Driver's Education by Grant Ginder

Author:Grant Ginder
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

OH SHIT

Colin

I yell, “Dad?”

Then, when there’s no answer, “Where the hell have you gone?”

He was just here. Minutes ago, I swear, he was here. I was hunched over my desk in the office upstairs, writing down whatever I could remember from our past and—he was here. His throttled voice shouted, Colin! and he’d punctuated it with a wet cough. I pressed my mouth to the floor, like I do every day, and I inhaled the bits of dust, musk, a chewed-off fingernail. I yelled that we still had time, that we wouldn’t miss Derby Death Match 2000. And then I returned to the keyboard. But now, as I stand alone in the dark den, studying the impression that his loose body has made on the sofa—Dad, where have you gone?

In the kitchen, I lower myself to my hands and knees and search beneath the small white table. When he doesn’t materialize, I pull open half-closed cupboards. I push aside stacked plates and used forks and glasses with a quarter inch of water in them. I peer behind cookbooks that I don’t remember buying, into the mouths of dirty mugs, as if I’m looking for a set of lost keys instead of a dying man, and still I shout, again, Dad?

As I push through the house’s old, crowded back hallways, the passages connecting the kitchen to Finn’s old room, I become overconscious of my left hand, which is trembling at twice the speed of my right. I slip it into the pocket of my khakis and grip my left thigh in some attempt to stop the tremors. I tighten my fingers around the flesh until my nails push through the cotton and leave crescent-shaped incisions in my quads. I say, Funny, Dad. Really, really funny. Come out now. Come out, we’re going to miss it.

When the wind from the bay sends the front door swinging on its hinges, colliding with a cheap ceramic vase, I jump. I lose my footing and knock my forehead against an empty bookshelf. I place a hand on reddening flesh, feeling the early stages of the bruise that will sprout along its surface. At the end of the hallway is the open door, the door he’s opened, framing Vallejo Street and a cerulean Pacific sky and the places, the so many fucking places for my father to lose himself.

My palms begin to moisten and I say, “Shit.”

I lost Finn once, too, when he was four years old at a beach in Santa Monica. He was ten yards from me, building sand castles—a speck of white against the blue. I turned away for ten seconds, it couldn’t have been any longer, so I could slather sunscreen on the backs of my knees—and I lost him. Too terrified for tears, I leapt and tripped over a hundred angry sunbathers, screaming his name at a volume that never seemed loud enough. Ten minutes later, a lifeguard discovered him—happy, laughing, oblivious—near the snack stand.

Now, standing in the driveway, shielding my

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