Peter didn’t wish for his life to be different in the far-reaching, deeply hopeful way that others often do, and he rarely imagined what things would be like if she were still alive. How could he? She was somewhere beyond his memory, a hypothetical answer to the rhetorical question of his life.
But his dad had never attempted to discuss her absence other than to occasionally announce—with a sense of resigned finality—that “bad things just happen sometimes.” Even when he was very little, Peter had absorbed this information, had embraced it by the time he was five, hated it at seven, welcomed it again at ten, and rebelled against it at twelve. Now that he was nearly seventeen, it had become simply the statement it was: a chain of words that had dictated much of his father’s life, and as a result his own.
He knew enough to realize that when she died giving birth to him all those years ago, a part of his father must have died as well. He understood this to be the way these things happen, the scripted etiquette of sudden death: the grieving widower, the crying baby, the rain falling across the freshly dug grave site. Peter had seen it a million times in the movies, but it bore such little resemblance to what was at stake now—to what amounted to his life—that he sometimes had trouble finding himself within the scenario.
Sometimes he was surprised that Dad didn’t just come out and blame him for what had happened. Because even though he didn’t actually say it, Peter could often feel it just the same. He knew his father loved him in his own way, but it was also like he couldn’t bear to look at him sometimes, and Peter had felt the push and pull of this his whole life, of a dad who considered his presence both a blessing and a curse. It was like being on a roller coaster, pitched forward and then jerked back, ignored until he felt he barely existed in the house anymore, and then loved so fiercely and briefly it nearly took his breath away. It was like falling and falling and falling until the very last moment, when you were absolutely sure you’d hit the bottom, and then being swept upward again.
And so Peter could only ever manage to care about his dad with love measured in inches, slid forward and drawn back like an uncertain card player. It would be too easy to say if things had been different or if she were still here or if he weren’t the way he is, because those things were immutable facts; nothing could make them otherwise. So he worried and observed; he thought too much and he moved too cautiously; he studied his father the way he did everything else, wishing things could be different.
Outside the car a peal of thunder made the ground tremble and the trees quake. Peter watched the raindrops slide down the windows, making streaky patterns on the stark canvas of the world just beyond, and he breathed in the musty smells of rain and dampness and old leather. He looked over at the empty passenger seat, the deep well that had been molded over the years by the unknown driver’s copilot. It made him think of the way he’d often see mothers driving their kids around town, so cautious and careful, inching forward at intersections, wary of the car seats in back or the children buckled in beside them. And when they came to an abrupt stop—when a dog darted out into the road or a light changed unexpectedly—they never failed to fling an arm out to brace their kids, an instinctive measure of safety and concern for their charges.
Sometimes when he sat out here in the car, unprotected and exposed, Peter couldn’t help feeling that way too. Like the weight of some invisible hand was keeping him safe.
He didn’t even realize he’d been sleeping when he woke later to the drumbeat of rain on the windshield. But there was a new sound too, something louder, and when Peter finally blinked his eyes open, his heart stuttered in his chest. Someone was rapping knuckles against the hard glass of the window beside him, and a moment later the person bent at the waist to reveal the angry face of his dad.
“Inside,” he said, his voice almost comically muffled from where Peter still sat inside the car, now fully awake. “ Now.”
Peter dropped his chin and fumbled with the door handle, and by the time he stepped outside and into the storm—which seemed to grow in intensity, a melodramatic prelude to whatever rebuke was sure to come his way—Dad had already disappeared into the house. Peter crossed the paved driveway, pulling uselessly at his collar as the water soaked straight through his shorts and T-shirt. He shoved open the back door and kicked off his soggy sandals, then stood dripping all over the welcome mat as three of Dad’s poker buddies regarded him with interest.
“Baby’s first carjacking,” Officer Maron said with a grin, and beside him Lieutenant Mitchell—a pudgy man with an astonishingly large gap between his two front teeth—let out a low whistle.
“What a proud moment.”
Peter ignored them and looked over at Dad, whose mouth was set in a thin line.
“It’s not like I was taking it anywhere,” he began, but Dad’s left eye had started to twitch, which usually only happened when someone stole a stop sign or smashed the neighborhood pumpkins on Halloween. He grabbed a deck of cards and slammed them hard on the kitchen table.
“You boys set up,” he said, his eyes still on Peter. “I’ll be right back.”
He stalked off toward the stairs, and the other three men looked at Peter sheepishly, averting their eyes and busying themselves with the poker chips as if suddenly embarrassed for him. Nobody liked to see someone stumble into the path of Sheriff Finnegan when his twitchy eye was acting up. Peter took a deep breath, then followed the heavy sound of Dad’s footsteps.
He was in Peter’s bedroom, of all places, his back to the door. He seemed to be deep in thought, contemplating the maps still spread out across much of the floor.
“Sometimes I just like to sit out there,” Peter said to his dad’s broad back, and he saw the muscles in his shoulders tense and then slacken again. “It’s not like I was going anywhere. I didn’t even have the keys.”
“Exactly,” Dad said, spinning around, fixing him with a hard look. “So answer me this: How does someone get into a locked car without keys?”
Peter pushed at his glasses and looked away. This was a famous tactic of Dad’s, the pseudorhetorical question. It was far more effective than a simple accusation, in that it required an answer. And he had no problem waiting around until he got one.
“I was just sitting,” Peter said, surprised to hear the resentment in his voice. “Is there a law against sitting these days?”
“In stolen property, yes.”