Driver’s Test

Kelsey Gilchrist

I failed my first driver’s test. Spectacularly.
After surviving the uncontrolled intersection and the railroad crossing, the last phase of the exam got me. Mid-parallel park, I turned the wheel in the wrong direction, steering my car directly toward the parked truck next to it. The examiner—a gruff, grey-haired man with tiny glasses perched on his nose—yelped and grabbed the wheel before I could execute a slow-motion crash into the side of the other vehicle.
The moment I surrendered control to him and jammed the brake with my foot, I knew I’d failed. Abruptly, the triumphant moment I had been envisioning for months—returning to the registry victorious, ready to sign my new driver’s licence—evaporated.
I had already made plans for that licence. Envisioned excursions into the city and road trips down scenic highways. The destinations of my imagined journeys weren’t important. It was the act of going—of leaving the tiny Alberta town where I had spent the first sixteen years of my life—that enticed me. Recently, it had begun to feel suffocating. The smallness, the closeness of everything. A driver’s licence was the ability to go somewhere else—anywhere else.
“Obviously, you failed,” said the examiner once the car was stopped.
It was a rude way to tell me what I already knew, but he had been abrasive throughout the test. At the beginning, I’d tried to make a little small talk to break the tension, but he ignored me, choosing to peer down the street instead of replying. And after we pulled away, he conducted the exam in crushing, deliberate silence, punctuated by the occasional sigh or grunt of what sounded like annoyance.
Still, he didn’t make me almost crash into a parked car. That was my fault.
My grandpa and my brother, Paul, were waiting for me when we returned. I didn’t have to tell them I failed; they had already inferred it from the fact that we were gone less than fifteen minutes. Also, you could probably tell by the look on my face.
After we left the registry, Grandpa drove us to the hospice, where Mom had been admitted the evening before. We hadn’t seen it yet, and I was still unclear on what exactly a hospice was. I understood that it was the place where she would stay to finish the dying process, but I was still confused about why it was different from a hospital.
It became clear when we pulled up in front of a single-storey building, which resembled a large country home more than a medical facility. I was surprised to see that it was surrounded by well-tended gardens, and there was even a gazebo and what looked like a network of walking paths extending across the property. We passed through the front doors, and I noticed that the lobby was even more impressive, complete with vaulted ceilings, shining hardwood floors, and plush couches. You wouldn’t have known it was a medical establishment at all, if not for the extra wide doorways to accommodate wheelchairs.
We entered Mom’s room. Never mind—definitely a medical centre. The hospital bed and the big scary machines were a dead giveaway.
My mom looked how she had looked for months now. Pale, eerily thin, and distant—nothing like my vibrant, rosy-cheeked, always-present mother. The distant part, I knew, was because of the drugs, which were protecting her from the pain of the tumours that were pressing on her torso.
When she filled out her end-of-life plan the year before, the nurses and social workers explained that if she wanted, she could refuse the drugs so she could be more alert and present to speak with her loved ones near the end.
Mom laughed. “Why would I want that?” she apparently asked. (I wasn’t there, but she told me the story later.)
Maybe it was selfish. I think it was smart. Every moment that I’ve seen my mother in pain is etched into my brain—each its own trauma. By making sure her last moments were pain-free, Mom saved us from our own pain, too.
When we arrived at the hospice, she was in a kind of drugged-out haze. She gave a weak hello, and Dad leaped up to greet us. Immediately, he launched into an overview of the hospice. Mealtimes, walking paths, call button for the nurses, visiting hours. It was a completely unnecessary amount of information, but my brother and I knew that when Grant was distressed, he managed logistics. We let him continue. He was too busy with hospice details to remember to ask about my test, but that was for the best.
After that first day, we got into a routine. My father stayed at the hospice all day, and I was dropped off by Grandpa or a neighbour or a friend once school let out. Paul flew back and forth from B.C. while he finished up university exams, which he privately told me he was failing one by one.
Spending time with Mom wasn’t exactly pleasant, but sometimes it was okay. She had moments when she was alert and chatty. We talked about normal things—my high school classes, gossip about relatives who were visiting, speculation about who would be cut from the team at my upcoming soccer tryouts. Often her lucidity would end abruptly, or she would fall asleep. Then, the room would suddenly become very lonely.
The hospice served meals and they always had little baked goods sitting on the counter in the lobby. After a few days, I knew the varieties, what time of day they arrived, which kinds were good and which ones had gross bits of coconut hidden inside.
It’s odd, the things that still matter even when death waits so close.
A week into the new routine, I took my driver’s test again. To my dismay, the same examiner greeted me when I arrived.
“I see you’re back,” he said.
No “Good morning.” No “How are you today?” Just that. And I didn’t think I was imagining the patronizing tone in his voice. Not that the examiner was ever not patronizing to me during the brief time we had already spent together, but it seemed to be more severe—and intentional—this time.
I had been feeling some nerves that morning, but they instantly dissolved. In their place, I felt a flame of something else. Anger.
I pushed down the feeling and offered a thin smile. “I’m ready this time.”
Instead of replying, he made a weird smirk and grabbed his clipboard.
No way. I was not going through this bullshit again.
We both climbed into the car. Before I began all the mirror check and seat-adjusting nonsense, I turned and addressed the examiner directly, looking him right in his ugly glasses.
“Listen, I’m a good driver. I’ve practised nearly every day with my grandpa for almost a year now and I took driver’s ed and everything. The only reason I failed last time is because you made me so uncomfortable. Could you—I don’t know—just talk to me about the weather or something while we drive?”
I could tell he was stunned. People are rarely that direct in real life.
The examiner had no way of knowing what I was thinking, which was what’s the worst he can do to me?
A moment passed. Then, to my surprise, he gave a stiff nod. I took it to mean he was agreeing to my terms.
And sure enough, as we pulled out of the lot, he attempted small talk. I made a flawless left turn at a controlled intersection. He asked me about school. I told him about my AP English class while executing a perfect hill parking job (downhill, with curb). Did I play any sports? Yes, soccer, for a club in the city, I explained as I navigated a tricky three-way stop.
We approached the last leg of the test—parallel park—and he asked me about my plans for spring break next week.
“Well, my mom was just moved to hospice care,” I said, in the same tone I used while talking about my English paper. Descriptive, matter of fact, polite. Unruffled. “So, I’ll be spending most of the time with her. She has stage four breast cancer with metastases in her back and lungs.”
I heard the examiner’s sharp intake of breath, but I didn’t turn to look at him. I focused on lining up the right-hand mirror with the minivan beside me.
“I’m so sorry,” he said quietly.
I turned the wheel—the correct direction this time—and pivoted the car to a perfect forty-five degrees from the curb.
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s been a tough time.”
I straightened the wheel, looked over my shoulder, and reversed into the parking spot. Just before the car touched the curb, I spun the wheel and eased it back, perfectly aligning with the van in front of it. I pulled the parking brake and waited.
The examiner took a small, almost imperceptible beat before scribbling something on his sheet.
“Am I good to go?” I asked.
“Yes, take us back to the registry please,” he said. All the gruffness had disappeared from his voice.
The car was silent on the ride back. Finally, he said, “When did your mother go into hospice care?”
“Last Friday,” I said.
“The day before your first test.”
“Yes.”
We returned to the registry. He gave me a carbon copy of my grading sheet, covered in check marks. A lady took my photo and asked me to record my signature on a tablet. Then she gave me a temporary licence to use until my new one came in the mail.
The examiner gave me a curt nod goodbye and wished me good luck with my English essay. I knew what he meant.
I drove straight from my test to the hospice. When I arrived, I caught Mom in a rare alert moment. Not only was she awake, but she seemed aware of where she was and who I was.
When I told her I passed my test, her smile filled up her whole face.
“I am so … proud of you,” she said. She spoke slowly and deliberately, pushing each word out with extraordinary effort. I could see her smile slip as the pain pushed through from underneath.
We hugged. I told her the story, but a lighthearted version. In my retelling, the examiner was comically grumpy rather than mean, and when I got to the bit when I told him to be nice to me, I exaggerated my little speech for dramatic effect. I didn’t mention the moment when I told him about the hospice.
She laughed. I laughed. We talked until she fell asleep.
I didn’t know it yet, but that was the last conversation I would ever have with my mom.
I drove home by myself. The hospice was in the country, and I had to take rural backroads, gravel grinding loudly under my tires.
I thought it would feel scarier, driving by myself. In each of the thousand times I had imagined it, I always thought I would feel jittery without someone in the passenger seat to offer directions or grab the wheel if I accidentally turned it the wrong way.
Instead, it felt the same as it always did. It was quieter, maybe, without a companion for conversation, but everything else—the gear shift and the turn signals and the mirrors and the lights—was identical. I was alone, but I still knew what to do.
It was past dusk, and the road was deserted, so I flicked on my high beams the way I had learned in driver’s ed. The two lights poured out from the front of the car, crossing together to form a single beam extending into the night. I found myself wondering where the beam stopped. The light was powerful, but it couldn’t go on forever. Somewhere out there in front of my car, whether it was a few metres or a few kilometres, the light ended, and the darkness began.
About three minutes into the journey, I felt a tightening in my chest. Something I had been holding in for days was pushing on my sternum and my throat, as if it was asking to be released.
I pulled over to the side of the road and immediately, big, wet tears emerged from the inner corners of my eyes. They ran down my face and neck in steady trails, pooling at the collar of my sweater. My breathing hitched and hiccupped, and I let it. I let the tears fall and my throat catch and my body shake, releasing myself to the violent, cathartic ugliness of it all.
Eventually, the stream slowed to a trickle, and then a drip. The shaking ended and I started to breathe normally again, chest rising at regular intervals instead of shuddering. I felt suddenly, eerily calm.
For one more moment, I sat in silence, meditating on the sensation of the last few tears drying on my cheeks. Then, I put the car back in gear, shoulder-checked, and pulled onto the road.
I gripped the wheel and leaned onto the gas pedal, gently accelerating into the path of my headlights. As the car sped faster, the road blurred, grey cement and yellow paint blending into one another as it disappeared under my tires.
I was driving.

Kelsey Gilchrist

is a Toronto-based writer and marketing strategist. Born and raised in southern Alberta, she writes about her relationship with her childhood and hometown. She is working on her first novel.