What You Have Left (22 page)

“These babies here,” he said, escorting us through the showroom, “they go for about ten grand.” The room smelled of new tires. My father beamed as Claire moved from kart to kart, testing them out. He patted one of the seats. “Hand-laid Italian fiberglass,” he said. Claire announced that Jeff Gordon had gotten his start racing karts. “At age
five,
” she said with reverence. Next on the tour was the service area, where karts sat in varying states of repair. Our shoes squeaked on the glossy floor. My father's workbench looked just like his kitchen counter, plastered with Post-Its and checklists. “They just think I'm organized,” he said, unlocking the back door.
Outside, an elaborate asphalt track filled the lot behind the building. There were bleachers, an electric starting pole, even a small replica of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's famed pagoda. My father smiled and pointed the camcorder at us. This was the surprise.

“Shop doesn't open till nine,” he said, “so that gives us two hours.”

We had the track all to ourselves. Right off Claire asked if she could ride alone, which was fine with my father— apparently, lots of kids race karts, not just future NASCAR champs—but I told her she'd have to start out riding with me. While she sulked, my father outfitted us with helmets, gave us a brief tutorial, then suggested I tail him around the track until I got the hang of it. With Claire wedged safely between my legs, I fired up the kart and followed him out of the paddock.

At first it was hard to keep up, even though he was going slow. The pedals were more responsive than I expected, and as I struggled to find a rhythm between the brakes and gas, Claire feigned whiplash, letting her head flop like a rag doll's. By the end of the second lap, though, I was getting a feel for the kart, champing at the bit to go faster. I opened up the throttle. For the next ten minutes or so, we circled the track at a good clip. Naturally, I set my sights on catching my father, though I tried not to be too obvious about it; after all, we were there for Claire. Not that I had a prayer of catching him anyway. He knew the track too well, he wasn't carrying extra weight, and he probably had more horsepower. Every time I was on the verge of overtaking him, he'd accelerate just a little. If I didn't know better, I'd have said he was taunting me. Finally, after he'd twirled a finger in the air to signal his last lap, I made my move. We were coming into a sweeping
turn. I cut wide, gunned the engine, and nearly put the kart into the guardrail before I wrangled it back under control. Claire stiffened, holding on for dear life. “Jesus, Mom!”

A minute later, hands still trembling, I pulled alongside my father and shut off the engine. Despite the close call, I wasn't ready to quit. I wanted another crack at him, just the two of us out there. It was time for his medicine, though, which he said made him too dizzy to drive, and besides, he wanted some footage of me and Claire.

“In one kart or two?” she said.

At that point, I felt like I owed her. “All yours,” I said, climbing out. “But if I see you hotdogging it, I'm waving you in.”

“Hello, Pot,” she said. “I'm Kettle.”

I ignored her and turned back to my father, who was replacing the camcorder's battery. I'd decided that what we needed was a level playing field.

“You ever rent a Hornet?” I said.

Once, not long before the skiing accident, my parents took me for a spin on a real racetrack. This was out in Cayce, at the old Columbia Speedway. After the races, if you were so inclined, they'd let you take a couple laps in your car. We waited in line behind the other wannabes and then, when the flagger gave us the go-ahead, my father popped the Fire-bird's clutch and off we went. The track was bumpier than I expected, and narrower. By the time we hit the backstretch, it felt like we were doing 150, but the speedometer was pegged at 60. I was up front, sitting on my mother's lap. After the first time around, I remember my father asking if she wanted to drive, which made a lot of sense, given her
experience and relative sobriety. “No, thanks,” she said. “I'm retired, remember?” My father wouldn't let it go. “Come on,” he said. “One lap. For old times' sake.” Later, on the drive home, my mother was quiet. She didn't want to talk about the race. She didn't want to sing. She just smoked and stared out the window. And though I knew she'd chosen to become a mother—though I knew she'd given up racing for that very reason—I couldn't shake the feeling that she thought she'd made a mistake.

On the videotape, you can hear us, but you don't see us. All you see is Claire making her way through the turns at a sensible speed, waving like a beauty queen each time she passes us. I'm in the bleachers with my father, trying to convince him to rent a Hornet. It's not just that I want to race him, and beat him; there's more to it than that. A long time ago, I came to the conclusion that the only way my father could have done what he did—the only way he could live with himself—was to put me out of his mind, will himself to forget. And what I wanted now was not so much an apology or an explanation as for him simply to remember, to
register
what had been lost. To feel a hunger in his heart like the one I'd been carrying around. And what better way than to make him see my mother in me? What better place than a racetrack?

My father's having none of it, though. “There's a reason they make you sign your life away before you get in one of those sardine cans,” he says.

“Like figure eight's any safer?”

“Why would I rent a race car when I already own one?”

“Come on,” I say. “My treat. Mom would be proud.” He
turns to me then, forgetting the camcorder, and my face fills the screen, hair boxy from the helmet. For the first time, I notice he still wears his wedding band, and I'd like to believe he's thinking about the happy life we once had, how broken-hearted my mother would be to know how it all turned out. “Your mother—” he says, but before he can finish, Claire's engine cuts out. The camera pans back to the track, where she's parking the kart. As she strolls over, I call out to her, ask how she'd like to man the camera while Grandpa and I take on all comers in the Hornet division. Right away, she loves the idea. “It'll be like Dale and Dale Junior,” she says.

My father's on the spot. He doesn't want to let her down. Even so, he complains about the nature of oval racing versus figure eight. “Just going around in circles,” he says. “It's metaphorically disturbing.”

Helmet tucked under her arm, Claire gives this a little thought. “But isn't a figure eight just a circle with a twist?”

My father was the one driving the boat when my mother hit the dock. We talked about this only once, on the way to Cal's after the funeral. My father asked if I thought he was to blame and I told him no.

“Your grandfather does,” he said.

“It was an accident.”

“There was a sailboat,” he said. “I had to hug the shore.”

And then I said what we both knew to be true. “She was showing off.”

I didn't see the accident, but I heard it. That summer, my mother had been toying with the idea of competitive skiing. While she and my father practiced slalom runs, I lay on the other side of the cove, sunning myself on the little patch of
sand that passed for a beach at our lake cabin. It was the fifth of July, and I'd just finished collecting empty beer cans and spent roman candles left over from our annual bash, filling a plastic lawn bag that rattled like Mardi Gras. Now I watched my mother carve arcs of water in the glassy lake, sometimes veering toward a dock and cutting away at the last second, her elbow almost grazing the surface as she hung a curtain of water above the sun-bleached boards. After a while, drowsy from the sun, I closed my eyes. I was almost asleep when I heard it: a dull, wooden thud followed by a sudden drop in the outboard's idle, two heartbeats of nothing, then the full-throttle sound of my father churning white water, racing back to her. As soon as he'd hauled her on board, he fired a flare, and for a moment, before I understood I was to run inside and call for help, I just sat there on the beach staring at the burst of red. Compared to the previous night's fireworks, it barely scratched the sky.

Back at the house, after I'd called the Drome and given them my credit card information, I asked my father if he had any pictures of my mother. He hauled out an old suitcase I recognized from childhood, the red American Tourister that used to accompany us on our weekend trips to the races. Inside were two photo albums and a pair of gray coveralls my mother had worn as a racing uniform. Claire's interest was piqued.

“Was she any good?”

“Was she any
good
?” My father rolled his eyes. “Jeff Gordon couldn't carry your grandmother's jockstrap.”

One of the albums held family photos—including pictures of me—but my father started with the other one, which
was devoted to my mother's racing career. With the cam-corder rolling, the three of us sat on the living room rug as he told us about each picture. His anecdotes confirmed what he'd said about Korsakoff's: his long-term memory was intact, sharp as a pocketknife. What surprised me, though, was how few of the stories I'd heard before, stories I had a right to know but didn't. For instance, my mother had been involved in at least four on-the-track crashes. (“The other drivers had it in for her,” he said. “They thought she should stick to the powder puff races.”) One photo showed her being pulled by two medics from an overturned car. In another, she's pointing to the car's smashed fender, her arm in a plaster cast.

Not only did the photos leave me feeling cheated, they were also starting to make me nervous about the Hornet race. I went into the kitchen for a glass of water. While I was at the sink, I overheard my father explaining to Claire why, after a lifetime on the sidelines,
he'd
taken up racing as well. Claire had commandeered the camcorder and was training it on him like a seasoned documentary filmmaker. “First time I saw a figure-eight race,” he was saying, “I knew Maddy would have loved it. But we didn't have figure eight back then. Not around Columbia. So I sort of tried it on her behalf.” The reason he kept at it—“and, obviously, it's not because I'm any good”—was that he'd yet to find anything else that made him feel closer to her. Which was funny, he said, because he'd spent so many years trying to get
away
from her (Jim Beam presumably being his key accomplice). It wasn't until he moved to Indiana, far from any patch of earth he and my mother ever shared, that he realized he probably ought to be holding on to her memory, not running from it. “When I'm out on the track,” he said, “I swear, it's like she's right there in the car with me.” Later I'd see that
Claire opted for a tight close-up during this moment. As for me, I was still in the kitchen, waiting to see if he'd get to the part about how he had run from me, too, but I suppose that's a story he wasn't ready to tell Claire, or even himself.

The antique stores were just a short walk from my father's house, but first I stopped for a pack of ultra lights and sat on a bench in front of the library, trying to put out of my mind the image of Claire surrounded by those photographs and gazing at my father, rapt as a disciple. I'd left the house in a hurry, telling them I had to get busy if I had any hope of justifying this trip. Now I started with the nearest antique store, moving decisively through the cramped aisles, feeling in full control for the first time since I'd set foot in Indianapolis. On a real buying trip, of course, I'd stick to private collections, estate sales, antique shows—places with stuff worth traveling for. Even so, as I worked my way down a strip of mom-and-pop shops, I managed to pick up a decent Hoosier cabinet and a few advertising pieces for a Bennigan's that Lyle and I were outfitting that summer. The find of the afternoon was a set of six ornate oak doors, original 1890s hardware intact, salvaged from some poor Queen Anne that had been “updated” by its new owner. I made arrangements to pick up everything later, and by the time I was done, I'd bought enough to fill the little U-Haul I planned to get for the ride home.

It was almost four, the late afternoon sun glinting off windshields of passing cars. We were due at the Drome soon to sign waivers and take our practice laps. I was halfway back to my father's house when my cell rang. Lyle sounded triumphant.

“It's called confabulation,” he said.

“What is?”

“What's going on in your father's brain.”

Lyle had been online doing some research. Confabulation, he said, was a classic symptom of Korsakoff 's. The patient invents things to fill in the blanks of his memory. Sometimes the details are so convincing that even the doctors are fooled. And of course the patient can't distinguish between the invented memories and real ones. Lyle asked when exactly my father claimed to have called.

“Last summer,” I said, taking a seat on the curb. “When he got out of the hospital.”

“Bingo. That's when you're most likely to have big gaps in your memory. Right after a seizure.”

“So he
is
full of shit,” I said. “He just doesn't know it.”

“I suppose that's one way of looking at it.”

I shaded my eyes and examined a pothole between my feet. Hidden in shadow, the original brick pavers shone beneath thick layers of asphalt. “But what if he's just
faking
confabulation?”

“For Pete's sake,” Lyle said.

Sixteen years before he found my father on the Internet, Lyle had the rare pleasure of meeting him face to face. This was right after Cal died, during what would have been my junior year of college, only I'd dropped out and gone into a full tail-spin, drinking like my father's daughter. After years of trying not to give a damn, I'd gotten it into my head that I had to find him, the last of my living kin. With a little homework, I managed to piece together a rough sketch of his life, a pattern of drifting from one town to the next, one job to the next, one bottle to the next. Eventually I tracked him down to a
service station in Camden, but when I showed up, the owner claimed he no longer worked there. A few days later, hoping he'd have better luck, Lyle went to Camden alone. He ended up in a diner eating lunch with my father, who told him he wanted to be a part of my life but just wasn't ready. Lyle sized Wylie up then and there and decided I was better off without him, better off not even knowing he'd found him. This, of course, was a big mistake on Lyle's part—thinking he had the right to decide what was best for me. When I figured out what was going on, I told him we were done and made for Camden, flask in hand, attracting the attention of the state police along the way. Lyle was after me, too, afraid I'd kill myself in a wreck, and he arrived at the garage just in time to find me once again not finding my father. The troopers showed up a few minutes later. Mindful of my drunkenness but perhaps more mindful of his own plummeting stock, Lyle let the police think he'd been the driver of the car that had just led them on a wild goose chase. He spent thirty days in the Kershaw County Jail, and just like in a fairy tale, we got hitched the day he got out.