"Was her name Emma, by any chance?"
Gary nods, once. "It was. She said you were going as well as could be expected, and that I couldn't help you."
I can almost picture it, Gary, still young, if not as young as he was when we were together, sitting across the table from one of my only real friends in the twilight while Emma sipped over-sweetened coffee and avoided answering as many questions as she could twist herself away from. She did it to protect me. She did it to give Gary his life back. But part of my heart is still aching, and wishing she'd left things alone long enough for him to catch up to me...long enough for him to catch me.
"Oh," I whisper.
"She also told me how to find the routewitches...and that, if I asked them nicely enough, they'd tell me how to send a message to you."
"You mean they'd tell you how to call me back here when it was time for you to die." I can't keep the bitterness out of my voice, and so I don't even try. First Bethany selling herself to the crossroad for the illusion of youth renewed, and now my first and only love, dying old and alone in a room that smells of bleach and ashes and age. No one ever told me life would be easy, but no one ever told me death would be this hard.
"Yes." Gary starts to say something else, and stops as a cough forces itself past his lips. It's deep, bone-shaking, and it drives home what his age couldn't: that I'm here, in this room, tonight, because Gary Daniels is getting ready to die.
I take an involuntary step backward, shoulders passing through the surface of the door behind me. "I can't do this," I say. "I'm sorry, Gary, I'm so sorry, but I can't do this. I just can't."
He coughs one more time before getting his breath back and saying the worst thing he could possibly have said.
"Please."
There's still a moment in which I almost turn and flee the room; a moment when I almost give in to the need to run. The moment passes. "I guess I still owe you for picking me up on prom night," I say, and step forward, moving closer to the bed—moving into the field of his need, penitent begging for the attentions of a psychopomp. One step and my hair brushes my shoulders in heavy lemon-scented curls, sun-dyed the color of drying straw. A second step and the green silk skirt swirls around my ankles, fabric dancing with every move I make.
A third step and I'm standing next to his bed, and mine is the last hand he'll ever have the chance to hold.
Gary smiles, still wheezing slightly as he whispers, "I like your hair better like this, Rosie." He raises one frail hand, moving as if to touch my hair. His hand passes right through me. Gary's eyes widen, and he holds his hand there for a few seconds before letting it fall back to his side. "I should've expected that."
"It's okay." I perch myself on the edge of the bed, putting my hands over his. He can't feel me there, not yet, but even the illusion can be a comfort for some people. "I've missed you."
"Oh, Rosie." He sighs, deep and long as the last breath of winter. "It's been so hard. You can't even begin to know...they all thought I was crazy. For a while, they even thought I killed you. It was so hard..."
I want to be angry with him, I really do; he was alive, at least, and had the chance to change things. I can't quite find the strength. This is Gary. This is the only man who really mourned me. How can I be mad at him for that? "I'm sorry," I say.
"Don't be." He puts his free hand over mine, holding it just above the point where my phantom skin begins. I can feel him surrounding my fingers, and I can't help it; I start to cry. "Don't cry, Rosie. I loved you then, and I love you now, and I need you to do something for me."
"Don't worry, Gary. I know my job. I'll get you to wherever it is you're going, I promise." He's not dying on the road; he can't stay with me. He'll have to move on, and break my heart all over again.
"I don't mean that." His expression is grave. "I need you to go to Dearborn, to Carl's Garage. He knows you're coming. He's waiting for you. Just tell him I've passed, and he'll know what to do from there. Can you do that for me?"
"Gary, I don't—"
"Please, Rose? Can you do that for me?"
I worry my lip between my teeth before finally, inevitably, nodding. "I can do that."
"Thank you." Gary tightens his hands around mine as he sits up in the bed and kisses me deeply, kisses me with all the longing of sixty years spent apart. He takes me by surprise, and I don't realize what's just happened until I feel his lips smoothing under mine, his hands growing young and strong and sure again. He—the essential Gary, the one that fell in love with a girl from the wrong side of town—sat up to kiss me. The body he spent all those years wearing...
...didn't. He pulls back, smiling that old devil-may-care smile, and says, "Remember, Rosie. You promised."
Then he's gone, winking out like a candle flame, and I'm the only ghost in the room. Just me, sitting alone with a slowly cooling corpse that no one has any use for anymore. I stay where I am for a moment more, and then fall back into the twilight, sinking down until there's no hand under mine, until I'm just a ghost among ghosts once more.
***
Please, Rosie. Please, keep your word...
***
I don't head straight for Dearborn.
Let me rephrase that: I can't head straight for Dearborn. If Gary wants me interacting with something in the world of the living, I have to follow the rules in getting there. It takes me three days and five coats to hitchhike my way from Buckley to the Dearborn city limits. Once I'm past them, I can walk the rest of the way, and so that's what I do, ignoring the cat-calls and the shouts from passing vehicles. As long as none of them offers me a ride, I can go where I need to go.
None of them offers me a ride. After an hour of walking down increasingly broken and glass-spattered sidewalks, I find myself in front of a rusty converted warehouse with a sign in the window that reads, simply, CARL'S. This has to be the place.
The coat I'm wearing gives me the substance necessary to open the door and step into the cramped office, which smells like motor oil and stale beer. "Hello?" I call. "Is anyone here?"
I'm beginning to think this errand ends with me standing in an empty room forever when a man with a handlebar moustache of impressive size—almost as impressive as the beer-belly that strains against his coveralls—emerges from the door behind the counter, jaws busily working a wad of incongruously pink gum. "Yeah?"
"Um." I blink once, and then ask, "Are you Carl?"
"Who wants ta know?"
"Rose." His face remains blank, not a trace of recognition in his eyes. I try adding a little more information: "Gary sent me?"
"Aw, shit." True regret wipes away the blankness as he shakes his head, one hand coming up to tweak at the end of his moustache. "Old bastard finally died on us, huh? And you must be the dead little girlfriend. Guess you got his messages after all. Good for him. I mean, he coulda done better in the rack department, but hey, who am I to judge? The course of true love never did run smooth, and alla that shit. I guess you'd better come with me."
"I...wait...what?" The rapid-fire delivery of so many different sentiments leaves me reeling, although I'm pretty sure that I was just insulted. "Come with you where?"
Now Carl smiles, although the regret remains, tucked around the edges. "He didn't tell you, huh? Ain't that just like him? Wanted to surprise his girl. Guess I can't blame him for that. Come on, girlie. It's not my place to say, but I'm the only one who can show you."
I frown, but in the end, we both know that I'm going to give in. It's not like he can hurt me, after all, and Gary sent me here. "Okay," I say, and follow Carl out of the office, into the garage.
***
The garage is connected to a small junkyard—not all that surprising, really. It's a good place for old cars to go to die. There's even a crusher, big enough for most single-family cars. A car sits next to it, shrouded in a plain gray canvas.
Carl starts talking as soon as we're outside. "I just want you ta know that this goes against everything I stand for as a mechanic," he says, jaws s
till working at the gum. "But it makes sense to everything I stand for as a routewitch, so I guess I'm doin' the right thing whether I do it or not. You better appreciate this, girlie, that's all I have to say."
"Appreciate what?" I ask.
Carl gives me a withering look and walks over to the shrouded car. When he yanks the cover away, I gasp. I can't stop myself.
The unshrouded car is a cherry 1946 Ford Super De Luxe, painted a deep sea green that looks just as good on a car as it did, once upon a time, on a prom dress. The sunlight caresses the paint like a lover. I understand the impulse. This is a car to be courted.
"He rolled off the assembly the day you died," says Carl, dumping the cover to one side. "Color's a custom job. So's the engine. There's a piece of the car you got run off the road in worked in there, and some mandrake root—some other things. He's a real special guy."
"She's beautiful," I whisper. Then I pause, realizing that one of us has the pronoun wrong. "Wait—did you just call this car 'he'?"
And then Carl fires up the crusher.
It's hard to describe the sound of a car that's been loved—really and truly loved—being murdered. Because that's what this is; murder, pure and simple, metal and rubber compacted into a single contiguous piece of lifeless slag. I shriek wordless dismay and run to the crusher's controls, like pushing the "stop" button might somehow undo what's just been done in front of me. "You can't do this! Why would you do this?!"
"Your boy asked me to," Carl replies, easily fending me off. I'm too small to shove him out of the way, and anyway, the smashing sounds are getting softer; all the major structural damage is already done, and what remains is simply reducing rubble into ash. "He said you'd come. I didn't quite believe him, even after I heard about you stirring things up on the Lady."
"Is this—is this some sort of punishment? He made you do this to punish me?" The sound of metal being torn continues, but the screaming is over. The car is dead, beautiful thing that it—that he—was.
To my surprise, Carl laughs. "Punish you? Punish you? You really are dense, aren't you? Does that come with the dead thing?" He produces a set of keys from his pocket, holding them up for me to see. Sunlight glints off the keychain, the grinning cartoon face of the Buckley High School Buccaneer leering at me from somewhere not quite the past, not quite the present. "You know, he really loved you. A man would have to really love a woman to do this just to be with her."
He tosses the keys, keychain and all, into the still-grinding teeth of the crusher. They vanish almost instantly, blending into the remains of the car. Carl turns and looks at me, expectantly.
"What?" I cross my arms and scowl at him, trying not to look as confused as I feel.
"Look in your pocket," says Carl, and I follow his orders before I stop to think about them, uncrossing my arms and sticking my right hand into the pocket of my borrowed coat. There's nothing there but lint and a crumpled toll receipt. "Your other pocket," says Carl.
Blinking, I stick my hand into the pocket of my jeans...and find a set of car keys. I pull them out and stare at them. The light glints off the face of the Buckley Buccaneer, just like it did before Carl threw him into the crusher.
"...how?" I ask.
Carl, meanwhile, grins like he's just won the lottery to end all lotteries. Clapping meaty hands against his knees, he all but shouts, "It worked! Damn if I'm not going to drink on this for the next ten years. Girl, you just saw a goddamn miracle, and I am the miracle worker."
"Okay, I'm confused. Can you please explain what the fuck is going on here?"
"Take off the coat," he suggests. His grin gentles, fading into something sadder and more sincere. "He really was a damn good man. I hope you deserved him."
"I tried to," I say, and slip out of my borrowed jacket. When a routewitch says to strip, it's generally best to do it. The junkyard jumps a bit as the fabric hits the ground, shadows turning sharper, bits of old metal lighting up around the edges with ghostlight memories. "Now what?" I ask, and my voice is as transparent as the rest of me.
"Drop down to the ghostroads, and say hello," says Carl. "It was nice meeting you."
"Nice meeting you, too," I say, still not sure whether I mean it, and let go of the daylight, falling down into the sweet dim dark of the twilight, and the ghostroads. The shadow of the junkyard remains, the parts of it that are old enough and enduring enough to have spirits of their own.
And parked in front of me, in the same place it sat when I saw it for the first time, is a cherry 1946 Ford Super De Luxe. Waiting.
***
I approach the car with something between curiosity and awe. I don't have a heartbeat, but it still feels like my heart is frozen in my chest. The paint job has changed colors, going from the green of my dress to a soft, misty gray, like a ghost seen from the corner of your eye and gone before it quite takes form.
"Gary?" I whisper.
The car doesn't answer, exactly—not with words, anyway. But the door is unlocked when I try the handle, and the upholstery is warm when I slide into the driver's seat. I rest my hands against the wheel, still trying to make sense of what I'm seeing, what Gary and Carl have somehow managed to do. Here, on the ghostroads, this car is as solid a thing as I am, a ghost among ghosts.
My hand is shaking as I let go of the wheel and slide the key into the ignition. The engine rumbles to life, all but purring as it wakes, and the radio, unsurprisingly at this point, turns itself on. The sound of Bing Crosby's voice flows into the cabin, sweet and strong and perfect, singing a song I haven't heard almost since the year I died. "You'll never know how many dreams I've dreamed about you, or just how empty they all seemed without you," he sings, and there are tears in my eyes, and I don't bother wiping them away. "So kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again. It's been a long, long time..."
"Oh, my God, you crazy bastard." I lean my head back against the seat and laugh, and laugh, and wonder how many years he spent planning this: how many days he spent with the car, just sitting in the driver's seat, letting himself sink into it. Letting himself imbue it. Cars can leave ghosts behind, when they're loved enough, but that wasn't what he was doing; he was trying something much stranger, and much more difficult.
And somehow, through some insane bend in the rules, it worked.
"I missed you so much," I whisper, and lean forward, resting my head against the wheel. This isn't an embrace, not really, not as such, but then, when you're dead, you learn the art of the compromise. You learn that sometimes "almost" is the best option of them all. And maybe, if you're very lucky, you get the chance to learn that nothing is forever—not even saying goodbye.
The radio station changes, abandoning the year I died for something a lot more recent: Journey, singing about how loving a music man ain't always what it's supposed to be. I'm laughing through my tears, and somehow, that's exactly right.
I sit up, wipe my eyes, and put my hands back on the wheel. Gary's engine is still purring, a sweet bass line beneath the radio's crooning. "All right, you crazy bastard," I say. "Let's drive."
***
"Can I talk to you for a minute?"
She turns around, all suspicion and wariness, those big doe eyes of hers shadowed with the fear that I'm here to make fun of her, to join the list of boys who've thought that "poor" means the same thing as "easy." "Sure," she says, and clutches her books a little tighter.
"Do you have...I mean, I was wondering...would you like to go to the Spring Hop with me?"
She studies my face like it's an exam question, fear fading in the face of pure amazement. When she realizes I mean it...I think I'd do almost anything to make her give me that look again. How did I let this wait so long?
"I would love to," she says, and it's 1944, and we're going to live forever, and I'm going to marry her someday.
Just you wait and see.
***
A wise man told me once that love—true love—never dies. It's just that sometimes, we can't see it clearly. As G
ary and I blaze down the ghostroads, a gray streak in the twilight that never ends...for the first time, I think I can believe that he was right.
Thunder Road
A Sparrow Hill Road story
by
Seanan McGuire
Well, now, I'm no hero, that's understood;
All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow...
Hey what else can we do now
Except roll down the window
And let the wind blow back your hair
Well the night's busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back
Heaven's waiting on down the tracks
Oh oh come take my hand
Riding out tonight to case the promised land
Oh oh Thunder Road...
— "Thunder Road," Bruce Springsteen.
There's one thing every journey—and every story—has in common. Then again, stories and journeys are the same thing, aren't they? Every one of them begins somewhere, trembling and frightened, like a green-clad ghost-girl who doesn't even realize yet that she's left her body in the burning wreck behind her. Every one of them moves onward from that point, little ghosts growing up to become full-fledged urban legends, letting their legs and their longings carry them from one side of the American ghostroads to the other. Every one of them gets more complicated as it goes, harder to predict, harder to understand unless you've been there since the very beginning.
Every one of them eventually ends. Whether you want them to or not.
Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan Page 23