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Display a printable version Last Dance with Mary Jane
Oh my my, oh hell yes Last dance with Mary Jane
Everyone's waystation is different, determined by what they were in life. Most of the souls I shepherd along were drivers, with a spattering of vagabonds, hitchhikers, and people who were just walking home--people, in other words, who were traveling under their own power. I only get passengers when they come with a driver. I guess that's because, as a hitcher, I don't relate well to people who let someone else make the decisions about where they'd be when the journey was finished. It may not seem like hitchers have much agency, but we do, really; we decide which cars to get into, we decide which destinations to name. It's not the same degree of agency that goes to the drivers, but it's enough for us. My waystation is a little diner that looks like it was built in the mid-forties, all chrome and cherry leather and the sound of the jukebox that never runs out of tunes. The music changes sometimes, updating itself to the tastes of the patrons, but the jukebox itself is always the same, sweet and clean and retro-futuristic in design, the sort of thing we used to pretend was all the rage on Mars. It would be a museum piece, in the daylight. For me, it's like a snapshot of home, in the days before I died. The Last Dance wasn't built for me, and I'm not the only psychopomp who uses it, but it might as well have been. If I have a home anymore, it's there. The waystations exist for the dead, belong to the dead, but they aren't owned by the dead. Too many of us are only passing through, psychopomps because of circumstance, making a few runs along the road before we give in to the call of taking that last exit, riding that midnight train to whatever's waiting on the other side. The natives of the twilight tend to the waystations, using them to provide them with a purpose, something to keep them from sliding down into the midnight. They work for everyone, in a way. When you die on the road, if you're lucky, a phantom rider or a hitchhiking ghost will be there, waiting, to offer you directions to the Last Dance Diner. Best malts this side of the 1950s, pie to die for, and best of all, a chance to rest, for just a little while, before moving on...and everyone moves on, in the end. Everyone goes. *** It's midnight in the Last Dance Diner. That's nothing strange; it's always midnight here, or close to it, the hands on the clock locked in perpetual embrace above the window that cuts through to the kitchen. Heating lights shine down on the clean surface of the counter there, warming stacks of pancakes and cheeseburgers with their accompanying heaps of fries. Nothing ever stays on the counter long--Emma's staff is too well-trained, the diner running like a well-oiled machine whenever someone actually comes through looking for a meal--but its presence is reassuring, granting glimpses of other people's meals as you wait for your own. Normally, anyway. That's how it's supposed to work. Not tonight. Tonight, the kitchen is dark, the cook and busboy and even the dishwasher gone to attend to some accident down the road, an accident bad enough that when it happened, they sat up like hunting dogs hearing their master call and were out the door almost before Emma gave them permission. I stayed behind. I didn't taste ashes, I didn't smell lilies...I wasn't involved. There's no point in rushing to an accident that I had no part in. It wouldn't have me if I tried, and those who died in its embrace will have other psychopomps to lead them home. The shades I came here to shepherd are long gone, all of them passing through the doors with murmurs of "I'll be right back" that must inevitably come to nothing. Psychopomps lead the dead home. We don't go with them. For a little while--not long, but a little while--it was just me and Emma, her in her cotton candy-colored uniform and sensible shoes, me in the faded jeans and white tank top that are practically my uniform, these days. I change my clothes to suit the people who pick me up, but when I'm left to my own devices, I always seem to wind up back in the jeans I wasn't supposed to wear, in the shirt I borrowed from Gary, once upon a time and once upon a life ago. Then tires crunched on the gravel of the parking lot, headlights shining briefly through the window. "Go toward the light," they tell the dead, but in my experience, the light has always been an oncoming car. Emma pushed herself away from the counter, offered me a small, apologetic smile, and said, "The Last Dance is open for business, even when the kitchen's closed," and went to greet her customers. That was an hour ago. They're still here. Busload of cheerleaders in school colors, red and gold, frilled skirts that would have been suitable only for porn stars and pin-up girls when I was their age--really their age, not just a shade who'll be sixteen until the stars blow out at last. The logo on their sweaters marks them as the Oxville Knights, and their laughter--loud and gleeful and ringing from the rafters--marks them as the living. Maybe. Because they're here, in the Last Dance, and we get the living sometimes, but normally not for this long, and normally not this many of them at one time. It's possible that they just took the wrong series of exits from the highway, turned on the wrong frontage roads and followed the wrong signs, but...I don't know. Something's wrong. Emma brings them malteds and pie ala mode, things that don't require an understanding of the grill and the fryer, and something's wrong, and I just don't know what it is. Outside the diner, thunder rolls, and rain begins to fall. It showers down lightly at first, but a sprinkle becomes a deluge in a matter of minutes, leaving us all looking out the windows at a world wiped away by water. Emma walks to the door, opens it, and sticks her head outside. Only for a few seconds; long enough to douse her hair, leaving her dripping when she steps back, letting the door swing shut again. "Looks like we're going to be here for a while, ladies," she says, drawing theatrical groans punctuated with giggling from the cheerleaders, who seem incapable of taking anything seriously for more than a few minutes. I can barely remember ever being that young. "Since the kitchen's closed and the rain's likely to knock out the power any minute now, I'm going to go grab some candles--and the ice cream. No sense letting it all melt." This earns her a round of applause from the cheerleaders. Everyone likes free ice cream, even girls who probably spend half their lives on diets. Emma winks my way as she walks toward the kitchen. "Rose, you're in charge until I get back," she says, and then she's gone, leaving me with a dozen cheerleaders staring at me like wolves staring at a wounded deer. This is going to be a long night. I can already tell. *** The hours tick by like seasons, endlessly long and strange. The cheerleaders fell on the ice cream with terrifying enthusiasm, leaving nothing but smears at the bottom of their bowls and smug smiles on their faces, like they'd somehow managed to get away with something. Emma and I had barely finished clearing away the dishes when lightning illuminated the sky, turning the world brilliantly white for a few seconds before fading away and leaving us in darkness. "Right on cue," said Emma cheerfully, and struck a match. The tiny flame was a signal flare in the darkness, one that spread from candle to candle as she made her way around the room. "Chuck will get the generator on when he comes back from his errands. Until then, who's up for ghost stories?" I hate ghost stories. Too many of them are autobiographical. That's why I'm still sitting at the counter, nursing a glass of flat, warm Coke, watching as the circle of stories goes around and around the room. The call comes from inside the house, the hook is left on the door handle, the roommate was dead all along. The beautiful dress in the thrift store came from the funeral home, the husband who stole the golden arm is punished for his sins...the girl in the white prom dress is just looking for someone to drive her home. She only ever wanted to go home. I stare off into space, trying not to listen, trying to focus on the rain. Then Emma's voice cuts through my self-imposed haze, saying, "Your turn, Rosie-my-girl. It's time to pay off a few of those milkshakes and tell us a ghost story." "What?" I snap back into the present, blinking at her. Emma only smiles, cat-green eyes reflecting the dim light the way that human eyes just never do. Bean sidhe bitch. "I don't know any ghost stories." "Oh, I think you do," she says. "Come on, Rose. Tell us a story." The cheerleaders pick up the request, cat-calling it across the room like I would be somehow susceptible to peer pressure; like the opinion of a bunch of teenage girls I've never seen before and never will again somehow matters. But the candlelight turns their red and gold uniforms black and yellow, blurs the outlines of their mascot until the Oxville Knights become the Buckley Buccaneers. The tattoo at the small of my back is itching again, making it impossible not to move. So I move. I slide down from my stool and walk over to the circle of cheerleaders and Emma, taking a seat in the space that opens up for me. The air seems too thick, smells like candlewax and ice cream...feels like summer in Michigan, when the sky presses down like a blanket, and the trees are almost too green to believe in. I take a breath. It rasps against the back of my throat, so I take another one, close my eyes, and begin. "This is a true story, and it happened in the summer of 1945, in a place called Buckley Township, in the state of Michigan. Rose Marshall was sixteen years old that summer..." *** Rose Marshall was sixteen years old the summer that she died. It had been an unusually hot year in Buckley Township. The leaves were already starting to brown from the want of water, and while the lawns in the nicer parts of town were still lush and green, the scrubby grass outside the house Rose shared with her parents and brother had long since died, leaving the yard embarrassed by its own nakedness. The skeleton hedges seemed to huddle in, like the house was trying to cover itself against the shame. Rose didn't mind. The less of the house that was visible to the casual onlooker, the happier she'd be; they weren't the only poor folks in Buckley--not by a long shot, not when it seemed that everyone who lived along the Mill Road was just this side of starvation more than half the time--but she didn't have to live in all those other houses. She only had to live in her own. Rose Marshall was sixteen years old the summer that she died, and she wanted out of her parents' house, out of Buckley, out of her entire life, more than she wanted anything else in the world. "Rose! Are you still lolling about in there?" "I'll be out in a minute, Ma!" she shouted, dropping her hairbrush onto the dresser. It wasn't making a bit of difference one way or the other. All that lemon juice she'd used to lighten up her normally brown hair had left it brittle and dry, like straw that was somehow being forced into a parody of a wave. If they'd been better-off--if they'd been like all those other girls at school, the ones with new shoes every September and bag lunches every day--she could have bought real peroxide, and done her hair up proper without as much damage. But done was done, and wishing wouldn't make her hair lie smooth and pretty, no matter how much she wanted it to. Only reason she'd been able to afford the lemon juice was all that babysitting she did for the Healys, and if that wasn't enough to qualify her for a little hazard pay, nothing was. The Healys had money, but their house was coming down around their ears, and the walls were full of vermin. Rose grabbed a ribbon off the top of the mirror and tied her hair quickly back into a half-ponytail, hiding the bulk of the damage while leaving the carefully-acquired gold as visible as possible. She was an expert at tying bows to hide tattered edges, just like she'd learned how to scrub out stains before they could set and mend clothes from the church cast-off boxes, darning and patching until they were just about as good as new. That didn't make wearing them to school any easier--not with girls who'd laugh behind their hands when they saw her wearing a sweater they'd donated to charity two seasons back, not when they saw her with her patched hems and her scuffed-up too-big shoes--but it made pretending pride a little less hard. "Rose!" "I'm coming, Ma!" she shouted, and jumped to her feet, running to the door. Her backpack was on the floor just outside, empty except for schoolbooks and notebooks filled with her semi-intelligible scrawl; she slung it over one shoulder, where it hung like a half-deflated balloon as she made her way down the hall to the living room. Her mother was still wearing her bathrobe, sitting at the scuffed old kitchen table her brothers dragged home one night (and she'd never been able to bring herself to ask where they'd found it; there was too much chance they'd tell her if she did) with a cup of coffee steaming in front of her. Her eyes swept along Rose's body from head to toe in a matter of seconds, assessing, calculating, measuring everything she saw against some secret scale where her only daughter was always found wanting, and always would be. "You're late," she said. "That boy won't be waiting for you if you don't haul ass out to the curb." "His name's Gary, Ma. He'll be waiting." "If you say so," she replied, and picked up her coffee. "Don't you dawdle after school today. You've got chores to do, and I want to see you before I head for work." "All right, Ma," said Rose, and walked--decorously, always decorously; better a little lost time than another lecture on how boys viewed girls who reached high school without learning to be ladylike--to the front door. Her mother didn't say goodbye. Neither did she. Ruth Marshall waited at the table for the sound of the horn honking twice at the front of the house. Then she stood, faster than her daughter would have given her credit for, and crossed to the kitchen window, where she watched Rose get into the passenger seat of Gary Daniels's car. She didn't hate her only daughter, no matter what Rose would have said if asked; she just knew what it was to be sixteen and poor and have the boys looking at you with those falsely sweet eyes, the ones that said "I would never leave you." They could get you to do anything, when you were sixteen years old, and they looked at you with those eyes. And in the end, they always lied. Ruth didn't know it, but she didn't need to worry about Rose and Gary going farther than a good girl would go; didn't need to worry about them doing much of anything she wouldn't approve of. There wasn't enough time for that. She watched the car pull away from the curb and turned from the window, walking slowly back to the kitchen table. It was the summer of 1945, and Rose Marshall had less than three days left to live. *** The cheerleaders shift and squirm on the vinyl seats of the diner, some frowning, some yawning, others just looking bored. One flips her hair and asks, "So, like, what the hell is this? Some Hallmark special about the Great Depression?" I don't have the patience for a history lesson right now, and none of these girls would be likely to care if I tried. I narrow my eyes instead, and say, "This is the only ghost story I know. Do you want to hear it or not?" I'm not lying, I'm not, because this is my story, my ghost story, and it contains every other story I've ever come across. There isn't room for another ghost story in my world. Not until the first one is finished, and it won't be over until Bobby Cross is in his grave, and the ghostroads are free of him forever. "We want to hear it," says Emma, her bean sidhe voice carrying the weight of a commandment. She doesn't use her powers on the patrons often, but when she does, she sounds like that. She isn't forcing me to speak--I'd know it, if she were--but she may be forcing the cheerleaders to listen. I'll have to thank her for that, later. I'm starting to realize that I want to tell this story; that it's been waiting long enough to be told. Something about tonight...this is the right time to tell it. I clear my throat, shifting on my seat, and begin to speak again. "Rose and Gary weren't the sort of couple that most people expected..." *** Rose and Gary weren't the sort of couple that most people expected to find in Buckley...or the sort that most people approved of. Gary, it was generally accepted, had prospects. He was a member of the football team, and not the least skilled, either; his family had money enough that college wasn't out of the question, scholarship or no. They'd come out of lumber, like most of the old families in Buckley, but now they were in the business of real estate and land rentals, and there wasn't a speck of dirt on their hands. If Gary liked to mess around with cars, well, boys will be boys, and he'd grow out of that soon enough. If he liked to mess around with girls like Rose, on the other hand... Gary's father swore the little tramp was just trying to get herself pregnant and land a husband who could take care of her and the screaming brats she'd be happy to weigh him down with. Gary's mother tended to think of Rose a little more charitably--she'd gone to school with Robert Marshall, before they both went on to the lives their place in society defined for them, and she remembered him as a kind boy, friendly, sweet, and willing enough to do what needed doing--but agreed with her husband on one thing, at the very least: their son could do better. As for Gary himself, he listened patiently to the things his parents told him, met the girls his mother brought home for him, and then returned to the things he cared about: auto-shop, hanging out at Bronson's Diner, and dating the daughter of the night-shift waitress. Rose Marshall might not have money, and she might not come from the best family, but she had eyes he could look into for the rest of his life, and she knew how to fix a transmission, and he was pretty sure that he was a lot more than halfway to being in love with her. Best of all, he was pretty sure she was halfway to being in love with him, too. Being with Rose made him happy in a way that almost nothing else did, or could. He was seventeen, and she was sixteen; in another six months, he'd be eighteen, and he could ask her to marry him. It didn't matter what his parents thought, or what her mother thought. He wanted to spend the rest of his life with Rose Marshall. He knew that, and that was all that he needed to know. "Your radio's broken again." Gary glanced toward Rose. The sun was glinting off her lemon-bleached hair like a halo, making her look even more like an angel than she usually did. (That was an image that would haunt him in the days and nights ahead, making sleep an impossible fantasy. But that was the future, and the future was another country.) "Just give it a thump. It'll start working again." "I'm not sure I can handle all those big technical words," said Rose, and smacked the radio with the heel of her hand. Rock and roll blared into the car, turned up just a little too loud for the safety of their eardrums. She twisted the volume quickly down, and smiled. "Much better." "What's the fun of something that works every time you try to turn it on?" "I guess," allowed Rose, who had been on the receiving end of too many broken things to really share that point of view. Some of them didn't start up again when you hit them. Some of them required begging and tears and giving six months of saved-up babysitting money to your brother to pay off the electric bill. "So, tomorrow..." "Tomorrow, huh? I was thinking I'd go see a movie. Maybe drive up to Ann Arbor for the afternoon." Rose made a face at him. Gary laughed. "Or I could pick you up at six for dinner, and we can go from there to the prom. If that's okay with you?" "That's just about the bee's knees to me," said Rose, solemnly. She was smart enough to know what it was really costing Gary to take her to the prom, and still innocent enough to hope that his intentions were honorable ones. They might not be--no girl with two older brothers and no father to look out for her could be quite that blind--but as long as she could hope... If this ended with the school year, if he said "It's been fun" and drove off to college in some big city like Detroit or Columbus, well, it would still have been worth it, every minute of it. Because he'd been good to her, and she liked it when he laughed, and there wasn't enough in Buckley that made her happy. If everything he'd been to her was a lie, well. She'd run that road when she came to it. Gary pulled in the lot behind the auto-shop classes, scattering greasers and smokers like quail before he killed the engine, and gave her a little grin, that little grin she always thought of as existing just for her. "See you after school?" Rose grinned back. "It's a date." *** "But when are we going to get to the ghost story part?" asks a cheerleader, plaintively. I blink at her. The Last Dance seems almost like a mirage somehow, blurry and unreal in the flickering candlelight. This can't be the real world, can it? This cold, wet, twilight world, where the sun never rises and the dead live on forever? This can't be where I'm spending eternity--not after the hot, clean heat of a Michigan summer, not after Gary's smile... "Rose?" says Emma. I blink again, clearing the candlelight from my eyes, and nod in her direction. "I've got it," I say, and take a breath. "The school day inched by like a thousand days before it; like a thousand more would inch after it. One minute at a time, counting down to the freedom of the final bell..." *** The final bell rang like Gabriel's trumpet, and students poured out of classrooms like angels answering the call to war. Rose stayed seated at her desk, counting slowly backward from twenty. She'd learned the hard way that it was best for her not to hurry. Let the popular girls--the ones who couldn't understand how someone like her could ever be competition for people like them--make their way out of the halls and off campus. Once that was done, it would be safe to move. "Rose?" "Yes, Mrs. Jackson?" Rose raised her head from the book she'd been pretending to read, flashing an appropriately respectful smile at the anxious looking teacher in front of her. Irene Jackson had only been teaching in Buckley for a year; hadn't learned the rules yet, the signals that meant it was time to look the other way, the patterns that meant something was too big for a single person to stop. She was young. She'd learn. If she had time. Irene Jackson was a good woman, and she'd gone into teaching because of girls like Rose--girls like the girl she'd been, once upon a time. The ones who didn't think they had any options, because their families couldn't buy those options for them. "Are you all right? You looked..." "I'm fine, Mrs. Jackson." Rose stood hurriedly, grabbing her books from the rack beneath her desk and clutching them against her chest. "I just have so much to get done before prom that I guess I was letting my thoughts run away with me." "You're going to the Senior Prom, aren't you? With Gary Daniels?" "Yes, ma'am." "He seems like a very nice young man." Rose's smile was brilliant enough to shame the sun, if only for a few seconds before it faded back into her normal low-caste wariness. "He is, Mrs. Jackson. A very nice young man. Thank you, ma'am." And then she was gone, heading for the door at the brisk walk-half-skip that all the female students used when they were trying to escape their teachers without being rude about it. Irene Jackson--who would later write Rose's memorial page for the school yearbook, and would weep without shame over every word--watched her go, a small frown pulling down the corners of her mouth. That night, she sat on the edge of the bed with her husband brushing out her hair, sighed, and said, "It was like she was weighing the rest of her life, right there in my classroom, and she was finding every bit of it wanting. How am I supposed to help these kids? They don't want my help. They don't want anything but to be left alone." David Jackson was a smart man, and knew that sometimes, his wife worried about things she had no business worrying about, like teenage girls from the bad side of town. He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, and said, "She'll be fine. Girls like that can surprise you sometimes, if you give them the chance. Just be there if she needs you." "I'm there for all the kids," said Irene, with all the conviction of a true believer. "All they have to do is ask." "There, you see?" He put the brush aside, reaching for her. "Now come here. It's time to forget about other people's children for a while." *** I'm filling space, relating events that I wasn't there to witness...but I know they happened, because the people involved told me about them. They told me when I went back to Buckley to offer them a guide into the dark places, playing psychopomp for the people who'd known me when I was alive--the only people who were mine to shepherd, even though they didn't die on the road. The ones who mattered in life can matter in death, if you want them to, and I've guided everyone I cared about who's died since I did. Everyone who'd go with me, anyway. I ran for Michigan when I felt my mother dying, but she was long gone by the time I got there, and the shades of the streets told me she'd known I was on the way, but chose not to wait for me. I guess some things don't change, not even among the dead. Maybe especially not among the dead. I take another breath, smiling gratefully as Emma slides another dish of ice cream into my hand, and continue. "The next night, with Ruth off to work the diner's night shift and her brothers off doing whatever it was they spent their evenings doing, Rose walked to her closet..." *** Rose walked to her closet the way she imagined a bride would on the evening of her wedding. She'd worked all year to save her pennies for a prom dress, putting up with endless hours of babysitting and doing more odd jobs than she cared to count. Every cent she got went toward the dress. She hid her money in a shoebox under her bed, tucking it into the furthest corner, where her mother wouldn't think to look. Her brothers wouldn't steal from her, although it was best not to tempt them; the Marshall boys were still looking for their own roads out of Buckley, and they wouldn't deny her that chance. A prom night might not change the world...but then again, it might. If she got lucky, it just might. The dress she'd purchased from the department store downtown was green silk, almost daring in the way it hugged her hips and waist, almost demure in the way it circled her chest and shoulders. The perfect dress. The color was right for her, whether her hair was lemon-bleached or its darker natural brown, and the matching shoes had been on sale. That was the final straw, the thing that decided her, even if it meant she had to work another month of Saturday nights while her perfect dress sat on lay-away, waiting for her to come and claim it. Even the store manager had smiled when she came to pick it up, paying her last five dollars with hands that were very nearly shaking. It was the perfect dress for prom. It was the perfect dress for everything. It was the perfect dress to die in. But thoughts like that were a million miles from Rose's mind as she stepped out of her heavy cotton skirt and slid the silk up around her waist, feeling the fabric cupping her the way Gary sometimes did, when he was feeling daring and she was feeling wild. She pulled it up a little bit, letting the heavy fabric whisper against her legs, tiny silk kisses on her skin. But draw it out as she might, she couldn't make the process last forever. All too soon, she was looking at herself in the mirror, at the green silk bodice, at the matching ribbons tied oh-so-carefully through the tamed and tempered straw of her hair. "If he asks me to go to the top of Dead Man's Hill tonight, I will," she whispered, the words wicked on her tongue, and watched the wanton blush spreading up her cheeks. She was going to get out of Buckley, she was, and one way or another, this was going to be the night that started her escape. One way or another. *** The hours ticked by as slowly as shadows creeping across the street at sunset, and Gary didn't come. Rose sat on the porch, keeping her back carefully lifted away from the wide slats of the porch swing, and watched the road with eyes that had gone from anticipatory into worried, and were now making the transition into angry. He hadn't come because he wasn't coming. Someone--his mother, maybe, or those pretty girls in school who didn't think a boy like him should go anywhere near a girl like her--had finally talked some of their brand of sense into him, and he wasn't coming. She'd been a fool to think a night like this was ever intended for a girl like her. Rose stood, blinking back tears as she turned to storm back into the house, away from the summer air and the hope of something more. Then she paused, hand stretched toward the doorknob. Paused, and thought. There are those who'll say that every choice we make can change the future, and that every future exists, somewhere. In a thousand, thousand futures, Rose Marshall went back into the house, took off the green silk gown, chose another path. Maybe she sold the dress back to the department store and used the money she'd worked so hard for to leave Buckley forever. Maybe she confronted Gary at school on Monday morning, found peace, found closure. Maybe she just decided to wait a little bit longer before she turned off all the lights, and was still awake when her prom date arrived, greasy-handed from changing his tire, with a half-dead corsage clutched in one hand. Maybe. But those are other stories, and that isn't how this story chose to go. The frown bloomed on Rose's face like the flower she was named for, starting small, but opening swiftly. By the time she wrenched the door open and stormed into her brother's room, it was in full display, petaled in anger, disappointment, and shame. Arthur and Morty were gone for the night, off on some mysterious errand, and they'd taken Arthur's truck, leaving Morty's clapped-out old car behind. He always left his keys in the dish beside his bed when he wasn't going to need them. Rose snatched them up and turned to go, not looking back, not pausing to change her clothes. If any of the neighbors had chosen that moment to look out the window, they would have seen a small, pale-haired figure dressed in green silk go stalking across the yard to the car parked beside the curb. They might have said "There goes that Marshall girl," might even have commented on what a strange thing that was to wear on an evening drive. But no one saw her go. No one said a word. Rose Marshall shoved the key into the ignition, turned it, and was gone. *** I pause for a moment, struggling to find the words that come next; struggling to find the next breath. I don't have to breathe, not really, but here and now and wearing the coat that Emma gave me when the cheerleaders arrived--wouldn't do to have them realize they could see right through me when the lightning flashed--it helps me think. I don't want to tell the parts that come next. I don't want to remember them. I want to lie, say things worked out, say that somehow, this was never a ghost story at all. I take that next breath, sigh, and say, "The fastest way to Gary's house was by way of a winding one-lane road that ran the length of the closest thing in town to a mountain. They called it Sparrow Hill Road..." *** Rose slowed as she took the turn-off onto Sparrow Hill Road, a sudden chill making the skin on her arms lump up into hard knots of gooseflesh. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. Every instinct she had was telling her to turn around, to take the long way, or to just go home; this wasn't worth it. Rose Marshall was nothing if not stubborn. Tightening her hands on the wheel, she hit the gas, and drove forward into the shadows lurking underneath the trees that covered the hill. It only took a few moments for the light to disappear completely. No one in Buckley ever saw Rose alive again. *** Sparrow Hill Road was about three miles long, from end to end, following a winding route around the outside of the hill it was named for. Rose had traveled almost a mile and a half when headlights flashed on behind her, sudden and almost blinding as they reflected off her rear-view mirror. "Ah!" she exclaimed, throwing up an arm to block the glare. "Jerk." She adjusted the mirror, but it didn't help; it was almost like the car behind her was aiming to kill her night vision. Rose muttered something unladylike under her breath and sped up a bit. She'd been driving Sparrow Hill Road since long before she was legally allowed behind the wheel of a car. If she had to drive it halfway-blind, then so be it. It wasn't like she had another choice. The road was too narrow where they were, and she couldn't turn around, or pull off to the side. Another half-mile slunk by, sliding away into the night. The headlights faded from her rear-view, and Rose dropped her hand from her eyes, putting it back on the wheel. She had time, barely, to grip before the car that had been driving behind her lunged forward and slammed into her rear bumper. The impact was hard and unexpected, throwing Rose forward against the wheel. She cried out, more in surprise than pain, and was in the process of straightening when the car was hit again, harder this time, knocking her almost onto the dash. "What are you trying to do, kill me?" she shouted, even though she knew full-well there was no way the other driver could hear her. Then she paled. There were always stories, urban legends, about girls foolish enough to drive alone on spooky deserted roads in the middle of nowhere... Rose slammed her foot down on the gas hard enough to break the heel off her shoe, sending Morty's car leaping forward at a speed it hadn't seen since it was new. "Come on, come on, please," she whispered, shifting as she urged the car to go even faster, to break whatever mechanical laws were holding it back. Just a little further. If she could make it just a little further, she could get back onto the surface streets, and then-- She didn't dare slow for the curve in the road. She twisted the wheel sharply left, trying to swing the car around. She would have made it--her reflexes were good, as the reflexes of the young and afraid so very often are--if not for the car that slammed into her own just as she began her turn, sending her, and her brother's car, plummeting down into the darkness on the side of Sparrow Hill Road. There was time to scream. There was time to think Oh God, oh God, I'm going to die, this is it, I'm going to die, oh, God... And then there was nothing. *** Silence reigns in the Last Dance Diner. Silence, and the sound of the rain. The cheerleaders stare at me in open-mouthed silence, waiting for the story to continue. I take a breath. "If Rose was awake when her car hit the ground, that night granted her a single mercy; she didn't remember it when she came to. The woods were silent all around her..." *** Rose opened her eyes on darkness. She was sprawled next to the road at the base of Sparrow Hill, her head pillowed on a clump of fallen leaves. She pushed herself slowly up, eyes wide as she stared at the woods in disbelief. She'd been falling; she remembered that. "There was an accident..." she whispered. "The car..." But there was no car. Only the road, and the night, and Rose, standing lonely and confused in her green silk gown. She looked down at herself; the dress was intact, no tatters or even stains from the ground where she'd been lying. She brushed her hands against her skirt, disoriented and confused. "I don't understand." "Rose?" The question came from the left. Rose turned, eyes wide, to see Gary Daniels--her prom date, the one she'd been coming to find--walking toward her with his tuxedo jacket tied around his waist and oil coating his hands. "God, Rose, what are you doing out here? I was going to call just as soon as I got back to a place with a phone--how did you get here?" He paused. "Rose, what's wrong? You're shivering." "I'm cold." It was the first thing to come to mind. It shouldn't have been true, not on a hot June night in the hottest summer she remembered, but it was. It felt like her bones had been replaced with ice, freezing her from the inside out. "Here." Gary untied his tuxedo jacket and offered it to her, saying, "I took it off before I started working on the tire. It shouldn't...it shouldn't stain your dress." "Thank you." She slipped the jacket on, the cold fleeing almost instantly. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she threw herself at him, almost without thinking. "I want to get out of here, Gary, Gary, please, please, get me out of here. Please." "Sure, honey, sure." He hesitated, finally stroking the back of the jacket as soothingly as he could. It was his coat; if he wanted to get it greasy, he could. "I've got the tire back on. We can go anywhere you want. We can even head for the prom, if that's what you want to do." "No. Not the prom." Rose pulled away, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. "Let's just drive, Gary. Can we do that tonight? Can we just drive?" Gary Daniels looked into her eyes, and realized two things all the way down into the bottom of his heart. He would go anywhere this girl asked him to...and he loved her. He wasn't halfway there. He loved her. "Sure, Rose," he said, and smiled. "Anywhere you want to go." *** They stopped at a service station, where he washed the grease from his hands and filled the tank to the very top with gas. Enough to go just about anywhere, especially for two kids with nowhere else to be. They were together, and it was a beautiful night, and that was enough. That was enough for the both of them. It was one of those nights that every summer should have, especially for a girl who's just sixteen and very much in love. The roads were clear, and every star in the sky was shining just for them. He kissed her down by the old river bridge, and she let him. She kissed him behind the drive-in theater, where the flickering light from the soundless screens turned the sidewalk into something just this side of a dance floor. It was perfect. That was how Gary would describe it later, when people called him crazy. "Perfect," he'd say, and look away. Sometimes, if they pressed, he'd add four more words--four more words that silenced everyone who heard them. "It was worth it." Only two things tainted the perfection of that night. The first was the sleek black car that followed them, once, twice, three times, tracking them for a few miles and then sliding into the shadows. Rose wouldn't get out when that car was there. She clung to Gary's hand, staring out the windshield, and refused to let him go and start a scene. "Just drive," she said, all three times, and because he loved her, and because the night was perfect, Gary did. The second was a commotion on Sparrow Hill Road. They saw it when they drove past; what looked like every police car and firetruck in the county, all flashing their lights and lighting up that hill like a beacon. Gary slowed, squinting up at the center of the fuss. "What do you think happened up there?" "I don't know," said Rose, who was becoming slowly, dreadfully afraid that she did know; that she knew all too well. "Let's not bother them, okay? I bet they're pretty busy." "Yeah, okay," said Gary, and kept on driving. They drove the night away, measuring it in kisses and parking places, miles and moments. The sky was getting light when Gary pulled up in front of her house, stopped the car, and got out to walk around and open the passenger-side door. "Thank you for bringing me home," said Rose, and smiled--a sweet, heartbreaking smile, the sweetest he'd ever seen from her. She ducked her head forward, pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth, and whispered, "I love you, Gary Daniels. Always remember that." Then she was gone, heading up the narrow pathway toward the door. Gary stared after her, one hand going to touch the place where she'd kissed him. He closed his eyes, reliving the moment for just a few seconds more. When he opened them again, Rose was gone...and when he got home, the police were there, waiting to tell him what had happened. Waiting to tell him what happened on Sparrow Hill Road. *** "Wait--I know this one," says one of the cheerleaders, breaking the trance I was close to falling into. "Doesn't he go back to her house to be all, dude, what the hell, and then there's his coat, folded on her pillow?" "I thought it was on her tombstone," says another cheerleader. "She doesn't have a tombstone, dummy, she, like, just died the night before. So it has to be on her bed." The cheerleaders look to me, waiting for me to answer them, to choose a winner in this strange little contest. Most of me is still on a hot summer night in Michigan, Gary's arms around me and the truth of my own death still something I can deny. "I don't know," I say, simply. "That isn't part of the story. Rose walked back up the pathway wearing his coat, and somewhere between the car and the door, she was just...gone. She was gone for a long time after that. But eventually, people started seeing her again. Standing on Sparrow Hill Road. Looking for a ride home." It took me years to learn that I didn't have to make that loop over and over again, that I could go elsewhere if I wanted to. Hitchers are only bound by geography when they want to be. And all I ever wanted was to get out of Buckley. "That's not much of a story," says a cheerleader, dubiously. "It's the only one I have." "It would be better if, like, the man who ran Rose off the road sold his soul at the crossroads so he could live forever," says yet another cheerleader. The others murmur agreement. "Only he didn't catch her ghost before she woke up and caught a ride, because he was still pretty new at the harvesting business, and she got lucky. If her boyfriend hadn't been there, and she hadn't been so in love with him that she manifested, that driver would have had her." I feel myself go cold. Not the crushing chill of the ghostroads, but the simple, freezing cold of terror. "That...might be a good story," I force myself to say. "Yeah, only because he didn't get her, she's stuck," says the first cheerleader, jubilantly. "'Cause she can't make herself move on while that guy's still out there, killing people and feeding them into his car." "She's still out there. Hitching around the country, looking for a way to stop him." "Maybe she's finally found it. But she's not sure yet. She's still scared." "Poor little ghost." "Doomed to walk the Earth as a restless shade, hunting for Bobby Cross." All the cheerleaders are looking at me now, gazes calm and interested, like I'm a cat toy--the best one they've had in a long time. The lightning flashes outside, and for a moment, the shadows they throw against the walls have winged helmets instead of artfully-tousled hair, hold spears instead of ice cream spoons. The shadows fade, and they're cheerleaders again, just looking at me, waiting. "But Gary--poor Gary--he has to be pretty old now, doesn't he?" asks a cheerleader. "Maybe that's her out, if she wants it. When her true love dies, she won't have anything else to tie her to this world. She can take him to the last exit, and go through by his side. It would be so romantic, don't you think? If she waited?" I stand abruptly. "I'm sorry, Emma. I'm going to go." Her eyes flash cat-green in the dark, and she says, "No, you're not." There's no command in her words, only fact, calm and simple as anything. She raises her hand, snaps her fingers, and the lights come back on. The cheerleaders's uniforms have changed again, going from Buckley Buccaneer black and yellow to silver and red, with "Valhalla Valkyries" written across their sweatshirts and blazoned on their gym bags. They smile at my expression, starting to gather their things, starting to get ready to go. "It was nice to finally meet you, Rose," says one of the cheerleaders. When she smiles, I can see a thousand years of warfare in her eyes. "It's always nice to meet someone who knows that you can't win if you let yourself stop fighting. You have our blessing, for what it's worth. Bobby Cross has denied us our duty too many times." If her smile was terrifying, her frown is a thousand times worse. How can he cross these girls? They look like they could pick their teeth with souls. But they also look sweet and soft and sugar-candy careless. That's the face they wear as they hug Emma, offer their farewells, and head out the diner door. The rain stops as soon as the first one steps outside. No surprise there. If the stories are right, they have the storms on their side. "Thanks for stopping by," says Emma, escorting the last of them out the door. Then she turns, and smiles at me. "How are you feeling?" "Tricked," I spit at her. "I thought better of you." "Better of me than what? Giving you the chance to tell your story to the Valkyries? Their blessing is a good and important thing to have, especially if you're still planning to go after him." Emma frowns, eyes flashing again. "I've been dreaming about you, Rose. They're not all good dreams. If you start down this road..." "I've already started." I sigh, walking back to my stool and sitting. The air smells like ozone in the wake of the Valkyries. "I need you to tell me what the tattoo on my back means. And I need you to get the grill started back up." "Am I paying for deception with cheeseburgers?" I nod, and Emma smiles. "Fair enough." The lights come back on when she snaps her fingers, the jukebox spinning to life. Tom Petty sings about a girl taking her last dance, and I sit at the counter of the Last Dance, listening to Emma moving through the kitchen, listening to the minutes ticking by. One more dance to kill the pain... ...and the dancing never ends.
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| Last updated on 6/15/2010 12:41:57 PM by Jennifer Brozek |
| Return to the Library. Go to Sparrow Hill Road 2010. |
| Other documents at this level: 01 - Good Girls Go to Heaven 02 - Dead Mans Party 03 - Tell Laura I Love Her 04 - Building a Mystery 05 - El Viento del Diablo 07 - Do You Want to Dance? 08 - Dead Man's Curve |
Well, I don't know but I've been told