Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (18 page)

Rose's smile was brilliant enough to shame the sun, if only for a few seconds
before it faded back into her normal low-caste wariness. "He is, Mrs. Jackson. A
very nice young man. Thank you, ma'am." And then she was gone, heading for the
door at the brisk walk-half-skip that all the female students used when they
were trying to escape their teachers without being rude about it.

Irene Jackson--who would later write Rose's memorial page for the school
yearbook, and would weep without shame over every word--watched her go, a small
frown pulling down the corners of her mouth. That night, she sat on the edge of
the bed with her husband brushing out her hair, sighed, and said, "It was like
she was weighing the rest of her life, right there in my classroom, and she was
finding every bit of it wanting. How am I supposed to help these kids? They
don't want my help. They don't want anything but to be left alone."

David Jackson was a smart man, and knew that sometimes, his wife worried
about things she had no business worrying about, like teenage girls from the bad
side of town. He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, and said, "She'll be
fine
. Girls like that can surprise you sometimes, if you give them the
chance. Just be there if she needs you."

"I'm there for all the kids," said Irene, with all the conviction of a true
believer. "All they have to do is ask."

"There, you see?" He put the brush aside, reaching for her. "Now come here.
It's time to forget about other people's children for a while."

***

I'm filling space, relating events that I wasn't there to witness...but I
know they happened, because the people involved told me about them. They told me
when I went back to Buckley to offer them a guide into the dark places, playing
psychopomp for the people who'd known me when I was alive--the only people who
were mine to shepherd, even though they didn't die on the road. The ones who
mattered in life can matter in death, if you want them to, and I've guided
everyone I cared about who's died since I did.

Everyone who'd go with me, anyway. I ran for Michigan when I felt my mother
dying, but she was long gone by the time I got there, and the shades of the
streets told me she'd known I was on the way, but chose not to wait for me. I
guess some things don't change, not even among the dead.

Maybe especially not among the dead.

I take another breath, smiling gratefully as Emma slides another dish of ice
cream into my hand, and continue. "The next night, with Ruth off to work the
diner's night shift and her brothers off doing whatever it was they spent their
evenings doing, Rose walked to her closet..."

***

Rose walked to her closet the way she imagined a bride would on the evening
of her wedding. She'd worked all year to save her pennies for a prom dress,
putting up with endless hours of babysitting and doing more odd jobs than she
cared to count. Every cent she got went toward the dress. She hid her money in a
shoebox under her bed, tucking it into the furthest corner, where her mother
wouldn't think to look. Her brothers wouldn't steal from her, although it was
best not to tempt them; the Marshall boys were still looking for their own roads
out of Buckley, and they wouldn't deny her that chance. A prom night might not
change the world...but then again, it might. If she got lucky, it just might.

The dress she'd purchased from the department store downtown was green silk,
almost daring in the way it hugged her hips and waist, almost demure in the way
it circled her chest and shoulders. The perfect dress. The color was right for
her, whether her hair was lemon-bleached or its darker natural brown, and the
matching shoes had been on sale. That was the final straw, the thing that
decided her, even if it meant she had to work another month of Saturday nights
while her perfect dress sat on lay-away, waiting for her to come and claim it.
Even the store manager had smiled when she came to pick it up, paying her last
five dollars with hands that were very nearly shaking. It was the perfect dress
for prom. It was the perfect dress for everything.

It was the perfect dress to die in. But thoughts like that were a million
miles from Rose's mind as she stepped out of her heavy cotton skirt and slid the
silk up around her waist, feeling the fabric cupping her the way Gary sometimes
did, when he was feeling daring and she was feeling wild. She pulled it up a
little bit, letting the heavy fabric whisper against her legs, tiny silk kisses
on her skin. But draw it out as she might, she couldn't make the process last
forever. All too soon, she was looking at herself in the mirror, at the green
silk bodice, at the matching ribbons tied oh-so-carefully through the tamed and
tempered straw of her hair.

"If he asks me to go to the top of Dead Man's Hill tonight, I will," she
whispered, the words wicked on her tongue, and watched the wanton blush
spreading up her cheeks. She was going to get out of Buckley, she was, and one
way or another, this was going to be the night that started her escape.

One way or another.

***

The hours ticked by as slowly as shadows creeping across the street at
sunset, and Gary didn't come. Rose sat on the porch, keeping her back carefully
lifted away from the wide slats of the porch swing, and watched the road with
eyes that had gone from anticipatory into worried, and were now making the
transition into angry. He hadn't come because he wasn't coming. Someone--his
mother, maybe, or those pretty girls in school who didn't think a boy like him
should go anywhere near a girl like her--had finally talked some of their brand
of sense into him, and he wasn't coming.

She'd been a fool to think a night like this was ever intended for a girl
like her. Rose stood, blinking back tears as she turned to storm back into the
house, away from the summer air and the hope of something more.

Then she paused, hand stretched toward the doorknob. Paused, and thought.

There are those who'll say that every choice we make can change the future,
and that every future exists, somewhere. In a thousand, thousand futures, Rose
Marshall went back into the house, took off the green silk gown, chose another
path. Maybe she sold the dress back to the department store and used the money
she'd worked so hard for to leave Buckley forever. Maybe she confronted Gary at
school on Monday morning, found peace, found closure. Maybe she just decided to
wait a little bit longer before she turned off all the lights, and was still
awake when her prom date arrived, greasy-handed from changing his tire, with a
half-dead corsage clutched in one hand. Maybe. But those are other stories, and
that isn't how this story chose to go.

The frown bloomed on Rose's face like the flower she was named for, starting
small, but opening swiftly. By the time she wrenched the door open and stormed
into her brother's room, it was in full display, petaled in anger,
disappointment, and shame. Arthur and Morty were gone for the night, off on some
mysterious errand, and they'd taken Arthur's truck, leaving Morty's clapped-out
old car behind. He always left his keys in the dish beside his bed when he
wasn't going to need them. Rose snatched them up and turned to go, not looking
back, not pausing to change her clothes.

If any of the neighbors had chosen that moment to look out the window, they
would have seen a small, pale-haired figure dressed in green silk go stalking
across the yard to the car parked beside the curb. They might have said "There
goes that Marshall girl," might even have commented on what a strange thing that
was to wear on an evening drive. But no one saw her go. No one said a word.

Rose Marshall shoved the key into the ignition, turned it, and was gone.

***

I pause for a moment, struggling to find the words that come next; struggling
to find the next breath. I don't have to breathe, not really, but here and now
and wearing the coat that Emma gave me when the cheerleaders arrived--wouldn't
do to have them realize they could see right through me when the lightning
flashed--it helps me think. I don't want to tell the parts that come next. I
don't want to remember them. I want to lie, say things worked out, say that
somehow, this was never a ghost story at all.

I take that next breath, sigh, and say, "The fastest way to Gary's house was
by way of a winding one-lane road that ran the length of the closest thing in
town to a mountain. They called it Sparrow Hill Road..."

***

Rose slowed as she took the turn-off onto Sparrow Hill Road, a sudden chill
making the skin on her arms lump up into hard knots of gooseflesh. Something was
wrong. Something was very wrong. Every instinct she had was telling her to turn
around, to take the long way, or to just go home; this wasn't worth it.

Rose Marshall was nothing if not stubborn. Tightening her hands on the wheel,
she hit the gas, and drove forward into the shadows lurking underneath the trees
that covered the hill. It only took a few moments for the light to disappear
completely.

No one in Buckley ever saw Rose alive again.

***

Sparrow Hill Road was about three miles long, from end to end, following a
winding route around the outside of the hill it was named for. Rose had traveled
almost a mile and a half when headlights flashed on behind her, sudden and
almost blinding as they reflected off her rear-view mirror. "Ah!" she exclaimed,
throwing up an arm to block the glare. "Jerk." She adjusted the mirror, but it
didn't help; it was almost like the car behind her was aiming to kill her night
vision.

Rose muttered something unladylike under her breath and sped up a bit. She'd
been driving Sparrow Hill Road since long before she was legally allowed behind
the wheel of a car. If she had to drive it halfway-blind, then so be it. It
wasn't like she had another choice. The road was too narrow where they were, and
she couldn't turn around, or pull off to the side.

Another half-mile slunk by, sliding away into the night. The headlights faded
from her rear-view, and Rose dropped her hand from her eyes, putting it back on
the wheel. She had time, barely, to grip before the car that had been driving
behind her lunged forward and slammed into her rear bumper.

The impact was hard and unexpected, throwing Rose forward against the wheel.
She cried out, more in surprise than pain, and was in the process of
straightening when the car was hit again, harder this time, knocking her almost
onto the dash.

"What are you trying to do, kill me?" she shouted, even though she knew
full-well there was no way the other driver could hear her. Then she paled.
There were always stories, urban legends, about girls foolish enough to drive
alone on spooky deserted roads in the middle of nowhere...

Rose slammed her foot down on the gas hard enough to break the heel off her
shoe, sending Morty's car leaping forward at a speed it hadn't seen since it was
new. "Come on, come on,
please
," she whispered, shifting as she urged
the car to go even faster, to break whatever mechanical laws were holding it
back. Just a little further. If she could make it just a little further, she
could get back onto the surface streets, and then--

She didn't dare slow for the curve in the road. She twisted the wheel sharply
left, trying to swing the car around. She would have made it--her reflexes were
good, as the reflexes of the young and afraid so very often are--if not for the
car that slammed into her own just as she began her turn, sending her, and her
brother's car, plummeting down into the darkness on the side of Sparrow Hill
Road.

There was time to scream. There was time to think
Oh God, oh God, I'm
going to die, this is it, I'm going to die, oh, God...

And then there was nothing.

***

Silence reigns in the Last Dance Diner. Silence, and the sound of the rain.
The cheerleaders stare at me in open-mouthed silence, waiting for the story to
continue. I take a breath.

"If Rose was awake when her car hit the ground, that night granted her a
single mercy; she didn't remember it when she came to. The woods were silent all
around her..."

***

Rose opened her eyes on darkness.

She was sprawled next to the road at the base of Sparrow Hill, her head
pillowed on a clump of fallen leaves. She pushed herself slowly up, eyes wide as
she stared at the woods in disbelief. She'd been falling; she remembered that.
"There was an accident..." she whispered. "The car..."

But there was no car. Only the road, and the night, and Rose, standing lonely
and confused in her green silk gown. She looked down at herself; the dress was
intact, no tatters or even stains from the ground where she'd been lying. She
brushed her hands against her skirt, disoriented and confused. "I don't
understand."

"Rose?"

The question came from the left. Rose turned, eyes wide, to see Gary
Daniels--her prom date, the one she'd been coming to find--walking toward her
with his tuxedo jacket tied around his waist and oil coating his hands. "God,
Rose, what are you doing out here? I was going to call just as soon as I got
back to a place with a phone--how did you get here?" He paused. "Rose, what's
wrong? You're shivering."

"I'm cold." It was the first thing to come to mind. It shouldn't have been
true, not on a hot June night in the hottest summer she remembered, but it was.
It felt like her bones had been replaced with ice, freezing her from the inside
out.

"Here." Gary untied his tuxedo jacket and offered it to her, saying, "I took
it off before I started working on the tire. It shouldn't...it shouldn't stain
your dress."

"Thank you." She slipped the jacket on, the cold fleeing almost instantly.
Tears welled up in her eyes, and she threw herself at him, almost without
thinking. "I want to get out of here, Gary, Gary, please, please, get me out of
here. Please."