The Drive The lights of the approaching car on the other side of the narrow two-lane highway form twin javelin beams that stab at his eyes. The car passes and the countryside is again obscured in darkness. He sees the road ahead in pools of soft light that spill in circles from the front of his Toyota Camry: the most reliable and the most popular car in America. The last fact was attested to by a recent survey that also deemed it the most stolen automobile in the country but he was not overly concerned. After all, they lived in a safe-city with low-crime, a sleepy and affluent community. Yes, the Camry was perfect for anyone looking for a reliable, practical car.
“Good value for money,” he was told by his Chinese colleague, Wing Chan. It was Wilfred`s first week at the job, in a new country, and he was asking everyone for opinions. Venky, the programmer who shared a cube with him, confirmed this, “everyone gets a Corolla or a Camry. I have one myself.” So he and Sandra, his wife of six years, walked into the dealership a month later, with a hefty down payment, and bought the beige Camry with its matching cloth interior. No extra frills, except for the AC, the radio and a single-disc CD player.
Each day he pulls into the parking lot at IntriTech, Inc. and finds a spot away from the shiny super-cars, away from the Boxsters and the 745is and the SLKs. He parks next to the Lancers, the Corollas and the Accents. Each according to his station. He is content with his place in life.
His beige Camry is definitely not a sexy car, not a throbbing, hungry machine that purrs under him, not one that makes him want to drive fast down a highway, feel the wind in his hair, Eric Clapton`s Cocaine playing on a loop. They used the car to go to work and back, to the grocery store and back, to the houses of the five friends they had made and back, and one weekend trip to Vegas.
Yet here he is, here they are, driving to escape, Clapton`s guitar-plucking a ghost sound, indistinct, almost not there. Driving to get away. Blasting down the blacktop on a summer night, running away from what happened a hundred miles ago.
Sandra is asleep beside him. She snores softly, her mouth slightly open. Her eyes are still puffy, her face blotchy and damp. Occasionally, she moans as if trying not to come awake, fighting to stay asleep. Sleep is escape, sleep is not remembering, sleep is refuge.
“Sleep,” he says softly. She draws up her legs and snuggles into the cloth seat. Her snores grow louder. Despite himself, he smiles. Each time he tells her of her snoring, she refuses to believe it.
“I`ll tape if for you one of these nights,” he had threatened once.
“How will you prove it`s me?” Her voice was threaded through with laughter.
“I`ll videotape it.”
“Hah, even then, you might just put in some other audio and tell me its me snoring. I dont trust you one bit Mr. Wilfred D`Cruz.” She punched him on the arm and he pretended to wince.
“You`re so violent. Why did I marry such a delinquent? I should have listened to my mom and married the girl she had selected for me.” He kissed her as he completed each sentence.
That had been two years ago. Before…
He struggled not to give in, blinking away the tears that formed in his eyes. He reached over and patted Sandra`s hand. Instinctively she curled her hand within his, stroking his palm with a bent index finger. “Shhh,” she said softly, comfortingly, the breath coming from between her lips in an almost-silent whoosh.
The road curved abruptly. He removed his hand from her warm grasp and turned the car smoothly. A big rig passed on the right side, making the car tremble. He realized that the road had become a four-lane highway while he was lost in his thoughts, so he moved to the slow lane. He was tired. More than tired, he was exhausted and drained.
He remembered when Sandra and he had first met on the beach, she with her bunch of giggling friends, he watching as she walked by, sitting on his old, trusty Jawa motorbike, sipping coconut water. It was like a teen movie, perfect and hackneyed; they were a made-for-each-other couple.
On the white sands and golden-red sunsets of Goa, a little bit of Portugal on the west coast of India, they had fallen in love. They met at dances and fireside jam sessions. They splashed in the water at Anjana Beach and watched white-skinned, naked Europeans turn pink, then red, their skins peeling like shells from shrimp. The salt from the sea made the young couple’s hair stiff, their eyes sting. Almost inevitably their romance turned to love. He proposed. She accepted. It was so simple.
Their families had met and liked each other. They got married in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, blinding white and Grecian blue, flagstone floors cool in the summer. Assorted cousins with names like D’Costa, D’Silva, D’Cruz and Fernandez flew in from other parts of India and from Portugal.
Together with their families, they walked in a procession to the Bom Jesus Cathedral to receive the blessings of St. Francis Xavier. His petrified body lay inside its dingy glass and gilded metal coffin. Wilfred remembered that when he was a child the saint’s body had been displayed within touching distance.
He had often felt the tough-leathery-centuries-old skin and wondered if St. Francis Xavier had ever missed his native land? All those years traveling, converting, working tirelessly, did he ever give in to his human side and long for Spain? Had he ever said, when I grow old I shall return to Spain and I shall be buried there? Instead, here he was, in limbo even in death, forever linked with Goa, forever an immigrant, revered though he was. He would never go home.
His body, now sealed in a glass sided coffin, was perched atop a tall pillar, ever since a mad woman searching for irrefutable proof of his divinity had bitten off the saint`s big toe. Nevertheless, the wedding party felt touched by the holy presence that radiated from his un-decaying body.
Then they walked into the blazing sunlight and went home, ate fiery wedding food and got drunk on feni. They danced all night long. The waves just beyond the boundary wall of his ancestral house dashed themselves against the rocks relentlessly. It was a perfect wedding.
The young couple had flitted through life after that, working at a half a dozen tech companies in Bombay, three months here, six months there. Writing code during the day while their counterparts across the world slept. Fixing, testing, validating, troubleshooting, always working yet still finding time to spend together. They went to the beaches, ate ice cream and then gradually started to long for something else, something more, something different. He spoke aloud to himself, remembering those days, “Yes, it was after all, the right time to put down roots, to aspire for something different, to buy a house, to settle down, to have a ch….”
One of the companies they worked for had sponsored them to come to the US and here they were, both computer programmers, earning a healthy six figures between them. They were living in California, a place which reminded him of Goa. It had the sun, the blue skies and the ocean. Like Goa, it too was on the west coast. But the sand here was browner, coarser and the water much colder. He was biased. He admitted it. He missed home. He told Sandra that he would go home one day, when he was ready, and spend his days being an old beach bum in Goa.
Then, a thought, fluttering like a dark kiss inside his head. It’s all too perfect. When will it end? How will it end? They spent little, saved a lot. Enough for a house, a Camry, enough for the future and for the baby. The baby! How had she slipped past his carefully-constructed defenses? He could not, would not think about her. He willed himself. He failed.
Now she had pried open the walls that surrounded him and he was open, vulnerable and powerless. All his defenses were swept away, breached, down, shattered. He could not, not remember her. Her baby smell, that gurgling laugh, her tiny fingers clutching his index finger with such ferocity and strength, the funny faces. He could feel his nose pressed against her soft tummy as he nuzzled her to hysterical fits of laughter. He could feel her, smell her… love her.
Almost without thinking, he drove the car carefully on to the shoulder as the tears blinded him, as the agony made his hands shake and his body tremble. Some buried instinct, an automaton-like will to live, had governed that move even though every conscious thought urged him to stem his pain, run away from this nightmare, end it all.
It had been a week since his daughter had died. A week since he watched the erratic, green, zigzag lines that had indicated her hold on life die away into flatness. A week since he had held one hand and watched Sandra hold the other while the baby`s skin grew cooler and cooler to the touch. Then her body had stiffened and she had died.
He had not cried. His wife had, and he had held her, feeling every sob wrenched from inside her, every hiccup, every shuddering breath. He stroked her hair, smoothed her back, and whispered things that he no longer remembered saying. He was watching this scene from outside himself.
He was not there. He was not experiencing it. He was away from the source of all that pain. He was not there watching that small, ravaged body, those tubes and the silenced machines. He had been somewhere else. Until now. On this quiet, deserted highway in the middle of nowhere.
Sandra came awake suddenly, alerted by the cessation of movement. “What?” she asked, her instincts still blurred, still in a place where pain did not intrude. “Where?” Then, she became aware of him, slumped over the wheel, his shoulders shaking, dry sobs tearing out of him.
“Shes gone. They killed her. Sasha…my baby. Shes gone.” His words, interwoven between the sounds of his crying made her eyes tear up again.
She unclipped his seatbelt and hers, moving closer to him, forcing him into an embrace. He resisted for one long moment before collapsing into her arms. Together they cried, each holding the other, in the darkness of their car, not knowing where they were or where they were headed.
The casket was white and impossibly small as it was lowered slowly into the ground, sinking past the lush green into the loamy, brown earth below.
Sasha had been born with a correctable heart condition.
“Just a simple surgery,” Dr. Jackson had assured them. They trusted him. Sasha gurgled as the doctor tickled her feet. They all smiled at each other, secure in the knowledge of medical invincibility.
“You`re going to be fine, young lady,” he told the baby as he made faces at her.
She would be okay. They were sure of it. They brought her back three weeks later for the operation.
“I am sorry. It was more complicated than we thought.”
“We tried everything we could. We…” the doctor launched into a long, complicated explanation. During the weeks and months that followed many explanations were given by many people. The words always fell with heavy resonance on their ear-drums, like the solemn, deep peals of the church bell in Goa when it announced the death of a local personage.
Boom. “We will keep her here for observation.”
Boom. “She is still in a coma. That’s very troubling. We need to watch her.”
Boom. “Your insurance is maxing out. We need to check with your company.”
Boom. “Brain damage…all organs failing…machines are keeping her alive.”
Boom. “I am sorry. The kindest thing is to let her go. She is gone already.”
They gently touched the purple blotches on her skin where the IV needles had been jabbed repeatedly in search of a viable vein. They kissed her bandaged chest where the skin, tissue and bone had already begun to heal. They kissed her warm forehead and caressed her soft, sparse, baby hair. Awareness and recognition stirred within her spirit and she winced in purely reflexive pain. They decided to let her go. An hour later she died, sinking slowly, as all her tiny organs short-circuited and shut down.
A week later they buried her on a grassy spot, shaded by a giant oak tree. It was beautiful, perfect for their baby’s final resting place. They ordered a headstone with an angel on it, her name and the dates that book ended her short life. Neither of them could think of an epitaph that would capture the essence of their sunny child, something that would tell those who glanced upon her grave, of her special place in their lives.
After the funeral, they drove back home in silence, not touching, sitting apart, smelling the fading powder-cookie-milk smell of their dead daughter in the closed space of the Camry. Their friends milled around the small family room. Horrified. Shocked. Glad it wasn’t their baby. Bringing food. Crying. Hugging. Saying appropriate things. Making appropriate noises. Doing appropriate things.
For a while they walked around in a haze, the people, the food, the event not really registering. Afternoon gave way to evening and Sandra stood up abruptly from the couch on which she was sitting. The stragglers still there, fell into silence. Sandra walked towards their bedroom. He followed her.
He walked into the room behind Sandra, closing the door behind him, leaving the gathered people outside in the living room and kitchen.
“Let’s go,” she said, her eyes red and swollen, tears streaming down her face, her voice shaking.
“Where?” he asked steadily, struggling to stay afloat in a tide that was threatening to drown him forever.
“Anywhere. Lets just drive. If you wont come with me, I`ll go alone.” She turned and took out a large overnight bag.
“I`ll come with you.”
Toothpaste. Two toothbrushes. Underwear. Three sets of clothes each, jeans and T-shirts. Socks. They threw it all in and walked out of the room. Past the closed door of the room next to theirs. Past the clucking sounds of dismay. Past the tears and concerned faces. They did not say goodbye. They did not give any explanations. They did not say if or when they would return. They backed out of the driveway, accelerated into the night and drove away, the Camry`s headlights cutting a clear path through the darkness.
He knew they would return. That they would never leave this place, never go back to Goa, no matter the pull of his ancestors or the magical landscape of his youth. They would never even change jobs or even move somewhere else, to escape the painful memories of this place. They could not leave her here, could not abandon their daughter here alone, under the shade of that oak tree. They were all she had. Her only connection to life. They had to visit her every week. They owed her at least this much. So they would return from their drive. For Sasha`s sake.
