It was late at night on a weekday when my father called me in a panic. Where was his car? Did I know? I felt my face twisting as I tried to figure out what to say. Just under an hour ago, I had promised a police officer over the phone that I would not let my father drive. I’d even gone overboard, some fear of authority kicking in, or maybe it was just my desire to keep my father out of further trouble. Yes, Officer, thank you. I agree. Yes. He absolutely will not drive. You have my word.

Now here he was, begging me to tell him where his car was so he could get it and bring it back home.

“Please, Becky. You have to tell me. I can’t be without my car.”

I stared out my bedroom window into the black night, trying to decide what to tell him.

There had been a shift in my dad over the past few months. He’d been having more and more “brain fog” and getting increasingly exasperated with his own forgetfulness. Long a movie buff, the kind of guy who never forgot a name or a face; who it had been impossible to rent movies with because he’d already seen everything; who had, in fact, earned a PhD in Film Theory at NYU back in the 70s, though he’d never been able to find a job teaching film; now, he was increasingly unable to recall actors’ names, what movies they’d starred in.

I’d hear him on the phone, cursing himself as he tried to summon the name of someone on the screen, grasping in anguish for all that had begun slipping away.

It was more than brain fog, though. An underlying blood disorder had finally caught up with him. He’d been diagnosed with renal failure and had had to begin dialysis. The sudden change in his health left him in a daze of disbelief. The new four-hour treatments three times per week in cold rooms with loud, whirring machines that sent his blood moving out then back in, soon aggravated and exhausted him. He’d begun having panic attacks. He fell once, then again.

When his friend called me that morning to tell me she’d been trying to reach him for days and couldn’t get him by phone, and then I also couldn’t reach him by phone, I began to panic. Was this it? Had he collapsed? Was he laying on the floor, crying out for help?

I called the police department of the Florida beach town where he lived, explained the situation and asked them to do a wellness check on him.

An hour later I got a phone call from my dad. “Did you call the police for me?” He sounded amused, almost flattered.

“Dad!” I shouted, a sudden torrent of tears streaming down my face. “Thank god you’re all right!”

He then went on to explain his version of events: How he hadn’t heard his phone ring the past few days, that was all. How he was totally fine. How just now he’d heard the pounding on his front door. When he’d opened, the policeman had said, “Do you know Becky Tuch?”

My dad looked the cop up and down. The guy had his thumbs in his belt loops, arms akimbo, and a goofy smile on his face.

“I thought you’d ordered me a stripper!” my dad told me.

Of all the things he’d lost, at least his sense of humor was freshly intact.

Later, though, he called again. Did I know where he’d parked his car?

 

I did know where his car was. What he did not remember was that he had driven earlier that day to dialysis. The clinic had called me because they were worried about him driving home. He was frail and forgetful. He seemed on the verge of falling. He asked the same questions over and over. I had called an uber for him, and he had agreed to take the uber home, leave the car by the clinic and get it another time.

This had just happened a few hours ago. He had no memory of it.

When the cops had left his apartment, the female officer called me and insisted that my dad should not be driving. Apparently, from what she saw, his apartment was a mess. He had a stack of mail that did not belong to him. He seemed to think the cops had come to talk to him about his car, and he had rifled through bills to find his registration, even after they repeatedly told him that was not why they were there. He was still wearing the plastic bracelet from a recent visit to the hospital. A large wound on his leg was open and wet.

“I work in vehicular homicide,” the officer told me. “You do not ever want to receive a phone call from me.”

I had yes-Officer’ed her over and over. She was right, after all. It was time for my dad to hand over his keys.

My mistake was that I thought my father would agree. I had not even considered the possibility that he would call me later and demand to know where his car was, so he could pick it up and bring it home. I hadn’t considered how empty and unstable he felt to not know his car wasn’t parked in its usual spot, right in front of his apartment.

Please, he begged. Tell me where the car is.

Dad, I can’t let you drive your car tonight. It’s too dangerous.

I NEED MY CAR.

Maybe you can have someone help you get it tomorrow.

You have to tell me where it is!

I’m sorry, Dad. I just promised the police I wouldn’t let you drive.

I’m fine to drive!

I know. I believe you. It’s just…

Just what?

You are no longer you, Dad.

 

The conversation went on over several phone calls, throughout the hour. In the end, I told him I would think about it.

And I did. I thought hard. About who my father was, who he had been, what I did and did not know to be true about him. One thing I knew for sure was that he was a good driver, a very good driver, and that he was, always had been, very attached to his car.

 

For nearly two decades, he had been a New York City taxi driver. He’d driven while in grad school and continued driving on weekends after leaving academia to teach high school English. During every summer of my childhood he had a dark orange burn in a circle around his left elbow, from where his arm sat hanging out the window of his cab.

My childhood was filled with long car rides in his taxi, the medallion of which at some point in the eighties he had finally purchased. It was in this taxi where I sat in the backseat and scribbled my earliest stories, even a novel. It was in this taxi that he and I made the hours-long drive to Connecticut to see his parents every few months, the trunk of which would then get filled to the brim with food my grandmother would cook and freeze for her thrice-divorced son.

It was his taxi where he got stuck daily in crosstown traffic that sent him exploding with rage. This was the taxi where he was once held up at gunpoint and this was the taxi where he took naps during slow afternoons. This was the taxi whose seats he scrubbed with bleach and this was the taxi in which he picked us up from our mother’s house and drove us to school, home from basketball practice, and came to get us in, always, when we needed him.

“Do you need a ride?”

It was a constant refrain from my childhood.

“Let me know if you need me to pick you up.”

“I’ll drive you.”

“Let me take you.”

“When’s your flight? I’ll meet you when you get in.”

From when I was a teenager: “I don’t care if it’s late. Just call. I’ll come get you, wherever you are.”

And for so many years, he did. I would call. And he always came to get me, wherever I was.

 

There are tests they give to older drivers to see if they’re still eligible to drive. I’ve learned that most old people do not take such tests. Florida, someone recently told me, is an absolute hazard, the streets full of people who should no longer be driving. It amuses to consider, street after street of stubborn octogenarians squinting into the road.

But of course, it’s not funny at all.

And yet, how do you take away something so fundamental to a person’s sense of themselves?

But this was not a time for sentiment. He could kill someone on the road. He could kill himself.

It took me a long time to return his final call.

I thought. I deliberated. I sat by the window, brain empty of any clear way forward. Was there a moral law I could use to guide me through this? Some kind of utilitarian principle? If I told him where his car was and let him drive, was I willing to accept the consequences? If I told him where his car was, did that make me an immoral person? Evil?

If I didn’t tell him, if I refused, was I willing to accept those consequences? His disappointment, his fury. His sorrow. His pain. His grief over the life that was gone for him, the man he would never again be.

I thought and thought. And then I finally picked up the phone and dialed his number. I took a deep breath. And I did the thing that on some level I knew I would do all along. For just a little while longer, that night, I held the world together in the shape we had always known it to be. And in that world, I did the only thing I seemed capable of at that moment. I had to set my father free.