Before I had a chance to text back, the boys shouted.
“There she is!” Corbin pointed. There was her old orange station wagon zooming down the hill. She careened to a stop across two parking spots and leapt out of the car, arms outstretched.
“My beautiful creatures!” she shouted. “Hugs! Immediately!”
With Grandma. I’m okay. I love you. More later.
“I’m so glad that you’re here.” Grandma flung open the trunk. Her gigantic dog slobbered in the backseat, leaning his big, blocky head over. “Sherman wanted to come too. Say hello, Sherman.”
I didn’t particularly like Sherman. He left slobber trails on my pants—or my bare legs. And he smelled like the fish oil Grandma put on his food, and like dirty old dog in general.
Grandma dangled the keys and grinned at me. “Want to drive?”
“No thanks.”
“Good place to practice. Not much traffic.”
“I don’t want to drive.”
“Your mother said we should be encouraging you.”
“I never wanted my learner’s permit in the first place. Did she tell you that?”
“Perhaps she’s tired of being your personal chauffeur. Has that ever occurred to you? The moment each one of my boys turned sixteen, I handed them a set of keys to the car and told them I didn’t want to drive them to any more parties or lessons or clubs or movies or jobs. I told them that unless we were going somewhere together, they were on their own or they could try to convince one of their brothers to take them or pick them up. With the exception of if they were drunk or stoned. I’d pick them up no questions in that case.”
“I don’t go to parties. I don’t belong to any clubs.”
“How about a job? About time you got one of those.”
“I don’t want to drive, Grandma. Please.” I climbed into the passenger seat. Sherman hung his head next to mine and panted, leaving a pool of slobber on my shoulder.
“Come on, Maeve.” Grandma leaned in, jingling the keys in my face. Everything was getting louder. The keys, the panting, the boys arguing about which side to sit on. The seagulls screaming outside. A logging truck gearing down. “Get behind the wheel.”
“Grandma, I don’t want to.” I pushed Sherman’s head out of the way. “And I wouldn’t drive anyway because you don’t have booster seats.”
“No one is going to pull you over here.”
“I’m not driving.” I closed my eyes, trying to will away the panic. “I am not driving. Could we stop talking about it?”
“It’s a Volvo, which happens to be the safest car in the world,” Grandma said.
“Not true. Subaru has the safest car. And it depends on how—”
“We’re hardly going far. And I bet you drive as slow as a little old lady. Or a typical little old lady. Those ones with the blue rinse in their hair.”
“I am absolutely not driving, Grandma. I don’t want to, and you can’t make me.” My voice was rising into a shout. “I just don’t want to!” I saw Grandma’s smile flatten, and I tried to calm myself down. “And it’s the law that kids have to be secured in age-appropriate safety restraints until they are nine years old.” Practically a whisper. “You want me to break the law?”
For a moment Grandma was silent. The boys were silent. Sherman was silent. Only the seagulls kept shrieking.
“All right.” Grandma closed the keys in her fist. “Suit yourself. I’ll drive.”
I’d take the bus. A taxi. A train. I’d get a friend to drive. I’d ride my bike. I’d catch a ride with someone. I’d walk. But I didn’t say any of that. She was like Dad in that she was all happy and full of jokes and smiles and hugs right up until the point that she was so pissed off she didn’t even want to talk to you.
The boys did up their seat belts, which would choke them if we got into an accident. I turned around. “Maybe you should sit on your backpacks. They’d be kind of like booster seats.”
“I don’t want to sit on my backpack,” Corbin said.
Owen shook his head in agreement.
“Maeve.” Grandma drew out my name in one long, low growl. “Billy and Claire are fine with it. Just leave it alone now.”
How hard was it to find two booster seats?
We could’ve carried them onto the ferry.
She could buy two and keep them in her car. The boys came over often enough. I would’ve bought two right then, if there’d been somewhere in that tiny town that sold them, and if I’d had enough money.
As we pulled onto the road, the boys argued about Gnomenville battle lines, and Sherman sat between them, watching the road more carefully than anyone in the car. Grandma drove, eyes straight ahead, not looking at me.
I tried to distract myself from my own catastrophic thinking by counting the driveways as they slid by. I got to sixty-three, and I was still thinking about car accidents.
Two thousand five hundred people died in car accidents in Canada each year. Another twelve thousand were seriously injured. And Canada was not a big country. Well, it was big. But California had more people.
Over thirty-seven thousand people died in crashes in the US. Each year.
Over sixteen hundred of those people were kids under the age of fifteen.
Nearly 1.3 million people died in crashes in the world each year.
You shouldn’t know these numbers, Nancy said. We need to work on that.
You should remember your calculus numbers instead, Ruthie said.
Why don’t you learn the Latin names of the plants in the garden? Mom said.
Holy shit, Dad said. Those are some crazy numbers.
And Grandma wouldn’t want to hear them at all.
Four people died in an accident on Marine Drive this afternoon, local artist Gillian Glover and three of her grandchildren: her sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Maeve Glover; and her six-year-old grandsons, Corbin and Owen Glover. If Ms. Glover had listened to the advice of her teenage granddaughter, perhaps the boys would have survived. Sadly, they were ejected from the vehicle due to being improperly restrained.
It was not far-fetched. The year before, a Port Townsend woman had driven a minivan full of second graders to Seattle for a field trip to the art museum, but when they were on the way back, she drove off the road and straight into a huge cedar tree. Five of the children were found scattered around the road and in the ditch. Two dead, three in critical condition. One seven-year-old sailed through the front window and wasn’t found for four days. The reason no one could find him was that no one thought to look up. He was lodged in a tree, so high up that no one would’ve seen him even if they had. A helicopter pilot finally spotted his red jacket from above.
And then I read that he hadn’t died right away. He’d died on the second day. Which meant he was up in that tree all alone overnight, bewildered and confused and scared and in so much pain.
None of those kids were wearing seat belts. None of them had been in booster seats. The woman said that she’d figured that because she was driving them on a school field trip, they didn’t have to wear seat belts, as if her minivan had suddenly and magically been transformed into a great big yellow school bus.