Picture Us In The Light(78)

I can feel my blood pounding through my arteries, spurts of pressure in my forehead, and I have to sit down and breathe until the world has leveled off again. The sirens don’t break through into my consciousness until my dad snaps his head up at the sound. “We didn’t call—”

“I called,” one of the people by my mom says, a white woman waving her hand at him and speaking loudly. “You’re lucky it happened so close by. They’ll just be right here.”

“No,” he says. “No, we don’t need—we don’t want—” And my mom, grimacing, manages, “No police.” But then they’re there with two cars, lights flashing like strobes, striding toward us and barking questions, and it’s just a minute or two later that a fire truck comes, too.

When I was a kid I used to love whenever we pulled over for emergency vehicles. It was before I knew it was a law—I thought it was a reflex people had that spoke to some common goodness, everyone’s shared desire that help arrive. But the way it feels today when they come, the way my parents visibly brace themselves—this is not the help I imagined on the other end when I was a kid.

“You were the one driving?” one of the officers says to me. “You have your driver’s license already?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you speeding?”

“No, sir, I—”

“He never speeds,” my dad says quickly. His face is stricken. “Never—”

The cop holds up his hand, and my dad goes silent. “Were you on your phone?”

The cop’s a small white guy, shorter than I am and thinner, too, but I can feel how impervious he is to me, how the force of every strong need or feeling I’ve ever had in my life would glance right off him. I say, “No, sir.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I don’t—I don’t know what happened. I lost control of the car.”

“You just lost control going thirty miles an hour?”

I can feel it falling apart for my dad then, too, even though he doesn’t say it. Of course I didn’t just lose control. The road’s straight here. “Yes, sir.”

“He just swerved,” the white lady puts in. “Going straight and then, bam, all of a sudden.”

“My foot slipped.”

He rakes his eyes over my face. I can’t help it—I look away. Maybe that was all he wanted, though, because he mostly leaves me alone after that. They make measurements on the road, take my phone and look through it, and dismiss me to go help my mom.

Which I can’t do. I can’t talk to her, can’t get close to her. I hang back and watch as my dad talks to the firefighter paramedics.

“It wasn’t a concussion, just fainting,” he insists, my mom grimacing and trying to nod along. “At the hospital, what would they do? They would send us home and tell us to keep an eye on her. We’ll just do that already.”

“You sure?” one of the paramedics, a white guy with an enormous neck, says skeptically. “You’re probably dealing with some cracked ribs here, best-case scenario. It were me, I’d go get checked out.”

“Yes, yes,” my dad says, nodding vigorously. “Very sure, thank you, yes, she’s fine.”

“You should go get checked out,” I say. “You—”

But the look my dad gives me, urgent and terrible, silences me. “She’s okay,” he repeats. “No need for a hospital. We just go home.”

“Do you remember losing consciousness?” the other paramedic, a slim Black woman, asks her. “Did you wake up confused?”

“I am fine,” my mom whispers, her face white. “I will go home and rest.”

So they write on the report that my mom is declining medical treatment, and the cop rips a sheet of paper from his clipboard and hands it to my dad and says, “Call in a couple days to get the report for your insurance company,” and they all leave—the paramedics and the cop cars that came swarming around us and the people who stopped when they saw the crash. We sit on the curb watching as the tow truck comes, my mom curled in a fetal position and my dad blinking rapidly at the space in the street where the car used to be, the asphalt covered in cubed greenish glass from the windows like bloodstains, and then the taxi comes.



We don’t speak to each other on our way back home. In the taxi my mom sits in the front seat, her breath coming in short catches. My dad, watching her, keeps leaning forward and begging the taxi driver to slow down. As for me, I got off easy: I ache all over and have a splitting headache, but nothing broken, nothing worse. My dad, who was sitting behind me, came out about the same.

The driver turns up the radio and hums to himself. Whenever I glance back at my dad he’s cradling his arms around his sides, but except for telling the driver to slow down every time we hit a bump and my mom gasps my dad says nothing, and never looks back at me. The fare passes thirty, thirty-five, and I have a sick feeling in my stomach as I watch it go up past seventy.

We’ve gotten off the freeway when I finally understand what I should’ve as soon as I saw the assault charge and what I should’ve understood, maybe, all along. And then everything comes together like an avalanche—the way they were always so careful before opening the front door. The way they always acted like they weren’t sure they’d still be here when I came back. How they always have me drive, how I’ve never been to China and how it’s been years since they were on a plane. How panicked they were at the police.