Traffic

Highway 17 is a parking lot. I'm stopped in the hottest stretch of the 26-mile route going through Los Gatos. It’s the final few miles before the ascent, and it is completely unshielded by a cloudless sky. Tall bushes line the paved highway but the sun is high above us and offers no shade. In the distance, a precious cover of trees waits tantalizingly atop the mountains, my home lying on the other end of the summit in the southern end of another county. So close, yet so far.

If I knew it was an accident, this blockade of unmoving vehicles wouldn't bother me. This is not about me, this is about them and their families, I’d think. Has someone contacted their loved ones? What was their last text to them? The speculation made me empathize, and the empathy soothed me.

But this traffic infuriates me. It infuriates me because I know there’s no danger here, no loved one lost, no need to speculate. I know this not only because I sit it in every Saturday afternoon, but because Google Maps confirms it, displaying on my phone that there’s no such accident, just a massive sea of cars all traveling to the same place at the same time. Today, there is no fatal car crash turning our typical 30-minute drive into a 2-hour crawl. No, today, everyone who lives in Santa Clara County just wants to go to the beach. 

Except me. I’ve lost all the patience and compassion, probably because I know that very fact to be true. I wouldn’t dare go to the beach on a summer day like today. I just want to go home, and it makes this standstill feel like hell on earth.

The sun’s heat assaults my arm through the tinted window, and I worry about the damage it might do to my tattooed skin. It makes me think of when I was little, and my brother would pour salt on snails. Those poor creatures, their bodies incapable of saving themselves. I rub at my burning skin, smack it, hold it in front of the blaring A/C vent, and find my escape in an audiobook: Olivia Song's voice reading “It Ends With Us” by Colleen Hoover. It’s the perfect kind of drama to distract me from grabbing the steering wheel and shaking it furiously, twisting and grinding my tires into the asphalt and frightening the other drivers. The stillness is maddening. It makes me think about shooters. Surely, this would be enough to drive anyone insane. It would be so easy for someone to get out and start unloading on us. Where would we go?

We are about to head under an overpass, and someone is holding up a handwritten posterboard that says, “Learn how to stop traffic! Buy my book!” with a website URL printed on another poster next to it. I’m thankful he doesn’t have a gun. Somebody buy his book, I think.

I check the clock, and it’s been two minutes since I last lifted my foot from the brake. I am about to grab my phone to call my husband, tell him to take our daughter out to the pool, out for ice cream, go enjoy this beautiful day without me, I won’t be home for hours. But when I pick up my phone, I see that my father is calling me. My Bluetooth hadn’t picked it up because I’m using my CD player.

Shit, I think, remembering that he had texted me this morning, asking me to call him. I’d told him I would after work. Three hours of wrangling small children and their parents into singing and dancing with me followed by an urgent desire to get home as soon as possible, and I’d completely forgotten. I swipe up to answer his call and fumble with my stereo to get the Bluetooth connected.

“Hello? Dad? Can you hear me?”

“Hey, sweetheart, how’s it going?” He always says this, but it’s the tone that changes. Right now, he says it with a sigh. There’s a somberness to his voice, like he doesn’t want to have this conversation.

Oh, no, I think. I’m not great with somber at my best. I feel the resistance of my traffic-anger. I don’t want to have this conversation either. “It’s going,” I sigh back. “Stuck in traffic, and it’s hot as hell.”

“Oh, right, right, that’s right. You had your classes today. How’d they go?” He’s procrastinating.

“They were fine. The last one was a little chaotic, but it was fine. I’m just tired.” The line ahead of me moves an inch.

Through the speakers, I hear my dad’s tongue clicking nervously. “Right, right, yeah…” He trails off.

I have both hands on the wheel now, digging my nails into it. “So…what’s up? How’re you doing?”

He sucks in air like it’s courage. “Uh, yeah, well, listen, honey, there’s something we need to talk about.”

I dig harder, squeeze my thighs together. The car next to me is slowly switching into my lane. On their bumper, there’s a sticker that says, “Always Be Yourself (Unless You Suck)”. A darkness veils us as we finally make it under the bridge. I feel the relief in my arm like a cool blanket. “Okay… What’s going on?”

His exhale is long. “Did you know Mom was going back to the doctor this week to get checked? You know, for that new lump?”

“Uh-huh…” I actually didn’t know because they hardly tell me anything deemed too serious.

“So, it’s back,” he says. “The cancer.”

Bingo! my gut rings, like I’d known it all along. It’s not as surprising as it should be. I count in my head. This would be my mother’s third, no, fourth, diagnosis. The first was when I was in kindergarten; that was a benign form of skin cancer. The breast cancer didn’t come until I was older. It seemed to come and go since then in the following years. My mom always made it sound like more of a nuisance than anything else.

Which is why I plainly say, “Okay. That sucks.” My gut is telling me other things, things my dad hasn’t said yet. “So, what’s the plan this time? I mean, her doctors know what she needs to do, so when are they going to start treatment?”

There’s a long pause. I have to check to make sure our call isn’t disconnected. That happens in this spot sometimes. “Dad? Are you there? Can you hear me?”

“Well, honey, uh, it sounds like this new kind, er, it’s pretty aggressive,” he finally says.

Aggressive. When I think of aggressive, I think of being cut-off. I don’t think of diseases. I don’t think of my people-pleasing mom. I think of this weird person driving in front of me who thought their bumper sticker was probably hilarious. I think of how I feel about being stuck in tourist traffic.

“Okay…,” I say, dragging out the word, processing. “So…?”

I’m coming out from under the overpass, the sun slowly sliding its way up the hood of my car. I can see around the first bend out of Los Gatos now, see the sky above touching the mountain trees. I’m so much closer to home than I feel.

The reborn silence in our conversation makes everything else feel loud: the hum of my A/C; my fingernails against the steering wheel; even the colors of the cars in front of me feel like they’re buzzing. There’s a tingling sensation that feels both as if it is coming from within my body and vibrating all around me, like the world is rewiring, adapting to something I don’t know yet.

When the light finally reaches my windshield, the cloudless sky swallows me again. “Dad? I think I might have bad service. Want me to call you later?”

 “No, no, I’m here. I hear you,” he says. In front of me, a herd of metal and rubber stares back at me with red eyes. And when my dad pours the salt, I have nowhere to escape: “Honey, she only has thirteen months.”