Candy Clark's Arc

Chapter 6 of 6

The face was not her grandmother's. It wore the coat and the hair, but the skin under it was wrong, stretched too smooth over the bones. It stared at the car. Then it took a step forward. The rosary in Candy's hand went cold and light, like the beads had emptied out. She squeezed the cross. Nothing pushed back. Whatever charge her grandmother had left in it was gone. The figure took another step. Snow broke around its boots. Thirty feet became twenty-eight. The rosary had held it off for six chapters of driving and stalling and praying, and now it was just a string of glass in her fist. Candy scrambled across the seat. She needed something else of her grandmother's. Something with more of her in it than a prayer she said every night out of habit. She yanked open the glove box. Registration. A tin of mints. The gas receipts she had already used and lost. Under them, the keys to the Buick, still on the ring her grandmother had carried in her purse for thirty years. A worn Buick emblem. A brass house key her grandmother had rubbed smooth with her thumb. Candy grabbed the keys. She turned the photo over on the passenger seat before she could stop herself. Her grandmother on a dark road at night. Smiling. Candy finally understood who her grandmother had been smiling at. She had stood out there before. She had faced this thing, and she had come home. The figure took another step. Twenty feet. Candy closed her eyes and tried to find her grandmother in her hands. Not the rosary. The kitchen. Flour on the counter. The tap-tap-tap of a wooden spoon on the rim of a bowl. Cherry pie cooling on the sill, red bleeding through the lattice. Her grandmother saying, you stir it till your arm hurts, then you stir it more. She opened her eyes and held the keys up to the windshield. "These were hers," Candy said. Her voice cracked. "She drove this road. She came back. You didn't keep her." The figure stopped. "I know what she gave me," Candy said. "It wasn't the beads. It was the car. It was the recipe. It was three phone calls I should have answered." The figure's head tilted. The wrong face pulled tighter. "You don't get me," Candy said. "She already paid for this road once." She jammed the key into the ignition. The Buick turned over on the first try. The dash lit up. The heater coughed warm air across her knees. Headlights punched two yellow holes into the snow. The figure was gone from the beams. Candy put the car in drive. The tires bit. The Buick rolled forward. In the rearview, thirty feet back, the figure stood in the red of her taillights. Watching her go. Following at a walk. The rosary lay on the seat beside her, empty as string. The keys shook in the column. She drove.