Shadowbahn(61)

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When he was his daughter’s age—the age that she is now as she crosses the country in their father’s Camry with her brother—a friend of his mother’s took a shower one morning and discovered a lump on her back just below her neck. Six weeks later, the woman was dead, departed with such dizzying hurry that Parker and Zema’s father never forgot it. Although it might be that he’s just one for drama, he honestly can claim that rarely a day goes by when he isn’t conscious of the possibility it’s his last.





song of reckoning


The year before his son’s birth, Parker’s father was in an auto accident outside Chicago. His car hit the rain on the highway in such a way as to send the vehicle spinning across three lanes of rush-hour traffic while inexplicably avoiding collision, then off the highway down a knoll and across a field into a wood, rather than caroming off a concrete wall back into all the traffic he had just narrowly missed. Drama or no, he could justifiably go so far as to later call his survival of the incident freakish, comparable to scenes in a Western when a perfectly placed tin star stops a bullet from entering the marshal’s heart.

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The father isn’t so stupid or dishonest as to say death doesn’t frighten him. Death terrifies him. The oblivion of it, the finality that would make some part of a person want to know when he wakes that morning—even as the rest of him denies it—that this is to be his final day. On a warm winter’s morning two decades after that near-miss outside Chicago, he picks up a prescription for his migraines, drops Parker off at the local community college, begins preparing for the seminar he is scheduled to teach two days later, and with Zema in the car goes down the hill for the single purpose of getting some cash at an automated teller so that, the next day, he can pay the gardener who comes twice a month.





the faithless song


Not counting the auto accident, Zema’s father has died at least once before, in Berlin at the turn of the century. That was a literary death, however, and no matter how much literature insists otherwise, it’s not the same; literary deaths don’t do banal, or know from the sad poetry that is banality. Because Zema is eleven years old on this day, her father finally lets her sit in the front seat as she’s been demanding to since she was six. The breeze that brushes his face when he turns from the ATM to see the three men is lovely, and from the window of his car comes “Don’t Explain,” which isn’t at all about this moment or the mysteries of how life begins and ends. I’m glad you’re bad, the singer sings to her faithless lover, don’t explain.

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Zema’s father pivots too sharply to the car once he realizes what’s happening. “Dad?” Zema calls from the front seat. One of the young men turns to look too. When he sees the girl he says, “That your daughter? That’s not your daughter.” The father calls back to her, “Don’t look,” then to the men, “She hasn’t seen your faces,” and the girl lunges from the passenger seat to the other side of the car. She bolts from the driver’s door into oncoming traffic—a flight that, preposterously, she’ll feel guilty about forever. The horrified father cries out, lurching to her; slammed back against the ATM by the three men, he takes his hands from his face to look.





the song that may or may not be true


Miraculously, Zema stands in the boulevard’s center divider, gazing back. In the cascade of second, third, fourth thoughts, she takes a step toward her father before he says, “Go,” more calmly than he would think possible, at a volume that no one would think she could hear over traffic; and she goes. At that moment, more than anything, more than despondency or torment, he feels the sweet sorrow of having loved his little girl and knowing that this is the last time he’ll see her, of feeling the magnitude of missing her that is an eternity’s worth of feeling. She dashes across the rest of the boulevard and keeps going until she’s run out of his life into some new perdition of her own imagining that no one else could possibly believe she deserves. Where, she will ask herself years later on the steps of a church in Valentine, was a woman sheriff with a gray ponytail when we needed her?

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Those years later, on the last miles out of Nebraska, before falling asleep at the wheel just long enough to wake on a secret highway running through the country, her brother will be overwhelmed by his sister’s sorrow, finally trying to tell her, to no avail, “It’s not your fault.” He will hear from her a whisper that mourns the lost family she never knew and the found family to which she never could quite convince herself she belongs, that mourns the lost code of identity and the secret message of the self that are neither deciphered nor disclosed. “White,” the eleven-year-old Zema answers the police, hours after the ATM and back home at the dining room table where her father used to rail about stereo and MP3s, her stricken mother across the table from her, Parker ashen and furiously mute. The black female officer looks at Zema gently, waiting just long enough before pressing. “Are you sure, honey?” she says. “It was dark. We . . . have security footage, you know. Cameras that film it all. So maybe,” a bit more assertively, “you’re mistaken. Maybe,” she adds, “it’s what you think your father would want you to say”—at which point the hue of Zema’s flesh, of which she became conscious the moment she became conscious of her new country, is rendered one more mystery of her life.