gps

My mother can't read GPS instructions. She struggles to pronounce street names and she's never mastered the distinction between right and left.

"You do it," she'd say, frazzled, pushing her phone in my face as my dad, city-raised and rage-bred, is at it again - the fucking passing traffic, the fucking streetlights, the fucking streets, the damn Pittsburgh roads, damn fucking potholes,this shit city with no pride–oh, all the jackasses came out today– double hit on the horn– where are the goddamn directions? Maureen? Maureen!

"You do it." She waits for no response, unloads this small burden, and then closes her eyes with exaggerated weariness so the audience in her head can see what an exacting toll this family – what a fucking moron, cutting me off, I'll cut him off, hick in a fucking chevy truck, this crappy town of heroin addicts-where am I going, huh? Where am I going? Someone give me the goddamn directions or I'm going to lose it. My mother is still like a corpse. She irritates my dad when animated, with her incessant and ill-timed babbling and ponderous questions, like when she asked if football uniforms included socks in the middle of the Giants game at Dad's favorite pub, but nothing she says bothers him as much as her silence.

Maureen!

"Turn up here, Dad." Some genetics are predisposed to the growth of tumors, but mine are to an irregular vocal tremor. It wakes now, like an insomniac snapping to action at four in the morning. Nothing in our family is ever subtle.

Turn? Turn?! Where? What do you mean turn? Are you a fucking moron? Where do I turn?

"L-l-l-eft."

It's too late. He's sped past the turn. My mother inhales sharply, her eyes closed so effortlessly an alien unfamiliar with human anatomy would not assume they open. I don't want to hold the phone anymore. My hands rattle like bones in a coffin and I hold out this shaky grenade for someone – for anyone – to grab. But my mother stays quiet, stays still.

Mother, please.

My mother lived through a tsunami when she was a girl in Indonesia. Perhaps that's how she knows, even with her eyes closed, when one will strike again. The ominous retreat of the shore, and the foreboding swell that followed, decimating villages and forests and life, etched itself in her soul.

He doesn't slow the car down, but the waves come in alternating swings. One knocks the phone out of my hands. The second knocks me. The earthquake in my veins cannot protect me. The waves come so fast and when they recede, they're red like the rivers flowing from my nose to my chin.

My father won't wreck the car because lucky twists of fate are saved for the bastards. And if he had slowed the car down, if he had glanced once at the road, maybe my hands wouldn't shake as they do. Because if I knew he'd never crash the vehicle with his family inside it, I'd know he'd never kill his wife or daughter. But the only reason my father won't wreck the car is because the devil won't let him. He doesn't welcome my father into his house anymore than we do.