WINTER, 2001
Chapter 11
"Far above our heads are the icy heights that contain all reason."
The Shins, "Caring is Creepy" - Oh, Inverted World, 2001
When asked to recall a memory about his mother, Jimmy wrote, in the little blue test booklet provided by Mr. Galloway: "In my nearly 18 years of living, my mother has tried to kill me at least a dozen times, and only once did she nearly succeed." He knew when Mr. Galloway reached his essay as he thumbed through his grading stack during their fifteen-minute reading period because he chuckled out loud, a surprised snort of laughter. After class he called him over and told him it was his best yet. "You're a talented writer, Jimmy," he said. "You've got an observant eye."
Jimmy embellished the story a little for the sake of the assignment, but the rest of the story goes, more or less, like this:
The time his mother nearly killed him had been in the little gray hatchback Jimmy knew for a good chunk of his early childhood. When he thought of car rides he still thought right back to that car, the flat vinyl backseat piled with their belongings and him in the center of it all, watching the blue-orange light of the city peak in through the back windows until it faded into the highway.
He spent a lot of time in that car, his mother smoking in the front seat. She rolled the window down but the smell found its way to him all the same. In terms of practicality, it was not a safe vehicle, and was constantly breaking down in ways he couldn't have begun to understand. His mother wasn't much better off, although she knew some things. Husband #2 had been, in her words, "a car guy", though whether that meant a hobbyist or a mechanic, Jimmy wasn't sure—Husband #2 had been before his time.
Despite its abundance of hazards, Jimmy still felt inexplicably safe when he was inside. His mother openly, vocally hated it, but Jimmy was ten the day he almost died, and warmth and familiarity were enough for him.
He was in the narrow backyard of their second proper house, in Fremont (though, strictly speaking, it's wasn't theirs, as they rented it, and technically they only paid for one room, which they shared). The house was one story, painted a weak, denim blue. A winter storm had passed just days prior, and he was piling snow on top of the old stone birdbath that never seemed to attract any birds. School didn't always cancel for snow that far north, but Jimmy had just gotten lucky, he'd figured, and that day it had.
He was kneeling in the snow when his mother cracked the backdoor, quietly called his name. She was always referring to the car as "the fucking car", or "that fucking car". They both did, in fact—she hated the car so much that she didn't even mind if Jimmy swore at it. Now, she hissed: "Get your things and get in the fucking car."
Jimmy was well-acquainted with his mother's "urgent" voice by then, and he did as he was told, though not without complaining every step of the way. His things were few and he was packed in minutes.
"Got everything?" she asked. He simply nodded, looking at her own suitcase.
"What's wrong?" he asked, but she ignored him, took his arm and made for the door. In the car, he realized as she struggled to start the engine that they hadn't brought anything else with them.
"Mom, are we bringing the globe?" he asked.
"No, Jimmy."
The globe was big and off-white, with raised bumps to designate mountain ranges, and was one of her favorite things.
Flustered, he asked, "What about the scrapbook?"
"I've got it, Jimmy. Fucking car." The engine scratched, whined. Something under the hood gurgled.
"Give it gas," Jimmy said. He had no idea what the meant, only that she was supposed to do it.
"Right," she said. She turned the key forward, nudged the brake, and finally the engine came to life. She leaned back, letting the engine run with the gas held down until it could idle on its own. She looked at him in the rear view mirror. Her eyeshadow, reddish-brown that day, was smudged.
"What's wrong?" Jimmy asked again.
He knew he couldn't expect much. "We've got to move on again," she said, and that was about enough.
"Did I get expelled?"
She laughed, a sound of surprise more than amusement. "No, Jimmy. This one's on me."
"Oh."
After the engine was suitably warmed she urged the car away from the curb in front of the one-story house they'd called home for a little less than a year. They had no snow tires, no chains, no four-wheel drive—nothing. Once they got out to the main roads, all plowed and salted early in the mornings, they'd be alright, but getting out of the residential area would be difficult. The car fishtailed a few times, but the roads widened and finally emptied into a street lined with small businesses. His mother audibly sighed with relief.
They stopped for gas, and breakfast. The sense of urgency from before seemed to have evaporated, but his mother was still tense, glancing at her watch over and over again.
Back on the road, the main street eventually rolled out into the highway, and Jimmy felt the familiar tedium of a long trip settling in. He leaned his face against the door, his nose against the window. Before long, he'd fallen asleep.
He awoke to his mother unbuckling his seat belt.
"Wake up, Jimmy. We're stuck."
He blinked at her, bleary-eyed. "Stuck?" He looked around, trying to recall where he'd been when he fell asleep. Outside was totally white at first, and rubbing his eyes didn't seem to help.
He slid from his seat and into the snow, shuffling around to the front of the car. They were on the side of the road. Snow-covered trees stretched skyward as far as he could see.
"Look at that," his mother said roughly, lighting a cigarette. She pointed at the tire nearest him; there was a smooth wet patch beneath it, which he later understood was snow that had melted away from the heat of the spinning tires as she tried and failed to get them unstuck.
"What do we do?"
"Grab the mats from the back," she said. He climbed inside the car and pulled up the rubber mats from the floor between the front and back seat. She took them, crouched down and tucked them behind the rear tires. "Now we can drive out," she said.
Back inside the car, she started the engine, said "Cross your fingers," and backed slowly over the mats. Without much more trouble, they were clear.
"You did it!" Jimmy said.
"See?" she said. She angled the car toward the highway. "Your mom knows a few things."
"Did you learn that from the car guy?" Jimmy asked. He didn't hear her answer.
It's such a cliche, is all he could think sometimes when he looked back on it. He figured that if you looked closely enough, life was throwing cliches at everyone all the time, one after another, and it was just sometimes that people noticed it and sometimes they didn't.
He wasn't really awake for most of it. He was confident that he never actually saw the SUV curve off the road and right into them, though the image certainly appeared in his nightmares enough. He remembered a loud crunching of metal like an enormous soda can being crushed, and his mother screaming. The pain, thankfully, he couldn't remember at all, although he supposed you couldn't really properly remember any pain, not quite the way it felt when you actually experienced it. He also remembered how everything looked when the car was upside down, for those moments he was lucid, the spiderwebbing cracks across the front windshield, and somehow that memory was the scariest of them all.
When he woke up properly, he was in the hospital. He had bruises all over him, and he was sore. His scalp had been split open along his hairline, above his left eye. There were stitches there that he was instructed not to touch. He was told by his mom, and a nurse, and then a doctor, that he did not have brain damage and he might be concussed but they were fairly confident he'd gotten lucky and was alright. His mother sat by his bedside when the doctor cleared out after telling her not to light a cigarette in the hospital, please. Now that they were alone, he wanted to ask her again why they'd left Fremont. When he thought about that day he would wonder, were those bruises from the crash, or had they been there before? He tried to remember and couldn't seem to place them in time. Maybe the bruise on her cheekbone was from the impact, but maybe he'd seen it when she looked at him in the rear view mirror, or when she watched him wolf down his breakfast when they stopped for gas. He could admit to himself that maybe his brain was filling in those details on purpose, the way they fabricated the impact he hadn't actually seen. Maybe he just didn't want to believe that his mother could actually fuck the two of them over that many times without someone else being the catalyst from time to time. Maybe. But bruises fade, and he never asked.
"Are you okay, Jimmy?" she asked.
His mom was not a crier. He'd certainly seen her cry—at movies, and TV shows, and, inexplicable to him at the time, when the two of them watched the twin towers coming down on the news only months before—but when it came to living, anyone could say anything to her, do anything, leave her anytime, and she would never cry. Swear, knock things over, but never cry. Jimmy attributed that aspect of himself to her.
It took him some time to open his mouth and respond. "I'm kind of hungry."
She smiled a little, and said, "Well," and her voice wavered. But that was the only time.
