Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit

by Jessica Raya

  “Time machines?” Mr. Galpin leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. He looked like someone who hadn’t slept in years. “No. No, I can’t say I do.”

  “I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately. I was thinking about how if you went back in time and changed something—a mistake you made or something—then when you came back to the present, things might be better.”

  “I believe that’s one idea, yes.”

  “But then I thought how that one change would change everything else, right? So everything would be different, not just the thing you want to be different.”

  Mr. Galpin turned his head. “It’s called the butterfly effect,” he said, interested now, seeing the potential for a lesson. “It’s actually an explanation of how a weather system, even something as significant as a hurricane, can be affected by the slightest change, such as a butterfly’s flight.”

  “Right, okay, so let’s say that even though you made that one mistake, you did some other things that turned out all right. If you went back in time, you might end up changing the good stuff along with the bad. See what I mean?”

  “I do.”

  “So maybe you wouldn’t want to change anything at all. Not even the bad stuff.”

  “I suppose that’s right,” Mr. Galpin said. “You’d have to leave it. You’d have to let it be.”

  I glanced over his shoulder, thinking of Jamie. “That’s what I was thinking too.”

  “Go on,” Mr. Galpin said. “Tell Miss Closter to break a leg.”

  At the end of the portables, I looked back, hoping he’d be gone. But Mr. Galpin was there still, leaning against the wall, bottle hovering near his lips. “I would, though,” he said to nobody. “I’d go back and change everything.”

  —

  The distant bleat of the school band greeted me as I pulled open the side door—that and the scent of cleaning fluid and gasoline. There was always graffiti to deal with, I thought as I pulled the neck of my T-shirt up to cover my nose. I wasn’t special that way.

  The Thanksgiving decorations had been hung in the halls, pilgrim hats and turkeys, chains of green and orange paper. The plastic tree would go up in a few weeks. I wanted to look forward to the holidays, to imagine a bright, shiny new year along with everyone else. But I would have to think about all that later. Right then I had to find Jamie. I didn’t want any more holes in my life where people used to be.

  I was so focused on my task that I almost didn’t see her. She stood at the foot of the auditorium stairs, hugging a small red suitcase in front of her. When I said her name, she turned slowly. The suitcase was too heavy for her, and she listed to one side like a sinking ship.

  “I knew you’d come,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Of course not,” I said. The clock over the office door told me it was almost three. The pageant would be ending soon. I pointed to the red suitcase. “What’s that?”

  “Guess,” she said.

  When she put the suitcase down, it made a hollow metal sound. Something splashed onto the floor. The smell of gas was so sharp it made my eyes water. I noticed the puddles on the linoleum all around her, the toes of her Hush Puppies stained black with it. It took a few more seconds for my heart to catch up with my head. The red suitcase wasn’t a suitcase at all.

  “Carol, what are you doing?”

  “Don’t act like you don’t know.”

  “What? What don’t I know?”

  She scratched her head through her yellow hat, then took it off and scratched some more. She’d shorn her strawberry curls to a couple inches all over. Lopsided bangs sprung away from her forehead. “You don’t like it,” she said.

  “No. It’s nice.”

  “I look like her, don’t you think?”

  “Mia Farrow?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m Joan of Arc,” she said and put her hat back on. Then she dipped a hand into the right front pocket of her cords and held out her fist. When she opened it, my red lighter lay flat in the middle of her palm.

  “That’s mine,” I said, stepping closer to take it. Carol closed her fingers again and tucked her hand behind her back. “You gave it to me,” she said.

  “I lost it.”

  She shook her head. “Why are you being like this?”

  The music in the auditorium stopped, followed by applause. Someone spoke too closely into a microphone. Carol opened her hand again. We stared at my lighter. “I wasn’t really given up for adoption,” she said. “They found me at a gas station. She’d left me in the trash.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “You didn’t want to know. Nobody wants to know anything. Everyone sticks their heads up their you-know-whats and pretends the world is just peachy-keen.”

  “I don’t want to pretend.”

  “Don’t you?” she said. “That day in the showers, they held me down. Do you want to know about that, Robin? Because you never asked. Not once. They held me down and made him touch me while they laughed. They should laugh at me. I’m garbage.” Carol tried to laugh but it came out like a cough. “Every time I think, He’ll take me now, I’ve suffered enough. But He never does, Robin. Why doesn’t He take me? Why isn’t it ever enough?”

  “We’ll fix it, Carol. We’ll tell someone.”

  “You never told.”

  I didn’t say anything. There were no words to fix this. The clock over the office door spun toward three. Beside it, the dead soldiers smiled at us blandly from their class photos. They’d seen worse.

  “They’ll be here soon,” Carol said, watching the auditorium door. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think you should see this after all.”

  “See what, Carol?”

  “Thank you for coming, Robin. I really appreciate your friendship. But I think you should go now.”

  “Let’s both go,” I said. “Let’s leave right now and never come back.”

  Carol looked at me hard for a minute. “Where?”

  “Wherever you want. We’ll go anywhere you want in the whole world. There’s a really ugly Pinto in the parking lot with our name on it.”

  “I get car sick,” she said.

  “You can drive.”

  She smiled a little, so I took a step toward her. I held out my hand, begging it not to shake. She reached out her empty hand, then reconsidered and lifted the one that held the lighter.

  “No, Robin,” she said. “This is where I’m supposed to be. Don’t you see? This is where it started and this is where it will end. I’m not a joke. They’ll see that now. They won’t laugh at me anymore.”

  “Nobody’s laughing. I’m not laughing.”

  “I baptize you with water for repentance,” she said. “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

  “What does that mean, Carol? I don’t know what that means.”

  The bell screamed. Three o’clock. A thousand feet thundered against hardwood, louder, louder as they moved toward the door.

  Carol lifted the lighter higher in the air, knuckles white, thumb ready. When the door banged open, the Bic stabbed the air between us and she flicked the wheel.

  I thought her hand was trembling, but it was me. My whole body shook. The wall of lockers behind her swayed like hula dancers. The fluorescents rocked side to side. Everything whirled around us, all the signs I had missed, all the words left unsaid. Only Carol was still and focused, as steady as that little blue flame. As she brought it toward herself, I saw how everything had led to this moment, how everything led to everything back to the beginning of time. Dreaming of time machines is about as useful as watching a rerun and hoping for a different ending. Our choices are carved in flesh and rock.

  “The Lord is my shepherd,” she began. “I shall not want.”

  “Please, Carol,” I begged. If I’d known it would be the last thing I’d ever say to her, I would’ve tried to think of something more profound.

  “You should probably close your eyes now. You don’t want to see th
is.”

  I shook my head. She was right, I didn’t want to, but I owed it to her. This time I would not look away.

  Carol smiled strangely, wholly, full of rapture I’d think later, finally understanding what beatific meant.

  “Don’t cry, Robin,” she said. “I am God’s special lamb.”

  As far as last words go, they were pretty damned good.

  19

  In November 1972, at a high school in a quiet, affluent Californian suburb, a sixteen-year-old girl set herself on fire. Damage to the building was serious but not catastrophic. Five hundred people ran to safety. Many recalled a loud boom and a flash of white light. The girl suffered third-degree burns over half her body. Two other students were injured trying to help. All three survived. A miracle some called it, including one girl who shared her near-death experience on a local talk show. “I see them everywhere now,” a teary Joyce Peyton told the studio audience. “Our whole lives are miracles. This television program is a miracle.”

  The details of this particular miracle were cobbled together over the next few months from eyewitness statements, private correspondence, church confessionals, and wishful thinking. A photographer from the local paper got a heart-rending shot of what was left of the melted jerry can silhouetted against a scorched hallway. Papers around the country ran it on their front pages, below the election results, but few reporters managed to get beyond the who, what, where. There were several theories. The melodrama of the teenaged mind. Unrequited young love. Drugs were implicated, of course, then quickly abandoned as a possible cause once people got a look at the alleged pothead in the paper. They ran Carol’s junior yearbook photo, taken that September just before she’d stopped coming to school. A cherubic face framed by a cloud of curls. For once, she hadn’t worn her hat. When the anti-abortionists got wind of our afternoons in Dr. Winkelmann’s parking lot, they put a stop to the conjecture and claimed Carol for their own. They called her a martyr for the cause. They declared her a saint. Carol neither confirmed nor denied their claims, but I’m sure she objected to them. Beatification is serious business, as she always said, and there are proper channels and procedures one simply doesn’t skirt.

  My part of the story, I kept to myself. My black box, a therapist would later call it, a fitting phrase as the memories often hammered me with violent flashes of light and sound not, I imagine, unlike a plane crash. There is a lot I’ve forgotten, but I can still feel my hair blowing back with that tremendous exhalation of heat just before the school seemed to fly at me. I slammed against a bank of lockers, metal twang ringing in my ears. Under that was screaming, mine, hers, other people’s. Carol had disappeared inside the flames. I froze. Just like that night, I froze and watched her burn. It was my dad’s voice booming in my head that yanked me back into that hallway. Stop, drop, and roll! For Christ’s sake, kiddo, stop, drop, and roll! I threw myself at her and we crashed to the floor.

  I beat her clothes with my hands. I wrapped her in my arms and squeezed her to my chest. The smell was horrible, but I wouldn’t let her go. Then someone was running toward us, shouting my name, one of the dead soldiers come to life. He pulled me to my feet, then scooped up Carol and carried her to his car. We were whizzing through red lights when I remembered poor Mr. Galpin. Who would watch out for him now?

  At the hospital, angels in green scrubs and shapeless white shoes swirled around us, barking at each other in a secret language. Carol looked so helpless on that giant gurney, so tiny and broken and wrong. What was it? “Her hat,” I yelled out as they wheeled her away. “We forgot her hat.” My hands were raw and shaking. They were somebody else’s hands. They sat me down and gave me a shot of something. The hours after were like watching an episode of M.A.S.H. underwater. When I surfaced again, Mom was beside me in her black slacks, crying against a woman who reminded me of my dad’s old secretary. The nurse showed her where to hug me so it wouldn’t hurt and then Mom really blubbered. Katy May mascara ran down her face, but her hair still looked nice.

  The Finley boy was fine, the nurses assured me. He’d been treated for smoke inhalation and released. Me, I would need to stay put a while longer. The other girl was in the ICU. That was all they said about Carol, and I was too scared to ask for more.

  “Could’ve been a lot worse,” the police officer said. He was wearing his sunglasses inside. While he spoke, I studied the girl in the mirrored lenses. Her red skin was as shiny as a poison apple, her eyebrows all but gone. The officer’s own thick unibrow bounced up and down behind his glasses as he spoke. Or maybe it was a moustache. I was body-surfing another shot of morphine. Everything around me was doing the hokey-pokey. Everything except my mom, who sat rigid in a hospital chair while he took my statement. She refused the nurse’s Valium, drank gallons of cafeteria coffee instead.

  “I don’t understand why this happened,” she said. “Who is Carol Closter? Why would she do this? Why would anyone do this?”

  The officer saved me from having to answer. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve seen kids do, though I’ll say this one is a real wacko. She used one of those plastic lighters you get at gas stations, if you can believe it.” He took off his sunglasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Damned thing had a sticker on it.”

  I can’t say what Mom believed at that moment, but she didn’t ask any more questions after that. The only questions I heard were from the nurses. Did I need more juice? A second pillow? Another one of those little pills? I was so brave, they told me, so lucky. I was a brave and lucky girl. My hospital room overflowed with balloons and stuffed animals, good wishes from strangers who agreed with the nurses. The pain arrived between doses, after cleanings and dressings, and in the seconds before I opened my eyes. I listened closely to what it had to say. Remember, it told me. Never again, I answered. I wasn’t sure about the brave part, but I sure as hell believed the lucky.

  After a week, I was allowed visitors. To my surprise, they came regularly and in droves. The Sisters brought carob bars and a portable turntable. They sat on my bed and played folk music guaranteed to heal my soul. Mildred Howard and the women from Mom’s office joked with the nurses and kept me well stocked in Rice Krispies squares. Vera Miller brought Moody’s Monopoly board and an old photo of herself in roller skates. My grandparents flew in from Canada, drank tiny bottles of airplane liquor, and stuffed homemade beef jerky under my mattress where the nurses wouldn’t find it. My grandfather didn’t talk much, but my grandmother had a lot to say about religion, California, and the general mess of things on our side of the border. She told Mom that the bags under her eyes were bigger than the ones they’d brought with them. “So you’re staying for a while, then?” Mom said, rubbing the line between her brows.

  When Jamie Finley came, he brought flowers and two cans of pop from the vending machine. I made him wait in the hall while Mom drew on eyebrows for me with her Katy May eyeliner. By all rights it was our first date.

  We couldn’t go for a drive, but there were stairs and a roof. We sat with our legs over the edge and willed the sun to go down. Jamie put his coat around me, then his arm. We didn’t talk much. The things I’d needed to say before didn’t matter anymore and what mattered now was too hard to hear. So Jamie didn’t tell me he’d be gone before Christmas, or that I was the first girl he ever loved. I didn’t tell him I had wanted it to be him all along, or that he was my first everything. Instead, we sat shivering and holding hands, and let ourselves believe we were lucky just a little while more.

  The day before Thanksgiving, they said I could go home. “Don’t worry,” Mom told me. “Your grandmother will cook.” She left the room to fill out the paperwork while I dozed off the last of the morphine drip. When I opened my eyes, one more visitor stood at the foot of my bed in a rumpled sports coat. I thought how disappointed Mom would be that she’d missed him. George McGovern at long last.

  “You came,” I said.

  “Hi there, kiddo.”

  My eyes filled. I couldn’t breat
he right. Something fluttered inside my chest, a bird caught in a house. I had done that. I had closed her in that small empty room and locked the door. All this time she had been waiting for someone to set her free.

  “Daddy?” she said.

  He buried his face in his hands and sobbed like a baby. It wasn’t a bad start.

  —

  Dad and I would be okay. We would begin awkwardly, stumbling and stuttering over old hurts. There was no other way to do it. Once or twice a month, he would drive up from the city where he lived now. He would let me pick the movie, take us for fish and chips, buy me things I didn’t need. It would take time, but eventually we would fill up the chasm with these handfuls of sand.

  Years later I would visit him on my way home from college for the holidays. He had a one-bedroom condo near the beach, a lady friend named Bev. He still sold insurance, but he’d finally given up golf. He’d started a small potted garden on his balcony with great success, squat flowering succulents, towering agave, and Mexican feather grass. I brought him a piece of Jasper for it from my graduate dig. It reminded me of those old road cuts on the edge of Golden. Maybe Dad saw what I did in that red rock, or maybe he just saw the stuff his life was built on. Either way, he turned it over in his hands and told me one last story.

  They’d met at a party off-campus. She was on a cultural exchange semester from Alberta, playing volleyball and studying American drinking habits a thousand miles away from her parents. He had his first business card in his pocket and a flask of bourbon in his blazer. She was the only girl at the party who he didn’t have to stoop down to talk to. They dated for a few weeks. He made her grilled cheese sandwiches. She made him laugh. Then she’d gotten knocked up and he panicked, asked her if it was his, drank himself into a stupor. She fled home before he knew what time it was. When he sobered up he bought a ticket to Red Deer, wherever the hell that was. They were married two days later in in her parents’ backyard. He’d borrowed my grandfather’s suit. “We were just dumb kids,” Dad said, “but we meant well.” Which I think sums up most people’s failures and victories well enough.