While It Lasts by Scott Nadelson

Author:Scott Nadelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Stories
Short Story collection
American Fiction
Contemporary Fiction
Contemporary Short Fiction
Literary Fiction
Jordan Prize
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lucky

Shortly after he turned seventeen and got his driver’s license, which wasn’t quite a year after he received his green card, Alexander Grinfeld drove his mother’s car down a steep embankment into Shale Brook. He was more angry than drunk, though he’d downed most of a six-pack at a party in the woods, and when he reached the sharp bend halfway down Lenape Road, he turned too late, jumped the curb, and lost control of the wheel. The car—a Volkswagen Rabbit, nearly ten years old when his mother bought it—skidded over ferns, loose dirt, and exposed granite. On the way his head smacked the steering wheel, and by the time the Rabbit came to a stop, on its side in the water, he was unconscious. Here the brook was three feet deep. It was late spring, the water still warm from a long day’s sunshine. His legs were submerged, along with much of his head. The current brushed back his bristly hair. It covered his ears, as well as his mouth, but left his nose alone. Another inch, the paramedics who fished him out later told his family, and he would have been gone. “Good thing you’re not a mouth breather,” his little sister Katya said.

When he woke in the hospital, with a massive headache and blurred vision, his anger had mostly dissipated, replaced by embarrassment. He apologized to his mother before she could finish crying and scold him, and later to his father, too, who berated him anyway, in Russian, a language Alex had been trying his hardest to forget. Wasn’t life difficult enough without him trying to kill himself? Was this why they brought him across the ocean, to give him the freedom to smash everything they’d built? Didn’t he think his mother had enough to worry about?

She did, Alex agreed: a year after they emigrated, his father left her for another refugee, a Cambodian who worked in his lab. But what did that have to do with Alex nearly cracking his skull and filling his lungs with silty water? If his father was so worried about his mother, he shouldn’t have slept with other women. He wanted to say so, but it hurt too much to open his mouth, so instead he just glared at the stocky little man in glasses, balding and paunchy, who’d nevertheless managed to make a new life in this stupid country, while leaving Alex to fend for himself. By the time his father pushed through the privacy curtain separating his half of the hospital room from that of a boy recovering from hernia surgery, he was enraged all over again. If he were behind the wheel now, he’d run over anything in his way.



Still, the shame returned every time a nurse told him how lucky he was to be alive. Or worse, when his ex-girlfriend visited, dropping off a card signed by two dozen classmates who’d never spoken a word to him. Her name was Jodi Lazzarini. To think of her as

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