For eleven months, my mother drove my father to chemotherapy every other Tuesday, and every time they came home, she flashed her brake lights three times as she turned into the driveway.
I was the one who watched for it. I’d moved back into my old bedroom that winter, when it became clear that a cancer in my father’s colon was not going to be talked out of anything, and on treatment days I stationed myself at the front window with a mug of tea going cold in my hands. The infusion took four hours. The drive each way was twenty-five minutes. I knew the schedule by heart. And at about two-fifteen in the afternoon, I’d start looking for headlights.
You couldn’t see my father from the window. He’d be in the passenger seat with his head tipped back, usually asleep, a gray blanket over his knees. You couldn’t tell anything from the car itself. It was a blue Buick, rolling slowly up the street with the afternoon sun on the windshield.
But as it turned into the driveway, there’d be a flash. Red, then dark. Red, then dark. Red, then dark.
Three times. Every time.
It meant they were home. That was all. It meant the drive had gone fine, that nothing had gone wrong at the clinic, that whatever else the day had cost, the two of them had made it back to the house. I’d put down my tea. I’d open the front door. And I would stand there on the porch, in my socks, and let the breath go out of me.
I never told my mother how much I counted on it. It was just something my parents did, like the way my father hummed while he shaved, or the way my mother set out two coffee mugs even when one of us was out of town. A small, private ritual, so old and so ordinary that I’d stopped seeing it years ago.
After the last appointment, in late November, the oncologist came out into the hallway and spoke to my mother for a long time. I wasn’t there. I was at the window. At two-fifteen, I saw the Buick turn the corner, slower than usual.
The brake lights flashed three times.
My father died six days later, at home, in the bed by the window, with the lamp on. It was a Monday morning. He was fifty-eight.
My mother is fifty-seven now. She still drives the Buick. And when she turns into the driveway at the end of every errand, every trip to the grocery, every Sunday coming home from church, she flashes her brake lights three times. Alone. For nobody. Into an empty driveway.
I asked her about it last month. I’ve been trying to understand it ever since.
Part 2
My mother told me the story that night in the kitchen, with her hands around a cup of tea.
She said it started with a broken light.
It was the summer of 1996, and she was twenty-eight. My father was twenty-nine. They’d met at a friend’s cookout, and he’d asked her out almost at once, a little awkwardly, in the way of a man who’d rehearsed it on the drive over. The first date was a minor-league baseball game, an hour from town. He picked her up in a rusted green pickup that he’d been meaning to fix since the spring.
It was a good night. They sat in the cheap seats and ate peanuts. He told her a joke about a goat that she still, thirty years later, claimed wasn’t funny. The home team lost by two. And afterward, he drove her back to her apartment, and she said she’d had a nice time, and he said, with great dignity, that he’d had the nicest time of his life.
Then he got back in the truck to drive home.
She stood on the curb and watched him pull out. And as he braked at the stop sign at the end of the block, she saw something that stopped her.
His brake lights didn’t come on.
“There was nothing,” she told me. “The back of that truck was a black hole. He tapped the brake, and nothing lit. I thought, he lives twenty minutes out on a county road. There’s no streetlights, and there’s a bend by the quarry where people take the curve too fast. Some fool is going to come up behind him doing sixty.”
She didn’t think about it. She ran to her car, a little white Corolla with a cracked bumper, and started the engine. She caught up with him two blocks later and flashed her headlights until he pulled over.
“Your brake lights are out,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to get to it.”
“You can’t drive out there tonight.”
“It’s twenty minutes.”
“I’m following you,” she said.
He tried to argue. She wasn’t a woman who could be argued with, even at twenty-eight. So she followed him the whole twenty minutes, a car-length behind, with her hazards on, her bright headlights acting as a kind of shield between him and the dark.
When he reached his driveway, he slowed to turn in. He couldn’t flash his brakes. So she did it for him. Three times, as hard as she could, tapping the pedal, a red warning for anyone who might come up behind them.
She’d meant it as a signal for the car behind her. There wasn’t a car behind her. It was just a habit, a way of saying slow down, he’s turning.
My father got out of the truck. He walked back to her window. And he looked at her through the glass, in the porch light, with an expression she said she remembered for the rest of her life.
“Three flashes,” he said. “What does that mean?”
She said, “It means I got you home.”
Part 3
For thirty years after that, my parents’ marriage had a small, private language of lights.
Three flashes, whenever either of them pulled into the driveway, meant: I’m back. I got here. It didn’t matter who was driving or how short the trip. If my father was in the kitchen and heard my mother’s car, he’d flick the porch light twice, and she’d know he’d heard. As a child, I thought every family did it. It wasn’t until I was fourteen that I realized it was just us.
My father’s illness was found in a routine screening the previous December. By January, it had spread. By the time they’d settled on a regimen, a punishing, steady, two-week cycle of poison and recovery, I’d already moved home.
My father handled it the way he handled everything, quietly and without complaint. He made his own jokes. He insisted on wearing a tie to the first appointment. For the first few cycles, he drove himself, with my mother in the passenger seat, until the Tuesday in June when he came out of the infusion room too dizzy to stand, and she took the keys from his hand without a word.
“I’ll drive,” she said. “You can navigate.”
“I know the way.”
“Then you can pretend.”
She drove him every time after that. Eleven months. Twenty-three appointments, according to her calendar. She never once missed. She never once complained about the hour or the traffic or the way the infusion chair left a crick in her neck. She sat beside him with a crossword and a thermos, and she held his hand when the needle went in.
In August, something happened that I hadn’t thought about until the night in the kitchen.
I was at the window, as usual. Two-fifteen came. The Buick turned the corner and rolled up the street. I stood with my mug in my hands, waiting for the flash.
It didn’t come.
The car turned into the driveway in silence. The headlights went off. I stood frozen. I waited for the lights. Nothing happened, and a cold, awful thing went through my chest, because in eleven months, in thirty years, it had never once failed to happen.
I was out the door and down the steps before the engine had stopped. My mother was sitting behind the wheel with both hands on it, looking at me through the windshield, and my father, in the passenger seat, was laughing so hard he was wheezing.
“Your brake lights are out,” he said, when I wrenched the door open. “Maureen. Your brake lights. Thirty years, and it’s your brake lights.”
My mother had gone pink. And then she was laughing too, helplessly, with tears on her face.
“I tapped it,” she said. “I tapped it three times. I thought it felt wrong.”
That weekend, with a flashlight and a pair of pliers and a small plastic bag of new bulbs from the hardware store, my father crawled around behind the Buick in the driveway, leaning on the bumper, taking forty minutes to do a ten-minute job.
I tried to help. He wouldn’t let me.
“I’m not having your mother drive around with no brake lights,” he said. “Not after the way we met.”
I think about that every day now. It was one of the last times I saw him standing on his own two feet.
Part 4
My father stopped treatment in November.
The doctor was kind about it. She sat with my parents in a small, quiet office with a box of tissues on the desk, and she used words like comfort and time, and she did not use any word that meant the other thing. My mother listened to all of it, nodding, with her purse on her lap. My father didn’t say anything. He watched a bird land on the windowsill.
I wasn’t in the room. I was in the lobby, with a cup of coffee I couldn’t drink. When they came out, my father walked down the hall slowly, one hand on the wall. He looked at me, and he smiled, and I knew.
I drove my own car home. I beat them by about twenty minutes. I went in the house and straightened the pillows, and put on a pot of soup, and stood at the front window.
At two-fifteen, the Buick turned the corner.
My mother drove very slowly. She came up the street in the thin November light, and she turned into the driveway, and I watched, from behind the curtain, with my hand over my mouth.
The brake lights flashed. One. Two. Three.
They’d been working perfectly since August.
I didn’t ask her about that. I’ve never asked. I think I understood, standing at that window, that there were things a person did on the last day of something that weren’t meant to be explained. My father was in the passenger seat. His head was tipped back. His eyes were closed. I’ll never know whether he saw it. I think he did. I think he opened his eyes, as the light came up red on the garage door, and he knew what it meant.
I got you home.
He died six days later, on a Monday, at about seven in the morning, with the radio on low and the lamp lit. My mother was sitting on the edge of the bed. I was in the doorway. She held his hand until the end, and for a long time after.
The funeral was small. A church full of people. A casserole line that stretched around the block. I don’t remember most of it. What I remember is the first Tuesday after the funeral, when there was no appointment, no needle, no drive.
I sat at the window at two-fifteen anyway. I couldn’t stop. And at two-seventeen, the Buick turned the corner, with my mother at the wheel, coming home from the grocery store.
The passenger seat was empty.
And as she turned into the driveway, the brake lights flashed. Once. Twice. Three times.
Part 5
I met her at the door.
She’d stopped the car halfway up the driveway. She was sitting behind the wheel with the engine running and her hands at ten and two, looking straight ahead through the windshield, not moving. I stood on the porch in my socks. I didn’t know whether to go to her or let her be.
After about two minutes, she turned off the car. She got out, carrying a bag of groceries, and walked up the steps, and she didn’t look at me.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. It just happened. My foot did it.”
“It’s okay.”
“There’s nobody here to flash at.”
“Mom.”
“I’m too old to be this foolish,” she said, and she put the bag down on the kitchen counter and began to cry.
I held her. She was smaller than I remembered. We stood there for a long time in the kitchen, not saying anything, with the soup going cold on the stove.
She still does it. That’s the thing I came to tell you. Every time she turns into the driveway. After the grocery store, after church, after the long Sunday drives she’s started taking alone with the radio on. Three flashes into the empty yard. For months I thought it was a habit she couldn’t break, the sort of thing a body does when the person’s gone.
I asked her last month, finally, when I couldn’t stand not understanding it.
She was quiet for a while. Then she said:
“Do you know what the three meant?”
I said I’d always thought it meant home.
“It did. It meant I got you home.” She turned her teacup in her hands. “But I think I’ve worked out something. It never meant that you were home. It meant that I was. Every time. All thirty years, I flashed those lights to tell your father I’d made it. I was telling him I was still here.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m telling him I’m still here.”
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say.
But that night, I stayed up. I sat at the front window in the dark, with the porch light off, until I heard the Buick on the street. It came around the corner and slowed, and the brake lights flashed three times against the garage door.
And I did something I’d never done in my life.
I reached out and flicked the porch light. Twice.
It was my father’s answer. His reply. I’d watched him do it a thousand times, when I was small. I heard you. I’m here too.
My mother sat in the car for a long time. She put her forehead on the steering wheel. Then she lifted her head, and I saw her through the windshield, in the yellow glow of the porch light, smiling.
She still flashes the brake lights every time she turns into the driveway.
Now somebody answers.
