gears in there, under there, beyond us, finding what it was I had commanded. I had that wonder I had known as a very little boy watching a helicopter: machine.

“This is boring,” said Tina.

The car backed, gravel crackling. I worked the wheel around and found drive. I tested the accelerator, which generated more noise than movement. I tested the brake, and the slight forward movement stopped.

I turned my head to acknowledge Mr. Milliken, feeling cheerful, nervous. Little Dung made the tiniest noise clearing her throat.

The car surmounted a hump at the ridge of the parking lot, and the road was littered with scraps of eucalyptus, tree trash all over the place. The air smelled wonderful. I found the lane with the car, and let the car’s momentum take one curve after another, downhill and easy.

“Too slow,” said Tina.

That night I sat up straight, and put my hand out into the dark.

I whispered Jared’s name, and listened. It would be just like him to steal into my own room as I slept, right into my bedroom, just to prove that he could do it.

But there was no sound, or only the normal sounds of the trees in the backyard making a fine, soft breathing noise in the wind.