Night, Truck, Two Lights Burning

By Peter Turchi

Late night in early winter. The last hour of the long drive home. I tend to the thermostat, keeping the car warm enough for my sleeping family, but not so warm that my focus turns dull. Beyond the chilled glass to my left, green lights of the dashboard angle up toward the stars.

Distance defines our relations. My wife’s parents live five hundred miles away, what we have come to think of as a day’s drive.

When we arrive, she will hoist our son high against her chest and take him, murmuring his dreams, into the house. I will carry our long-legged daughter from our car to her room, where I will lay her gently on the bed we have made for her.

 I remember being proud that I hadn’t fallen asleep.

“You go ahead and rest,” my father told me. “I’ll let you know when we get there.”
I had promised my mother I would help him stay awake, so hugged my pillow, to keep warm. The truck’s heater wasn’t working, but according to my father, it would have only made us drowsy. This was November, sometime between my birthday-which we had celebrated in an empty house, amid packed boxes—and Thanksgiving. Under my father’s influence, the past Christmas Eve, I had seen a reindeer’s red nose from my bedroom window; with the same power of persuasion, he had convinced me, at least, that our move from Maryland to North Carolina—a place so far off it might as well have been wholly imaginary—was a great adventure.

When we finally left the highway, he said, “Home at last.” There at our exit were three big hotels and a restaurant called the Kountry Kitchen and another called Noah’s and a go-kart track. My attention lingered on the go-kart track, which was closed. It was after midnight, the latest I had ever been out in my life.
My father stopped the rental truck at a traffic light, looking down at a piece of paper he had drawn from his shirt pocket. We turned left, and then right, and then there were no more hotels, no more restaurants—nothing but a curving road. The farther we went down that road, the more I worried about what my mother would think. She had made no secret of her opposition to the move; rather, she had expressed this so strongly that I harbored the unspoken fear that she might not follow us. She was very much in my mind as we passed a small house with a chain link fence strung with Christmas lights that somehow looked as if they hadn’t been taken down the winter before, and a collapsing larger house, with covered porches on three sides, and beside it a field populated by broken school buses and eyeless shells of trucks. (To be honest: I’m not sure how many of those things I took in that first night; but they were there the next morning, when the overall impression of neglect and decay hardened the fear in my stomach.) I had just started to think that if we went far enough we’d get away from this kind of place, we’d reach another road with bright lights and hotels and restaurants, when my father slowed down, then stopped, then backed up.
“Here we are,” he said. “Camelot.” He had told me his version of the legend of King Arthur on the ride. We had sung songs, and told riddles, and played games using the letters on billboards. My father could always be depended on to think of something interesting to do. On the edge of a field across from the entrance to the Natural Bridge, in Virginia (which we did not see, as there was an admission charge), we ate sandwiches my mother had packed, and played a game he invented using two sticks and a crabapple. Later, while we drove, my father wedged a paper cup between the dash and the windshield and had me take shots with a crumpled cigarette package, narrating like a commentator on TV. We were football fans, my father and I, but we would play any game that presented itself.
Rule number one, he liked to say: Keep your options open.

My mother arrived two days later, in my father’s pickup truck. We had made a sign for the door—Welcome Home—but that didn’t appear to register. Even before she went inside, I understood that the pizza we had watched the pizza man spin almost to the ceiling, the cupcakes for dessert, and the grocery store flowers my father had arranged in a beer bottle on the tiny counter top would not be sufficient to create, for my mother, a mood of celebration.
The trailer park was not a park, as I had imagined, but a series of crude terraces cut into the side of a steep clay hill, with a gravel road up the middle and a security light at the top of a telephone pole. There were twelve trailers, six on each side, and the way they were placed on the hill, one above the other, meant nearly everyone could look down into someone else’s kitchen, living room, and bedroom. The most desirable spots were the two at the top, which were relatively private—though none of the trailers could have been more than twenty feet from its neighbor—and had the best view of the woods across the road. Our trailer was at the very bottom, which meant, my mother said as she stood in the doorway, not unbuttoning her coat, Everyone could see in. A modest woman, she sewed our curtains closed.

I woke to a strange sound. Not a dog, not a cat….There had been talk of bears, and I hoped to see one in exactly those circumstances: from under the covers, safe inside our trailer.

When I heard the sound again, and understood what I heard, it became a glowing ember, a warm promise.
My parents, laughing. Not my father alone, which I was used to, or my mother’s polite acknowledgment of a joke, but the two of them, together.
The laughter was followed by other sounds, and an exchange I either heard through the thin wall or imagined. The result of my father’s insistence, my mother’s reluctance, was my father rolling from the bed, then shuffling out to where I sensed I should pretend still to sleep.
Did she know what he meant to do? I doubt it. My father believed in asking for forgiveness, not permission.

He slid one strong arm under my knees, another behind my shoulders, and lifted. I fought to suppress a smile of anticipation, expecting to be carried in to share with them the wonderful discovery they had made, the cause of their laughter. I felt my rear end sag, my father’s knee rise to prop me up. My feet, then my head, bumped against the wall of the trailer, and then the door was open, cool air reached under my blanket. In two long strides we were at the door of his truck, I heard the click of the latch, and he fed me in. When my feet reached the far door, I understood this wasn’t the start of a late-night drive. I heard my father’s heavy step into the trailer, heard him return, and the passenger door opened once more. My head rose, then was lowered onto my pillow. Reaching under the blanket, he set in my hand the stuffed creature I slept with.

“Sweet dreams,” my father said, and shut the door.

The first time I told this story, without a moment’s forethought, was ten years later. She had confided something about her own parents, and we were, after all, in the dark, in the back of her mother’s car. Her reaction surprised me, to the extent that I stored the memory in a room at the end of one of the long, turning hallways of the mind.

The moment we confine memories to words, images are obscured by the language, the understanding, we have now. To be as true as possible to what I can still see, I would write:

One-eyed kitten—white, stuffed, red stitches where a right eye would have been—on the open glove compartment door. (My stage, where the kitten performed with a tire gauge and magnetic St. Christopher.)

Dark shadows cast by the bright security light.

Some nights, loud adult voices from a trailer up the hill. Others, the long, low rumble of a freight train.

I tried to explain to that young woman, in her mother’s car, how it was that I didn’t feel abandoned, or cast aside, but elated. My parents were happy; I was playing my role, never opening my eyes when my father carried me out to the truck, or back to my room. But then I woke one dawn with the windows frosted over. The blanket had slipped, exposing my back to a chilled seatbelt buckle.

Huddled on the vinyl seat, wrapped as tight as I could get, I waited for my father to push open the trailer door. My clouded breath reminded me of the numbness of my ears and nose. Unable to deny my need, I made a plan: open the door silently, take long, barefoot strides across the gravel, use the bathroom, and return. But the instant I entered the trailer my mother awoke, began shrieking accusations at my father. Bundling me close to her chest, she carried me to their warm bed.

She intended comfort, but I felt crushing disappointment. If only I had sneaked back in. If only I had held out a little longer, my father would have been spared my mother’s anger, my mother spared her shame.

I can only guess how much time passed. My parents returned to their familiar relationship: my father exuberant, loud (“Let’s all go dancing,” “Let’s go down to the field and set off some fireworks”); my mother quieter, more steady. She mended our clothes, and fed us, and took me for long walks along the river, and made friends with a nearby farmer so I could pet the horses and stare back at the newborn calves and take warm eggs from under his hens. She taught me songs like “Red Sails on the Sunset,” and “King of the Road.” Each time we went to the grocery store, she gave me a coin to use either on the noisy rides out front or on the clear-globed machines filled with worthless trinkets just inside the doors. My desire for those trinkets was as urgent as it was irrational; I dreamed about the rides, the horse and ambulance and spaceship. Yet some days I dropped the coin into my pocket, remembering rule number one.

What I mean to say is, my mother was kind and generous and attentive. But my father shone with the brilliance of a sun.

He stocked vending machines with candy and crackers. It seemed to me the most marvelous job a father could have. Once we drove his route together, me on the (filthy, my mother said) floor of the panel truck, him telling stories about people he had met. My father knew everyone in the world, and introduced me to them, one by one. “I’ve got the boss with me today,” he’d tell his customers.

His plan was to own and manage a fleet of sandwich wagons. It may not sound like much of an ambition, but my father had the charm of a scene-stealing actor, and convinced people he was going places. My mother must have thought so, because she married him young, against her parents’ advice. She was independent, and serious, and had, I imagine, plans of her own.

One day, an envelope arrived which gave her so much pleasure she said we could do whatever I wanted—which was to make cheese sandwiches and have a picnic on the large flat rock in the middle of the river we sometimes walked to, which we did. The envelope, she confided, contained a check for a large sum of money, designated by the sender to be used by my mother to buy a car. This gift was a great mystery to me. Adding to the intrigue was the fact that, while she had known the envelope was coming, my father did not. That night, the news of the check and its intended use was the cause of prolonged debate. My mother did not cry, or curse—I never heard her curse. Rather, she grew quietly, darkly resolved.

I was a beneficiary of her insistence. We drove to the local branch library, and to the enormous central library, where my mother looked up one thing or another while I sat in a corner, happily lost in picture books and early readers. I never thought to ask what she was looking for. We also went to the grocery store, where the women at the bakery gave me a free tea cookie whether we bought anything from them or not, and took long rides on the Blue Ridge Parkway, where we hunted blackberries and wild blueberries, and my mother sat on a boulder and read while I tested the seaworthiness of leaves and sticks in a narrow stream.

She bought a magnet with my name on it, which she fixed to the dashboard directly ahead of the passenger seat. The letters were raised, in script, and as we drove I traced my name again and again.

Bedtime came, and I said I wanted to sleep in the truck.

I remember planning my announcement, and thinking the gesture heroic; I remember its silent reception.

Finally, my mother asked me why.

Because it was fun to sleep in the truck. (This was not entirely a lie; I had come to think of the vinyl bench seat, with its warm smell of my father, as more truly mine than any part of the trailer.)

My mother suggested that sleeping in the truck was not a good idea.

I must have responded badly. My memory is of getting my way, and an extra blanket, and realizing, somehow, that my offer had not had its intended effect.

My mother was not an extravagant woman, but in the spring we washed her car every week. She would vacuum and clean the trailer, then together we would haul the vacuum cleaner and sponges and a bucket of hot, soapy water outside. I wore shorts. I had never owned a bathing suit, and my mother did not approve of children of any age “running around without a stitch.” Some days she wore her old housecleaning clothes, but other times she wore a one-piece bathing suit, an outfit that made her fair game for both of us. For me, it meant that she wouldn’t be angry if I accidentally turned the hose in her direction. She would shriek, and grab the nozzle from my hand and aim it at me, and we would take turns exclaiming at the cold water and hosing the other down. For my father, the bathing suit seemed to guarantee that he would pick her up, and call her Daisy Mae in a preposterously exaggerated version of the accent of our neighbors. It made her laugh, but my father’s arrival almost always meant an end to our fun.

I never wondered what the neighbors thought when they heard my father going out to his truck in the middle of the night. I don’t know that any of them ever saw me inside.

In my memory, during the months we lived there, it was nearly always night. Some nights he hardly waited for me to scoop up my blanket and pillow. Other nights he stood in the space between the open truck door and the cab, or better yet, held me aloft, and talked a beery cloud. One night he turned his back to the security light and the rental trailers on concrete blocks stacked on the clay and we stared up at a reddish dot in the night. “Mars,” he said. “You might live there one day.” For a moment we both imagined such a thing. At least, I did. And while on that grocery store ride a journey through space had always seemed like an observed heroic adventure, all rockets and thrusters and urgently shouted commands, that night I imagined life on Mars to be a quiet, solitary enterprise.

“Near the moon,” I said, silently equating moon with mother.

“That’s right,” he said.

Long after an introductory astronomy text set the record straight, the sense of the night that held sway over me was the one I gathered in my father’s arms.

The argument over my mother’s car may have seemed worse than it was, as I imagined myself in the middle of it. I don’t recall the expression on either of their faces, which suggests I was either standing outside, listening, or staring at the floor. She wanted to take the car to a service station; my father wanted to do the work himself. It was a waste of money, he insisted. She claimed he would get distracted, or have to find a part at the junkyard, and the car would sit, neglected, for weeks. My father’s tendency to stop short of finishing his projects was indisputable.

Nevertheless, he disputed it, said he’d be damned if he’d pay some high school dropout to do a half-assed job (a remark meant to cut deep, as my mother had not graduated from high school). She said she’d pay for it herself, and if he didn’t want to follow her she’d hitchhike home, she wouldn’t have any trouble finding a man who would give her a ride, and something about that must have convinced my father that there was no stopping her, because he relented.

I rode with him, absorbed in a book from the library. I opened the crisp cover wide and put my nose close to the pages, inhaling the scents of ink and paper and the hands of boys before me. I turned the pages carefully, admiring the bold lettering of the title. I couldn’t have been more than a page into the story when my father cursed, quickly shifted, and jumped out of the truck.

The scene in front of me remains perfectly clear. On the left side of the intersection, headed right, a blue pickup. On the right, a man in a straw hat getting out of a white sedan. And in the middle of the intersection, my mother’s car, with a horrible impression the width of the pickup truck’s bumper running from just ahead of the driver’s door to just behind it. Even before my father roared I saw, at the top of the door panel, a bright streak of red on the yellow paint.

Any number of people said it was a good thing I had gone in the truck. But the thought that pulsed through me for days, years, was that I should have been with my mother. It would have been such a small favor, to have ridden beside her.

In my dreams, she held out her hand. Night after night, I told her, “I’m right here.”

My father and I were not together much longer. You can imagine the conversations with relatives, my father’s grief. We insisted on going it alone, and lasted perhaps a month. There was an excruciating drive back to Maryland, where we said what we both claimed, maybe even believed, were temporary goodbyes. Over the next few years there were regular visits, a much-anticipated trip to the beach.

I should admit here that I came to resent some of my father’s decisions, and let him know it. Every so often he would burst onto the scene, trying in a weekend to make up for months without a phone call. There was another wife, and a child. Then a third wife, and two children. Those choices soured some people’s impression of him.

I don’t believe my father is a bad or shallow man. He was young, and heartbroken, and committed to the belief that life should be lived as if every day were a great adventure. That attitude can be terribly appealing.

Some people believed, and on one or two occasions even expressed, that my “new family” was the preferable one: a settled, loving couple, with energetic and companionable children. My mother’s brother, an amateur historian, encouraged intellectual curiosity in whatever form it took, bookish or less orthodox. My aunt is an industrious woman who believes boys should be able to replace a button and cook a decent meal, and girls had better be prepared to change a tire. The home they made was demanding, in the best sense, and supportive, and I mean for nothing I write here to imply a word of criticism of them, or anything but the deepest gratitude for all they have done for me.

And yet, inevitably, I have wondered what would have become of me if that other life, the one three of us began, had been allowed to continue. There might very well have been a different painful separation, other difficult times. I might have found my way into that same second household, under different circumstances. I realize I am indulging a deep streak of romanticism when I imagine that my mother and father might have clung together, discovering solutions to their apparently contradictory desires and sacrifices, and that I might have completed my childhood in the family that made me, gone on to live the life I was meant to live.

For a long time I believed that if my mother’s accident had been avoided, if my foundation had been more solid, everything that followed would have felt more certain. But every foundation is, eventually, shaken. My grandparents are gone now. As is my uncle. More and more, I find my nights, and my days, illuminated by the light of dying stars.

Soon our daughter will be too big for me to carry.

Imagination, abhorring a vacuum, insists on filling gaps; assumptions made years later insinuate themselves as fact. If these memories I have tried so carefully to record are not, strictly, true, what is this that I’ve made?

O, my mother.

O, father.

We put our children to bed, and then we tell ourselves the stories that will carry us to sleep.