Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (31 page)

The question is so completely, perfectly
wrong
that it crosses the
line into completely, perfectly
right
. I laugh out loud, shaking my
head. "That's the first thing you have to say to me, after sixty years? 'Hello,
you look great, what have you done to your hair'? Gee, Gary, you'd think you
might start out with 'it's nice to see you,' or even a 'how've you been'."

"I've missed you so damn much, Rosie." Gary settles deeper into his nest of
pillows, joy mellowing into something sweeter: pure contentment. "I was hoping
you'd come for me, when the time got close, but I couldn't really be sure. It's
gotten so you can't tell the real routewitches from the charlatans, and it's not
like I could go comparison shopping."

I blink, staying where I am for the moment, just inside the door, ready to
run if I have to. "What do you know about the routewitches?"

"Not nearly enough," he says, earnestly. "I was a ghost-chaser for a lot of
years, Rosie. I'm not proud of it, but that's what I was, because I was hoping
that if I chased long enough, I might catch up to you. I met this redhead little
piece of a girl just across the Minnesota line—I suppose 'met' might be too
generous a word. I got found by her, and she told me you were a road ghost, and
I had to let you be." His smile turns wry before smoothing back into serenity.
"She told me you were real. That the night we had was real. That was all I
really needed to hear."

"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 still
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.