What You Have Left (23 page)

As I approached my father's house, I found myself doing a sort of mental calculus, trying to decide if his believing he'd tried to contact me was in fact as good as his having actually done so. I hadn't made up my mind by the time I walked through the door. My father and Claire were still camped out in the living room, only now she was wearing my mother's old racing uniform.

“Grandpa's going to build me a kart!” she said, pivoting like a runway model to show off the uniform's ancient oil stains.

My father gave me a helpless look. “If it's okay with your mom, that is.”

“Please, Mom?”

The name
MADDY
was stitched above her breast pocket. Shiny red stripes ran down the sleeves, which hung past her hands. I turned to my father. “Can I talk to you a sec?” Claire gave me a disappointed look and sank onto the sofa as my father followed me into the hallway.

“She said she wanted one for her birthday,” he said. “I'm sorry. It just popped out of my mouth.”

“It's not that.” I was remembering all the promises he'd once made to me.
I found us a little place at the beach. I'm looking into schools. Shouldn't be more than a month.
I was remembering how, for a while, I'd believed every word, and I was thinking how much I'd like to get him out on the track and run him into a wall. “It's just that I'd appreciate your not writing any checks you can't cash.”

For a moment he stared at me as if I'd stomped his foot and he was trying to decide if it was on purpose. Then he glanced back at Claire, who was leafing through a karting magazine from the pile on the end table. “I'll cash 'em,” he said, not even looking at me, “so long as the bank's open.”

“Come on guys go go go let's give it a little juice and see what those babies can do.” On tape, Claire's voice cheers us on as she records our exploits for posterity. This is the heat. Onscreen, the Hornets appear to be moving in slow motion, the whine of their engines like a tired swarm of bees. Inside the car, though, things are happening fast. Too fast for me to think about ramming my father. Too fast for me to do much of anything except squeeze the steering wheel, grit my teeth,
and try not to get run over. Whatever confidence I had in the go-kart that morning has vanished in the confusion of so many cars on such a small track.

Early in the race, Claire tries to get fancy with the camera, zooming in, searching out our faces. The result is jittery and disorienting, almost unwatchable. Finally, mercifully, she settles for a wide-angle shot that takes in most of the track. It's the second or third lap, and by now my father and I are already hugging the wall, ceding the inside lane to real contenders as we grimly duke it out for last place. This is not quite the showing Claire has hoped for. Soon she gives up cheering and switches to the voice of a TV announcer. “Ladies and gentlemen, looks like it's going to be a long, long night.” The heat drags on for fifteen laps. A couple of times my father makes like he's going to pass me but never quite builds up enough steam. Who can say if he's really even trying? When I cross the finish line ahead of him, the rest of the cars are already lining up to leave.

If my father saw my mother in me as we circled the track, if he felt the pistons of loss firing away inside the worn cylinders of his heart, he didn't show it afterward. All he did was rest a hand on my shoulder and grin. “Guess now we know racing's not genetic.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “Or maybe I just got
your
genes.”

We'd decided to skip the feature and were standing around waiting for the track steward to relieve us of our rentals so we could get back to Claire, who at that very moment was probably trying to locate us with the zoom. My father glanced toward the grandstand, raised his arm in a wave. He'd agreed to this only because she wanted it, and
now he was eager to be done. After the steward took our keys and checked the cars for damage, we made our way back in silence, pausing only for a bottle of water so my father could take his pills. He hadn't had much to say since our chat in the hallway.

As we climbed the concrete steps, Claire stood and held her nose. “What's that smell?”

My father stared at his boots and sniffed. “The smell of de-feet?”

“Oh, well,” she said. “Them's the brakes.”

Where they'd come up with this routine, I had no idea, but as I stood there watching them, it wasn't hard to imagine a day when my father would give up on me completely and move on, concentrating all his efforts on Claire, the clean slate, the fresh start. “How'd you ever win a race anyway?” I said.

He glanced from me to Claire and shrugged. “Used to be I was better in the
clutch.
”

“Must have had more
drive
back then,” Claire added.

I'd heard enough. I suggested we celebrate with corn dogs and then stop by the office to pick up our hard-earned trophies. On the way down to the concession stand, my father told Claire about his lone victory. Only six cars had been in the Bomber race that night, and three of them were lost in a pileup. Another threw a scrap-iron fit two laps before the finish. “And the last driver was a rookie,” he said, “even more of a feather foot than me.”

Claire was holding his hand as she guided him through the crowd. “Here,” I said, peeling off a twenty. “I'm getting a beer.” That's how low I'd sunk, wanting my father to have to watch me enjoy a drink. The beer stand was next to the concession stand. I got in line and was still waiting to place
my order when my father started telling Claire how much he was looking forward to visiting her in Columbia. He asked if anyone was living in the cottage he and my mother had rented from Cal before we moved up to the lake. Then he asked if she'd like a go-kart for her birthday. “I'd love one,” she said, shooting me a glance. He offered to build her one. Again. “Course, you'll need somewhere to ride it,” he said. “A nice little dirt track. Wouldn't be too hard to make one if we could get our hands on a Bobcat.” Claire told him we had a tractor. “And there's plenty of room out behind the silo,” she said.

During this conversation, I stared at my father, willing him to look my way, but he was oblivious. Had he simply forgotten what I said? Did he not realize he was making promises again? In the end, it didn't matter. What mattered was that Claire believed him—believed
in
him. I watched them doctoring their corn dogs at the condiment table, chatting away like old friends. Bringing her along had been a bad idea. The funny thing was, my first impulse had been to leave her at home, on the grounds that my father wasn't the kind of person I wanted her around, and also that he didn't deserve to know her. But I'd given in to a different kind of selfishness. I'd imagined the ache my father would feel the first time he laid eyes on her, the reckoning of his loss, the ten years he'd already missed. And how could he look at her without thinking of me, too, a young girl standing by a mailbox, shrinking in his rearview mirror? I'd never even stopped to consider the risk to Claire, the possibility she might fall for him so fast, so hard. Now the two of them were drifting over to the souvenir stand to check out the T-shirts. No doubt my father would buy her whatever her heart desired. I turned around, disgusted, and was surprised to find
myself looking into the steely blue eyes of none other than Jeff Gordon, a life-sized cardboard cutout with the Budweiser logo emblazoned on his flame-retardant suit. Though I'd never thought much of Claire's crush on him, I decided right then I'd get us tickets to a NASCAR race the minute we got home.

“Next?” The guy behind the counter was staring at me with an amused smile.
Whenever you're ready, lady. Whenever you make it back to Earth.

I tapped the can of Budweiser in Jeff 's hand. “I'll have what Jeff 's having.”

The guy raised an eyebrow, more amused. “You mean Dale Junior?”

Up until the business in Camden, I'd carried on with my life more or less expecting to turn around someday, at the grocery store or the post office or on a street corner, and catch a glimpse of my father. Often I had the feeling I was being watched. He was simply waiting for the right moment, perhaps one that offered a shot at redemption—a robbery or house fire he could save me from. These, I knew, were thoughts for a child, and after Camden, I began to let go of them. Now and then, driving home or lying in bed, I'd still talk to him in my mind, not the missing Wylie but the young father he'd once been, the two of us retracing conversations we might or might not have really had. Slowly but surely, I learned to keep him in the past, where he belonged, where he couldn't do any more harm.

That night, as soon as I heard him snoring in the next room, I got out of bed, pulled on jeans, and quietly packed our bags. I was waiting until the last possible minute to wake
Claire. She wouldn't want to leave, would want to know why we were sneaking off in the middle of the night without even saying good-bye, and I didn't know how to explain why I couldn't stay. After I'd carried our bags to the door, I made a final sweep of the house, pausing by the phone. Better to wait and call Lyle later, once we were on the road; in the morning, he could arrange shipment of the stuff I'd bought at the antique shops. Turning to get Claire, I noticed the blinking red light of the camcorder recharging on the mantel and, beside it, the five or six videotapes my father had made since we arrived. It occurred to me that there might come a time when I'd want to hear his stories about my mother—the ones I'd missed while I was out—but I didn't know which tape was which. The labels weren't annotated, just numbered. As I sifted through the pile, I felt a pinprick of guilt. I could picture my father turning the house upside down, wondering if he'd misplaced a tape or simply mis-numbered them. And without the tape, would he even remember the time he'd spent looking at those photos with Claire? I decided I didn't care; he'd already gotten more of us than he deserved. In fact, the tapes alone were more than he deserved, the memories they held no more his than mine.

Sometimes, when I'm the last one awake, when Lyle and Claire are fast asleep and the logs in the fireplace have burned down to embers, I'll curl up in front of the TV and pop in one of the tapes, looking for things I might have missed, or things I thought I'd only imagined. I've noticed, for instance, that when we first saw my father, when he embraced us at the Drome, he continued to hold Claire long after he'd turned me loose. It's as if the arc of our whole visit were inscribed in
that initial moment, plainly visible if you knew what to look for. To me, this is comforting. There's no beating fate.

For his part, my father's never mentioned the tapes. Possibly he thinks I destroyed them. Possibly he thinks I still have them. Possibly he's decided to let me keep them, now that he's able to see Claire every day. Shortly after we left Indianapolis, he sold his Bomber, broke his lease, and headed south. He took a room in an Econo Lodge over by Fort Jackson and proceeded to insinuate himself in our lives with a months-long campaign of charm and devotion. Eventually we agreed to rent him the cottage, and now, after years of not knowing where he was, I can look out my window, across a field where I played as a child, to the house my parents lived in when I was born, and see his floodlight burning in the night.

If he misses figure-eight racing and the closeness he felt to my mother, he doesn't complain. Perhaps it's enough to be back in the house they once shared. On weekends, he helps out at the mall. At first he refused to let me pay him, but now he just turns around and puts the money into a savings account for Claire, which he set up after I stopped accepting his checks. Afternoons, when the two of them aren't on the track down by the bluff, they're often at his workshop in the barn, where he builds kart engines. Claire's in charge of teaching him to use a computer. She's also in charge of worrying about him. For instance, she dislikes the idea of him traveling alone. This fall, he's been invited to the annual meeting of the Calorie Restriction Society in Phoenix, where he'll tell his story to a group of doctors, researchers, and fellow would-be Ponce de Leons. He's even managed to get my husband on the bandwagon. After just five weeks of CR, Lyle reports feeling better than he's felt in years. I used to think
CR was a crock, but these days I'm not so sure. The ability to do more with less is a valuable one, and it's not such a leap to believe our bodies know this. The body is, after all, geared for survival, capable of defending itself in unexpected ways, not so different from figure-eight racers, mothers protecting their young, the human heart itself.

This book was more than eight years in the making. Along the way, I had a lot of help. My deepest gratitude goes to Julie Barer, as good a friend as an agent (which is saying a lot), and to my editor, Wylie O'Sullivan, who is even more wonderful than her name. I'm also indebted to Wylie's many hardworking colleagues at Free Press, notably Dominick Anfuso, Martha Levin, Jill Siegel, Carisa Hays, Suzanne Donahue, Shannon Gallagher, Wendy Sheanin, Carol de Onís, Beth Maglione, Erich Hobbing, Eric Fuentecilla, and Alex Noya.

Thanks and love to my mom, who's been there always, and to my dad, who graciously allowed his stories to be hijacked herein, which means more to me than he knows; to my aunt Dargan, who had answers; to Richard and Joanne and Jennifer, in-laws extraordinaire; to Dick and Lois Rosenthal, for their friendship, kindness, and for taking a chance on me; to Jeff Weiser, patron of the arts and the best friend I could want; to Judy Clain, for her advocacy and friendship; to Jeff MacGregor and Olya Evanitsky, who went above and beyond the call; to Lizzie Himmel, for making it fun; to Emily Watson, for bringing me into the circle; to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, for the privilege of waiting tables; to my unwitting teachers, the many fine writers whose work
I had the privilege of editing at
Story
; and to my witting teachers, especially Mary Grimm, Michelle Herman, and, of course, Lee K. Abbott, whose fault it is I write.