Past one burial service where black-garbed mourners drifted like forlorn spirits away from the open grave, past another burial service where the grieving huddled on chairs as if prepared to stay forever with whomever they had lost, past an Asian family putting a plate of fruit and cake on a fresh grave, Joe fled. He passed an unusual white church—a steeple atop a Palladian-arch cupola on columns atop a clock tower—which cast a stunted shadow in the early afternoon sun. Past a white Southern Colonial mortuary that blazed like alabaster in the California aridity but begged for bayous. He drove recklessly, with the expectation of relentless pursuit, which didn’t occur. He was also certain that his way would be blocked by the sudden arrival of swarms of police cars, but they still were not in sight when he raced between the open gates and out of the memorial park.
He drove under the Ventura Freeway, escaping into the suburban hive of San Fernando Valley.
At a stoplight, quaking with tension, he watched a procession of a dozen street rods pass through the intersection, driven by the members of a car club on a Saturday outing: an era-perfect ’41 Buick Roadmaster, a ’47 Ford Sportsman Woodie with honey-maple panelling and black-cherry maroon paint, a ’32 Ford Roadster in Art Deco style with full road pants and chrome speedlines. Each of the twelve was a testament to the car as art: chopped, channelled, sectioned, grafted, some on dropped spindles, with custom grilles, reconfigured hoods, frenched headlights, raised and flared wheel wells, handformed fender skirts. Painted, pinstriped, polished passion rolling on rubber.
Watching the street rods, he felt a curious sensation in his chest, a loosening, a stretching, both painful and exhilarating.
A block later he passed a park where, in spite of the heat, a young family—with three laughing children—was playing Frisbee with an exuberant golden retriever.
Heart pounding, Joe slowed the Honda. He almost pulled to the curb to watch.
At a corner, two lovely blond college girls, apparently twins, in white shorts and crisp white blouses, waited to cross the street, holding hands, as cool as spring water in the furnace heat. Mirage girls. Ethereal in the smog-stained concrete landscape. As clean and smooth and radiant as angels.
Past the girls was a massive display of zauschneria alongside a Spanish-style apartment building, laden with gorgeous clusters of tubular scarlet flowers. Michelle had loved zauschneria. She had planted it in the backyard of their Studio City house.
The day had changed. Indefinably but unquestionably changed.
No. No, not the day, not the city. Joe himself had changed, was changing, felt change rolling through him, as irresistible as an ocean tide.
His grief was as great as it had been in the awful loneliness of the night, his despair as deep as he had ever known it, but though he had begun the day sunk in melancholy, yearning for death, he now wanted desperately to live. He needed to live.
The engine that drove this change wasn’t his close brush with death. Being shot at and nearly hit had not opened his eyes to the wonder and beauty of life. Nothing as simple as that.
Anger was the engine of change for him. He was bitterly angry not so much for what he had lost but angry for Michelle’s sake, angry that Michelle had not been able to see the parade of street rods with him, or the masses of red flowers on the zauschneria, or now, here, this colourful riot of purple and red bougainvillea cascading across the roof of a Craftsman-style bungalow. He was furiously, wrenchingly angry that Chrissie and Nina would never play Frisbee with a dog of their own, would never grow up to grace the world with their beauty, would never know the thrill of accomplishment in whatever careers they might have chosen or the joy of a good marriage—or the love of their own children. Rage changed Joe, gnashed at him, bit deep enough to wake him from his long trance of self-pity and despair.
How are you coping? asked the woman photographing the graves.
I’m not ready to talk to you yet, she said.
Soon. I’ll be back soon. When it’s time, she promised, as though she had revelations to make, truths to reveal.