The Tunnel

Daisy

What I could never explain to Helene was that parents were humans too. I had learned this the hard way one evening when my father and I drove from Little Rock to Fayetteville to see his dying mother. I was sixteen and barely knew this woman existed, but for a few short days, Carson Garmin was released from the man who typically kept watch inside his body, and he became something much more worrisome than usual – a kitten.

I first noticed it on the way up in his Pinto, "The Lima Bean," I called it because of its garish green color. My head rested against the window, willing myself out of the car and back into the brutal haven of Madame Marie's overheated studio, where I should have been practicing jetes until my legs fell off.

Instead, I was cruising through the Bobby Hopper Tunnel with a man who was battling his past in the driver's seat. I made the mistake of looking over, the warm lights of the tunnel reflecting off glass and mirror, and my father's face that betrayed itself.

He was just another person. That was all. And something about that made me sick to my stomach.

I threw up on the side of the highway, holding back my own hair as the contents of my stomach made an appearance. It was moments like these that I missed Jacqueline, my mother, who was either a weather girl or dead by now. And that was another hard feeling too – how do you miss something you've never had?

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand as we settled back in, dazed and confused that he hadn't yelled at me or made some snide comment about the car smelling like vomit. But he was too busy working out his own pain to even poke at mine.

The radio was a low hum, and my ears strained to hear "we had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun" because turning up the radio could have meant him falling apart. But that unnerved me too, suddenly not knowing which way my father would turn. Carson Garmin could be a Grade A asshole, but at least he was consistent.

But today? No telling.

Several refrains and waves of nausea later, we were at his mother's house. He told me to call her "Granny," which became a marble in my mouth, so I decided not to call her anything at all. And then there we were, standing on her front stoop and suspended in time because he kept shifting his feet, lifting his fist, but not having the nerve to knock.

It was a glimpse into my future with my daughter – she waiting and me never getting the nerve.