“Mom really swore at you?” Alli finally asked, and I burst out laughing. That would be the one part of the story that Alli got hung up on. We’d reached Hogan Lane—thanks to Alli, I’d returned to this street in much higher spirits than I’d left it. I knew it’d be a good idea to get her.
“So what do you think?” she said. “You sure it’s in your head, or maybe it happened and it was a good cover-up.”
“There wasn’t a body,” I replied. “I can see where mom and the police are coming from.”
“Yeah,” Alli agreed, and I could hear that even she was slowly becoming convinced. “And honestly, if Mr. Sharpe was real, wouldn’t his car still be parked on the side of the road right now?”
It took all of my mental power to keep myself from gasping out loud, though I couldn’t disguise the sudden shuffle of my steps.
His car! I realized. Mr. Sharpe had driven up to meet me…and…if he’d been killed on the rocks, his car would still be out there!
All of a sudden, a way of definitely proving my story—true or otherwise—had appeared. In my shaken state the night before, I had completely forgotten that detail, and now that it had showed up, every cell in my consciousness focused on it at once.
Luckily, we had just reached our driveway and Alli was distracted. She went into the house without paying me any more regard, clueless that she had caused me to have a breakthrough.
I remained in this nearly frozen state through dinner, my body like a discarded exoskeleton. There were few questions over dinner: how was the day, what did you learn Alli, did you remember to ask if your sister could help at the bake sale, is Michael listening to us speaking…hello, Michael, are you there? Alli’s hand waved in front of my face and broke me from my thoughts, and I robotically rolled out answers to them. Luckily they ignored my mental absence, probably thinking that regret over my car crash was sinking in.
After my mom disappeared into her office and my sister took over the living room television, I headed for my room and switched on my computer screen. That was my habit. I’d sit at the screen and edit photos all night, or study the gazes of politicians who’d been on the news, or the eyes of celebrities just so that I could mentally predict the tabloid headlines that’d be out months later.
That night, though, I couldn’t even touch the mouse. I sat in the center of my face-covered walls, Alli’s revelation rolling through my head. The car…that silver Maserati with the blue headlights.
I know it’s there…
Now that everything had blown over for the most part, did I even want to know the truth?
I was unable to banish it. Finding truth was too much a part of me to simply disregard. If I found it, then I could tell the police and my story would be proved true, and they’d go hunting for this man who’d somehow escaped. My mom wouldn’t be angry with me anymore and my name would be cleared.
And if there was no car in the first place? It was an option I didn’t want to think of, because that meant I’d truly been having hallucinations. But it would put my mind to rest. Because if there was no car, then there had been no man. And if there was no man, there had been no murderous gaze or silver claws, and all of this was a mere overreaction.
I glanced at the clock. It was almost time for bed.
Or time for work? my treacherous mind countered.
My cell phone was in my grasp a second later, dialing Spud.
“What’s up?” he answered. “Crash another car?”
“Not yet,” I replied.
4
Evidence
The last time I’d sneaked out of the house, I’d nearly been turned into human rotisserie. Sometimes I wondered just how dangerous I could get if I didn’t constantly keep myself in check. Maybe if I’d tried to be more normal, I wouldn’t have found myself climbing out my window at midnight again, careful of even the slightest noise this time. Maybe then I wouldn’t have scraped my palms by scooting across the shingles until I reached the roof of our garage, dangling from the edge until the ground was close enough to let go. Maybe then I’d just stay at home and sleep at night, and surround myself with insignificant pains like how to get a hotter girlfriend or how to keep my boss from yelling at me for being late to work.
A girlfriend and a real job wouldn’t be that bad, would it? I thought. As if I had time for either. I stole across the grass still damp from the light shower that had appeared early in the night, and slipped through gate.
The emptiness of the street squeezed in like a quilt. There were no lights in the houses, no cars pulling into the driveways. One might have found more life in a taxidermist’s freezer.
I hurried down the sidewalk with furtive glances back at my house, its wooden panels appearing gray in the dim cast that covered the dismal street. My mom was probably (and hopefully) catching up on sleep, now that I didn’t have a car to escape with. No lights switched on as I walked with my hands in the pockets of my jeans. There were only the empty echoes of the city far away, and the ever-present blue fly zapper someone had forgotten to unplug before going in to sleep.
To be safe though, I’d told Spud to park at the end of the street. I could see the outline of his beaten brown Chevy pickup around the corner, the lights off but the engine rumbling low into the night.
“I knew I kept you around for something,” I told him as I climbed into the passenger side, the bench seats covered with an old mat stitched over its original material. Spud huffed as I closed the door.
“You owe me a good bunch of things for this,” he said, though his tone betrayed his phony annoyance.
“What about the free work I gave you yesterday?” I countered. “I think we’ll be even.”
Spud pushed on the gas to shut me up. The engine was far louder than my BMW’s had been—the sound made me wince, but there was nothing to be done about it. Most of his truck’s original pieces weren’t even there anymore, the radio from sometime in the 1990s but the steering wheel at least two decades older. A new sound system had been wired in messily with cables poking up from under the seat, and every time Spud slowed for a stop I had to push a speaker back under the chair with my foot. I only relaxed when we were a good half-mile from my house and Spud turned the headlights on.
The closer we came to the meeting spot, the more the anticipation inside me grew. What if the car was where I remembered? I hadn’t planned through what I would do next. If I found no car, the least it would do was convince me that my mom was right, and all of this had been my imagination. I wasn’t sure which I wanted more.
The truck wheezed as we crawled up the canyon road, everywhere around us still deserted and far too familiar for my own comfort. I stared out the side window as the trees and rocks rolled by, recalling my own quiet drive out. I’d left my house early so I was there on time, barely thinking about what I was about to do because it came so naturally. That job wasn’t supposed to be out of the ordinary.
Now the woods bore a sinister feeling. My eyes kept imagining things darting amongst the trees: the glint of an animal’s eyes, the face of someone watching us when it was only the withered side of a dying bush. I could smell the woods through the crack in Spud’s broken passenger window that didn’t shut all the way—branches still damp from rain, like the sharp scent in December when people started putting up their Christmas trees.