Deathwish 017: Sara
“my father decided to end his life, in a Best Western motel off the highway”
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Father’s Day, June, 2004. Dad was dead almost five years. We were driving home from Los Angeles where we’d visited our grandfather who was suffering from bladder cancer (he’d be gone by August). The drive to our mother’s took almost two hours, and we were twenty minutes from home in Temecula, an unremarkable city of tract homes and strip malls. It’s remarkable to my family, however, because it’s the puzzling location where my father decided to end his life, in a Best Western motel off the highway.
We’d just passed the motel and I wondered if my sister was thinking of him also. She was driving in the fast lane. I looked over my right shoulder and saw a truck that appeared to move toward us in slow motion. Look out, I said vaguely, just before it hit.
We spun in a cloud of gravel and I wondered if we would die together, so close to that motel. She screeched like a frightened, wild animal when we slammed into the center divide.
We jumped out, exhilarated. The truck was gone. My elbow hurt, but not much, so we declined the ambulance when it arrived. It felt mature, almost bohemian, to do so.
A tow truck picked us up and we arranged for a ride home from a friend (our mother was still at her parents’). The cheerful driver dropped us at TGI Friday’s when we could think of nowhere else to wait. I held a bag of ice beneath my elbow (the only thing we’d ordered), while my sister called our mom and relayed the story delicately. Mom asked where we were, and when my sister gave our location, we cracked into unexpected laughter. Mom was unamused by what she believed was a sick joke, but we were delirious with gratitude to be delivering the news of our survival from TGIF’s in Temecula.
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To read the previous installment, "Deathwish 016: Heather," go here. To participate in Deathwish, find details here.
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Sara was born in Tustin, CA, and lives in Los Angeles, CA.