Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (17 page)

***

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."