Once Upon a Day (2 page)

When it was gone, of course he knew that too. He changed from a man who could smile at strangers first thing in the morning to a man who wouldn’t look anybody in the eye. He’d lost his family in a freak accident, and the rest he let go of as easily as opening his hand and releasing a string of balloons. Good-bye to the family practice he had just started with two friends from his residency. Good-bye to the Victorian house he and Ellen had gone deeply into debt to buy when she got pregnant during his internship. Good-bye to the cradle and the tricycle and the pink and purple birthday party dress Lizzie never had a chance to wear.

More than a year later, he still hadn’t adjusted to the way time itself had been altered. Before there was never enough time, and the list of things he and Ellen had not gotten around to doing was one of
many things that still tortured him. The untaken trip to Paris bothered him less than the movies they’d talked about renting. Why hadn’t they watched them? Ellen’s entire list could be watched in a weekend. He knew this because he had done it, several times. He watched the movies his wife had wanted him to, and thought about what she would say if she were there. This was back in the early months, when he was trying to give her gifts, as though she could come back if only he worked harder to make her want this life.

After the accident, there was too much time. Each day stretched before him like a flat Kansas highway, the only landmarks the meals he forced himself to choke down, the few chores he performed, and the occasional walks he took, rarely noticing anything or anyone on his path. He finally bought the old green and white Checker cab not because he needed the income—his compensation from the city would support him forever, especially since he had no desires, nothing he wanted now—but because he could drive it as little or as much as he liked, sixteen hours a day, more if his insomnia was bad.

He wouldn’t have sued, but the city gave him an enormous sum anyway. The newspaper headline called it a “regrettable tragedy.” It was a Sunday in late July; the police were chasing a teenager who had stolen a rusted-out ’84 Toyota from a neighbor’s driveway. The car was worth less than five hundred dollars, but the patrol car that slammed into his family at the intersection had been going over eighty miles an hour. He was driving; Lizzie was in her booster seat in the back, behind Ellen. The teenage thief turned himself in when he heard what had happened. The policeman who was driving took early retirement.

And Stephen, the barely thirty-year-old family practice doc, became a cabbie. What difference did it make? His knowledge of how to heal bodies had done nothing for him anyway. His wife and four-year-old daughter had still died right in front of his eyes.

Now he was learning the quickest way to the airport from any street in St. Louis. How to slide around a bus, and when to change lanes so his customer would feel they were making progress. What
times the restaurants and bars closed, and which of his regulars would be likely to drink one too many and need a ride on a Saturday night.

People often mentioned what a safe driver he was. The safest cab driver they’d ever ridden with. He nodded, but he didn’t respond. He never drove without the radio playing. Talk show, pop music, news channel, it didn’t matter. The radio was his excuse not to talk.

The only time he would answer was when a customer asked about the amusement park tickets. They didn’t ask often, even though he’d had the tickets laminated and kept them displayed above the visor, right next to his license. Stephen wasn’t surprised. He knew most people aren’t interested in their cab drivers.

He wasn’t surprised; still, he longed for the question. He longed for another opportunity to tell the whole story of that perfect July day at the amusement park: riding the water slides and the Ferris wheel and the child’s roller coaster; eating hot dogs and ice cream—mint chocolate chip, Ellen’s favorite; trying to win a giant stuffed panda bear, and when he couldn’t make the ring toss (a setup, he was sure), buying the bear for his daughter anyway.

Every time he told the story, he added a few more details. As the months went by, the story often filled the entire drive; sometimes he would still be talking while his customer was trying to hand him money and get away.

He knew he was going too far, but he couldn’t help himself. Back at his apartment whenever he tried to think of that day he drew a blank. It was only in the cab, talking to strangers, that he seemed to be able to bring it all to life: the feel of the sun on the back of his hands and the bright drips of green falling off their cones onto the hot pavement and how awkward and adorable Lizzie looked that night, lugging the giant panda to their car.

He didn’t realize how he’d begun to live for these discussions until a rainy morning in April, when they suddenly came to an end.

He’d picked up a girl at the bus station downtown. One of the weirdos, though this one wasn’t pierced or tattooed or obviously
strung out, but even more bizarre, naturally pale as a made-up Goth, but dressed like a throwback to the fifties: long flared black skirt, fluffy pink sweater, even the white ankle socks and saddle oxford shoes. Her hair was in a thick braid, twisted like some kind of tight crown on top of her head, and she was sitting up so straight she looked uncomfortable, eyes unblinking, small white hands folded carefully in her lap. Stephen had already put her out of his mind when she mentioned the tickets about ten minutes into the ride. But before he could tell her about the slides or the food or even the perfect weather that day, she noticed what no one else had: that the tickets weren’t stubs.

“What happened?” she said. “Why didn’t you ever use those?”

He flushed with a confusion that quickly turned to anger. It had taken him nearly a year to perfect the story of the amusement park—for chrissakes, couldn’t he have even this? He wasn’t asking for all the days and hours and minutes he would have had with Ellen and Lizzie, he was just asking for one more day.

Stephen had been taking his family to the park when their car was broadsided. Lizzie had wanted to go all summer, and that day they had the tickets: they were really, finally going. All he had done in his story was change “were going” to “had gone.” A mere verb shift, and yet it changed everything.

And now this strange girl in his cab was forcing him to change it back.

Her voice was entirely innocent. She had no idea what she’d taken from him. But then again, he had no idea what she was about to give.

W
E HAD A FATHER
who loved us. Even as my brother Jimmy turned his back on the Sanctuary, I knew he had to still believe this, deep in his soul.

In my earliest memory, Father was holding Jimmy and me on his lap, telling us how important we were to him. More important than all his money, more important than the Sanctuary, more important than the stars in the sky or the ground below. The most important thing in the known world, the most important thing imaginable. “I want you two to be happy here forever,” he said, his voice as tender as his arms around us. “Whatever you want you can have, as long as it won’t hurt you.”

As long as it won’t hurt you.
Too bad Father had such an active imagination. When I was eight years old, I read a story about a girl on a tire swing, with long flowing hair glittering in the sun as she moved back and forth. I asked for a swing of my own, but Father couldn’t do it. “Swings can wrap themselves around your neck and
choke you, Dorothea,” he said. “You can fly out of a swing and sever your spine.” When Jimmy wanted paints—not watercolors, like we already had, but real rich colors, thick—so he could try to copy the encyclopedia picture of a Roman centurion onto his bedroom wall, Father wanted to give them to him, I know he did. He was shaking his head sadly when he told Jimmy, “Those paints are poison. The toxins could seep into your skin.”

From pets that might bite to bicycles that could crash, our father had to protect us. He couldn’t bear the idea of a plastic swimming pool, no matter how shallow, because a child can drown in only a few inches of water. Climbing trees was a sure way to break your arm, or worse. There were dozens of trees on our property, but none of them had limbs lower than twenty feet, thanks to Father and the chain saw he kept locked in the storage shed. From my bedroom window, the trees looked like a clump of upright celery stalks.

I was weaker than my brother; perhaps this was why it was easier for me to sympathize with Father’s worries. I was only two years old when I developed what Grandma called my “nervous breathing,” and what the doctor called an anxiety disorder. My heart would pound at a hundred and eighty beats per minute or more, and my breath would develop a frantic rhythm to match. Father taught me how to control it, so I wouldn’t lose consciousness, but still, the horrible feelings of dizziness and panic were something I could never entirely forget, and they lurked in even my happiest moments, like snakes poised to strike.

We lived on thirty-five acres that straddled the border of Colorado and New Mexico, more than twenty miles from the nearest town. The four of us—Father, Grandma, Jimmy and me—were survivalists. That’s what the local preacher said anyway, when he came for a visit to see what we were up to, and went away convinced, without ever stepping foot inside, that our father knew what he was about.

After he left, Father laughed. Each month, we ordered nearly everything we needed from Colorado Springs: three freezerfuls of
food that arrived on the first Tuesday in a clean white truck. “Survivalists?” he said. “We wouldn’t survive twenty-four hours without the delivery man.”

Father could joke and laugh, but the grown-up Jimmy had forgotten all about that side of him. “He’s a nut,” my brother would say, and I would sigh. This was about a year before Jimmy left, for good as it turned out, though only Father suspected he wouldn’t be returning. I thought he would come running back as soon as he realized what the world was like; I even tried to convince him in my letters that he was putting himself in danger, though of course I had no proof of this, and he laughed off all my fears. He wrote that he was surrounded by normal people doing normal things, like working and falling in love, things he himself was planning to do now that he had finally “escaped” from the Sanctuary at the ripe old age of twenty-three.

The Sanctuary was Father’s name for our home.

We’d lived there as long as I could remember, though Jimmy claimed that he vividly remembered the time before, in California, when our mother was still alive. I was four when we left, he was six; maybe he did remember. Maybe everything he said was true: that we’d lived near the ocean in a house on a hill with a whole room just to watch movies in; that he’d gone to first grade with other children, and watched cartoons on television, and flown in airplanes to other countries, and rode at the front of a parade on Thanksgiving Day. He even got to stay outside until he was sunburned, he said, because a sunburn wasn’t a big deal to our mother. She said a sunburn gave you rosy cheeks and little freckles across your nose and all you had to do was put on spray and it didn’t hurt anymore.

Father would never allow us to stay outside for more than twenty minutes at a time. He would sit on our wide porch with his watch in his hand. “Sunburns can give you skin cancer,” he said. “I’m sorry, children, but we have to be on the safe side.”

Jimmy’s first rebellion was pretending to be sick during lessons and then climbing out of his bedroom window so he could stand in
the sun all morning. At first, Father thought Jimmy’s redness was due to a terrible fever from his flu. When he realized the truth, he was so surprised he collapsed in the chair by Jimmy’s bed, head in hands. Then Jimmy was sorry. He was only eleven years old; he still wanted to please our father.

Grandma said this rebellion would pass, but it didn’t, obviously. As he grew to be a teenager, the things we’d accepted all our lives were suddenly unacceptable. Why hadn’t we gone to school like normal children? Why did the doctor always come to our place? Why didn’t we have a television like everyone else in the world? Why did we have to learn everything from old textbooks and an ancient set of encyclopedias? Why had we never left this stupid Sanctuary? Father got to go to town sometimes—he had a Land Rover just for such trips—why wouldn’t he take us with him? What was wrong with him anyway?

It shocked me to hear my brother talk like this. Father had taken such good care of us for so long, and personally, I felt sorry for him, having to do it all with only Grandma to help. I often thought if only our mother was there, everything would have been much better, though the truth was the only thing I really remembered about her was her hair: long and fiery red, like Jimmy’s. There were no pictures of her in the house; Grandma said it was because Father couldn’t bear to see them. Neither Father nor Grandma would tell us how she died. Jimmy didn’t remember either, but he said it must have been really awful, or why else did our father become so strange?

“He’s no stranger than the Amish,” I retorted during one of these arguments, sticking an encyclopedia volume in Jimmy’s face, already open to a page on the Amish people of Pennsylvania. I was thirteen and I was ready. “At least we have electric lights!”

Jimmy frowned. “We don’t have a religion.”

I wasn’t sure about this. Father said we were “lapsed Catholics,” but Jimmy said that meant no longer Catholic, which meant no longer anything.

“So?” I said.

“The reason the Amish live like that is they believe it’s what God wants. That’s not what Father thinks at all. He thinks the people in town are evil monsters we have to stay away from.”

“He never said that.”

“Oh come on, Thea. You know how he talks about how corrupt the world is. What do you think he means? The dogs and cats and horses?”

Jimmy was rolling his eyes like I was a fool. Perhaps I was, but Father was not, of this I was certain. If he said the world was corrupt, then it had to be true. No matter how innocent the dusty road to town appeared, there was something out there, something unspeakably terrible and cruel. There had to be, or why would Father work so hard to keep us away from it?