Sparrow Hill Road

by Seanan McGuire

  “Thank you.” I tug my borrowed coat tighter, smelling old perfume, old sex, old lies. My lies are some of the oldest of them all, but I tell them for the very best of reasons. “I’d really appreciate a ride.” Rides are what I don’t live for, after all.

  The waitress who takes Larry’s money looks at me a little too hard, a little too intently. She knows me. She’s deep enough into the twilight Americas to know me, but she’s still in the shallows. She’s still too close to the daylight layers to understand why she knows, or what, exactly, it is that she’s seeing. I flash her a smile. She steps backward, counts Larry’s change wrong twice, and finally—once she has the register closed again—flees into the back.

  She won’t be here much longer. She’ll go back to the daylight, leave this blacktop twilight to the people who can breathe its air and not worry about suffocating. That’s good. People like her should get out while they still can, to make up for all the people who never get the chance.

  Then Larry leads me out of the diner, out into the night, and the waitress doesn’t matter anymore. We’re on the road again, and there’s nothing that can save us now.

  Most truckers have permanent addresses, places they can sleep when they’re not rolling down the midnight miles, eating distance and turning it into dreams. Very few truckers consider those addresses to be anything resembling a home. They live and breathe for their steel darlings, those eighteen-wheeled wives who carry them so faithfully, and understand what it is to be one half of a marriage that goes deeper than passion, all the way down into true, undying love.

  Larry’s truck shines like a beacon through the outside dark, glittering with a light he’s never seen. If I asked him, if I had a way to frame the question, I bet he’d tell me he’s felt it. That he feels it every time he crawls into his little wandering-man’s bedroll and closes his eyes: the arms and the protections of his lover, soothing him into sleep.

  He sees me staring at her, rapt, and reads the message on my face for what it is, even if he doesn’t see the reasons for it. “Isn’t she a beauty?” She shivers when he puts his hand against her door, a loving bride welcoming her husband home. She’s missed him so. If only he could see how much she loves him.

  “She is,” I say solemnly, and he opens the door for me, and I step into the open arms of his lover.

  She knows me, like the waitress knew me, like the routewitches and the ambulomancers know me. She knows what’s coming as soon as the door closes behind me, and the question hangs heavy in the cabin air: Is there another way?

  I press my palm flat against the worn leather of her dashboard. It’s warm, like a beating heart. The heat spreads through me, wiping away the frost. I’m riding. Even if the truck isn’t rolling yet, I’m doing what a hitchhiker is supposed to do. I’m riding, and I’m wearing a stranger’s coat, and my belly is full of diner food eaten alongside a good man’s last supper. That’s enough to bring around the thaw.

  Some accidents can be avoided; some drivers can be saved. Some . . . can’t. No, I tell her, and she sighs. It’s a deep, shuddering sigh, one that even Larry feels as he’s getting in on the driver’s side.

  “Now, don’t you be that way,” he says, patting the steering wheel. “I just had your shocks looked at.”

  “You talk to your truck?” My hand stays warm after I pull it away from the dash. I try to sound curious and amused at the same time, like the idea strikes me as funny somehow. All I really manage is wistful.

  “I spend more time with her than I do with anybody else,” he says, and slides his key into her ignition. The engine comes alive with a muted roar, like a lioness ready to defend her mate from the wilderness that surrounds them. Larry pats the wheel again, the gesture seeming to come automatically. “She’s a good girl. She’s always done her best by me.”

  “She always will.” I lean back into my seat, pretending not to see the curious look Larry sends in my direction. I just keep my eyes on the distant freeway lights. The headlights come on, and then we’re away, and it’s too late for anything beyond the open road.

  The night closes in around us on every side. Larry guides the truck around a gentle curve, and says, “So, Rose, what were you doing back there? A girl like you, in a place like that, well . . . it’s just not safe. Not everyone is out to help. You’re old enough, you should know that.”

  “I do.” The road is unspooling all around us, and the air tastes like lilies and ashes and miles that flicker out and die like candles. Not long now. We’re almost there. I wish like hell that this could have been different, but I know the hopeless cases, and I know the ones I never could have fought for. “I just . . . I’d been hitching a ride, and the guy I was driving with decided he wanted to go in a different direction. So I thought I’d stop in and see if I could find anybody who was going my way.”

  I don’t need to see his frown. I can hear it. “You never asked which way I was going.”

  “You told me Detroit.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “I left home when I was sixteen. I didn’t have a choice.” I let the sentence sit there to be examined, letting him fill in all the spaces between the words, letting him realize that I still look sixteen. He doesn’t know that I’ll always look this way. The story he tells himself will be terrible, because the stories we tell ourselves always are, but it won’t come anywhere close to the truth. It never does. Until they finish their falls onto the ghostroads, into the twilight, they never start those stories with “How did you die?”

  “Oh.” His voice is soft. Silence closes in around us for a while. Not long enough. “Don’t you have any family you could go to?”

  Family. There’s an interesting thought. Show up on the doorstep of some woman twice my age who has my older brother’s eyes, and try to explain who I am, where I’ve been, and why I went away. I shake my head.

  “Not really. We were never a very close family, and there’s no one I could go to.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about me.” I offer a smile across the darkened cabin. Something flickers in his expression, something old and sad and scared. We’re getting close to the border; close to the final fall. He’s starting to feel the wind from the onrushing ending, and he still can’t see it clear enough to do a damn thing about it. They never can. “I’ve been on the road a long time. I can take care of myself.”

  The truck rattles on beneath us, eating the road, turning distance into dreams. I have to try. I always have to try. It might hurt less if I stopped, and I think that’s why I do it.

  “Have you ever heard the story of the woman at the diner?” Such an innocent question. Such a guilty answer.

  Larry laughs. “Now we’re telling ghost stories? I guess that’s one way to get me to stop asking personal questions. Yes, I’ve heard of her.”

  “How does the story go? The way you heard it for the first time, I mean. It’s different everywhere you go.”

  “Road stories always are.” He clears his throat. “Uh, the story goes that she was a cheerleader.”

  That’s a variation I haven’t heard before. “A cheerleader?”

  “Yeah. She went to some middle-of-nowhere school, and all she wanted was to get to Hollywood. So she and her boyfriend saved their pennies until they thought they had enough, and then they hit the road. Only he lost control of his car less than three hours outside of town. It flipped over, and he was killed instantly. She managed to pull herself from the wreck and went staggering off, looking for help. She found a truck stop. The truckers said they’d help her. They put her in the diner with a cup of coffee while they went down the road to find her boyfriend. They wanted to see if maybe she was wrong and he was still breathing.”

  “He wasn’t, was he.” He never is. In the versions where I have a boyfriend in the car, he’s always dead on impact. Guess it would screw up the story if their little wandering lady wasn’t doing her wandering alone.

  “No. So they covered up his face and said they were sor
ry, and one of them stayed to wait for the police while the others went back to the diner. But by the time they got there, the girl was already dead. Her throat had been slit. The short-order cook was gone. He left a note saying their meals were all free, and thanking them for the tip.”

  I shudder. Murder. Also new.

  Larry doesn’t see, or maybe Larry just thinks it’s the sort of delicious fear that comes with a good ghost story. Either way, he keeps on going. “The one trucker they’d left back on the road, see, he doesn’t know she’s dead. So when she comes walking down the road a few minutes after the police take her boy away, he just thinks she got tired of waiting. He tells her that her boyfriend’s dead, and she cries so hard. She cries like her heart’s been broken. The trucker, he’s a good guy, and he asks if there’s anything he can do.”

  “So she asks him to take her home,” I whisper.

  “Yeah,” says Larry. “She’s cold, so he gives her his coat, and he drives her all the way back to where she started from. Drops her off in front of her very own house. It’s not until the next day that he realizes she didn’t give back his coat, and so next time he’s driving that route, he stops by. Figures he’ll see how she’s been doing. Only the police are waiting. The police have been waiting ever since her body was found, tucked into her own bed, with her throat cut ear to ear, wearing a stranger’s coat.”

  “God.” The ways the story twists and changes never fail to surprise me. People are nothing if not inventive in the lies they tell.

  “He tries to say that he’s innocent, but nobody believes him. He gets the death penalty, of course, and when they bury him, this pretty little teenage girl comes up to his wife. Walks up to her right next to the trucker’s grave. She says she’s sorry. She says she didn’t mean for that to happen. She just wanted to go home. Then she walks away. The wife realizes who she was and runs after her, but she’s already gone, like she’d never been there at all . . . except for the coat. The trucker’s coat, hanging on a tombstone.”

  “That’s a new version,” I say, trying to break the silence that the story leaves behind. “I haven’t heard that one before.”

  “Really? How many variations do you suppose there are?”

  “Hundreds.” The weariness in my voice could be used to veil every star in the twilight. The smell of lilies is strong now. Not much longer.

  “I guess that little ghost-girl gets around.”

  “You have no idea,” I say, and Larry laughs, and that’s it: no more warnings. We’re in this till the end.

  The road signs flicker and blur in the dark outside the cab, Larry’s headlights cutting a bright banner through the night. He chatters about inconsequential things, all of them mingling and blurring like the signs, until they’re nothing but the final solo in the symphony of a man’s life. Would things have gone differently if I hadn’t been here? I used to think so, but I know better now. He’s tired. It comes off him in waves, under the lilies and the ashes and the growing scent of empty rooms. If I hadn’t been here for him to talk to, he would have just dozed off at the wheel.

  I don’t condemn them, no matter what some people say, and I can’t always save them. That I can save any of them at all is a miracle. Most of the time, all I can do is get them home.

  The other truck looms out of the darkness like a demon, whipping around a blind curve at the sort of speed that’s never safe, not even when the sun is up. Larry swears and grabs the wheel, hauls it hard to the side, fights to dodge and then fights even harder to keep the truck under control. There’s a crash behind us, the sound of metal tearing into metal, and all the stars go out overhead.

  Larry doesn’t notice. Larry is too busy clinging white-knuckled to the steering wheel, eyes wide and terrified, breath coming in panting hitches. “That was . . . oh, Jesus. Rose, are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  One more thing he hasn’t noticed: my coat is gone. It’s an artifact of the daylight, and I left it on the road when we dropped down. It’ll be found among the wreckage. The man who gave it to me may have a few questions to answer, if they can find him. “I’m fine, Larry. I’m not hurt.” It’s the honest truth. I’m not the one he should be asking.

  “That was—that was way too close. We have to go back. Did you hear that crash? I think he tipped over. We have to go back.”

  I lean over, putting one cold hand against his arm. The ghostroad is smoother than the real one, and the highway signs are easier to read, glowing like lanterns against the starless night. “We have to keep going, Larry. We have to get you home.”

  “But—”

  “Please.”

  Maybe it’s my tone, maybe it’s his own fear, or maybe it’s just the twilight already starting to dig its claws into him, already getting under his skin. Finally, slowly, Larry nods. “All right, Rose. We’ll keep going.”

  “Thank you.” I touch the dashboard again. It’s cool now, as cool as my skin. I wonder when he’ll notice. “I think it’s time for me to tell you my version of the woman at the diner.”

  “She wasn’t a cheerleader—she didn’t have the money to buy herself a spot on the team—but she was a high school student. She liked to drive. She liked to watch other people drive. And she liked her boyfriend, who came to visit her behind the auto shop, and who let her fix his car so that it ran like a fairy tale. The cheerleaders would never have let her get anywhere near them. She might have gotten them dirty. But that was a long time ago.

  “After the crash, after she . . . died . . . she liked to hitchhike. She was walking down the side of the road one night when a man pulled up next to her and asked if she needed a ride anywhere. She said yes, and that she’d really like to go get something to eat, so he drove her to the nearest truck stop with a diner. Only when they got there, she thanked him for the ride, and then she went and sat with somebody else. A trucker. And after he bought her a burger, she asked him for a ride. Or maybe he offered. It doesn’t really matter in this version of the story.”

  Larry is watching me more than he’s watching the road at this point, watching with the sort of terrified understanding that only comes on by inches, only comes when you’re not looking for it. He’s starting to realize that something—that everything—is wrong.

  “So he let her into his cab, and they drove off together. But there was a crash. A terrible crash. He was killed. The body of his passenger was never found.”

  “Rose . . .”

  “Only a year later, a year to the day, that first trucker saw her walking down the median again. Same place, same stretch of road. He pulled over. He told her he’d been afraid she was dead. She just smiled, and asked for a ride. And when he asked her if she’d stay in his truck this time, she said no; said she was meeting somebody. Same thing happened. Accident, dead trucker, missing girl. And again, two years later, she showed up again. By then the first trucker was starting to realize that there was something wrong. So he pulled off the road when he saw her, and he demanded to know what she was doing. ‘Are you killing these boys?’ he asked. ‘Are you doing this to them?’”

  “Rose—”

  “And she looked at him, and she said, so sadly that it just about broke his heart, ‘No. I’ve never killed anyone. I just want to make sure that somebody’s there to see that they make it all the way home.’”

  This time his voice is just a whisper; this time, he understands. “Rose.”

  I offer him a smile as sad as a Sunday in September. “I came to you for a reason, Larry. I’m just here to make sure you find the right roads. I’m only here to get you home.”

  Driving on the ghostroads is easy, and Larry’s rig knows the way. She travels light and faster than she ever did in life, finally free to corner on her own, to compensate for her driver when he can’t focus through his tears. He only cries for a while. Not as long as some, longer than others. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with crying when someone dies, not even when it’s you. If you can’t cry at your own funeral, when can you cry?

&nbs
p; The road gets simpler, turns and curves fading into straight lines and dark exits. Finally, the bright neon oasis of the Last Dance Diner appears ahead of us. I reach over and squeeze Larry’s wrist.

  “This is my stop.”

  “Rose . . .”

  “It’s okay. Yours is just ahead.” The danger is past. Once they reach the Last Dance, they can find the rest of the way on their own, and I don’t dare go any farther—for me, the Last Dance is where the danger really begins, because that’s where I have to face the fact that my future is a story not yet told. I don’t know where that road ends, and until I’m finished with everything I have to do, I don’t want to find out. Besides, the Last Dance makes damn good malteds.

  He pulls off the road, letting the engine idle, and turns to look at me. His face is younger than it was when we met. The twilight is easing the years away. “Why me?”

  “Because the crash was coming whether I was here or not, and sometimes people get lost on this stretch of road. They need someone to tell them which exits to take.” I lean over to kiss his forehead—cool lips brushing cooling skin—before opening my door. “Good luck, Larry.”

  Larry looks at me in silence for a long while before he nods and turns back to the road. I slam my door and the truck pulls away, driving down that long, straight stretch of highway. And then it’s gone like a piece of tissue whipped away by the wind, and overhead, the stars start blinking back on. The wind picks up and I’m cold again, falling out of the midnight back into the twilight, where the air still tastes like apple pie and dreams.

  Hunching my shoulders against the cold, I start for the Last Dance Diner. Maybe they won’t be too busy tonight, and I’ll be able to sweet-talk Emma into sliding a malted or two down the counter. There are worse ways for a dead girl to spend the night that never ends.

  Trust me.

  1956

  Three Rescues and a Funeral