An editor who read a story of mine in a small magazine asked if I’d write about The Real Thing That Happened To Me. I replied that it’s bad enough those boys will be free in a few years; why do I want to bolster their notoriety? I’d submit page after page of:
Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias, Alicia Renée Dias
The accent marks can serve as a guide to letting it be sung.
I won’t turn my child or criminals into cash. To atone for my own violence, I’ll do something that stays known only to me. Aid to a victims’ support network, I’m thinking.
The serving girl who replaced Kumiko is exasperating. I fired Alex. It’s a revolving door. We lack enough sign-ups for a tea ceremony, though I hope for a reason to contact Kumiko. One day I’ll marvel at bumping into her by chance and confess I need her as my psychiatrist.
The Dormouse remains missing.
Now and then, I picture Charlotte growing, attending school. Does Elsie get in some harmless teenaged trouble? Vincent, their father, loses hair. At the dinner table, he entertains his wife and daughters with anecdotes that leave them hysterical with laughter.
One day, on Facebook, I note a picture on a friend’s page and gasp. It’s Betty Lezardo. In another fashionable dress, at a literary event. I enlarge the photo, clicking until I can better countenance her face. There’s no mistaking it, and it’s my doing, I’m sure: A slight but definite sidelong glance distorts her eyes, as if fearing what’s behind or not trusting what might be gaining on her. She clutches a glass of white wine with a burning marble of fluorescence in it, from the lights overhead. Her face screams forty-ish more than what I saw on her, like a time-lapse. She appears completely haunted.
Next to her is Elsie, in an LBD, a gateway garment to female adulthood. The skirt flares. Elsie Lezardo, the person who pried me out of fantasy and hurled me into the reality of forward history. Is she sixteen? Has that much time sped past? What are her crushes and career plans, her despairs so enormous she refuses to believe they’ll subside with time? There’s no Charlotte, because this is a grownup party.
Once, thinking of Alicia as she’d be—Elsie-sized now—I fell asleep in Central Park in Sheep Meadow, on a sloping lawn, and leaves like crisp scuttling crabs walked sideways over my face. I sat up with a start. I am alive, I thought.
I’ll never behold Charlotte, Betty/Bird, or Elsie again in the flesh. If we happen upon each other by accident, I’ll cross the street unless they do it first. When I awaken in the morning, I put on a kettle and answer it when it screams. And then I open my front door to Wonderland, and the strangers come in, good and ill, and I serve them the best of what I’ve made from my hours in the night.
On Highway 18
Rebecca Campbell
Jen bought a 1982 Plymouth Horizon for four hundred dollars just before they graduated high school, so if she and Petra wanted to get into town for the Bino’s—open twenty-four hours—to eat fries and pale, oily gravy, or drink the bitter black coffee of three a.m., it was Jen who drove. Petra rode shotgun, watching the highway unfold, and refold, and unfold again as it wound through clear-cuts. Sometimes they had a place to be, a pit party, or a dozen people meeting up at a doughnut shop on the highway. A lot of the time, though, it was just the two of them, driving four hours to an empty beach on the Pacific coast of the island, arriving in darkness so absolute they couldn’t see the waves, only hear their roar at low tide, sitting under the starless, overcast sky until the sun rose.
Mostly they took Highway 18 into town, running from the island’s coastal valley to its interior mountains. Everyone else did, too, as though at one end or the other something might happen, and if you missed it you would miss the only thing that had ever happened or would ever happen on the island.
Anyway, after Jen bought the Plymouth they often found themselves in town, driving through well-lit and desolate streets to the 7-Eleven, where they would buy Orange Crush and gummy sours. Their only company a few kids squatting in the parking lot under lights that turned their acne scars purple and glazed the concrete a brassy gold, all these kids with blue freezie-stained mouths.
Petra often thought about Highway 18, and about how it spilled from the empty stretches, unlit, into the parking lot, the kids, the Bino’s. While Jen chatted with another long-haired boy, Petra walked through the cars to the highway and watched the trucks full of logs so enormous it was hard to believe they grew that way as they barreled through town like it wasn’t a place, just an interruption on the long peregrinations lumber takes from hillsides to sawmills and freighters and then out across the Pacific.
The kids in the 7-Eleven parking lot knew everything that happened from one end of the highway to the other. They knew, for example, about the last girl who’d been found—the one in the ditch beside the Petro-Can.
“Be careful, man,” he said, a kid Petra had known in tenth grade, “you know how ghosts like highways. Watch out for hitchhikers.”
“Ghostly hitchhikers?” she asked, watching Jen and her Jesus-haired boy.
“Yeah, man! They’re all over. I talked to a truck driver and he told me about this girl he picked up north of Port Alice, and she told him shit. I won’t even fucking repeat it. She told him what’s going to go down in like the year 2000. And when they got to the bus station in Nanaimo, he pulled over and she was gone. Like bam. Gone.”
“Have you ever seen her?”
“Maybe? Like. I thought I did once, but I didn’t pick her up. But if I get a chance again, I’ll pick her up and ask her all sorts of shit about what’s coming.”
After she talked to the kid in the parking lot, Petra began to watch for hitchhikers. She knew the types: northbound tree-planters; a man and his toddler Petra saw on Monday mornings; guys on their way in to work or back home again. There were kids from the university headed for the beaches on the west coast.
It wasn’t until a few weeks after the 7-Eleven parking lot that she began to see—or think she saw—the other sort of hitchhiker. The first time, it was just a thin girl in ten o’clock summer twilight or the very early morning. This kind might only appear as a silhouette, a girl who disappeared as one glanced down to adjust the radio.
But then Petra saw her on a long straight, when they were driving behind a truck. She knew that in the cab of the truck, a man—she was sure, always, that it was a man—had seen the girl as well.
The truck stopped. As they passed, the girl had reached the passenger door and was illuminated by the interior light, and though Petra looked back to see her face, she saw only her dark hair and the driver’s silhouette in the cab. The sight was so familiar, Petra wondered if it happened every time they drove that road, every time they saw a girl stick out her thumb to get a little further down the highway.
Her mouth was dry when she finally asked Jen, “Does it feel weird, to you?”
“What’s weird?”
“That girl back there.”
“It’s not weird, it’s stupid. Remember what happened to Nicki?”
And then the thin whine of stretched magnetic tape interrupted Jen as she was about to mention, say, the girl they found in the ditch by the Petro-Can, and talk about how they should all know better.
Of course Petra hitchhiked, too, everyone did, even if they never talked about it. The bus only ran twice daily. You didn’t have a car. It was different on an island anyway, you all knew each other, though she was rarely picked up by anyone she knew, which meant her parents didn’t have to hear about it. Things happen, of course, but when don’t they? Girls are lost, then they’re found again, and that’s often worse than thinking they’ve disappeared somewhere, into the city maybe.