Then I drive nineteen hundred miles east, playing music so loud, it blocks out rational thought. It takes two and a half days. There might be scenery, but all I see is a loop of Nicolette’s face, Yucca Valley Correctional, Connie Marino shooting hoops in the driveway of my dad’s spread, and my mother’s house on fire.
In the middle of this, there are flashes of my dad coming at me, going, Think, Jack. But I’m too busy trying to stay awake in a peeling-plastic bucket seat to think.
Anyone, anywhere, anytime. The world ends. I whimper like a little girl. Connie dies. Bang.
At the point when I realize my mind has turned to the kind of mush that steers cars into the center divider, I pull off and sleep in the front seat, parked at a desolate rest stop in Kansas. I don’t have any real dreams, just reruns of what I did to my mother right before I left, and the promises I made that I’m not going to keep.
It started off practical. I said I was leaving. She said my car wouldn’t make it.
“I could use Don’s car.” His uglier-than-shit car was mounted on blocks in our garage, waiting for him to finish up his two-to-five. “He has no use for it.”
Pain flashes across her face. Very fast, she turns away so I won’t see it. I see it, her sorrow and her mother-love for my thug brother.
“Why are you doing this?” she says. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m eighteen. Guys my age are in the Marines.” This is lame and nonresponsive, but at least it’s true.
The reaction on her face is bad enough, and then she starts to talk. “Jackson, Marines are grown-ups. Grown-ups don’t waltz out of town on a whim. Grown-ups are responsible.”
“How can you say I’m not responsible? In this family, isn’t it enough that I don’t hold up convenience stores? You act like it’s a felony that I want to take a road trip. Don commits felonies, and you treat him like the Second Coming.”
“Don doesn’t have your gifts. Jack, sit down. Be good. You’re a serious person. Now act like one.”
I feel like the exploding guy I pretended to be in Enright’s office.
“I want to skip graduation, so I’m Public Enemy Number One?”
Even as I sleep by the interstate in Kansas, be good be good be good pounds against the inside of my skull like the clapper of a deafening bell.
“No, wait, didn’t you marry Public Enemy Number One? Maybe you’d like me better if I screwed up big. Maybe then you wouldn’t be so obvious about worshipping Don—”
“I left Don with your father,” she says in her unnaturally calm voice. “It was the worst decision of my life. And don’t you ever talk to me like this.”
Naturally, her worst decision was a Don-decision.
“Don wasn’t the one he was trying to mold. I was. You sat there for ten years and let him do it.”
She reaches out to pat my arm, but I’m two feet back before her hand can touch me. “There are no words for how sorry I am,” she says.
This would be my opportunity to be decent, forgiving, kind. I could dream a different outcome and wake up without my gut braided like a Boy Scout lanyard. But it’s as if I’m turning into the hard guy everybody always thought I was no matter how good I was.
“If you’re that sorry, maybe you should have found some words.”
She sits down on the couch as if I’d pushed her. “Don’t try to get back at me by demolishing your own life, all right? I understand you’re furious. I understand why. But I’m not about to roll over and say this is all right. This isn’t just monumentally stupid—what about memories you’ll want later? Grad night, marching with your class at graduation—”
“I want the memory of seeing Las Vegas in the rearview—tonight.” I say this with so much conviction, I almost believe it. “I’ll use Manx money if I have to.”
This would be the money my father left. My mother thinks of it as tainted. I see it as restitution. Before I turned eighteen, it was her choice. Now it’s mine.
“Jack, no!”
There, I’ve brought my mother to the verge of tears. I feel like warmed-over crap. “It’s mine, and he owes me.”
I’ve never said things this harsh or true to her before.
She hugs me, but she’s shaking. (Even in the dream, I feel her shake.)
? ? ?
I’m not getting back at her, I’m saving her.
? ? ?
She steps away, and her hands find their way to her hips as if she’s about to let me have it. “I’ll spring for the tent and all the gear. You don’t need his money. But I want your itinerary, and I want you to answer your phone. Do you hear me?”
I feel nothing but relief with her back in the mom groove and me in the kid groove—but for now, it’s all a lie. “Loud and clear. Thanks for the tent.” As for the gear, there’s no way she’s going to know about the gear I’ll need for this trip.
She half whispers, “These are the words. I didn’t see what I didn’t want to see. I was a terrible mother. I’m trying to make up for it.”
I’m not a guy who cries. I start to apologize, but she interrupts me. You would think that asleep in Kansas, in the realm of wish-fulfillment, I’d get to finish apologizing and feel like a stand-up son, but I don’t.
She says, “I think you wanted to tell me how angry you are.”