Candy Clark's Arc

Chapter 2 of 6

The Buick crawled forward at ten miles an hour. Snow poured down in sheets and swallowed the shoulder lines. Candy could not see where the pavement ended and the ditch began. She knew the figure was somewhere behind her. She knew the ditch would finish what the figure had started. She gripped the rosary against the wheel with her left hand. The beads pressed into her knuckles. Her headlights pushed maybe six feet into the white. Beyond that, nothing. She needed a line to follow. Something under the snow that would tell her where the road held. She thought of the gas receipts. Ten years of them, crushed under the tire an hour ago. Her grandmother had driven this road again and again and kept every slip of paper. Candy had thrown the rest of them on the passenger floor. She braked. The sedan slid a foot and stopped. She reached across the seat and grabbed a handful of receipts. Faded ink. Dates in her grandmother's careful print. She rolled the window down two inches and fed one out. The wind took it and pinned it to the snow beside the tire. A marker. One she could see in the mirror if she needed to back up. One that said the road was here, under this. She rolled forward and fed another out. Then another. She drove with her left hand on the rosary and her right hand feeding paper through the crack in the window. The receipts landed dark against the white and held. The radio clicked on. Static, then a woman humming. The same tune from before. Candy did not turn it off. Her grandmother used to hum while she rolled out lattice for a cherry pie, cherries bleeding through the crust on the kitchen counter. Candy fed another receipt out. Her hand shook. The humming stopped. A recorded voice came through, tinny and small, the way voicemail sounded played back on a kitchen answering machine. Candy. Are you eating. The second message. The one she had never returned. She kept her eyes on the six feet of light in front of her. She kept feeding receipts. The voice played again. Candy. Are you eating. "I hear you," she said. Her throat closed. "I hear you. I'm driving." The radio cut to static and then to nothing. The Buick's headlights caught a red-and-white shape ahead. HIGHWAY 9. The same marker. Half-buried. The same drift bent the same way against the post. Candy stopped the car. She looked in the rearview. Her line of receipts stretched back into the dark, straight and even, marking a road that had not taken her anywhere. The figure stood at the far end of the paper trail. Closer than before. Its face was turned toward her now, even with the rosary in her hand. The beads had stopped working.