The night was short, though, and when the sky lightened she got out of the car and walked past sleeping-bagged bodies in the beds of pickup trucks or curled as she had been in the back seats of cars—though not alone.
Jen must be somewhere among them, in the back of Chris’s truck, or lying on a tarp on the other side of the fire. Petra decided, That’s enough, fuck it, and wrote a note to leave on the dashboard. Going home. I hope you had a really really really great time with Chris. She followed the rutted driveway from the pit to the road where, under the first yellow stain of dawn, she saw a girl. It was Jen.
“Hey!” Petra shouted. “Jen! Wait for me!”
The girl didn’t move, so she shouted again, and then a car left the pit, gravel popping like gunshots. Petra glanced upward without thinking to see the stars wink out as the sky turned from black to blue. When she looked down again, Jen was gone. The car stopped and someone’s older brother asked if she wanted a ride back into town.
Petra tried to explain about the note, but by August Jen didn’t have any time. She moved in with the Parkinsons to look after their three kids when Mr. Parkinson headed to Yellowknife for three weeks a month. After the kids came Chris, and after Chris there was Jen’s mother, and after that it might be Petra, if she was lucky.
It didn’t matter, she told herself, because sometime soon Jen would call. They’d escape together in the car, and if they saw a girl hitchhiking, Petra promised herself, they’d pick her up. She would make Jen do it, before it was too late.
Jen never called. Petra finally caved on the last weekend before she left for university, and Jen agreed, if reluctantly, because she had to work six days that week, and it was going to be Chris’s birthday soon.
They drove for two hours to an empty beach with a spiral slide and a tire swing. They ate jelly worms and drank Orange Crush and drove home just before sunrise.
Petra saw the girl first. She was a slightly darker shade of gray than the predawn highway.
“Let’s pick her up.”
“What? No. Do you know her?”
“Just once? Okay?”
They reached her, their headlights sliding across her pale face—the dark hair, the skinny limbs in denim—and Jen, still bristling, pulled over onto the shoulder.
Petra opened the door and got out.
“Hey!” she called back. “You need a ride?”
So quiet on the shoulder that when she heard a crow overhead she glanced up. When she looked back, the girl was gone.
Inside the car, Jen rested her head on the steering wheel. “I need to sleep,” she said. “Hurry up.”
“She’s not there.”
They drove on in silence, Jen’s knuckles white, her eyes fixed. When they reached Petra’s house, Petra said, “You don’t want to go for breakfast?” her voice plaintive in a way that surprised her.
“I have to work in, like, two hours.”
“Do you think she looked like you?”
“No.”
“I thought I saw you before, once, that night at the gravel pit. You were hitchhiking”
“Why do you keep—”
The last word cut short in a sob. Petra got out of the car. The last thing she said to Jen was, “Will you come visit me, maybe?”
“I don’t know,” Jen said.
“You could come visit,” Petra said again, and even she could hear how plaintive her voice was and knew—without Jen saying anything—that the answer was no because who would pay for the ferry?
Petra didn’t call and Jen didn’t call and by the end of the week whatever had happened between them, it felt final. Petra was going to say something, but she’d wait and find a cool postcard from some bookstore on the mainland. She’d write a real letter. Or maybe next time she was home she’d phone, or they’d run into one another downtown. It was stupid not to call, but the longer she waited, the harder it was to break the silence.
When her parents drove her to the early ferry on her last day as an islander, it seemed to Petra that girl after girl stood on Highway 18. The fading moon cast long, uncertain shadows occupied by girls who reached out into the darkness to flag down a car that might take them away.
“Could we stop for her?” Petra asked, pointing at a distant figure.
“I don’t see anyone,” her mother said, and when Petra looked again the highway was empty.
In the end, this was how it happened.
Petra spent the summer after university lying on the bleached grass of her parents’ yard with a yellow-paged paperback falling open on her stomach. When the silence got to her, she drove into town. She talked to the kids at the 7-Eleven, and shared a freezie that glowed an atomic pink. She was invited to a pit party, and saw the logs still leaving the clear-cut valleys. A girl had been found out behind the garbage dump.
At twilight on an empty stretch of highway, headed home, she saw the girl. As she pulled over, the evening felt so familiar it might be the reenactment of something that had already happened, or maybe a meeting she had arranged and forgotten. She glanced back into the darkened east, away from the fringe of green sunset—maybe to give the girl her opportunity for escape—but the girl was still there, making her way toward the car. Petra opened the door and said—as though they had rehearsed it—”Do you need a ride? Where are you going?”
She was careful not to take her eyes off Jen. In the twilight she looked no older than she had four years before, or five, or however long it had been.
Jennifer did not speak. The sunset fading, and the stars emerging, and Petra remembered again how dark night could be.
“I’m on Ypres,” she said, “right on the corner near the school.”
They drove in a musty kind of silence, Petra’s eyes fixed on the empty road, darker and darker until the world outside her headlights vanished.
“What happened to the Plymouth?”
“It broke down after a year or two. The Parkinsons let me go, and Chris had a car, so you know. He drove me around.”
Petra wanted to say how sad she was about the Plymouth. She wanted to talk about how she was really considering going back to school for library science or something. Or how she could get an internship or teach English overseas. There was something confessional about the night, something in the smooth passage of concrete beneath their lights and the sky overhead darkening.
It was full dark, proper dark, by the time Petra pulled into the little gravel drive off Ypres and finally said something true.
“I miss you.”
The voice that responded was drowsy and flat, not much like Jen’s at all, but what it said had the quality of a prophecy: “That is true, as far as it goes. One thing you need to remember: for you it was always going to be different. You will teach English in Korea. You will cry in front of a pho stand in Hanoi. On a beach in Crete you will fuck a boy whose name you can’t pronounce. You will come back here the autumn you turn thirty and, when you are cleaning up your old room in your parents’ house, before they sell, you will find a box that contains your old report cards, and the star-shaped notes we used to exchange in tenth grade, a card I gave you for your sixteenth birthday, and you will wonder where I am, and you’ll go into town and ask around, but no one will know. They’ll remember the last time they saw me, and think maybe I headed for the mainland after I broke up with Chris. My mother will have moved, and when you call her number—which was my number, and which you will remember to the last day of your life—a stranger will answer.”