The Drive Read online

  “So you built the original one from scratch,” Gary says, more acknowledgment than question. My father nods, as if building the rolling home of my childhood was no big deal. “I wonder if it’s still out there somewhere?”

  “In the Bolivian outback? Not bloody likely,” my father snorts. “Sold it to a rancher who probably chopped it up for firewood eons ago.”

  My mother tags along, seizing each pause in my father’s rants with strings of linked-together words too rushed to interrupt.

  “We-finally-found-an-island-off-the-coast-of-Nicaragua-where-the-land-is-cheap-enough-and-we’re-going-to-call-it-Corn-Island-Dive-Resort-and-we’ll-build-a-hut-maybe-called-Sea-Hunt-like-the-old-TV-show-for-when-you-and-Jenny-visit-and-you-can-get-all-your-rich-advertising-clients-from-DC-to-come-spend-their-money.”

  She runs out of breath by the time she remembers why we’re standing there. “Of course you can come too, Gary. Since it looks like you’re going to be part of the family.”

  That Gary doesn’t whip out his cell phone and call a cab back to the Portland airport right this second seems pinch-myself lucky. But not as lucky as later, after he and my father have had a few beers out in the garage. Gary stands behind me at the kitchen sink, pulls my hands out of sudsy dishwater, dries them off with a towel, and places a loose diamond in my open palm.

  “You’ve got your dad all wrong,” he tells me. “He doesn’t show it, but he’s really happy about the wedding. Otherwise he’d never let this go for such a bargain.”

  I turn the stone over in my hand: one carat, maybe more. It seems heavy and vaguely familiar, like I’ve seen it in another setting. Literally.

  “A bargain? Wait a minute. Are you telling me this wasn’t a gift?” I ask.

  “Practically the same thing,” Gary replies, holding the diamond up to the light. “He’s got a generous streak, your old man. I could never have afforded anything nearly this perfect. Straight from the heart of Africa.”

  Which is when I remember where I’ve seen it before. On my mother’s right ring finger when she smuggled it out of South Africa. It was the only way we could get our money out of the country, Dad had explained at the time. Foreigners couldn’t leave with cash.

  “Okay, so he’s ingenious, too,” Gary says. “That’s one hell of a chance he took.”

  “Not as much of a chance as the diamond seller took when he gave them to my father with only 10 percent down,” I say. The diamond my father has so graciously discounted for his future son-in-law was never paid off in the first place.

  My father offers to let us sleep in the unfinished motor home, but he hasn’t installed a propane heater yet so we opt for the bedroom where I spent the last two years of high school. I warn Gary about its Pepto-Bismol-pink walls and gymnastics ribbons still thumbtacked in a rainbow arch over the bed. He plunks our suitcases down, and I smile at the bowl of fresh-picked blackberries my mother leaves on my white dressing table. It’s not the only welcome-home gesture. My father has meticulously taped a clean layer of plastic sheeting over the window that’s been cracked since I was fourteen. But what Gary is staring at is a fax machine, still in its cardboard box.

  “What’s this?” I ask my mother.

  “I guess it’s your wedding present now,” she says. “Daddy and I were going to give this to you for Christmas—you know, so you can fax us all the dates and credit card numbers when scuba divers want to make reservations for Corn Island Dive Resort.”

  It is at this moment that I realize my mother has no idea what her daughter’s life is like. I am a vice president in the creative division of a global public relations firm, a woman who eats more meals on airplanes than at home. My fifteen-year-old dog, Wipeout, spends so much time at the Maryland farm where she goes when I’m away that the two women who run the farm have their own set of keys to my house on Capitol Hill. I have a full-time production manager who coordinates my schedule and makes travel reservations and an administrative assistant who files my expense reports. I haven’t touched a fax machine in years.

  The first time my parents ran away from Oregon, I was a child with no choice but to tag along and little responsibility along the way. Now I hear my mother’s intonation rising at the end of every sentence. She’s trying to talk and smile simultaneously, and I realize that she wants me to be the grown-up.

  “It’s a wonderful fax machine, top of the line,” she says. “It’ll make it so much easier for you to take care of our bills and bank stuff. Instead of relying on the mail.”

  Sure, no problem, I feel like saying. Why don’t I file your taxes, too? I’ve got so much free time on my hands.

  “Bev, really, you shouldn’t have,” Gary says, making like the gift is much too thoughtful or generous, but my mother is tone deaf to the joke.

  I’m still stunned. I’ve just introduced my mother to the man I’m marrying. I don’t expect her to flutter around me making guest lists, but a fax machine for a wedding present?

  “Mom, isn’t it supposed to be something borrowed or something blue?”

  She looks away, chirping and hopping around the fact that there will be no wedding shower, no motherly words of advice. She is flying south, following my father again. I have always been her accomplice, the one who can talk my father down from the ledges of his leaps into the unknown. The fax machine is my mother’s way of saying please be there if I need you. Always be my lifeline.

  Gary is still shaking his head in disbelief at the clunky machine in front of us.

  “So, right about now you’re probably wondering what kind of craziness you’re getting yourself into,” I say, hoping he’ll laugh.

  He does. “As long as it’s only hereditary and not contagious.”

  Gary and I met on my first agency shoot in DC. He’s a cinematographer, watching scenes unfold through a tiny viewfinder while I conduct the interviews and direct the content. He is discovering I have no such power over my parents. They have the capacity to careen off balance and spin assumptions into unfamiliar planes. Their eagerness can be rough, their intensity overwhelming. The words they choose are not diplomatic; their thoughts tumble out uncensored.

  I understand this because I know what happened to my parents and why their default setting is to yank the cord from the wall. But I haven’t told Gary. So I decide to drive him out to a graveyard a half hour away, without my parents. We stand in the Oregon drizzle looking down at a slab of rose-colored marble.

  Our Son

  John McDonald Bruce

  1968–1972

  His love and laughter live forever

  It’s a lie, that headstone. My younger sister and I are still afraid to say our dead brother’s name out loud. Jenny doesn’t ask our father for parenting advice or brag to him about her two boisterous sons. Maybe it’s because her youngest boy has John John’s eyes, but my father takes no joy in playing with his grandsons. He chooses to keep them at least a continent’s length away. He was robbed of a son, and being a grandfather is a consolation prize he resolutely, selfishly rejects.

  My mother’s scars are not so visible, so close to the surface. If anyone asks, she says she lost a son, not that he died. She greets her grown daughters with baby-love words: “How’s my number-one Princess?” and “Does my Sunshine need a hug today?” as though this will resurrect the world we shared before my brother died.

  John is an unspoken absence in all our lives, and standing over his grave with Gary at my side I don’t know whose childhood is really buried here.

  “He was there one day and then just gone. I never got to say good-bye.”

  I nudge the toe of my shoe against a weed that’s attached itself to John John’s neglected headstone.

  “We don’t have to accept the fax machine, you know,” Gary says as he draws me near. “You don’t have to be the parent.”

  I love this man but he can’t fathom the extent to which the past paralyzes the family he is about to marry into.

  “Nobody just says no to my father.”

&n
bsp; There’s another way, he tells me. We sit on damp Oregon soil, backs against the gravestone of my father’s son. One hundred miles south of here, Gary’s son, Alex, is studying philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is so happily immersed in college life that he barely remembers to call home.

  “I needed to make sure Alex was settled,” Gary says. “And he is. He’s not a kid anymore.”

  I have no idea where this is leading.

  “Your parents were younger than we are when they took off for South America, right?”

  I nod. For two nights now we have sat in the dark, in a wood-paneled living room with orange shag carpeting, listening to the purr and click of a slide carousel projector. Gary’s head is full of faded color images to match the tall tales my father tells of our journey down the Pan-American Highway in that ridiculously heavy homemade camper. There are no mentions of my missing brother; the slide-show version of the trip drowns grief in glory and erases agony with adventure. There we are, sleeping in the shadow of pyramids in Mexico. Skinny-dipping in volcanic craters in Guatemala. Breaking down and being rescued by a Sandinista newspaper publisher in Nicaragua. Getting thrown in jail in Panama. Surrounded, at gunpoint, in Colombia. Scaling the heights of Machu Picchu. Selling the camper to buy airplane tickets to South Africa, where my father’s parents would dust us off and squeeze Jenny and me tight enough to make up for the grandson they would never meet.

  “What if we take a trip like that of our own?” he asks. “Your dad has all the old maps and your mom kept a journal. We could try to find the original camper in Bolivia. You could finally say good-bye.”

  He’s telling me that nothing about my crazy family will scare him off. It is both a sweet thought and a ridiculous proposition. We both have careers, successful ones. We are just beginning our lives together. We don’t need to escape or run away from anything.

  Chapter Four

  THE WEDDING

  It annoys me that my father thinks I’ve taken his advice. We are indeed eloping, on a beautiful beach near the Tulum ruins along Mexico’s Mayan Riviera. But it’s not because I still do everything my father says. It’s just that a big wedding isn’t rational when none of our family can come. Alex can’t take time off midsemester. Gary’s parents are too old to fly. Mine are on a container ship headed to Nicaragua.

  “Doesn’t matter anyway,” Gary says. “We can always drop in on them when we drive down the Pan-American Highway.”

  There it is again, that graveside proposition to retrace a journey thirty years in my past. Driving thousands of miles to search for a homemade camper abandoned in the wilds of Bolivia isn’t logical. I’m not the type to quit a six-figure job that sends me to shoots all over the world on business-class flights. And there isn’t time to consider the idea anyway. Not with the wedding a week away.

  Mexico only officially recognizes civil marriage ceremonies, so between shoots I’ve scouted out a Mayan judge willing to conduct one on a stretch of beach beside the thatch-roofed bungalow I found online. I’ve arranged for blood tests and scheduled everything around Mexico’s required waiting period. But when we drive to Tulum’s courthouse to pay the fees, we are told that for the ceremony to be legal we must have four witnesses: two for the bride and two for the groom.

  “I never saw anything about that on the Internet,” I sputter, all of my fastidious planning about to be derailed by an overlooked detail. “Or in any of the guidebooks.”

  “It’s okay, Teresa, nobody’s grading you,” Gary comforts me. “We’ll figure something out.”

  The solution presents itself over shots of tequila that night at the empty hotel bar. I’m translating my favorite Spanish toast to Gary: health, wealth, and love, and the time to enjoy them. It’s a musical-sounding phrase that lights up smiles on the faces of bored beach bartenders. Gary buys a round for all four of them—Armando, Basilio, Enrique, and Juan Antonio—and then steps aside to let me do the talking.

  “We’re trying to get married tomorrow,” I tell our new friends. “But we need four witnesses. Are you guys doing anything at, say, sunset?”

  It turns out we are not the first couple to require emergency wedding witnessing, and each of the bartenders calmly reaches into his apron pocket and hands me a Mexican identity card.

  “Just take these to the judge first thing tomorrow so he can put our names in the computer,” Juan Antonio says. He laughs at the shocked look on my face. Four total strangers have just handed us their official identities. “It’s cool, we know where you’re staying.”

  Gary proposes his own toast, to me. “We would never have gotten this far if you weren’t such a left-brained perfectionist.”

  “To the smart Señorita Teresa,” Juan Antonio says, raising his shot glass.

  “Would it spoil all this sucking up to tell you that the whole uptight left-brain/free-spirit right-brain theory has been disproved?”

  “No,” Gary answers, downing his drink. “But how very left-brained of you.”

  Beachside elopements are utterly romantic but not terribly predictable. A half hour before sunset the next day, Enrique runs up the steps to our bungalow.

  “The judge is here,” he says. “Can you guys do it right now instead of sunset? We’re getting slammed at the bar.”

  Before I met Gary I don’t know if I could have laughed and said, “Sure, no problem.” Or if I could have handled the German nudists who decided to park their baby stroller, cooler, and beach blanket right in front of our almost-sunset ceremony. I’m not sure what is more surreal: the fact that they’re both beginning to strip off their clothes or that they’re arguing so loudly they drown out the soft voice of the Mayan judge in front of us.

  I’m aware only of Gary’s arm around my waist, turning me closer to him, and Juan Antonio adjusting his position to my left, just enough to shield my eyes from a hairy German ass striding defiantly into the ocean waves.

  A PART OF ME WANTS TO LINGER IN THIS COUNTRY WHERE A WEDDING is reason enough to stand up for strangers. I remember traveling through Mexico as a child, and there is something nostalgic and comforting in its warm sand, nylon hammocks, and punched-tin lanterns swinging from ropes between palm trees. But our honeymoon is cut short because I have to fly to Honduras to scout for an upcoming corporate-brand film.

  I am still feeling sorry for myself when the plane touches down.

  I have been to this country before, as a seven-year-old stowaway in my father’s Frankenstein camper. When a power outage zaps the air-conditioning of the Intercontinental Hotel, it is just a sweaty slide back in time. I was too young, cocooned in my father’s sturdy beast, to understand the turmoil stirring just under the surface of this and almost every Central American country in the 1970s. By the time my family reached Honduras, the sight of men with machine guns slouched under banana trees was as normal as the barefoot kids who brought us bread when we camped for the night.

  So it feels natural, in a way, to have an armed driver deliver me from location to location in modern-day Honduras, dodging crater-sized potholes on the long drive up a mountain to Lago Yojoa. I will be bringing a crew here to film one of the country’s first aquaculture operations: tilapia cordoned off from the rest of a freshwater lake nestled in a depression formed by volcanoes.

  I am suddenly, acutely aware of my little brother’s absence. John John loved playing with plastic boats in the bathtub of our trailer in the woods of Oregon. He should be the one paddling out on a ninety-five-foot-deep lake, not me. The atmosphere is exotic and ethereal and catapults my memories of Central America from the faded images of my father’s slide show to a vivid immediacy.

  My client ties up our canoe at an elaborate floating dock where I snap photographs of workers dumping sacks of pelleted fish food into the netted underwater enclosures. In a whirling instant the surface is transformed from placid to frothing with hungry fish, and I realize that the money shot will be underwater. But from the surface of Lago Yojoa it is impossible to tell whether Gary will be able to shoot
without underwater lights.

  There is only one thing left to try: taking a look for myself. Somewhere buried in my backpack is a disposable, waterproof camera—a low-tech backup just in case I need to take location pictures in a downpour. I’m wearing a bathing suit under my clothes and strip down to it while my client turns his back.

  I’m about to take the plunge when one of the workers shouts out a warning. He points to the watch I’ve forgotten to take off my wrist. I gulp. It was the first present Gary ever gave me and I’m about to ruin it. I’m shoving it into the change pocket of my jeans, wadded up on the dock, when I realize it’s probably just as stupid to jump in with my wedding ring on. It’s the first time I’ve taken it off since Tulum, and I have never felt more naked as I do diving headfirst into thousands of slippery tilapia.

  The bulging, glassy eyes of the fish seem to magnify underwater, especially when a woman with a disposable camera plunges into their midst. I am literally kicking my way through walls of tilapia, my bare skin bumping against fluttering fins, gaping fish lips, and solid flanks of glittering scales. I lift the camera toward the surface, shooting into streams of sunlight.

  Back at the surface I’m still gasping as my client hands me an empty burlap feed bag and points to my soaking wet hair.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” I tell him, too exhilarated even to shiver. “It’ll just dry off on the boat ride back.”

  He bites his lip. “Um, actually it’s not that. You just might want to clean off a bit. It’ll be harder to get out when it dries.”

  I run my ringless hand through my hair and discover that it is smothered in tilapia poop, clumps and strings of it clinging to every strand of hair. The burlap sack simply grinds it deeper into my scalp. I reach for my shirt and wipe my face. Yup. Coated in a fine layer of fish excrement. Time to get back to a hot shower as quickly as possible.