Passenger(64)

It takes the road to bring it back to me. Because it happened on this road in the first place. The needling in my brain explodes into light and a sunburst of memories engulfs me—

My name is Palmer Troy.

I was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey. My birthday is August 31. I’m thirty-two years old.

In the fall of last year, I was hired to head up the music program at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore City. It is a big step, advancement from teaching music classes at the community college in Ithaca, New York, so I take the job. We pack up and move. The school has already selected us a single-bedroom apartment on St. Paul Street, just a few blocks from the institute, until our house in the suburbs is ready. It is only temporary. We can do it. We can make it work. It will be perfect. Madeline will miss her mother, but it will be perfect. You just wait and see.

You just wait and see.

It is on this stretch of road that the baby, the small child, starts to choke. It means nothing at first. Babies sometimes choke. But it lasts too long and Madeline turns over in her seat and starts shouting the baby the baby Palmer the baby’s choking the baby.

You see the baby in the rearview—and his little face is blue, his eyes bugging out, the drool pooling on his New York Giants pullover. The drool is red and you immediately think: blood.

You slam the brakes and the car jerks to a stop. Popping your door, you jump out and yank the rear door open. You dive for the baby, instinctively tugging at him, tugging, not grasping that it is the child safety seat that prevents the child from going with you. Madeline screams the baby the baby and somehow you manage to get the child unbuckled from the safety seat. What looks like a thousand colored balls spill from the car and spread like a stain across the pavement.

Here, in the middle of the vacant highway, with the car doors open and Moonlight Sonata on the radio, you administer the Heimlich to the small frame. The child is not breathing, will not breathe, and your hoarse voice whispers come on come on come on baby breathe baby come on baby breathe but he doesn’t breathe.

Baby doesn’t breathe.

They are gumballs, colored gumballs. There was a bag in the back seat. The child had gotten into the bag. The red drool is not blood but red dye. Coloring.

There is a give and the gumball is fired from the child’s mouth to the street. It rolls, barking into the other spilled gumballs as it goes, its red faded to a moist, shiny pink.

But you are in a fury.

There is an obsession to you now.

To save a life.

To save your child’s life.

You keep pumping. Those arms are mechanical arms. The adrenaline is furious. You are frantic and Madeline is screaming from the car over the sonata and there, in the middle of a vacant wooded highway, the boy dies from what is later determined to be a crushed ribcage and collapsed lung.





TWENTY-FIVE





Somehow, with the sky still dark, I make it back to Baltimore. I have driven all through the night on some psychological autopilot. The day has a fatigued parchment tint to it. I coast the pickup truck down Pratt Street, the neon-lit, yawning expanse of the Inner Harbor to my right, fighting through the fog. It has snowed in my absence; now, a light misty rain muddies the streets. The black waters are motionless and like smoked glass beyond the piers, streaked with sodium lights from across the harbor. Through the fog, the ribbed, slate-hued hull of the U.S.S. Constellation looks like a fallen prehistoric beast. The traffic on this street is all one-way, taillights through the windshield smeared to red contrails by the wiper blades. A dense fog has descended upon the city, obscuring the trademark red letters of the Legg Mason building.

The weather makes for bad driving so there is very little traffic on St. Paul Street. I pass the old stone church. Like a living thing, it seems to retreat into the fog, hiding from the street. I recall my first visit to the church, almost a full year ago. Six days stumbling lost and useless about the city before I am drawn to it. I read the pamphlets on the bulletin board and, seated in the front pew, paw with lethargy through one of the leather-bound Bibles. When the old nun appears beside me, silent as a wisp of smoke and wincing from some mysterious stomach pain, I tell her my name is John, because that is the book of the New Testament I am looking at when she asks.

There is a parking space only a block from my apartment. I pull Clarence’s pickup truck into the space and crawl out of the cab. The air has a thickness to it, weighty as original sin. It’s like being miles under the sea. I pull my jacket tight about my body. Tuck my red scarf down into the folds. A single female voice, angel-wise and heaven-sent, echoes through the swirling mist, seemingly coming from all directions at once—





Eres mi amor, mi amor

Eres mi amor,

Somos amantes y somos amigos

Eres mi amor, mi amor

Eres mi amor…





I pause on the sidewalk and swivel in the snow. The rain fades to a mist that hangs in the air, frozen in time.





Somos amantes y somos amigos

Eres mi amor, mi amor

Eres mi amor…





That is it: the haunting, melancholic piano melody I have been playing all month, the sad song that is really a love song. I have forgotten but now I remember. Just as I remember hearing the woman sing months ago, back in the spring, while the windows are open. How she sings in Spanish and I don’t understand any of it, so I check out tapes from the library—I use my fake Paul Howard driver’s license, in fact, to get a library card—and I teach myself Spanish. A little. But enough to know the words…