Sparrow Hill Road

by Seanan McGuire

  My way station is a little diner that looks like it was built in the early fifties, 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 made for me, but it might as well have been. It doesn’t matter that I’m not the only psychopomp who uses it. If I have a home anymore, it’s there; everything circles back to the Last Dance. It’s the snake that eats its own tail and the story I can’t escape. That’s okay. I like it there, no matter how complicated it gets. And trust me, once the dead get involved, things can get very complicated.

  The way stations 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 the midnight train to whatever’s waiting on the other side. The natives of the twilight tend the way stations, using them to provide themselves with a purpose, something to keep themselves 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.

  The clock was striking midnight when Tommy dropped me off in the parking lot of the Last Dance Diner, leaving me alone as he dwindled into taillights and memory down that endless road to morning. I’ve been here for hours now, and it’s still midnight at the Last Dance.

  That’s not as strange as it seems: 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’d only been here for an hour when it happened. 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 have no part in. It wouldn’t have me if I tried, and those who die in its embrace will have other psychopomps to lead them home.

  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 there were tires crunching on the gravel of the parking lot, and headlights shining through the window until they clicked abruptly off. “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, 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 not normally for this long, and not normally 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 a la 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.

  Thunder rolls outside the diner, and the long-threatened 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 fall 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’ve somehow managed to get away with something. Emma and I have barely finished clearing away the dishes when lightning illuminates the sky, turning the world brilliantly white for a few seconds before fading away and leaving us in darkness.

  “Right on cue,” says Emma cheerfully, and strikes a match. The tiny flame is a signal flare in the gloom, one that spreads from candle to candle as she makes her way around the diner. “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 pretty green 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. Beán 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 reque
st, catcalling 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. I can feel their eyes on me, the tension in the room 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 candle wax 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 1952, in a place called Buckley Township, in the state of Michigan. Rose Marshall was sixteen years old that summer . . .”

  Buckley Township, Michigan, 1952.

  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 mother and brothers 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 mother’s 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 rich enough to make her 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.

  Rose grabbed a ribbon off the top of the mirror and tied her hair 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 books were on the dresser just inside the door, stacked helter-skelter with her pencil case and the notebooks she diligently filled with her semi-intelligible scrawl. She grabbed them, tucking them up under one arm 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 your pretty little 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 good-bye. 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’ 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 when 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. But she didn’t know that, couldn’t know that, and so she stood and worried as she watched the car pull away from the curb. Only when it was gone did she turn from the window, walking slowly back to the kitchen table.

  It was the summer of 1952, and Rose Marshall had less than three days left to live.

  The Last Dance Diner, 2013.

  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 after the Depression, and it’s 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 beán 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 makes me feel like 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 to find in Buckley . . .”

  Buckley Township, Michigan, 1952.

  Rose and Gary weren’t the sort of couple that most people expected to find in Buckley . . . or the sort of couple that most people approved of. It was generally accepted that Gary 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 l
and 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.