“Keep me company,” my mother had said, coaxing me into the car for the trip to pick up my older sister from a week of church camp located at the end of an hour’s mystery of unfamiliar roads.
“I’m feeling a little peaked,” my mother said as soon as we pulled out of the driveway, and by the time we started home, so did I. Now, the roads were the same, only boring, and my sister started singing camp songs that made me dread where I was scheduled to begin church-camping next summer. “You can’t get to heaven on roller skates,” she started. “A mile later, you couldn’t get there “in a big fine car.” A few miles later, you couldn’t expect to make it “in a Kleenex box,” which seemed to lull her to sleep.
Because it cost extra, there was no radio in the blue and beige Bel-Air. What’s more, Saturday morning had slid into afternoon, and my mother told me to roll my window up, shutting off my makeshift, mid-1950s air conditioning. “Just the vent,” she said. “Because your sister is back there behind you.”
I lapsed into what my mother had named my “Benadryl zone” even though she had never given me a dose or taken one herself. Home remedies and a bottle of aspirin took care of almost everything, including whatever it was that frequently ailed her. I inched the window down. She didn’t seem to notice. I inched it again as we flew past a stop sign.
I was reaching for the handle again when our mother said, “Where are we?” slowing down while looking back and forth as if she was searching for house numbers.
“We missed the turn,” I said.
“What turn?”
“To the big road.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said, but we were almost stopped by now, and when she pulled into a driveway and turned around, my older sister, blinking herself awake, leaned forward from the back seat. “There’s three lanes to cross there. We’d get killed if we didn’t stop,” she announced like Miss Musser, my third-grade teacher until three weeks before.
What do you know with your eyes shut? I wanted to say, but as soon as we crested the first small hill going the other way, anyone could see Route 8, the big road, as proof. Early Saturday afternoon, near the end of June, the traffic was steady, nearly every car and truck going, it looked like, faster than the posted limit of fifty.
“Mommy, you really didn’t stop,” my sister said.
“You didn’t even slow down,” I clarified.
“How come we’re not dead?” our mother said, sounding as if she needed more evidence. I started thinking how happy she would be when she understood that we had ourselves a genuine miracle to talk about. She pulled off the road and parked where there was room. I expected her to say something like “God was watching over us,” but she murmured, “I have such a headache” in a voice so flat it sounded as if she was reading it from a phone-book listing.
Our mother sat motionless and unblinking, staring at the road for so long I began to imagine a near-future of standing with my sister on that road’s shoulder, an ambulance parked nearby. Though I had no idea what her condition would be called or how dire that might be. Whether it was temporary or permanent. I didn’t speak, afraid that she wouldn’t stir or even manage to answer. Her thumbs lifted and fell, her tongue flicked over her lips. “Not a word of this to your father,” she said.
“Why not?” my sister said, sounding sure to tell, first thing.
Our mother didn’t answer. She leaned forward, concentrating. When we began to move again, the silence that settled among us steadily grew heavier, the car crowded with symptoms and secrets. At the stop sign, our mother looked both ways for so long that the three lanes of Route 8 seemed impassable.
At last, she swung us into the middle lane, the one that drivers used to make left turns off Route 8, protected only by a solid line that declared a no-passing zone. She drove so slowly that I was afraid we would be hit from behind. I closed my eyes and tried to think us home.