All You Get Is Me (2 page)

The woman behind us is getting more and more agitated by the second. In my mirror I can see her lips forming curse words and her manicured fingernails death-gripping the steering wheel.

We approach a short straightaway, which is followed by a curve that dips down into a valley of dense forest for about half a mile. The SUV pulls out from behind us to pass, crossing a double solid yellow line. As it approaches the driver’s side of the pickup my dad touches his brakes to let her pass but she slows down as their windows line up and gives my dad the finger. I watch her hateful sneering face and I think,
Lady, you may live to regret that
. As she turns her attention back to the road I see her face change to horror as an oncoming pickup truck appears on the road directly in front of her. My dad swerves off the road and slams on his brakes but there’s nowhere for him to go. We watch, frozen, as the woman yanks her steering wheel hard to the right, narrowly missing the front of my dad’s truck, and slams almost head-on into the oncoming pickup. The noise is unbearable. The pickup whips around, changing directions, and its back end flips over the embankment into a small ravine. The truck comes to rest upside down with all four wheels still spinning. Tom Waits is singing about getting behind the mule. The SUV has rolled over too and skids to a stop in the middle of the road. Suddenly it’s dead quiet.

My dad throws the truck into park and digs his cell phone out of his shirt pocket. He thrusts it at me.

“Roar, call 9-1-1. Tell them where we are. Tell them it’s bad, okay?”

My dad runs across the road to the edge of the ravine and surveys the wreck.

My hands shake uncontrollably as I press the numbers into his phone. I give the annoyingly calm emergency operator our information in a trembling voice and I beg her to tell them to hurry. She tells me that help is on the way and I should stay on the line till it arrives. It’s all I can do not to scream, “HURRY UP!”

My dad has lowered himself down the edge of the ravine and he’s making his way to the passenger side of the truck. A baby is hanging upside down in a car seat. My dad jimmies the door open and the baby starts to cry. He undoes the buckles and grabs her to keep her from falling. I take the phone and sit on the edge of the ravine. I won’t let myself look at the driver’s side.

“Is she okay?” I ask.

“I think so.” He takes her into his arms. She’s plump and dark skinned, wearing a pretty little sundress with a few drops of blood down the front. My dad scrambles up the bank with her. She’s calm now and she seems to be okay. He hands her to me. I put her in my lap and rock her a bit, telling her everything will be all right even though I’m pretty sure it won’t. I wipe the tears off her cheeks with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. She searches my face with her big dark eyes, trying to figure out if she knows me. I check her for injuries but all I can find is a greenish blue goose egg on her forehead. I glance over at the SUV. The driver isn’t moving and there’s a trickle of blood on her forehead.

After what seems like a lifetime but is actually a couple of minutes, I hear the wail of sirens. I tell the operator they’ve arrived and hang up the phone. By that time my dad has worked his way over to the driver’s side of the overturned truck and he’s talking to the driver, a woman, in Spanish and holding her hand. The paramedics leap into action. One of them gently takes the baby away from me. She starts to cry again. A policeman pulls up behind the ambulance and a fire truck follows him. The cop deals with the cars that are starting to back up behind the accident and the firemen assess the scene and pull out a stretcher to lower into the ravine. The paramedics work on the SUV driver. They pull a gurney over to her and attach a cervical collar around her neck before they ease her onto it.

My dad scrambles back down the ravine, next to the stretcher, and speaks quietly to the woman as they maneuver her out of the ravine. He tells her that her baby is fine and that she’ll be fine too. Her eyes are closed and I can’t tell if she’s breathing. Her left arm is crushed and she looks like she’s lost a lot of blood. We stand there helpless and watch them load her into the ambulance. My dad turns to me, wiping tears from his eyes. There’s a smear of blood on his cheek.

“Roar. Go get your camera.”

“Is she going to be okay?”

“I don’t think so. Go get your camera and take some pictures of the truck and the SUV, okay?”

“Okay.” I run to the truck and grab my camera. It’s loaded with black-and-white film and I’ve got about half a roll of film left. My dad distracts the cop, explaining what happened, and I shoot off the rest of the roll. I get the mangled truck, the SUV, long shots and close-ups. I don’t photograph the victims, though. I won’t do that.

The police want my dad to come down to the station and file a full report but he says he wants to go to the hospital first to see how the woman is doing. They seem okay with that and one of them takes down his information on a little notepad. We climb into the truck and drive slowly to the hospital, arriving long after the ambulance. The scene where the doctors yell and the nurses grab at things that can jolt a person back to life is all over by the time we get there. The police from the scene are wrapping things up in that overly officious way they have of making you feel guilty even if you haven’t done anything. On their way out they remind my dad about coming to the station and I can see his back go up. He’s never been great with cops.

The waiting room is calm again, perched for its next disaster. My dad talks his way into where the woman and her baby are. I sit down in a turquoise vinyl chair and try to watch late-breaking CNN news on the TV mounted above me because it’s a whole lot better than the image of the accident that keeps creeping back into my head. My hands are still shaking, my throat is tight, and tears keep rolling down my cheeks. Every few minutes I look anxiously at the double doors that my dad disappeared behind. The receptionist looks up at me sympathetically. I wipe my face on my sleeve. She decides not to say anything. This isn’t the first time I’ve been to this emergency room. You wouldn’t even believe the things that can go wrong when you live on a farm. I have a scar on my knuckle from accidentally putting my hand through a glass window in the barn. I had to get seven stitches. That was a mess. Another time I was here with my dad and Steve when Steve fell out of the hayloft on his ankle. He had to get it X-rayed. He says he slipped. I think he was stoned. I read a story once about a farmer who severed both arms in a piece of farm machinery and he actually had the presence of mind to dial 9-1-1 with a pencil in his mouth. You’ve really got to hand it to that guy. I think they even put his arms back on.

The glass doors hiss open and a man in an expensive suit and important-looking shoes strides into the waiting room and makes a beeline for the receptionist. She looks up again with a face that says “Don’t mess with me.” She has a name tag that says “Candy” pinned to her enormous bosom. A kid who looks about a year older than me trails behind Mr. Slick. He’s wearing the opposite outfit: a torn Misfits T-shirt, baggy jeans, and worn-out Converse sneakers. His thick black hair hangs in his eyes and I suspect he may hate everyone, especially Mr. Slick, who is now speaking to Candy in a very loud voice as though she might be hearing-impaired.

“My wife was brought in here, Connie Gilwood. She was in a car accident. I need to see her immediately. Where is she?”

Candy seems not to appreciate his tone. “Let me just locate her, sir,” she says tersely. She types efficiently on a keyboard and clicks a mouse.

“Just tell me where she is, damn it!” He clutches a cell phone in his hand and he seems to be thinking about hurling it at her.

The kid, who I now know is the son of the woman who was driving the SUV, shuffles his feet and looks at the floor.

“Sir,” says Candy, “I’m here to help but that kind of talk generally doesn’t inspire me to move any faster.”

“Well, there must be someone else I can talk to—a doctor, a manager?”

Candy points to her name tag. Underneath her name it says “Emergency Room Supervisor.”

“I’m it, darling,” she says, smirking at him.

The kid’s eyes meet mine and he looks away, embarrassed.

“Okay, here she is, Connie Gilwood.” She reads from a computer monitor. “She’s doing just fine. I’m assuming you’re Mr. Gilwood?” She looks over her reading glasses at him.

Just as she says the name, the double doors that separate the waiting room from the drama swing wide and my dad appears.

“You’re Mr. Gilwood?” he asks Mr. Slick.

“Yeah. You know about my wife?”

“I sure do.” My dad’s voice is shaking a bit. “Your wife is fine. The woman she hit was just pronounced dead. There’s a baby back there without a mother.” He points behind him with his thumb.

“Who the hell are you?” Mr. Slick takes in my dad’s ponytail and his dirty jeans and his flannel shirt.

“You’ll know soon enough.” He heads for the exit. “C’mon, Roar,” he says, but I’m already there. I look back over my shoulder at the son. He’s watching my dad with something in his eyes that I can’t quite read. It definitely isn’t shock, though.

The sliding glass doors hiss open again and we walk out into the midmorning sunlight.

Chapter 2

M
y mother started to slip away from us when I was ten. We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house on Church Street in Noe Valley, a quiet neighborhood in San Francisco. If you go to the corner of Church and Twenty-fourth streets and turn right, you can walk down a long, steep hill that leads to the Mission District. I wasn’t allowed to go there on my own but my dad and I would walk down the hill together. We wandered through the fragrant produce stalls and bought weird stuff like plantains and jicama and sweet mangoes. Sometimes we’d walk all the way down Twenty-fourth to the Roosevelt Tamale Parlor for the best tamales in town. I would drink lemonade and my dad would drink dark Mexican beer. If it was summer, we’d walk up San Jose Avenue to Mitchell’s Ice Cream and try to outweird each other with our flavor choices. Mitchell’s is about a thousand years old and features exotic flavors like avocado and purple yam.

Our house was a lively place back then. My mom was a painter and she hosted dinners for all her artist friends and they brought their friends and then my dad would show up with all his left-wing activist friends. The parties went late into the night and no one ever thought to send me to bed. I usually fell asleep on the sofa with music and dancing and strange accents swirling around me. Eventually my dad would throw me over his shoulder and carry me off to my bedroom, where I would sleep through the noise. My mom would come in later and kiss me, smelling of wine and her spicy perfume.

My mom painted most days in a light-filled room at the front of the house, overlooking our street. She could look out the bay window and watch the Church Street trolley roll by. For a while she was happy all the time. There was lots of laughter in our house back then as she told stories about her day and then eagerly wanted to hear about ours as she moved about the kitchen, making dinner. Eventually it became clear that her art was never going to sell. The people she went to art school with were getting their own gallery shows and selling their work but no one seemed too keen on my mom’s paintings of flying pigs and Dalmatians and cows. Eventually, even my mom seemed to lose interest in her own work and most afternoons I would come home from school at three to find her passed out on the big burgundy velvet sofa in her studio with an empty wine bottle on the table next to her.

My dad had his hands full defending people who couldn’t defend themselves. Most of those people couldn’t afford to pay much either, but he never put pressure on my mom to get a real job. He was crazy about her and he would come home dead tired at night and sit next to her on the sofa, rubbing her arm and kissing her, trying to breathe some life into her, but she would just lie there like a rag doll or tell him to go away. My dad, who was never much of a cook, learned to make simple dishes like lentil soup and stew. Usually it was just the two of us at the table.

The parties at our house stopped and invitations to parties at other artists’ houses stopped too. My mother, once the life of the party, had become an embarrassment. She drank too much and spewed bitterness about the politics of the art world. She often ended up in tears and my dad would have to apologize to everyone and then help her out to the car. I could hear him on the phone, late at night, talking to Jacob, his best friend from college, trying to figure out how to help her, how to get her back. Jacob is a psychiatrist and he prescribed antidepressants, but my mom wasn’t supposed to take them if she was drinking so she didn’t take them at all.

My mom started to lose weight. Bit by bit, her curvy figure and her Black Irish features disappeared. Her shiny black hair grew dull and thin and her bright blue eyes turned gray and empty. My dad and I started treating her like a piece of furniture, passing her on our way out somewhere with barely a glance in her direction. I raided her closet and started wearing her clothes to school. I safety-pinned the waistbands of her colorful gypsy skirts to fit me and I wore a bunch of beaded necklaces at once around my neck and wrapped her silk shawls around me. At school, no one seemed to notice. I went to the kind of school that encourages free expression. There was no such thing as a red flag when it came to a kid’s wardrobe choices.

Some mornings, my mom would stagger out of bed and make pancakes for us. She seemed almost like her old self again, chattering away or humming happily to gypsy guitar music on the stereo. My dad and I played along, complimenting her cooking even though the pancakes were either burnt or gooey and raw in the middle. On those days, I would come home to find my mom back in her spot, the sink full of the breakfast dishes and the milk going sour on the counter next to an open box of eggs and a bag of pancake mix.

Even in this condition, my mom tried really hard to be the kind of mom she thought I needed. She would show up for parent-teacher meetings with smeared makeup and rumpled clothes and alcohol on her breath until I started hiding the letters from school.