The Forgotten Hours(69)
John Gregory had taught his daughter to drive in the back streets of West Mills, where the spiky fruit of the sycamores would batter the car bonnet like hail, startling her. But mostly she had learned on the dirt-packed roads of Eagle Lake, starting when her feet could barely reach the pedals. At dusk you had to keep your eyes peeled for deer, invisible but for their wild eyes and the flash of a white tail. They’d lunge out at her as she drove by, sometimes four, five of them on one short ride. She quickly learned to keep her cool. By the time she was ten years old, she knew how to navigate the clutch. Sitting next to her in the Falcon, John had been patient, slow to startle, always ready with a word of encouragement. He’d place his hand over the birdlike bones of hers as she yanked the gearshift around, the car bucking in protest underneath her.
A few days after meeting up with Jack came the day of her father’s release. The Falcon was in decent running order again, after an $853 tune-up at Ricky’s in Blackbrooke (Katie used money from her savings account). David had offered to fetch it, and she let him. He’d parked it in a vacant lot behind a friend’s restaurant down in Red Hook, then drove into Manhattan to pick her up in the morning. She thought then, in the car, of telling him that she might possibly be pregnant, but it seemed wrong to complicate the day in that way.
Wallkill prison was a long drive up 95 from the city, and she’d usually gone up there alone, always by Greyhound bus. This time they drove the Falcon with the top down, David at the wheel, keeping it steady at sixty miles per hour. The silence between them existed in a neutral sort of place, as though they both hadn’t quite decided how they should be acting toward one another. It was a good day, good things were happening, but a sense of something unsettled, off kilter, made it seem precarious.
They pulled up the wide, buckled driveway, past the giant plastic marker reading WALLKILL CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, and swung around toward the main entrance—and there he was, just like that. Standing with his hands stuffed into the pockets of an unfamiliar black anorak, wearing a pair of aviator glasses. The sun bounced off his forehead, the glass in his lenses blasted into shining discs. He was pale, unsmiling. As they pulled up, he remained stiff, his face unmoving. For a second Katie thought maybe it wasn’t him after all. She and David left the car idling and climbed out, neither of them making a sound—and that’s when John raised his fists to the air, lifted his head to the sky, and shouted, “Waaaahooooo!”
He hugged them each so hard their breath caught tight in their chests. Katie could not control the grin that took over her face. It was happening—her father was free, finally free!
“Scared ya,” he said. “Suckers!”
“Dad.” David pulled away, smiling. “I see prison hasn’t sobered you up.”
“Hell no,” John answered. “Let me look at you, son. It’s been a while . . .”
“I know, but—”
“Nah, just joshing you. It doesn’t matter. Man,” John said, slinging a small sack into the back of the Falcon, “will you look at this baby. Let me have her for a minute, will you?”
He jumped into the driver’s seat, and as David and Katie stood side by side watching, he raced down the driveway, tooted the horn a few times, revved the engine, and then did a spectacularly brazen U-turn in the intersection—one hand on the wheel, the other raised high—and returned to them. Watching him move through the free air, unimpeded, Katie was ecstatic one second, jumpy the next. She looked at David to see if he was as unsettled as she, but his face gave nothing away.
“Rides like a dream,” her father said. “Thanks, kids. This makes my heart sing. Climb in.”
The car rumbled, a deep, throaty murmur, as it cruised along the back roads. The sky and trees whizzed over their heads like a too-fast movie reel. “Where are we going?” Katie asked.
“Where do you want to go?” her father said.
David pulled his baseball hat lower over his forehead against the wind. “Your call, Dad!”
The car barreled toward the Hudson River. When the trees swallowed them in their stippled embrace, John slowed down. He tapped on the car door with his left hand, his right hand loosely clasped around the steering wheel. The Falcon nosed out of the shadows onto the open road again, and the vista unfolded in front of them for miles in every direction. In the distance a few tiny round dots hovered in the sky, but they didn’t seem to be moving. They were pink and green, some striped with blue.
“Hey, no kidding,” John said. “Hot-air balloons!”
They looked like M&M’S, gaudy and bright, and there were at least ten of them, floating effortlessly, creating no noise, and leaving no wake. As the Falcon approached, the balloons loomed along the road to their right, dancing ever so slightly. Katie grinned to herself. The muscles in her shoulders began to loosen up; the world was complicated, yes, but also full of beauty, and now they could all move forward and embrace it.
“Always wanted to go up in one of those things,” John said. “But your mother was too damn scared.”
“No surprise there,” said Katie.
“Ach,” her father said, dismissing her with a wave of his hand. “Not a word you say will change the fact that I think she’s damn near perfect.”
It was sad, his enduring dedication to her mother. How much sweeter his release would have been if Charlie had pulled up today in the Falcon with his children.