The cranberry red minivan had acquired a shimmy in recent years--a fact that its driver, Abraham, regarded in much the same way he regarded his own receding hairline: with outer good nature and private interior squirms.
It was barely four in the morning. Abraham's vision was limited to the penumbra of cloudy light cast by his headlights into the inky void. They hadn't passed another automobile since the semi truck twenty minutes back, and after a day of work followed by six sleepless hours behind the wheel, Abraham grew increasingly disoriented. The radio, with its unvaried assortment of jingly Christmas carols, had long ceased to entertain him. He had turned it off as soon as his children were asleep.
He gripped the wheel, squared his shoulders, and reached to the dash to turn off the heat. Perhaps the frigid November air would keep him alert.
His wife stirred in the passenger seat, jogged awake by the sudden drop in white noise. Elisabeth was a light sleeper under normal conditions; much more so in the jouncing minivan. She squirmed to an upright posture, inhaling deeply as she always did upon waking.
"You still doing okay, Abe?" she whispered after finding her bearings.
Abraham nodded, relieved at the clarifying effect of her voice, so familiar to him that it felt a part of his mind's most rational workings.
"Want me to take a turn?"
He shook his head. "Maybe in an hour or so. I'll be okay for now."
She relaxed back into her seat and turned her head to squint out the misted window. The atmosphere of the van settled again into quiet. The absence of the heater's harsh blare and the sharpened edge in the cooling air give this new silence a palpable weight. Abraham indulged the childish fancy that this prosaic minivan was a rocket ship, bearing them through space and time to another planet. He smiled to himself at the aptness of the analogy as he thought of their destination: Elisabeth's childhood home in Iowa, its dust mote laden air, its elongated sense of time and space.
Abraham's thoughts turned to his children as naturally and unremarkably as a washing machine changes cycles. Lizzie, Robbie, Esther, and Henry: he ticked them off mentally, oldest to youngest: a habit of his. Twelve, nine, six, and four.
Glancing into the rearview mirror, he glimpsed their dark shapes heaped like dirty laundry across the benches. The brothers were in the rear. Henry's pale elfish face nuzzled against Robbie's shoulder in a breach of their brotherly code that Robbie would never have permitted were he awake. Robbie's posture was an enlarged iteration, his forehead bumping against the window and his mouth hanging ajar. In the front bench were the girls. Esther's fuzzy curls clung to the pillow she had propped against the armrest. Her wee feet peeked from beneath the hem of her princess nightgown and poked against Lizzie's leg.
Lizzie.
As he looked at her, a semi truck barreled past, its lights illuminating her face for a brief and shocking span. She was awake and staring out the window, unaware of his attention. Something in her expression at that moment pinioned Abraham's heart in his chest. He felt it flapping, frantic, against that keen lance of emotion innocently inflicted by his daughter's transfiguration.
She sat in her usual place in the minivan, unmasked. In her expression dwelt emotions that looked so at home there he marveled that he hadn't seen them before: yearning and faith, a sense of breath bated. These inhabited her countenance with the candor that is the soul of privacy, all considerations of civility and shyness clearly forgotten.
Abraham was startled to find that until now he hadn't believed she had a private self detached from his own--one that glowed beneath the good manners of her upbringing and the instinctive theatricality of her public interactions. With his realization arrived a sick pang of apprehension: the knowledge that his daughter's precious form housed a treasury of vulnerabilities that he was powerless to defend.
His eyes double checked the road and then returned to her face, and this time they encountered her direct gaze: mild again, masked. She smiled sweetly.
"Much longer, Dad?" she whispered.
He cleared his throat. "About three hours left, darling."
"I guess I'll try to sleep some more then," she sighed. He heard her shift position, causing Esther to grunt in her sleep and Elisabeth to awaken with her usual sharp inhalation, look around, and sink back into rest.
Abraham took several deep stabilizing breaths and reached across the armrest to hold his wife's hand. Again he counted off his children. Lizzie, Robbie, Esther, Henry. Burning with love, he chanted their names in his heart again and again, like the rosary, like a prayer.
2 comments:
Abbs, I know how we've talked about how you don't have to create to feel fulfilled, but can I just say that I think if you ever wrote a book I don't think I'd be able to put it down. This is beautiful.
I read this and was absolutely enthralled. You must write a book. Now. Go. This is beautiful.
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