In March 1996, a few months before he drove into a tram stop, my father bought an old Ford Torino with the money he’d won on a horse called Holy Moly. He was a fast, erratic driver, and it made him happy for a while, that car — the roar of it, the faded yellow phoenix on the black bonnet, the way the road seemed to open up for him. He hated traffic, but when all the lights are green, you can slide through the universe like a spirit without a body. Then things started to go wrong, and he had to spend a lot of money trying to fix them.

I was seventeen years old when it happened. My sister, Tara, was a year younger. Our mother was away at a yoga retreat. At the time, I don’t think any of us really believed he was trying to kill himself. What he was trying to do, we assumed, was crash and claim the insurance. That was the sort of thing he would have done, and in fact, I half recalled him saying something to that effect once. Even now, so many years later, I still sometimes believe this to be the truth.

In any case, my father died before we could ask him what he’d been thinking. But I also know that it’s possible to think or feel a number of contradictory things at the same time and to act decisively anyway. Maybe he didn’t know which of the possible outcomes he preferred, death or insurance, maybe they were both okay in that moment, and what he really wanted was the thrill of sudden fate bearing down on him again. He was forty-three years old. I think he had been unhappy for most of my life…

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