Candy Clark's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

Candy sat with her hands on the wheel and listened to her mother's voice come out of the radio. It was thin and scared. It said her name again. She reached for the volume knob and stopped. Turning it down would not make the road forget her. She let the voice go on. "Candy. Honey. Where are you." She knew what the road wanted. It wanted her to answer. It wanted her to keep driving, keep watching the paper trail, keep pretending the next mile would be different. It fed on the calls she never returned. Three voicemails. A recipe. A question about eating. A woman saying she was missed. Candy had let all three sit on the tape and driven to campus. Two weeks later her grandmother was in the ground and Candy had not cried once. She had packed the Buick and driven back like nothing was wrong. That was the trick. She saw it now. She had been trying to outrun a road that was made of her own silence. She put the car in park. She turned off the headlights. The paper trail vanished into the dark. Out past the hood, the figure in the coat stood in the snow. Closer than before. Close enough that Candy could see the wrong angle of the shoulders, the hair that did not sit right. It was not her grandmother. It had never been her grandmother. She set the rosary on the dashboard. The beads clicked against the vinyl. She folded her hands in her lap. "Grandma," she said. Her throat closed. She made it open again. "I got your calls. I heard all three. I didn't call back because I didn't know what to say. And then you died and I still didn't know." The radio hissed. Her mother's voice cut out. "I should have written down the recipe. I should have told you I was eating. I should have told you I missed you too." She was crying now. She had not cried at the wake or the burial or the driveway when her mother put both hands on the hood. She cried here, in the front seat, with the heater ticking and a dead woman's rosary on the dash. "I'm sorry, Grandma. I'm sorry I let you die alone." The figure in the snow turned its back to the car. It did not walk away. It only turned, the way a person turns when they are done watching. The radio went silent. Not static. Silent. The Buick's engine cut out on its own. The heater stopped ticking. Snow kept falling on the windshield in the dark. Candy wiped her face. She picked up the keys from the console. She turned the ignition. Nothing. Not a click. Not a cough. The car that had started for her on the first try, the car her mother said would not start for just anyone, was dead. And the figure was still out there, its back to her, waiting for her to step outside.