Chapter 18 #2
Ricky clapped my shoulder. “Did he tell you that? He’s such a kidder. This one’s a regular driving fool.”
“No, but you said you can’t drive stick,” Erik reminded me.
Ricky waved a dismissive hand. “Anybody can learn. I can teach you, too, if you want. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Really?” Erik brightened. “That would be cool. I was telling Mr. Popp, I need to get a car soon. He didn’t think I should get a Jeep, so maybe I should learn stick and get something sporty, like a Mini Cooper or an MX-5.”
“Sure, those are fun choices,” Ricky said, steering me out of the lobby. Once we were outside, he added, “How that kid is still even remotely closeted is beyond me.”
Ricky opened the passenger door of the car for himself, then leaned over to unlock the driver door for me and stuck the key in the ignition. I plopped into the driver seat once more, my innards automatically coiling tightly into a protective ball at the memory of this place.
“Clutch in, engine on,” Ricky said cheerfully. “And we’ll need lights. It’s the silver knob, top left.”
I groped around the upper corner of the dash, landing on a metal knob. I gave it a push, and washer fluid sprayed onto the windshield.
“A clean windshield won’t hurt, either,” Ricky chuckled, leaning over me to twist the knob, turning on the wipers to swipe away the fluid, then pulling the other knob, the one that I hadn’t seen next to the wiper knob, to turn on the lights.
With much better coaching than Ricky had been able to provide earlier in the afternoon, I was able to back slowly out of the parking spot.
In the wide, sparsely populated lot that served the inn, the spa, and the bistro next door, I was able to make wide, slow turns, getting a feel for the steering and the brakes and stalling only a few times.
Then Ricky had me drive a loop around the bistro building, accumulating enough speed to finally get into second gear.
“Okay,” I said, panting nervously as I sped around the building, the tires making squealing noises that may or may not have been audible outside my head. “Changing gears is easier than getting started, but I don’t know about this kind of speed.”
“Oliver, you’re going ten miles per hour. Fifteen, tops. We have enough room here, you should try to get it into third, but you’re going to have to go faster.”
“Faster?”
I gathered all my courage, eventually working myself up to twenty-five miles per hour and a slightly boggy shift into third. “Very good,” Ricky said. “Now see if you can bring it to a stop from here.”
I remembered that I could go into neutral as I braked, bringing the car to a smooth stop that impressed even me. This was apparently enough to satisfy Ricky that I was ready for the open road. He surveyed the driveway that led up the short, steep hill to the highway.
“Gosh, I hope there isn’t much traffic at this hour,” he mused, sending what little confidence I’d been able to muster into a tailspin.
“To get up this hill, you’re going to need to keep it in a low gear, probably second, but give it some gas.
Don’t stop at the top until you’re on level ground.
We have to turn left onto the highway. Ready? ”
“Nope,” I said, putting the car in gear and starting to roll toward the hill.
Ricky’s prayers were answered—mine, too, if you didn’t count the ones about not having to drive in the first place, which had very much not been answered—and there were no lights coming down the highway in either direction at the top of the hill.
I didn’t make a complete stop, rolling slowly into my wide left turn across the two southbound lanes.
“Never even driven in California, and you’ve already started doing the California roll,” Ricky chided me.
“What’s that?”
“It’s where you don’t stop for stop signs. You’d better get in the right lane.”
“Don’t we need to turn left?” I protested.
“Yes,” Ricky said evenly, “but my lights aren’t very bright and you’re doing twenty in a fifty-five. If someone comes up behind us, we’re toast.”
I cautiously dipped my foot into the accelerator as I steered a bit more sharply into the right lane than I had intended, the needle on the speedometer jumping to a dizzying thirty-five as I popped the gear lever into third.
“Look at you,” Ricky said admiringly. “Changing lanes and shifting gears at the same time. You’re learning quickly.”
“Don’t patronize me,” I said, leaning forward over the wheel and squinting at the darkness ahead.
“Where’s that turn? What’s that?” A pair of lights emerged over a small rise in the road up ahead, rapidly growing larger and brighter as they approached, creating dazzling, blinding glare in the streaks left by the washer fluid on the edges of the windshield where the wipers didn’t reach. “Ricky, I can’t see! What do I do?”
“Look down,” he said calmly. “Look at the white line along the right-hand edge of the lane until the other car passes.”
“Okay,” I said, my eyes readjusting as the light shifted to my peripheral vision. “But what if I miss our turn?”
“You won’t,” Ricky said soothingly. “Our turn isn’t for—shoot. There it is.”
“What? Where?” The other car barely completed its pass as I jerked the wheel to the left, my own headlights catching the sign pointing to the lighthouse in their arc.
Unfortunately, the sign was a little farther away than I’d judged, and I discovered that I had turned a few yards shy of the cross street, bumpily cutting the corner, whizzing narrowly between the post for the street sign at the corner on my right and a couple of large trees on my left before bouncing back up onto the asphalt of the road down to the lighthouse, slewing a bit as I corrected my path back into the proper lane.
“Oh, boy,” Ricky said, the corner of my eye catching his hand bracing against the dashboard.
If I’d been less busy driving, I might have appreciated that I was finally paying him back for some of the white-knuckle rides he’d taken me on in Washington.
As it was, I was worriedly noticing that as our altitude decreased heading down the hill to the parking area for the lighthouse, our speed seemed to be increasing in inverse proportion.
“Eep,” I said.
“Brakes, brakes,” Ricky responded urgently. “Put it in neutral!”
Right. The parking area was directly ahead, a lone car, Wiley and Tawny’s Porsche SUV, glittering in the moonlight bouncing off the water in the inlet below.
I rode the brakes the rest of the way down the hill, putting the car in neutral and swinging wide to park on the other side of the Porsche.
But yet again, I misjudged. Hiding behind the Porsche was another, smaller car, and I saw it almost, but not quite, early enough to adjust my angle to go around it.
Almost.
They were so brief, the thump and the tinkle, that I could almost try to convince myself that they hadn’t happened. “Hey,” Ricky said dazedly from the passenger seat as I pulled on the parking brake and turned off the engine. “We made it, and got your first accident out of the way. Big night.”
Aw, crud. They had happened. “I’m so sorry,” I said, collapsing into a pile of spent adrenaline and frayed nerves and remorse, gripping the steering wheel to barely keep myself upright.
I hadn’t wanted to drive. I didn’t have a license, didn’t have insurance, and, most of all, hadn’t wanted to damage Ricky’s car.
“It happens,” he said amiably. “No time to worry too much about it now.”
As he gathered his crutches and slowly lifted himself out of the car, I hopped out, flicking on the flashlight on my phone and inspecting the corner of the other car’s back bumper.
There was some cracked plastic trim, a broken reflector lens, and a small scrape and wrinkle along the corner.
I snapped a photo of the damage, absently thinking it might be needed for an insurance claim, and realizing that I had no idea how insurance worked.
I moved to the front of Ricky’s car. The chrome bumper gleamed smoothly under the glow of my flashlight, with only a small streak of paint transfer where it had come into contact with the other car interrupting its solid-metal perfection.
I snapped a photo of that, too, then tried a fingernail on the paint, finding that it came off easily.
“Good news is, your car’s fine,” I said, straightening up. “The other one has some boo-boos. Should I leave a note? I took pictures for your insurance. Was that the right thing to do?”
“Hey, Oliver,” Ricky said impatiently. “You notice how there are two other cars here? That means that Tawny might not be alone. She might be in trouble. We gotta boogie here.”
I bolted to attention. “Oh my god, you’re right,” I said. “Come on!” I started toward the wide gravel trail leading to the lighthouse, almost breaking into a run before I remembered that Ricky was on crutches.
He started out at a reasonably good pace, all things considered, but I was already having to strain to slow my pace to match his, and that was before the trail started heading uphill.
The farther we went, the higher and further away the lighthouse seemed to loom up on the bluff in the distance.
I alternated between forcing myself to take long, slow strides, and dancing nervously around Ricky to keep myself from getting ahead of him.
He kept pushing ahead, grunting a little now and then, until finally, with the lighthouse somewhere around a dark curve up ahead, no longer even in view, he brought himself to a stop.
“Go ahead if you want,” he huffed. “I need a second. I promise it’ll be short, but I need a second.”
“I’m not going to go without you,” I said. “We’re a team. I wouldn’t know what to do on my own. I wouldn’t feel safe, and I wouldn’t feel right leaving you.”
“You’d be fine, and you’d figure out what to do,” he said, giving me a wan smile. “But it is more fun when we’re together. And you’d be right to feel guilty about leaving me.”