Candy Clark's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

Candy sat in the dead car with her hands in her lap. The dashboard lights were gone. The heater was gone. Snow piled on the windshield and blocked out the figure standing in the road. She could not see the coat anymore. She could not see the wrong hair. She could only hear her own breathing and the tick of cooling metal under the hood. Then something knocked on the trunk. Three soft taps. A pause. Two more. A pause. Three again. Candy went still. She knew that rhythm. Her grandmother used to tap it on the kitchen table when Candy was little and would not come to dinner. Three, two, three. Come here. Come eat. Her grandmother had done it a hundred times. Nobody else knew it. Not her mother. Not anyone. The rosary sat on the dash where Candy had left it. She did not reach for it yet. The road had already used her mother's voice. It had already used her grandmother's voice on the radio. It could use a knock too. It could use anything it had heard her love. "Grandma?" Candy said. The knock came again. Three. Two. Three. Slow. Patient. The way you knock when you are not in a hurry because you know the person inside will come. Candy put her hand flat on the seat beside her. She thought about the photo she had turned face-down on the passenger side. Her grandmother on a dark road at night, smiling. Smiling at what. Smiling at who. She picked up the rosary. The beads were cold. She wrapped them around her knuckles until the cross pressed into her palm. "If it's you," she said, "say the last thing you told me." The knock stopped. Snow slid down the windshield in a thin sheet. Through the cleared strip Candy saw the figure in the coat still standing out on the road, back turned, thirty feet off. It had not moved. It was not at the trunk. It had never been at the trunk. Whatever was knocking was closer than that. The tapping started again, softer now, right behind her seat. Three. Two. Three. Then a voice, small and thin, muffled by the metal. "Candy. Honey. Let me in." It was her mother's voice. The same voice the road had used before. Candy closed her eyes. Her mother was two hundred miles away. Her mother had cried in the driveway. Her mother was not out here. "You're not her," Candy said. "You're not either of them." She pressed the cross harder into her palm until it hurt. She did not turn around. She did not touch the door. The knocking stopped. Outside, in the snow, the figure on the road turned its head. Slowly. Toward the car. And for the first time, Candy saw its face.