And she picked her suitcase up, and Derek slung his bag over his shoulder again, and they headed toward the front door.
* * *
—
Willa’s mother did not accompany them to the airport. Elaine did, oddly enough, but it hardly mattered, because she didn’t speak once during the whole trip; just slouched in the front seat, still in her pajamas and baggy sweater, and gazed out her side window. Although she did say, when they drew up in front of the terminal, “Bye, you guys.” And then, with another of her snorting sounds, “Try not to get yourselves hijacked.”
Derek chuckled, but Willa didn’t.
She thought about the hijacker, though, after she and Derek had checked in for their flight. She wondered whether his gun had been real, and what his motive had been. Both questions that Derek had asked her himself, and she had been irritated with him at the time, but not now. Now she felt a sense of…more than gratitude—actual dazzlement, as she remembered how Derek had risen and bent to grip her upper arm and drawn her firmly to her feet and rescued her.
1997
WILLA AND Derek were out on the freeway, driving to a swim party in Coronado. A vice president at Sports Infinity had a house there with an Olympic-size pool. Turning down the invitation was not an option, according to Derek, but Willa could think of lots better things to do with her Sunday afternoon. She found Derek’s business associates difficult to talk to. They all seemed to have this slick, smooth surface with no bumps that she could grab onto, she told Derek. (Derek said, “Huh?”) Also, she didn’t see swimming as a social activity. Here she’d given so much thought to her clothes—slim silk pants, peach-colored tunic, Mexican huaraches—and now she was supposed to struggle into a swimsuit in somebody’s cramped cabana and dunk her carefully straightened pageboy in liquid chlorine.
More to the point, though, they were having a little crisis at home and she really felt she should be there. Ian, their sixteen-year-old, was insisting that he needed a year off from high school. Willa had occasionally heard of students taking a break between high school and college, but never during high school. And he didn’t even have a plan! He just said he might like to hitchhike around the country getting to know “the people.” He was also talking about camping in the desert so he could experience the Hale-Bopp comet in a meaningful way. It didn’t inspire confidence that he frequently misspoke and called it the “Hale-Boggs” comet.
“One thing we might do,” Willa told Derek now, “is get in touch with the college admissions counselor at the school. You know what a help she’s been with Sean’s applications. I realize this is not about college, but she might convince Ian that colleges take a very dim view of an applicant who’s had a spotty attendance record in high school.”
“You are such a pushover,” Derek said. He was driving badly, as he always did when he was annoyed. He revved the SUV’s engine as if it had personally provoked him. “The kid is breaking the law,” he said, “pure and simple. You’re not allowed to ditch high school. He could be hauled in by a truant officer.”
“Even if he’s sixteen?” Willa asked. “I thought people could drop out after they turned sixteen.”
“Willa, why are you trying to negotiate with him? We’re the parents. We say, ‘No, goddammit, you stay in that school where we put you.’ Lord knows we pay enough for it.”
“I just think he seems so unhappy,” Willa said. “Really, I don’t feel the school has been such a good fit for him. It might have been fine for Sean, but Ian is more, I don’t know—”
“More lazy,” Derek finished for her.
Ian wasn’t lazy, exactly, but Willa knew better than to argue. Another not-good fit was Ian with his father. They just didn’t understand each other.
“Did you find out when that exit comes?” Derek asked her.
“Oh,” she said, and she looked hastily at the map book on her lap.
“Don’t tell me we’ve missed it.”
“No, no…”
He honked at a sports car in front of them that wasn’t doing anything wrong, as far as Willa could see.
She squinted at the map for a moment and then looked out the windshield again, so as not to feel carsick. It was a sunny, warm May afternoon, that unvaryingly perfect weather of southern California. Willa was tired of sunshine. She missed the seasons; she longed for a thunderstorm or even a nasty winter blizzard where everyone stayed inside curled up cozily with a book. But no, there was just this eternal blue sky, skin-temperature air, brassy yellow sheen bouncing off the freeway.
“That damn fool must be asleep,” Derek said.
He meant the driver of the station wagon to their left. Willa couldn’t see the man’s face, but she noticed that his car was too close to theirs. Derek tapped his horn, and the station wagon nonchalantly moved away.
“What Ian needs is an aim in life,” Derek said. “Why has he got no aim? He’s so damn…limp. If only he’d gone out for a sport the way I kept telling him he should do—”
“Ian isn’t the sporty type,” Willa said.
“Well, why the hell not? I was crazy about sports at his age. So was Sean.”
“Ian is not you,” Willa said. “Ian is not Sean.”
Ian didn’t even look like Derek or Sean. He took after Willa’s side of the family; he was slight and he wore glasses. Put him next to Derek—so square-jawed and solid—and you would think they were two different species.
“Fellow must be saying, ‘I know what: why not grab a quick nap while I’m driving?’ If ‘driving’ is what you want to call it.”
Derek stepped on the gas to speed past the station wagon, but at that moment the station wagon started drifting into their lane again. “God damn,” Derek said, leaning on his horn. He braked violently as the station wagon arrived in front of them. Willa reached for the dashboard, more as a protest than anything else, since she was safely fastened into her seat belt. “Did you see that?” Derek asked her.
“Yes, I saw. But now, don’t you react, Derek.”
Because she knew him all too well. He would treat this trip like a bumper-car game if he got riled enough.
“Write down his license number,” Derek ordered.
“What good will that do?”
“He shouldn’t be allowed on the road, I tell you. Write it down.”
Willa sighed and bent for her purse. But while her head was lowered she felt the SUV gathering speed again, and she straightened to see that they were swerving to the left and roaring past the station wagon. Except not past it, actually, because the station wagon was gathering speed too. Now Willa was side by side with the driver and she could see that he was a thin, hawk-profiled man with his eyes trained on the road in front of him. She surprised herself with a sudden competitive urge. “Faster!” she wanted to tell Derek, although she stopped herself because that was the last thing he needed to hear. Luckily their own lane was clear for some distance ahead, so there was no real danger. But then Derek flicked his right-turn signal on. “Don’t do it,” Willa said.
He ignored her. He tucked the SUV into the space directly in front of the station wagon, with only an inch to spare. Or less than an inch. In fact, no room at all. She felt a scraping sensation. She heard a ghastly metallic shrieking sound, and then time began to slow down, stretching out so interminably that she fancied she saw the word “s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g” written letter by letter across the bottom of her mind. Each individual piece of damage seemed to happen in its own eon. Their right rear fender ripped. (But that was easily fixable.) Their right rear door buckled. (Oh, dear, slightly more serious.) Her own door was crushed inward. (What if she couldn’t get out?) And then the whole car was slung sharply around so that it ended up perpendicular to the freeway and partly on the shoulder, its front end buried in tall, waving, sunshiny grasses.
She had a kind of crick in her neck from when they’d spun
around, but otherwise she wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t even frightened. She seemed to be in a kind of bubble, sealed away on her own.
Entirely on her own. Because that very still form beside her, with its head resting on the steering wheel, was surely not a person.
* * *
—
He had been forty-three years old—too young to think of making funeral plans. So all of that was left to Willa, and Willa just wanted to huddle in the dark with her arms around her two boys. She felt her loss as a physical ache. She felt hollowed out, scooped away at the center. Also angry, to be honest. What had he been thinking? How could he have done this to her? Why was he not here to feel deeply ashamed and remorseful?
The anger invigorated her. She freely admitted to the police that the accident had been Derek’s fault; he’d cut in too close after passing. She told her sons, “You know how he could get when he thought somebody was driving badly.” They nodded, needing no elaboration. (Sean probably even approved.)
The only funeral she had overseen before now was her mother’s, a dozen years ago, and that time she’d had her family around and her ex-neighbors and the church she’d grown up in. Here she had just Derek’s two brothers and their wives, whom she barely knew, and she didn’t belong to a church. She was forced to rely on her woman friends—sympathetic, but lacking much experience with death—and a funeral director named Mr. Percival, a pale, fragile-looking young man without strong opinions. If she said, of some choice he offered, “Oh, I don’t know; I just don’t know,” then he would say tentatively that many people liked to do such-and-such, and she would say, “Okay.”
“But you may prefer—” he would venture.
“No, that’s okay.”
In fact her one firm directive was that Derek should be cremated, because the cemeteries she had seen in California didn’t look anything like the little church graveyard back home. Oh, and she wanted just drinks and tidbits served in the funeral home’s reception room after the service—no real food involved, and certainly no guests coming back with her to the house. She needed to be rid of everybody as soon as this was over.
School was still in session but Sean stopped going, which hardly mattered since he was a senior mere days from graduation. Ian, on the other hand, went on attending, even though he usually seized on any excuse to skip class. He was probably trying to escape the atmosphere in the house. He didn’t talk about Derek at all and he avoided any contact with Willa or his brother, instead spending his evenings shut away in his room twiddling tunelessly on his guitar. Sean was the opposite: he followed Willa around pestering her for every detail of his father’s death. Had Derek had a chance to realize they were crashing? Had he said any last words? And how about the other driver: had he been injured, did he speak to Willa afterward, did he apologize for his part in it?
“I don’t know,” Willa kept telling him. “I don’t know; I don’t remember.”
“Because face it: the guy was not blameless,” Sean said. Which was exactly what Derek would have said, if he had lived.
It took Willa two days to get hold of her father, although he was the first person she thought of calling. Now that he was retired he kept mostly to his basement workshop, where there wasn’t a telephone. He’d told her once that he avoided the phone because it was generally some neighbor or other trying to make him come for a meal. And he didn’t have an answering machine. But she persisted, calling early and late till she finally reached him on Tuesday evening. “Hello?” he asked, in that reluctant, dread-filled voice he always used when he answered the phone, his second syllable trailing away as if he were already preparing to hang up.
“Pop,” she said.
But then she couldn’t say the words. Her eyes glazed over with tears and her lips started trembling.
“Wills?”
“Pop, Derek is dead,” she said, and Derek all at once filled the room—his rapid, confident stride; the way he would smooth a strand of her hair off her cheek before he kissed her; his habit of buttoning her top button after he’d helped her into her coat. Nobody would ever again focus his whole attention on her. Nobody would take on that watchful, appreciative look when she walked into a room.
“I don’t understand,” her father said.
She didn’t, either, she wanted to say, but she made herself tell him, “He had a wreck on the freeway.”
“Oh, honey.”
“Can you come out?”
“Well, of course I’m coming. When’s the funeral?”
“It’s Thursday,” she said. “Is that too soon to find a flight? I tried to reach you earlier, but—”
“I’ll be there. Did you call your sister?”
“Yes,” she said, because she had, by then. Elaine was almost as hard to reach as their father; she worked in a lab in Michigan and her hours were unpredictable. But she did answer her phone, finally, and right away she said that she would come to the funeral, although she showed no particular reaction to the news of Derek’s death. “Thank you,” Willa told her. The two of them had very little to do with each other these days, but she found herself looking forward to her sister’s cool, sensible presence.
In fact, though, it turned out that Elaine was so cool and sensible that she arranged to arrive the night before the funeral and fly out right afterward. Willa wasn’t happy about that. Still, she had to admit that her literal request had been for Elaine to come to the funeral, period. Oh, they were never going to be like the sisters in Little Women!
She used to feel hurt that after Elaine became so distant from their parents, seldom returning home once she started college, she hadn’t thought to stay in touch with Willa, at least—to write or call her from time to time, or visit her and Derek during holidays. Wouldn’t you think she would realize that of all people, Willa was the one who understood her side of things? But no, she basically resigned from the family, and on the rare occasions now when they saw each other, her conversation was like that obsessive rehashing you hear from the survivor of some natural disaster. “I was standing in front of my bureau,” she said once. “It was early in the morning. I was wearing my footed pajamas. I was three years old and I had never gotten dressed on my own before but I thought I’d surprise Mom and try doing it that day. So I opened my underwear drawer and started hunting for my favorite underpants, the ones with the rhumba ruffle on the seat. And Mom walked in and said, ‘I hope you’re not messing up all those things I so carefully folded.’ I said, ‘Nope!’ and quick-quick I tried to pat everything smooth again, but she came up close behind me and ‘You did!’ she said. ‘You did mess them up!’ And she had her hairbrush in her hand because I guess she’d been doing her hair and she started hitting me in the head with it, slam on one side of my head, slam on the other side, and I was ducking away and shielding my head—”
“Yes, well,” Willa said, “it’s true she could be—”
“You know what’s the saddest thing about kids whose mothers are mean to them? It’s that even so, their mothers are the ones they hold their arms out to afterward for comfort. Isn’t that pathetic?”
“Elaine. Just move on,” Willa said.
And then felt guilty that she had spoken so sharply.
She always did feel guilty about Elaine, for some reason. But what could she have done differently? And hadn’t she had just as bewildering a childhood herself?
Maybe guilt was her natural state. She felt guilty about Derek’s death, too, because she should have known better than to bring up the sensitive subject of Ian while Derek was driving. And she felt guilty about that jolt of competitiveness she’d experienced when they were overtaking the station wagon. Actually, it had been something a little stronger than competitiveness. You could almost call it rage. Yes, rage had flashed through her chest like a viper. Faster! she had thought. And Derek had gone faster.
She bent double in her chair and pressed the heel
s of her palms hard into her eye sockets. Then one of her sons walked into the room and rested a hand on her shoulder for a moment before he walked out. She assumed that it was Sean, but when she raised her head to watch him leave she saw it was Ian.
* * *
—
The owner of Sports Infinity came to the service, along with several of the vice presidents and their wives. Willa’s friends came with their husbands, and a few of her sons’ classmates came, which she found touching, and some random people like Derek’s squash partner and his secretary and the woman who’d been the family’s housekeeper when he was a little boy.
Willa sat in the front pew, which was made of blond wood—the whole chapel was blond wood—with her father on her right and Ian on her left. Elaine sat on her father’s other side and Sean sat at the end, where he could get out easily, because he was going to make a speech. He was the only speaker from the immediate family, in fact. Willa couldn’t have managed it.
She felt proud of her sons, both looking very responsible in their dark suits and crisp white shirts. How was it that they had become these men, who knew how to tie a tie and whose shoes were like long, shiny beetles? But she was concerned about her father. His form of aging seemed a kind of erasure, his scanty rim of hair not turning white but merely fading and his features growing blurry and less certain. And Elaine, she thought, could be any random stranger glimpsed in passing: a sensible-looking woman with a choppy brown bob, her face bare of makeup, her brown slacks and loose, wrinkled top so unflattering that they seemed a deliberate reproach to Willa in her stylish black suit.
While the guests were arriving the organist played something unfamiliar that seemed chosen for its blandness. Willa hated organs. She should have told Mr. Percival that. She murmured to her father, “It sounds like it’s whimpering, doesn’t it?”
He stirred and said, “What’s that, honey?”