THE LAST RIDE

By Maddy

With my heels in hand, I stood in the street like a wild person, waving my arms; it was late (or very early), it was cold, and it was high time to go home. The taxi driver, who immediately understood how desperate I was, slammed on the brakes across the street, smoothly swung his car into my lane with a U-turn, and opened the door for me.

Once seated in the back, he looked at me with a broad smile in his rearview mirror. ‘Was it disappointing?’ I tried to look as neutral as possible. ‘The party. Was it disappointing? Or did you just drink a bit too much?’ It must have been the late hour, or the fact that he hit the nail on the head on two fronts, but I let myself be lured out of my shell the old-fashioned way. And that while I excel at silence and related matters that squash an unwanted conversation within two seconds.

‘Both.’ It was like it goes with parties and high expectations: they are rarely fulfilled. The company was moody, my shoes were already hurting my feet after ten minutes, and the music was – we can be brief about that – downright terrible. But it was a good friend's party, so sneaking out was not an option. Drinking heavily in the hope that it would get better was. And it was like it goes with drinking heavily at a not-fun party: that rarely ends well. My moody company disregarded friendship etiquette and headed home, leaving me in an even worse mood.

‘The taxi driver listened to it all and was still laughing broadly. ‘I had a party tonight too.”

The taxi driver listened to it all and was still laughing broadly. ‘I had a party tonight too.’ I had been caught off guard. His question turned out to be just a prelude to his own story, and before I could feign interest, he was already off. ‘It’s my brother and sister’s birthday. They were born on the same day and died on the same day.’ I didn’t need to ask anything because he would keep talking anyway, but in the rearview mirror, he kept a close eye on my reaction. It swung back and forth between empathy and panic, while I wondered if I had sat down with a half-crazy person in the car. What kind of taxi was this anyway? There was a light on the roof, right? I looked up, but surprisingly, I couldn’t see anything through the roof. The taxi driver took my wide-eyed expression as encouragement and stepped it up a notch: ‘We were always three of us, because we are all just one year apart. They call that an Irish triplet. But they both had the gene, and then you get it anyway. I didn’t have the gene. We only found that out when we did the test. My mother had it, well, they didn’t want to be like that. She walked around the street at night in her birthday suit, and I had to go pick her up, with the taxi.’ I looked at my bare feet and then at the smiling face of the driver. I asked anyway: ’What happened then?‘

‘My brother was the first to show symptoms. He became aggressive. And then they both got out together. On their birthday. Four years ago.’
I said nothing, because there are some stories that can’t be commented on at all. He was still looking at me in his rearview mirror, and I looked back, although I silently wished he would occasionally look at the road.

‘So that was today?’
‘Yes. Well, yesterday. It’s already tomorrow.’
‘Congratulations.’
He laughed again. ‘Thank you. You’re the first to say that. Everyone else says: ‘How terrible.’’

I realized that he had told this story to all his passengers throughout the evening, and I felt simultaneously a bit less burdened and even sadder.

We were standing in front of my door, and I settled the fare. ‘Are you going to keep working?’

He leaned over his dashboard and looked up at the sky. It was slowly turning orange-pink.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m going home too. This night is over.’