Interstate

Fiction by Matt Colangelo

When my father and I left Massachusetts, we already knew a system was approaching. There were puffy rain clouds on the last three days of the five-day forecast. My mother suggested we keep an eye on it.

The word “storm” was uttered early the next morning as we got ready for the appointment. We stood in front of the television in our hotel room as the New York City meteorologist traced his finger along the disagreeing lines of the first official spaghetti model. “Possibility of a real winter storm here,” the meteorologist warned. He circled a band of yellow just east of the Caribbean and drew an arrow north-northwest to a bunch of red capital Hs. “This low-pressure area could meet this high-pressure area coming down from Canada.” It wasn’t clear yet whether the system would continue on its course — gaining strength over the Caribbean — or curl eastward, dampening into whitecaps over the mid-Atlantic. We stared at the storm’s two potential paths until our cabbie texted he was downstairs.

We spent the ride idling behind brake lights and exhaust. My father studied his hands to see if they were shaking. He opened and closed them into fists and rested them on his kneecaps, played a few notes of the Chopin filtering into the backseat. I looked up from his hands and out the opposite window. My eyes settled on a middle-height where the horizon would have been had it not been obscured by rows of midtown skyscrapers. I imagined the thunderheads that I knew were there, hundreds of miles beyond the buildings, and tried to will them into the ocean.

*

The doctor could have been a contestant on a talent show. That’s how good he was at juggling all the tasks involved in the evaluation. He maintained direct eye contact with my father the whole time. He asked questions like “How soundly have you been sleeping at night?” and looked at my father before, during, and after his responses. The doctor’s whole body was leaning into the conversation; his football-lineman shoulders were squared up. He was entirely there, present, even as he scribbled on a legal pad with manic, disembodied energy.

My mother had given me one job — to take the family minutes — and I was failing at it. I wrote down everything everyone said in a tight, vertical script that devolved into a sloppy, half-cursive mess the more I struggled to keep up. It was a problem one of my history professors had mentioned after class: that I didn’t know what to write and what to leave out. I tried to capture everything, but not everything was important.

I stopped and recalibrated. The doctor’s interrogation had moved on to the details of my father’s exercise regimen, where he went to physical therapy and what he did there. I wrote, hasn’t been going very often. Old therapist made him do planks. He asked about my father’s diet, which food groups he’d cut back on. My father slapped his belly like the back of one of the high-school soccer players he used to coach, “Still got my appetite at least.” The doctor smiled before transitioning into a series of questions about my father’s bowel movements and various other things I didn’t want to hear about. I learned that my parents’ sex life was irregular but active. My father elbowed me in the ribs, “That’s on the record, if you want to write it down.”

After he had exhausted all his non-motor-related questions, the doctor got up, opened the door, and instructed my father to walk up and down the length of the hallway. He analyzed the peculiarities of his gait: his slightly forward-leaning posture that made him look like he was walking into a strong wind; the bend in his knees; the asymmetrical swing of his arms, his right arm reaching out a little further than his left. These symptoms had developed more recently, a couple years after my mother first noticed the subtle tremor in his thumb and index finger. One day she showed me a piece of paper with a phone number he had written, held it up like the printout of a seismograph, evidence of what was still only the suspicion of a tremor. His lines were slightly jagged like the edges of a broken mug.

The local neurologist was the first to mention Parkinson’s by name. She put him on a dopamine agonist, which stopped the twitching — a development that seemed positive but in fact only confirmed the problem. The doctor told us not to get too excited, that it would return. So for the next few months we waited, studied his hands in the morning, analyzed scribbles left on the counter, listened when he sat down to play the piano — for over-pedaling and missed notes on the runs. That was the beginning of his descent through stage one and into stage two: tremors, slouching, difficulty walking.

This doctor was a movement-disorder specialist. My mother had scheduled the appointment months ago and had asked me if I could please drive him to New York and back since she couldn’t get time off and my father wasn’t allowed to drive anymore. I agreed to do it in a very hypothetical way that became real and binding the more time passed and the more my mother’s references to it went unchallenged. It had slipped from possibility into obligation, and now it was responsibility: me watching over my father, taking notes, making sure nothing went wrong.

I watched the doctor analyze him under the stark white light of the hallway and wondered what he found more concerning: the slight curl in his upper back or his shorter-than-usual strides.

When my father made it back, the doctor positioned him so he was facing one of the walls, as if he were about to frisk him. “We’re going to test your reactions now.” He placed his hands on the tops of my father’s shoulders and pulled him back without any warning. For a split second, I thought my father was going to fall backwards and hurt himself, but he managed to get a foot behind him. The doctor did this a few more times then invited us back into the exam room.

The doctor’s take, which he expressed as much to me as to his patient, was that my father was mostly likely experiencing depression symptoms. I expected my father to call bullshit, wave his hand and say, really, that’s what I’m paying you for, but he didn’t.

“You think?” he said.

The doctor nodded. “I do.”

He explained how depression could exacerbate Parkinson’s symptoms and make people think they were regressing more rapidly than they actually were. He gave us the name of a psychiatrist and said the standard treatment was typically a course of tricyclic antidepressants that wouldn’t interact with the Parkinson’s drugs. I wrote down tri-cyclic and asked about my father’s posture, if he noticed anything that concerned him, like how he leaned over when he walked. He said not particularly, that it seemed to be consistent with a lack of exercise, and that the lack of exercise could also be contributing to him feeling down and vice versa. He recommended physical therapy, adding that it is easy to conflate the effects of aging with disease.

I wrote in my notebook: DEPRESSION — needs treatment

My father said. “Well, this is good news.”

The doctor smiled, put his pen away like it was time to leave.

My father grabbed the arms of his chair.

“Sorry, I just have a couple more questions,” I said.

The doctor turned his giant shoulders towards me. “Go ahead,” he said.

“Okay, well, I guess my first question is just, like, how sure are you?”

“How sure am I about what?”

“That it’s depression and not the PD. Like, how do you know the PD isn’t getting worse? Shouldn’t we be doing more tests, just in case? Brain scans, that sort of thing. Wouldn’t that be the most scientific way of solving this?”

The doctor leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looked at me with a sad-eyed, tight-lipped smile that said: I understand, you must be going through a lot, but also: you don’t know what you’re talking about. He took a breath, his shoulders rising and falling into place.

“Well,” he started. It felt like his eyes were trying to pin me down, get me to look away, which eventually I did, “I’ve seen a lot of cases like your father’s. It’s not as uncommon as you think.”

I pretended to think about what he had just said. “I understand that, doctor. But I guess what I’m trying to say is,” I swallowed the spit that was collecting at the back of my throat, “don’t you think doing any more tests could be helpful? Like, there’s no other data you would want to collect, to be really scientific about this?”

My father put a hand on my knee. “It’s okay.”

“Stop,” I told him, “this is serious.” I turned back to the doctor. “Okay. What I’m trying to say is, we want to be really scientific about this, do all the tests. We want to get to the bottom of it.”

My father grabbed my elbow. “That’s what we’re doing.”

The doctor stood up and put his hand out. “Listen, I think the best next-step is to set up an appointment with the psychiatrist and see what she thinks. Then we’ll schedule a follow-up.”

My father stood up and shook his hand. “That sounds like a good idea.”

*

My mother called to ask about the appointment and to inform us that the weather system had grown and looked like it was going to creep up the coast of South Carolina, bringing freezing rain and forty-mile-per-hour gusts. The alarm in her voice clashed with the quasi-celebratory mood that my father had imposed on our lunch table, ordering a bottle of prosecco. He stole the phone off my ear and said the appointment went well, that it was probably just depression, and he would give her the full de-brief when we got back to the hotel. He passed the phone back and twirled a forkful of fettuccine into a large spoon.

In our defense, the storm wasn’t definitely going to hit New England. My father told her this from a position of authority, in front of the hotel television. One model still had it deflecting off Carolina into the Atlantic. She suggested coming home a day early. He said we had tickets to a play tomorrow, we would survive.

At the theater, he insisted on walking up the stairs by himself, so I stood behind him and studied his grip on the railing, thinking: what if he falls, how would I catch him. I imagined him tipping backwards, me having to lean against him and tackle him forward into the stairs as our fellow latecomers surged by us on both sides, but it didn’t come to that. We got seated just in time, as the house lights dimmed and the curtain was drawn, revealing the King of Spain in a nightgown playing with a goldfish. An array of onstage candelabras cast an orange glow that barely reached us in the mezzanine. It was enough light to see my father staring at the action on stage, his fingers tapping out the melody of a baroque aria on his knee.

I waited till about thirty minutes into the first act before leaning over and whispering “bathroom.” He whispered back, “intermission,” to which I responded “lines.” I scooched past three pairs of legs and walked up the steps to a doorman who shined his mini-flashlight on a sign that said I would have to sit out the rest of the act. He opened the door just wide enough for me to squeeze through. Signs directed me to the ground-floor lobby and around a corridor to the men’s bathroom. I stood in the hallway and pulled out my phone.

My mother picked up on the first ring.

“How is it?”

“The play? Pretty good.”

“Good. How is everything else?”

“The weekend is fine. You know, I’m hanging in there. Our patient is driving me a little nuts. Didn’t exactly push the doctor for information yesterday. It’s like he couldn’t care less. You know? You know how he’s like that?”

“Hey cubby.”

“Yeah.”

“Can you do me favor? Focus on getting back please. We’ll talk about that stuff later.”

I could hear applause, thousands of feet creaking the floorboards above my head. “I gotta go back in.”

*

By the time we got back from the play, the system had grown. It extended from South Carolina to the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay, a blanket of green and yellow spinning slowly. The local news replayed a two-second clip of the Doppler radar to show the storm’s counter-clockwise rotation, how it pulled down wind from the north-east. That’s what made it a nor’easter, the meteorologist explained.

“We’re gonna have to wake up early tomorrow, that’s all,” my father said.

Temperatures were dropping, so the earlier we left the better.

“Sure you don’t want to wait it out?” I asked.

“We’ll be fine. We have four-wheel-drive.”

I called my mother and told her we were planning to leave first thing in the morning, before the weather got bad. She lobbied us to stay another day. “What’s the point?” she argued, “Just come back on Sunday. There’s no difference.” My father took the phone. He repeated more or less what he had told me: that the weather wasn’t going to get bad until the afternoon. We had four-wheel-drive. It was going to be fine.

*

We left at 10 a.m. knowing that we would end up catching, closer to Massachusetts, the beginning of an ice storm. Tree branches were expected to fall on power lines. School had been cancelled twenty-four hours in advance.

My father tracked the storm on his phone, updating me on changes in the snowflake icons and borderline-freezing temperatures. It was thirty-five degrees when we left, but it was going to get colder, so in addition to scanning the outbound arteries for bumps and potholes, I was also monitoring the color of the asphalt — light, medium, dark grey.

“You can go faster, don’t worry,” he kept telling me.

I felt wind pushing against the tall, square frame of the Jeep, the car leaning and drifting to the right. “It’s fine, I’m okay. Just let me do it.”

*

The windshield wipers weren’t keeping up with the rain, so I upshifted them into a faster setting. Puddles were beginning to form on the shoulders. To avoid them, I hugged the inside of the lane, earning beeps as cars edged past us on the left. We had made it off the bumpy two-lane parkways and onto I-95.

I had ceded control of the radio to my father, who flipped through every station until he found classical. St. Martin in the Fields was broadcasting a live performance of Debussy that he was whistling along to with his eyes closed and an exaggerated vibrato on the long notes. After I made a couple sudden movements to avoid a puddle and re-center the car after an unexpected gust of wind, he said, “Relax. Drive to the music.”

*

Rain had begun to chatter against the windshield. Cars were bunching together, huddling as if for warmth. Their brake lights shined blurry-red through ice crystals that collected between windshield wipes.

My mother called. The ring interrupted the water music and rattled inside the car’s boxy interior. Answering put her on speakerphone.

“How is it?” she asked.

“Not bad at all,” my father responded.

“It’s icy,” I said. I looked at my father. “It’s okay, though.”

“Do you have four-wheel-drive on?”

I double-checked the 4x4 button, turned it off and on again. “Yes.”

“It’s fine,” my father said. “We’ll call when we get on the Pike.”

*

He wanted me to stop, because we only had a quarter tank and maybe that wasn’t enough to get home. He offered to stand with the pump, so I went inside and got two black coffees and a bag of melba toasts. I took a bathroom break, washed my hands.

In the time it took me to do that, things had changed. I noticed something was off when I pushed out the side exit, a moment of panic, the kind that hits you before you know exactly why, and then I realized: the car wasn’t there. Did he take off? Was he jammed into some trees somewhere? I looked to the left and right of the gas pump, turned around to check the parking lot behind me. I walked past the first row of pumps to see if the car was blocked or if I had misremembered where we stopped. I jogged to the other parking lot, splashing hot coffee on my hands and wrists, and finally saw a tall, flat roof poking above two sedans. My father was in the driver’s seat, adjusting the rear-view mirror.

I walked up and stared at him through the closed window.

“I’m not getting in,” I yelled, over the sound of sleet falling and cars rolling by.

He mouthed through the windshield: What?

“I’m not kidding.”

“Let’s go.” He waved me into the car, but I stood there collecting sleet on my shoulders. He rolled the window down a crack, “I had to move it. You can’t just camp out at the gas pump.”

I started walking back towards the convenience store, my sneakers sinking into the slush and soaking through. My father pulled alongside me and beeped for me to get back into the car.

He opened the passenger door and yelled , “Let’s. Go.”

“I’m driving.” I tried to say it with finality.

“Just get in,” he countered.

I left the passenger door open and went around to the driver’s side, where I found the door locked. “This isn’t funny,” I said. He shut the engine off and sat there looking out the windshield. I shouted through his closed window at the side of his face.

“The only reason I’m here,” I said, “is to drive you to the doctor. I’m the one looking out for you.” He stared at something, sleet falling or cars driving out of the refueling canopies, but didn’t say anything. “Want me to show you why you can’t drive? Here.” I pointed to a scratch on the front-left fender. “Remember when you did that?” I circled in front of the bumper and pointed to a dent the size of Montana. “You told us a parking attendant did that.” He looked at me, but didn’t say anything, so I kept shouting into the windshield, “You can’t drive. It’s snowing and you have stage two Parkinson’s and your body can’t do this anymore.”

I heard the door unlock. He elbowed the door open and started to get out.

“Don’t touch me,” he said.

He swung his legs around, put his feet down on the running board. He pushed my hand away. I watched him round the car on his own. He kept his left hand on the body for support and lifted himself into the passenger seat with the help of the retractable grab-handle. He took his time getting in, kicked his shoes against the footrest, let sleet get all over the inside of the door, switched the coffees in the cupholders, and slammed the door shut.

I fixed the rear-view mirror and raised an open palm: “Look at the windshield.” I turned on the defroster. Hot air fogged up the bottom of the windshield and began melting the thin layer of ice that had frozen while we were gassing up. We waited a few minutes for the ice to melt and the windshield to defog before rolling into the yield lane. I tested the brakes again, got a sense of the traction.

“You okay?” I asked.

*

The sleet was really coming down now, but I managed to pull behind a snowplow that was seasoning the road with a mixture of sand and salt. I matched its pace, faster than I had been going before, and watched a constant wave of slush break over the guardrails. I focused on the wave, measured its arc, my distance from it. We didn’t talk. Neither about his inability to drive nor the doctor’s appointment. Nor his declining health. Nor the end of this whole process, the thing everybody in my family — cousins, aunts, uncles included — always skirted around, avoided talking about even though it was so obviously there: the fact that he was going to die. Soon. Or become so incapacitated he wouldn’t want to live, at which point, I don’t know, we would probably keep him alive for a while. I didn’t know how it would all play out, the logistics of letting someone go.

I followed the snowplow for an abstract amount of time that was probably close to twenty minutes. Then it pulled off the interstate. The threshold between newly plowed and recently plowed was stark. Our front tires cut a double-wake, kicking up snow. I could feel ice underneath, individual tires spinning, so I reduced my speed: fifty, forty-five, forty, and kept it there, let the tires work, held the wheel straight.

It wasn’t even a turn. There were two black-and-yellow arrows indicating a turn but it was more of a gentle bend. I pulled it back, thirty-five, thirty, twenty-five, imagined the weight of my tires pushing into the snow when I felt the car lose traction.

The tires spun and instantly we were weightless, floating, and as were floating we were also rotating ever so slightly off-center. There wasn’t much I could have done. You’re supposed to lay off the brakes, avoid making jerky movements with the wheel. You’re supposed to have faith that the machine will regain traction on its own, so we slid, at twenty-five, twenty, fifteen, ten, rotating slightly, almost parallel to the road. We drifted sideways onto the shoulder and clipped the end of the guardrail. The airbags didn’t even go off.

I leaned back and took my hands off the steering wheel. Inhaled slowly and let out a long low groan, laid on the horn with the base of my palm. Hit it several times and yanked the emergency brake as far as it could go.

“You good?” he asked.

I flipped on my hazards and got out to check the damage. My father got out too. I held his arm as he stepped down onto the shoulder, our shoes making prints in the snow. We stood next to each other and examined the car with squinted eyes as if it were a famous painting. The car was forest-green but everything around it was white: the snow, the birches. Even the silver guardrail was hard to see. There was a new scratch on the front-right corner of the bumper, on the same latitude as the one my dad had put on it right before my mother took the keys away. Two cars went by with their fog-lights on. A third slowed as it approached us. We waved them on, snow piling up on our shoulders.

“Not bad, considering,” I said.

We got back in. My hands were shaking, more quickly than my father’s ever did. I held them up to the vents, counted my breaths.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Could’ve happened to anyone.”

I released the hand brake and reversed the car off the guardrail. My father turned the hazards off. We kept it at about thirty, slow enough we heard snow and ice compacting under our tires. We kept saying, “This is a good speed. Keep it there,” until my hands stopped shaking, almost like nothing happened.

*

The sky cleared up unexpectedly on the Pike. Snow mirrored the light upwards, made me reach for the giant cheap-o sunglasses I kept in the console. Another round of plows had passed through and salted the roads. A meteorologist said the storm had deflected slightly.

We stopped for a coffee before our exit. Parked and went in. On the way out, my father cracked a joke: he asked for the keys. I laughed. But then I felt something turn over, like how the poles of the earth flip every so often. Maybe my mood had improved; maybe it didn’t seem so risky anymore, him driving instead of me; or maybe, on some level, I knew this would be his last time driving a car. I handed him the keys.

“You sure?”

We were about ten minutes from home, all flat. I got in the passenger side and slid the seat back on the rails. He adjusted the mirrors and backed out of the spot, hands playing vibrato on the wheel. He pulled onto the main road without any problem. Big movements didn’t seem to bother him. It was the small ones, minor corrections, staying in the middle of the lane. I noticed that he had developed a technique for driving with the tremors. Instead of gripping the wheel on the sides, like he used to, he loosened his grip and lowered his hands so his forearms were resting on his lap. His hands still shook, but the shaking didn’t transfer to the wheel. He was both in control and out of control at the same time.

The highway turned onto a post road, a corridor of gas stations, truck-rental depots, and dollar stores that divided central Massachusetts’ two main post-industrial towns. Every quarter mile an empty paper mill advertised a for-lease sign. We turned. On the next street, strip malls turned into poorly-kept Victorian homes, paint peeling off the sideboards.

After a couple more turns the sidewalks disappeared and the flat road started to rise and fall like the end of a rollercoaster. Snow-covered trees textured the sides of hills left over from the glaciers. My father took it slowly, squinting out the windshield like he was trying to find something. We passed the dump, curled around the reservoir, and came up on a familiar fork, a decision we had made so many times it was automatic: right for home, left to go around the reservoir again. I didn’t expect him to go left, make a slow pass around the man-made lake, hands trembling on the wheel, eyes searching the trees.

When we reached the post office down the street from our house, he pulled into the parking lot and we switched seats. I drove us the rest of the way, two hundred yards down the street and up our driveway. My mother was watching us from the kitchen. She came outside and helped my father into the house, held him by the elbow and coached him up the front steps. “How’d it go?” she asked. It was a few seconds before I realized she was talking to me.

Matt Colangelo graduated from Oxford University with an MSt in English Literature and The New School with an MFA in fiction. He lives in New York, but is currently a Fulbright fellow in Italy, documenting the country’s ongoing struggles with earthquakes. His nonfiction has appeared in Munchies, Food & Wine, and Human Parts. This is his fiction debut.