Where the Road Bends

by David Rawlings

  Eddie was behind this—he had to be—playing the music that had drawn her to the cave, the berries he’d harvested the day before. Just the idea of someone being near calmed her. She’d already conquered fear once today, and she could do it again.

  Bree made her way back to the rear of the cave, her nerves tingling. The snake eyed her from the safety of the shadows. Her heart rose to her throat as she held out quivering hands wide. She forced calmness into her tremoring voice as she ventured a cautious step toward the snake. “Careful now. Careful.”

  Vertical slits stared her down, evaluating if she was predator or prey.

  Bree ventured another nervous step, her hands wide, her voice low. “Careful now. Careful.”

  Prey. With a sudden jerk, the snake lunged for her again.

  Twenty-Three

  “So where are you headed, love?”

  Ice-cold water burned Eliza’s throat as she guzzled from the bottle. The blasting air conditioner chilled her overheated skin to goose bumps. She couldn’t keep up. One minute she was preparing to defend herself from a stranger on a baking, deserted dirt road; the next minute she was shivering in the front seat of a massive truck with a bright young woman called Grace. They flew above the outback—high above the road that had broken her—barreling along at a speed that seemed impossible ten minutes earlier.

  Grace gripped the giant steering wheel, a deft touch guiding tons of metal as it powered through the approaching twilight. She flicked switches on the expansive dashboard, then flicked the chin of the stuffed wombat that sat on cracked leather, next to a bumper sticker that proudly asked and answered its own question: How’s my driving? I don’t want to know.

  Grace veered around a trough in the road. “So how did you end up here?”

  “I was participating in a journey of discovery—I believe they used to be called a walkabout.”

  “You did that on your own? Not very smart, I would’ve thought.”

  The CB radio’s mic cord jiggled in Eliza’s face as she absorbed the blows of Grace’s disappointment. Even with a woman she didn’t know, she never wanted to be thought of as any less than capable. “The tour group said they weren’t going to do one, but they dropped me off next to this road. So I started walking . . .” She tried to corral the words into order, but they wouldn’t cooperate. How could she talk about walking in straight lines and ending up where she started?

  “If you tell me where you are headed, I can help you get where you need to go.”

  “Our campsite is in a crater next to a gravel track.”

  Grace grunted. “That could be anywhere out here. Any idea which direction you’ve come from?”

  “Not really.” On the truck’s dashboard, one straight line sat alone on the GPS, like the flight path over the Pacific. “I guess you could take me back into town, and I could retrace our steps from there. But where did you come from?”

  The cabin shuddered under more corrugation. “Like most of us, I came from where I started.” She pointed to a sheaf of papers rubber banded to her sun visor. “This tells where I need to be.” She reached across and tapped the GPS. “This gives me the right bearings. You’ve gotta have them to know you’re heading the right way. Otherwise you’ll get lost out here. You’ll get lost anywhere.”

  That made profound sense, even if it came from a grease-smeared, ponytailed truck driver. “You sound like my life coach.”

  “You’ve got a guide already?”

  “Tarquin’s more someone who sits there while I talk.”

  “That sounds more like a dog than a coach.” Grace bit her lip. “Tell me your story.”

  The stinging recollection of Eddie’s rebuke shaped her response. “While I work in fashion . . .” She wracked her memory for something she did while not on the clock and came up empty. “I spend time . . .” Her thoughts deserted her and with a sigh she went back to her usual well. “I’m the second-in-charge at Virgo Fashion. We’re a multinational company with a whole family of brands and ten thousand staff.” She checked off her career achievements as if she were playing LinkedIn bingo. The highlights came easily, her tried-and-true script rolled out as if she were talking to the news, a fashion magazine, or her hand in a game of one-upmanship with an insecure man across their drinks on an ill-fated date.

  A mob of twenty twitching kangaroos sat up at their approaching rumble before bounding away, and Grace leaned the road train away from them. “It sounds like you’re doing some wonderful things, but you’re a human being, not a human doing.”

  “I think I’m reaching the same conclusion. I’ve been asked to go for this job, which would be the pinnacle of my career, but I really don’t want it. I know it’s not a fear of failure, but . . .”

  “Maybe you’ve been head down, charging ahead at some random point in the distance, and now that you’re at that random point, you’ve looked up and thought, ‘How did I get here?’”

  Eliza chewed her lip as the outback scrolled past her window. This tour had turned into a mini version of her life—low flying through the outback at seventy miles an hour, with no idea of where she was, wondering where she was headed. And this young woman had pinpointed her restlessness in five minutes.

  “Maybe you’ve been sucked into the trap of doing what’s next and you’ve closed your eyes to what’s needed.”

  In the distance another mob of kangaroos bounded across the road, but one stopped in the middle of the track and waited.

  Grace winced. “This might not be pretty.”

  Eliza frowned. “Why? Can’t you stop?”

  The giant truck slowed, the gears screaming as Grace worked down through them. “Most truckies out here wouldn’t risk their cargo by swerving, so they would simply go over it.”

  Eliza saw the reason for the kangaroo’s pause. A tiny figure, a joey, slowly hopped across the dirt track toward its mother. “We have to stop. Slow down.”

  Grace geared down again, the engine shrieking at its overwork.

  Eliza slammed a hand on the dashboard. “Stop, Grace!” Her heart pounded in her ears as her scream filled the cabin. “Stop the truck!”

  Grace threw everything onto the brakes. An unholy squeal pinched Eliza’s ears as the cabin filled with the acrid scent of burning rubber. “Hold on.”

  Eliza closed her eyes as the truck jerked to a stop, wrenching her from her seat. She opened one eye, then the other, and stood to see the kangaroo five feet from them. Its ears twitched, and a tiny head poked out from its midriff.

  Eliza jumped from the cabin. The reason for the kangaroo’s reticence wasn’t only the joey. A large cut on its leg oozed a deep red.

  “It’s okay.” She slowly approached the animal, who turned and limped its way from the track, a painful hop taking it into the bush. Eliza wiped a tear from her eye as she climbed back into the truck. She’d saved two kangaroos and she couldn’t wait to tell Bree.

  Grace was silent as the truck resumed its speed.

  “I can’t believe truck drivers just run over the top of such beautiful creatures—especially ones with babies.”

  Grace geared up again. “You get really wound up when you really care about something, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I get the sense that it’s been a while since you’ve felt that happen.”

  Eliza snapped a look at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “It makes a difference to you when you do the right thing rather than sticking to the schedule. It’s nice to see.”

  That sounded surprisingly New Age for a female Australian trucker pushing a giant truck through the dusty outback. “So where are we exactly?”

  Grace nodded to the glove compartment. “Why don’t you go old school? If you look at the map in there, you might see something familiar. It might help.”

  Eliza snapped open the latch and reached for a neatly folded map. The sheet of paper grew with each unfold until it covered her half of the cabin. The map was dominated by a single thick
line that ran down its middle, intersecting with a smaller road right in the center. Small tracks branched off from this major road. At the bottom of the map, closely drawn contours hugged tight around a hill labeled Flagstaff.

  “Hey, that’s the name of my college.”

  A smile crept across Grace’s face. “Anything there you recognize?”

  Eliza scanned the terrain on paper. “Nothing. I presume this road in the middle is a highway or an interstate?”

  “Have another look.”

  Nothing was recognizable or even stirred a memory. She let her eyes drift to the top of the vibrating sheet of paper. A black-and-white rectangle marked the map’s scale, and beneath it was a compass designating the four directions for orientation.

  Eliza’s breath deserted her and her heart stopped beating. “What is this?”

  Grace checked the rearview mirror as she eased off the accelerator. “What do you think it is?”

  Eliza’s eyes were drawn to the compass. In between the elegant calligraphy of the N and the S and nestled neatly between the flourishes of the E and the W was a face.

  Her own.

  Twenty-Four

  The heat drained from Lincoln’s face as his shaking fingers found the wall. No one knew about that box. No one. He wanted Eliza to be the first to know about it, and he had been too proud to own up after the crushing rejection. His voice eked out in a thin whisper. “Who are you?”

  “I told you, I’m a guide.” She nodded to the desk. “What’s in there?”

  “How did it get in there?” He wrenched at the drawer again, but it was stuck fast.

  Alinta stepped closer. “How did what get in there?”

  Lincoln furiously massaged his temples. “This isn’t real. You aren’t real.”

  “I am. We all are.”

  “All?”

  “Yes, we were all called on to help each of you discover how you got to this point in life and which road you will take from here. Not back to the campsite, but in life.”

  Each of us? What had happened to the others?

  “So what’s in there?”

  Lincoln tried to force some sense into the situation, and the answer that slipped out made no sense. “Something from college. But how—?”

  Alinta perched on the desk’s edge. “By locking away the hurt, you’ve locked out so much more.” Compassion radiated in her deep smile and seemed to emanate from her eyes, almost like love. “Tell me what happened in college.”

  Lincoln slumped to the floor and sighed as the memory he’d long confined wriggled free. “I was ready to move things to the next level, surprise her on the plains of Africa, but she decided an entry-level job in fashion was more important.” He flushed as the bitterness of his past washed back to the shore of his present. “She told me if things were meant to be, she would pick things up when I got back. But when I did, she didn’t.”

  Alinta’s eyes softened. “I’m so sorry. That must have hurt.”

  Lincoln’s words didn’t make an appearance, but Eliza’s face did. It flitted across his memory, but not one lit by the flames of the campfire or forty thousand feet above the Pacific in business class. Her face was younger, fresher, tauter—and sitting under a mortarboard.

  Steel returned to his voice. “Yeah, but I moved on.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep, put the whole thing behind me. There are plenty more fish in the ocean, so I went fishing.”

  “And how did that work out for you?”

  “Even after I thought things were going well, there was always a point where the women left. I was unlucky, I guess.” He scoffed. “And then I made the mistake of getting married.”

  “Do you know what’s common to all those relationships?”

  Lincoln raised an eyebrow. “What? That I haven’t found the right person yet?”

  “No. The common ground here is you.”

  Lincoln rose from the floor, his breath shallow, a deep ache settling into his clenched jaw. “So you’re saying all this is my fault?”

  Alinta shook her head. “Those relationships that never went anywhere . . . do they follow the same pattern?”

  Faces circled through his mind—a carousel of women he had pursued. Their stories followed the same script. The thrill of the chase. Dangling his wealth like a baited hook. The announcement of togetherness made in the right places. But then the ring of words that became hollow and angry, echoing through the years. Closed off. Shut out. Weighing the right way to talk of the inevitable separation. And the reflection with an unanswerable question: What have I done wrong?

  Lincoln lowered his head. The answer was always that he should know, but it left him with nothing but emptiness.

  Alinta reached for his shoulder. “I’ve seen this before. By locking yourself away, you’ve almost guaranteed that you will be rejected.”

  Lincoln shook off her hand, but the anger within him met a ceiling. A barrier to his indignation. A recognition. A hint of truth to what she was saying.

  “The rejection must have been crushing, but carrying it continues to hurt you. Crack the shell around you and be the man you were made to be.”

  Alinta again reached for his shoulder. “If you don’t deal with this, you are just guaranteeing pain in the future. You will continue to shut out those you claim to love.”

  This time Lincoln didn’t shake her off. The line from Dianne’s letter. “What did you say?”

  Tears welled in Alinta’s eyes. “You’ve blocked out so much and so many because you’ve been shaped by pain.”

  “Shaped by pain?” Lincoln’s pulse thudded in his ears as his indignation smashed through her insight. “I am totally in charge of what happens in my life.”

  Alinta smiled softly through the tears. “How’s that working out for you? Even if you don’t lose much because of that letter, it will keep happening until you actually acknowledge what is causing it. If you want to change your path, which started from the wrong point, you need to address that.”

  Something about this woman stopped his usual defensive posturing. It wasn’t her beauty or even the strangeness of long-locked-away memories appearing in front of him in a locked desk, in a locked office, in the middle of nowhere.

  It was the fact she was right.

  The trader in Lincoln awoke. In every deal there was always a catch. He’d buried enough over the years to know that. “So what’s the price?”

  Alinta laughed. “You still don’t get it, do you? This isn’t a transaction. It’s my job to bring it to your attention and guide you. I can’t fix it, but I can give you tools to help you deal with whatever comes next.”

  Lincoln nodded. “So what do I do?”

  “Let me see what’s in that drawer.”

  Lincoln stared at the desk drawer, then back at Alinta. Doors that didn’t open, then did. Drawers that held memories long locked away.

  This is crazy.

  He stormed outside and the heat assaulted him. He swept away the flies as the sun inched lower and the blue of the sky surrendered to a dusky pink, dusting the shimmering landscape with pastel hues to chase away the harsh reds and oranges. The only red that stood before him came from the railway signal watching over him, unblinking, and the buffer stop blocking the line was still in place.

  Lincoln weighed his options. If he were to leave, he’d be heading out into the middle of nowhere with no idea of his direction. Alinta was his only hope. He trudged back inside. She leaned against the desk, ankles crossed, the lowering sunset peering over his shoulder and catching the gold flecks in her raven hair. And the honey in her voice was back.

  “I’m glad you’ve made that choice. When people can’t answer my question of who they are, it’s because they hide behind the facade of who they want people to think they are or what they promise they’ll end up becoming. Not who they are now, or how they got there.”

  Lincoln absorbed her truth like a boxer on the ropes.

  “I can read your face like a book, your heart e
ven more so. When you talk of Eliza, it carries a depth of emotion as if she wounded your soul.”

  The first of the evening chill crept into the room. He might have spent a life fishing, but Eliza was the one who got away.

  Alinta traced the timetables with a finger. “The last time this line was open, you were graduating. And the last time this door was opened, you were closing the door to your heart. So please, will you let me in and share what hurt you?”

  Twenty-Five

  Eliza’s bouncing face stared back at her from the center of the compass. “What is this?”

  Grace gripped the steering wheel as more corrugation rattled Eliza’s teeth. “It might explain why you’re feeling lost.”

  They raced past a sprawling gum tree beside the road and a leaning wooden sign gesturing down a dirt track no wider than a bicycle. Grace pointed it out. “I’ll bet that leads somewhere exciting.”

  Eliza dropped her attention to the map. Her photo surveyed a journey that was featureless. Anything but exciting.

  Grace leaned across to her, the setting sun sparkling in her sunglasses. “You won’t find that road on your map.”

  Eliza limply shook her head.

  “The road on that map looks like it’s only going one way. I get that. I’m head down, barreling along the road most of the time.

  “When I get the orders for my next drive, I rely on those above me to give me directions.”

  Eliza scoffed. “If you are making some kind of veiled reference that I need help from anyone else—”

  “It’s not veiled, and it’s about now that people usually ask—”

  The question burst from Eliza’s lips. “Who are you?”

  Grace tugged her cap’s visor. “And there it is! I’m a guide, and it’s my job to give you the perspective you can’t get from inside your own life.”

  “So you’re not a truck driver?”

  Grace cocked her head. “What do you think? I appear out of nowhere, at the precise moment you’re about to give up? In my glove compartment is a map with your face on it.” She smiled. “It’s about now that people start telling me this isn’t real, but it is. Let me tell you about the people I’ve had in my cabin who’ve told me that. They all claimed they were fine being at the center of their life, but none of them were happy. Successful, maybe. Overachieving, maybe. Fulfilled? Rarely.”