Told you my mind starts sorting through useless trivia if I spend too much time on the road, so don’t start bitching about how this has nothing to do with anything.
I cranked up the volume and pressed down on the accelerator—almost anything from Who’s Next turns me into a speed king—and before Roger Daltrey was finished roaring about the teenage wasteland, the exit was in sight.
Or, rather, an exit.
I checked the odometer and saw that it had been just under five miles; there wasn’t supposed to be an exit for a while yet.
You know those moments in life that, when you talk about them later, you always preface with something like, “I should have known because…”? Well, there’s no “because” here; yeah, what happened a few moments later was odd, no question, and I wish to hell I could say that I knew or sensed that something in the world was about to wander off the highway permanently, but the truth is there was nothing that set off any serious alarms. By now, I was so tired and cramped and sore and hungry and all the rest of it that I didn’t care about the shadows that had broken into my apartment, or Miss Driscoll’s morbid hobby, or the two thousand dollars, or my date with redheaded Kimberly—nothing.
On the TripTik map or not, that next exit was mine. If I’d turned down the radio and listened carefully, I bet I could have heard my bladder cheering.
That said, I can tell you now that if I had decided to wait for the following (and TripTik-acknowledged) exit farther down, all of this still would have happened—hell, I could have taken any exit from this point on and it wouldn’t have changed anything.
The sign said, simply: EXIT. Nothing more; no town name, no number, no white arrow pointing in the correct direction. All of this both registered with me and didn’t (like the total number of deaths from the I-71 accident); I saw it, knew something about it was odd, but just didn’t care. I wanted to feel solid ground and not pedals under my feet for a few minutes.
As soon as I merged onto the ramp the light above the EXIT sign blinked twice, made a sputter-buzz kind of noise, then went out completely.
I wasn’t prepared for how damned black it became after that. Nowhere on either side of me was there another light, so all I had to see by were the meat wagon’s headlights. I clicked over to the brights and slowed down, just in case some possum, squirrel, dog, or deer decided to make a break for it and test my reflexes.
The first roadside memorial (a cross made of plastic flowers, sporting several ribbons) barely registered with me when it faded into the glow of the headlights. I drove on. The cross glided past. One of the ribbons snapped backwards and flapped in the breeze as if waving good-bye.
I thought of the miniature monuments Miss Driscoll had erected around her tracks.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find something creepy about these monuments (be they HO-scale or life-size). I understand that those left behind have to do whatever it takes to deal with their grief, but if it was me and someone I’d loved had died in a wreck (probably in bloody pieces and great pain) the last goddamned place I’d want to erect a monument to their memory was the spot where their final agonized breath had been drawn and expelled. And since the maintenance of these things is the responsibility of those who erect them, that means you have to make an at-least quarterly pilgrimage to the place—assuming that you don’t have to drive past it every day on your way to or from work. How can you pay suitable respect to someone’s memory when you’ve got semis and SUVs and busloads of screaming kids roaring by every few seconds? Cemeteries may not be the cheeriest places to visit, but at least it makes sense to mourn there. Grieving by the side of the road in front of a monument no one but you gives a shit about just strikes me as distasteful…but then, I’ve never had to confront that particular kind of grief, so it’s easy for me to pass judgment: Dianne—my ex-wife—always pointed that out to me—that it was easy for me to judgmental about these memorials; she found them to be deeply moving.
Dianne never brought up my shortcomings to try and make me feel small; she did it because they, in her words: “…keep the best of you hidden from me and everyone else. You’re not the cynic you want everyone to think you are.” I never saw it that way, nope; as far as I was concerned, it was her way of proving to me once again that my moral compass was fucked up and wouldn’t I just be the best person if I saw the world just like her.
Yes, I was an asshole. It’s taken all these years of being without her for that to finally sink in.
I looked in the rear-view mirror, saw the lone waving ribbon from the shrine, and felt a brief sting of regret—but for what, I wasn’t sure.
“Baba O’Riley” segued into Grand Funk’s “I’m Your Captain”, and I turned up the volume, forcing myself to not think about the way Dianne detested this song.
The next shrine popped up as suddenly as a slice of bread from a toaster. This one was of the heart-shaped variety, but that isn’t what startled me. It was the sight of the face in the center. It blinked at me. And then smiled.
A sharp movement on the right of the shrine flashed against the windshield and I hit the brakes, thinking that some animal was about to make a mad dash for safety across the road, but instead of a raccoon or cat, what emerged from the side of the shrine was a hand, then a wrist, and then the face in the middle glided upward, leaving a blank space in the center—
—and the girl who was setting up the shrine waved at me.
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding and waved back at her, easing off the brake but not yet speeding up again.
Pushing back some of her long strawberry-blonde hair from her face, she looked at me, then at the shrine, and then shrugged, her smile looking more and more like that of a child who’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t have been. Her clothing was dark—way too dark to be safe at this time of night, in this location.
Checking the dashboard clock, I saw that it was almost two in the morning, and there was no other car in sight. Had she walked here from whatever town lay at the end of the ramp? Why do this in the middle of the night when there was the chance someone might not see you until it was too late? And what the hell was I doing, sitting here wondering about this when I needed to be moving?
That’s when it hit me that she wasn’t trying to erect the shrine, she was trying to take it down, and I‘d surprised her. This was probably some kind of sorority prank—she couldn’t have been more than nineteen—and the look on her face told me that she was embarrassed but not necessarily sorry.
I looked at her, then the shrine, shook my head in disgust, and drove away.
She came out into the middle of the road and stood watching until I rounded the curve that emptied out into the town proper. I half expected her to give me the finger—after all, I’d been the one who had the nerve to interrupt her little practical joke—but she only stood there, arms at her sides, staring at my tail-lights.
Something about her shape seemed off to me, but I couldn’t pin it down, and then decided I didn’t care.
The second after I crested a small hill and she disappeared from view, I saw the stack of memorial wreaths, crosses, and hearts. They were piled up to the side at the traffic light like discarded bags of trash, plastic lace cracking, ribbons waving in the air, and countless photographed faces staring up through the open spaces in the center.
There must have two dozen of the things piled there. I sat staring at them for several moment before turning to look out the rear window. Jesus, had she taken all of these? How far had she been walking, anyway? There was no way all of these had been taken from the small stretch of road along the exit, unless this particular exit was one of the deadliest in existence, which I doubted.