Candy Clark's Arc

Chapter 3 of 6

Candy sat with the engine idling at the buried highway marker. Her line of receipts ran back into the dark. The figure stood at the end of it, face turned toward her, closer than before. The rosary hung slack in her hand. She had driven all night and come nowhere. Her eyes burned. The heater ticked. She blinked and the marker was gone. Snow filled the windshield. She jerked upright. The Buick had rolled forward maybe three feet while her head dipped. The passenger-side tire had drifted off the pavement. She felt the lean. The wheel pulled soft toward the ditch. If she slept, the car would slide down and stop for good, and the figure would walk the rest of the paper trail to her door. She cranked the window all the way down. Snow slapped her cheek. It was not enough. Her eyelids kept closing on their own. She slapped her face. She bit the inside of her mouth until she tasted iron. Her head sagged again. She put the car in park and gripped the rosary with both hands. The beads were warm from her palm. She pressed the little cross against her lip. She needed something to hold her awake. She needed a voice that was not on the radio. She thought of her mother in the driveway two weeks ago. The neat paved slope, salt already down. Her mother crying with both hands flat on the hood of the sedan, telling her the car would not start for just anyone. Telling her not to take the road. Candy had turned the key anyway. The engine had caught on the first try, and she had watched her mother get smaller in the mirror. She said it out loud now. "Mom. Mom, I'm sorry." Her voice cracked open something in her chest. She kept talking. She told the windshield about the cherry pie her grandmother used to make, the lattice, the cherries bleeding through. She told it about the recipe voicemail she never wrote down. She counted the beads with her thumb and named a person for each one. Mom. Grandma. Mom. Grandma. The naming kept her eyes open. She put the car back in drive and edged the tire onto the pavement. The lean corrected. She did not close her eyes. She drove until the headlights caught red and white again. The same marker. The same drift bent the same way. She had known it would be there. She stopped the car and did not cry. The radio clicked on by itself. Static, then a click, then her own mother's voice, thin and small. "Candy. Honey. Where are you." Candy stared at the dashboard. Her mother had never left a message on this radio. Her mother was two hundred miles away, in a kitchen, on a phone. The road had her mother's voice now. And it knew her name.