Devil’s Lake

My father taught me to drive one weekend on the I-70 East from Dayton to Fairview. It was only a six-hour drive round trip, and we could have done it in a day easily if the original point of the trip hadn’t been for Dad to make his monthly sales meetings at his stores along the way. He was Regional Sales Manager of Fry’s Food and Drug back then, but he had his heart set on working his way up to VP of the Ohio Sales Division. The long hours he was putting in at the office during the week, and on the road during the weekend, meant that he didn’t have the time or the energy to take me out after school like my friends’ dads so that I could practice doing figure eights around lampposts in empty parking lots.

“She has to learn sometime,” Mom said one night at the dinner table. “For goodness sake, she starts college in a few months.”

My parents hadn’t made me take Driver’s Ed, unlike all of the other sixteen-year-olds in Dayton. I knew what those classes were like—just a bunch of scare tactics really. My friend Shelley Perkins told me all about it—how they sat in those cold metal desks in a dark classroom and stared at an old TV that the instructor wheeled in. A semirecognizable TV actor would come on the screen, dressed all respectable in a suit and tie, and tell you some sad story about how once somebody he knew died because someone else drove recklessly and how it was sad. And he would spout on about statistics, about all the kids who died in car accidents every year. Then they would show you pictures of the cars—all broken and twisted in ways they shouldn’t be, the glass smashed. They never showed human bodies and they never showed blood but it was almost worse staring at those crushed cars and just imagining.

Besides, one of the assignments they made you do in Driver’s Ed was bring in a newspaper clipping about a local accident—it was supposed to make the whole thing seem closer to home, like it could happen to any of us. And I knew if I took the class, I would have to do the assignment and everybody would expect me to do it about Tom, because how much closer to home could you get than that? If I didn’t, it would seem disrespectful almost, and people would be thinking about Tom the whole time anyways. But I didn’t know how to stand up there and talk about his accident.

So I didn’t do Driver’s Ed and I was seventeen and I was the only one of my friends who didn’t have my license. It was inconvenient sometimes and it was maybe a little embarrassing. “You’ve never driven a car?” Shelley had said when I told her I didn’t know how to drive, only she said it as if I’d just told her I was a virgin. It wasn’t anything I wanted to admit to anybody, how I really didn’t want to learn to drive.

“Henry?” my mother said when she went to pass Dad the plate of buttered asparagus and he didn’t notice. He had his reading glasses on at the dinner table, which my mother hated, and his weekly sales reports sat next to his plate. “Henry, are you listening?”

“Mhm, dear.”

“So you agree?”

“Of course.”

“Good. This weekend would be perfect, don’t you think? You have that trip to Fairview?”

“That’s right.”

“And you can take Helen with you and teach her?”

“I’m a little busy, dear. Do you think you could manage it?” Dad said, which only proved that he hadn’t been listening because we only had one car, a brand new ’88 Acura Integra that Dad washed and waxed every other weekend.

Mom had been delicately sawing at the rosemary chicken breast on her plate but at that point she set her knife and fork down and just stared down at her lap. Dad finally looked up from his sales reports and began to backpedal.

I couldn’t understand how my parents could tolerate tolerating each other so much. Shelley told me I was lucky because her parents yelled at each other all of the time. In her house, it was all slammed doors and raised voices and her mother crying in the bathroom. But Shelley was wrong about a lot of things and this was one of them. I hated my parents’ soft words to one another. I hated their silences. Sometimes I wanted my parents to lose it a little bit, if only to prove that they still cared enough about each other to hate each other. Once, when I was at Shelley’s house, I made Shelley call my house and ask for my father by his first name, in a deep, sultry tone. I had gotten on the other line to listen. I clutched the chunky plastic receiver in my sweaty palms and held my breath when my mother answered. “Is Henry there?” Shelley purred. There was a pause—and I half-expected my mother to burst out in accusations or heated threats. “And just who the hell are you?” or “You stay away from my husband!” like you’d see on some afternoon soap. Instead, my mother’s voice came across cool and collected. “I’m sorry, he’s not home at the moment. May I take a message?” And Shelly had hung up quickly before her laughter could give her away.

“Sure, sure, that sounds fine,” Dad said at the dinner table when he saw that he had no other choice than to take me with him that weekend. Then he went back to reading his sales reports.

“Now, you be sure to call me once you get to Fairview and check in to the hotel,” my mother said. She was standing in our driveway clutching her arms across her chest and ducking her head down to talk through the open car window.

“She’ll be fine,” Dad said from the front passenger seat. He was all dressed in his work suit and he had his briefcase lying flat across his lap and his pager resting in the front cup holder. “We’ll be fine.”

It was noon on Friday and our little trip had gotten me out of school for half the day, which was one thing to be thankful for, I guess. I buckled myself in as Dad spread a map of Ohio across the dashboard and pointed to the southwest edge at Dayton. He dragged his index finger along a fat red line that ran horizontally across the state.

“Any idiot can read a map,” Dad said. “And really, as long as you can read a sign, it’s hard to get lost. We’ll make three stops: Springfield, Columbus, then Fairview. We have a stop in Pickerington tomorrow morning on the way back.” I nodded and he folded the map and tucked it into the glove compartment.

“Don’t get intimidated on the highway, dear,” my mother said through the window. “It’s okay to stay in the right lane and just let everyone go around you.”

“You have the mirrors where you want them?” Dad said. He looked over at me and I fidgeted with the rear view mirror like I knew what I was doing. “Now, picture the steering wheel as a clock and put your hands at ten and two.”

I gripped the wheel. It felt slippery under my sweaty fingers.

“Foot on the brake,” Dad said. “Good. Now keep your foot on the brake and put the car in reverse.”

I gave my mother a quick smile goodbye and she stepped back from the car.

“Slowly lift your foot off the brake and let the car drift backwards.” Dad put his hand on the back of my headrest and turned to look behind us. “You’re clear.”

We drifted backwards down the driveway, and I watched my mother lift a hand from her chest and wave. She wiped at one of her eyes with the heel of her hand and I realized that she was crying. I think she was thinking about Tom, and maybe she was getting a bit nostalgic and maybe even a little sad, seeing me learn to drive. I wondered if Dad was thinking about Tom too, and if he was thinking about when he had taught Tom to drive, years and years ago, and if that made him sad, but I didn’t ask.

Dad directed me out of our subdivision and onto a main road. I kept forgetting which way to flip the lever next to the wheel to signal left and right. Was down left? Or was it up? Several times when starting up after a stop, I hit the gas too hard and we lurched forward.

“Easy, easy,” Dad would say. We drove through the suburbs and I took Springfield Road for a while, which paralleled the Interstate but the speed limit was only thirty-five. Dad kept looking at his wristwatch and sighing. After we passed our old subdivision near Enon Park, he said I had pretty much gotten the hang of the thing and motioned for me to turn onto the ramp for the I-70 East.

“You’re going to have to speed up in order to merge,” Dad said as we started up the ramp.

There were two lanes of traffic on the highway—a bunch of cars and trucks and semis zipping by. They seemed to be going so fast, faster than they had ever seemed to go when I was just a passenger. I pushed my foot down on the gas pedal, pressed it further and further toward the floor of the car, and watched as the red spinner of the speedometer climbed upward in its arc behind the glass. Forty. Forty-five. Forty-seven. Fifty. I could hear the engine groaning beneath the hood. The ramp was leaning into the intersection; I could see ahead where my lane opened into the highway. Fifty-six. Sixty. We were flying toward that whirl of metal bodies and rubber. Flying toward them faster than I could stop. I wanted to stop. I wanted to close my eyes.

“Get over, get over, get over,” Dad said. He had his hand on the back of my headrest again and was watching the traffic on the highway next to us. My hands were frozen on the wheel. I couldn’t merge into those metal bodies. I couldn’t, even though the merge lane was getting smaller and smaller, the yellow line that marked its edge to our right was sloping inward and so was the concrete railing. And we were going faster and faster. Sixty-four. Sixty-eight. Seventy. We were headed straight into that concrete wall and I did it. I took a deep gulp of breath, closed my eyes, and imagined.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Dad said. I felt his hand brush mine on the wheel, felt the wheel beneath my clenched fingers jerk to the left. There was a jarring honk behind us. I opened my eyes and saw a white truck pull out from behind our car and speed by. The bearded man behind the wheel flipped me the bird.

I stole a glimpse at Dad in the rearview mirror. I had incorrectly positioned it and so I could see the left side of his face. There were fat beads of sweat along his hairline near his temples.

“I’m sorry,” I said very quietly, but he didn’t say anything. I kept staring at that place near his hairline, saw the thick spread of brown freckles there like dark planets orbiting his forehead. Dark, nameless planets.

Dad made me wait in the car while he did his meeting in Springfield. He accidentally left his pager in the front cup holder and instead of running it in to him, I sent a page to Shelley. Her dad was an investment banker and he had bought Shelley a pager for Christmas. All of the rich kids in our class had them. There was a numerical code everyone used to communicate, so the messages were all pretty basic. Clingy girl friends would send their guys “143,” which meant “I love you,” because that’s how many letters were in each word. There was a logic behind all of the codes, just not the same logic. For instance, “0001000” meant “I am alone,” because the one is all by itself, and “2222” meant you were sleepy because it looked like a bunch of z’s. Some codes just existed mostly within our school, but several of them were pretty universal. I sent Shelley “13” which meant I was having a bad day. There was no code for “because I almost crashed my car into a concrete railing.”

She sent me back “14,” which, when you flipped the pager upside down, looked like “hi,” and “607,” (“I miss you.”) I reclined my seat, put my feet up on the dash, and squinted through the windshield. When I was younger and we used to go on family road trips, Tom and I would pass the time by finding shapes hidden in the clouds. I saw a lot of animals—a wolf’s head, the long ears and whiskers of a rabbit, the outline of a cat. Tom, six years my senior, always saw places—the boot of Italy, the deep dip of the Gulf of Mexico, the craggy curve of the Pacific coast. I could never see the things Tom saw, and I’m not sure those shapes were really there to be seen in the first place. I think Tom saw what he wanted to see—the world outside of the flat plains of Ohio. Now, alone in the car in a parking lot in Springfield, I tried to see the clouds as Tom saw them, geography written into the sky.

When Dad came out of his meeting, he walked straight to my side of the car.

“How ‘bout you let your old man drive for a bit?” he said.

“Ok,” I said. “But don’t you think…don’t you think I should practice?”

“You can watch me,” Dad said. “You can learn a lot just by watching.”

I got out and moved around to the passenger’s side. As I buckled myself in, Dad said, “And when your mother asks, that’s all we really need to tell her—that you’re learning.”

By the time we got to Columbus, I really had to pee. I didn’t want to tell Dad, because then he would have to take me into the store with him, and I got the sense that he didn’t want to do that because then he would have to introduce me to people, which would mean mixing business with family. So I waited until he had been in there a good fifteen minutes and then I walked through the front doors of Fry’s Drug and Food just like I was any other customer. The bathrooms had a yellow sign in front of them on the floor: “Closed For Cleaning,” and so I asked one of the cashiers if I could use the employees' bathroom in the back. I wouldn’t have asked if it wasn’t becoming an emergency situation. The cashier was really nice and said I could go but that she would have to take me, so I followed her through these double doors in the back of the store and along this really glum looking hallway with gray-painted walls. We passed a room with a glass door and as we were walking by it I glanced in and I saw him. My dad. Sitting at the end of a long table. Only, there was something different about him. He was leaning forward and he was laughing. He had a smile on his face. A guy next to him started talking and my father did something very strange. He looked him in the eyes the whole time and nodded his head. I think he was really listening.

“Is there something wrong?” the cashier asked me.

I realized then that I had stopped in the hallway in front of the glass door.

“No,” I said. But that wasn’t true.

After Dad’s meeting in Fairview, he drove us downtown to a fancy little Italian restaurant called Francesca’s. It was dimly lit inside; there were thick white cloths on all the tables. Every seat was filled and there was a line out the door. It was the kind of place where you probably had to have a reservation on a Friday night, but Dad marched right up to the host, who was wearing a three-piece suit and a rose in his buttonhole.

“Giovonni,” Dad said.

“Mr. Gabler, so nice to see you,” the host said, with a real Italian accent and everything. “And who might this lovely young lady be?”

Dad put his hand at the back of my neck. “My daughter, Helen.”

“How nice,” said the host. “We have your table ready for you. Right this way.”

He grabbed two tall menus and escorted us to a red velvet booth. As I slid into it, I immediately felt out of place and underdressed in my jeans and tee-shirt.

“Your waiter will be with you shortly,” said the host before he handed us our menus and then headed back off across the restaurant.

I didn’t recognize anything on the menu really, even though I had always thought Italian food was pretty basic stuff. What was insalata mista di stagione, or bavette con langostine? I looked for names I recognized like ravioli or spaghetti and found none. Even the descriptions of the dishes were written entirely in Italian.

“Do you come here a lot?” I asked. It wasn’t the sort of place I could picture my dad in. He never took my mother and me to restaurants like this except on special occasions like our birthdays.

“I’ve been here a few times,” Dad said, looking down at his menu.

I pictured him sitting here at this table alone, drinking his glass of white wine, eating a plate of fancy pasta all by himself and I felt sad.

“Mostly I take business associates here,” Dad said.

I thought about the men I had seen him with today behind that glass door and I pictured them here together in this booth, laughing and talking. But they weren’t here this time. I was. It was me Dad had chosen to bring. I realized he must have thought about bringing me here as soon as my mother had suggested the driving lessons, because he would have had to call ahead of time to make the reservations. I sat up a little straighter in the booth, tried out the name of one of the Italian dishes silently on my tongue. This was the first time I felt any sort of connection to my father in years, since the incident with the picture frames—how we had both felt the same way about them.

To be fair, my mother had never gone off the deep-end in her grief. She had never done any of those strange things that mothers sometimes do when they lose a child, like turn their kid’s bedroom into some weird memorial. She had even gone with my father to the morgue to identify Tom’s body after the accident. My aunt Ruth had come up from Louisville to stay with us for a few days and help out with the funeral. She and my mother went through Tom’s closet and boxed up everything for the Goodwill except for the shirt and tie and trousers Tom would be buried in. Mom had even washed the sheets on Tom’s bed, but Aunt Ruth didn’t sleep there. She slept on the pullout couch in the den, the one with the springs that were bent out of shape and dug into your back all night while you were trying to sleep. But I still remember the day my mother removed every picture of Tom from the house. It was about three months after his accident and I came home from school one afternoon to find that all the frames sat in their exact same places on the downstairs bookshelf and on the mantle over the fireplace, only they were empty. Every school portrait of Tom was gone. Even the picture that had been taken that summer at Dad’s boss’s lake house. The one where we’re all standing with our backs to the water, and the grass is thick at our ankles, and I’m wearing the swimsuit that’s too big for me so the seat of it sags. When I was sure that every photo of Tom was gone, I went looking for my mother. I found her in the kitchen fingering frozen tatter tots onto a layer of green beans in a glass dish.

“We’re having casserole tonight,” she had said and she smiled that smile that made me realize I couldn’t argue—not about the casserole, which I hated, which I would push around on my plate so that it looked less than it was and fill up on dessert instead, and not about the pictures. I never did find out where the pictures went, but what bothered me the most was having to look at those empty frames every day. They had the original white paper backgrounds in them, the ones with the big black text that spelled out the frame’s dimensions: 5x7, 8x24, 12x18. There was something unsettling about those frames, as if our loss could be exactly measured, as if it could all fit neatly into a 5x7 slot.

I knew my father was as upset about the frames as I was, because when we moved out of our house near Enon Park, I saw him pack the frames into a brown box. I saw him throw the box away. And when my mother got upset that the box with the empty frames was missing, I saw him pretend to help her look for it. I saw him, but I never said a word.

I looked up at my father across the table from me.

“I think I’ll have the tortelloni alla zucca,” I said.

At the hotel in Fairview, Dad set his briefcase and his pager on his bed and went into the bathroom to take a shower. I settled onto the other queen bed and turned on the TV, not even bothering to remove the scratchy bed cover. As I was flipping through the channels, Dad’s pager went off. I glanced at the clock on the bedside table—it was going on nine and I realized that I had forgotten to call my mother to let her know that we had arrived safely. I muted the TV and reached across the gap between the beds for Dad’s pager, thinking I’d send my mother a page to let her know we’d call her back in a few minutes, as soon as Dad was out of the shower. But the sender’s number wasn’t my mother’s. It wasn’t one I recognized at all, and next to it was the code “0001000.”

I sat there for a moment just holding the pager, trying to think if I had given out my Dad’s pager number to anyone besides Shelley, or if she would have given it to anyone, but coming up with a blank.

The pager went off again: “607.”

The block figures on the pager seemed so unfamiliar suddenly, so foreign, even though I had seen that code many times before. I kept doing the translation in my head and wanting it to mean something different but it kept coming out the same as it always had: I miss you.

The shower was still running in the bathroom—I could hear my father’s voice humming “My Girl,” by the Temptations, over the drumming of the water in the tub. It was the song he used to sing to me when I was a little girl as I would get ready for bed, but I hadn’t heard him sing it in years.

Quickly, I picked up the hotel phone that sat on the nightstand between the two beds. I pressed “2” to connect to the outside line just like the little sticker on the phone said, and when I heard the dial tone, I punched the sender’s number into the keypad.

It rang twice and then a woman’s voice answered.

“Hello?”

I swallowed. My throat was dry and it hurt. I pressed my ear hard into the receiver, straining to hear all the things I needed to know—what did this woman look like? What kind of room was she in? Who had left her alone exactly? Had the reservation at the fancy Italian restaurant really been for her?

“Hello?” she said again, her voice lilting up at the end in impatience this time. “Who is this?”

“Is your refrigerator running?” I said. I was twirling the plastic phone cord around my index finger so tightly that it was cutting off my circulation.

“What?”

“Is your refrigerator running?” I said again. It was an old joke Shelley had taught me and it was the only thing I could think to say.

“Who is this?”

“Then you better go catch it,” I said and hung up.

I lay back down on the bed and turned the volume on the TV back up. It was something I didn’t want to watch, but I didn’t bother to change it.

Dad came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. The mirror in the bathroom was coated with steam.

“Did I hear you on the phone?” he said.

“No,” I said, not looking at him. “It must have been the TV.”

The next morning Dad drove us to Pickerington for his last meeting.

“Shouldn’t be too long,” he said as he straightened his tie in the mirror of the drop down visor. “Just sit tight.”

“Sure, Dad,” I said as he turned off the car and I reclined my seat. He left the keys in the ignition so that I could turn on the air conditioning or listen to the radio if I wanted. He remembered to take his pager with him this time, but that was all right because I had written down the woman’s number on the complimentary hotel stationary when he wasn’t looking. It was folded safely in my back jean pocket just in case.

I waited a good five minutes after Dad had gone in before I straightened up and walked around to the driver’s side. I readjusted the seat and buckled myself in. As I placed my hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, I could see the vein in my wrist throbbing. I turned the key in the ignition.

I tried to remember my father’s instructions. Brake. Reverse. Slowly lift foot off brake and drift backwards. I craned my neck to the left and the right to make sure it was clear behind me and then I incrementally lifted my foot from the brake so that my father’s Acura inched backwards. I exited the parking lot at a snail’s pace.

From memory, I tried to retrace my way back to the I-70, reversing every turn we had made on our way from the highway to the store. I sat forward in my seat, almost bent over the steering wheel, and my foot flitted nervously back and forth between the gas pedal and the brake, as if it couldn’t make up its mind of whether I should stand still or move forward. As I drove, I talked to Tom in the way I often did: silently like a prayer. I told him things that wouldn’t be news to him, because the dead see everything, but these were things I was just figuring out—how Dad had moved on somehow, how I must have missed it, how I had been an idiot to think for even a second that the Italian restaurant had meant something. Well, that was all just fine, and he could find his own way home.

The farther I went, the more the buildings around me seemed less and less familiar. I got the sense that I wasn’t driving back towards the Interstate at all, but that I was heading out of town. When I came to an open field, I pulled off to the side of the road and reached into the glove compartment for Dad’s maps.

The maps were folded right on top, but when I pulled them out, something fell to the floor. I reached down to grab it.

It was something thick, printed on cardstock. It had been folded twice—once in half, and then in half again. The creases were well-worn, the paper yellowing. When I opened it out to its full dimensions and turned it over, I realized what it was. The old 5x7 photograph. There was the lake behind us—brown and unbroken. There was my father in his swim trunks and his cotton button-down with his arm around my mother. There was Tom waving at the camera; there I was, tugging at my swimsuit bottom. And there we all were, smiling into the camera because we didn’t know what was coming for us. I noticed then that there was a smudge over Tom’s face, about the size and shape of my father’s thumb. The photo was faded there, casting a ghostly glow over my brother. I put my thumb in my father’s thumbprint, touched the photo as he must have done a hundred times.

After a while, I put the photo and the map in the passenger’s seat and swung the car back on the road, back in the direction from which I’d come. I drove straight until I was in the thick of buildings again and took haphazard turns until I saw a payphone. I parked and grabbed a handful of quarters from the console.

In the phone booth, I slid the cold quarters into the slot and tucked the plastic receiver between my chin and shoulder as I retrieved the woman’s number from my back pocket. As I punched it in, I thought about how tired I was of our silences, of the way we didn’t fight—not with or for—one another. The phone began to ring on the other end and when I looked out through the smudged glass of the booth, I saw the road stretched wide and open like a hand before me, and above, the sky was heavy with clouds, full of shapes I was starting to make out.