Candy Clark pressed the gas again and the Buick's rear tires spun on nothing. Snow packed the wheel wells. The wipers dragged and stuck. Two weeks ago her grandmother died alone in bed, and now Candy was stranded on the same highway her grandmother had warned her about: Route 9 takes people with unfinished business and does not give them back. She had driven the sedan straight from the funeral house toward campus without checking the sky. The heater ticked. Cold pushed through the window seals and touched her knuckles. On the passenger seat sat a stack of gas receipts going back ten years, a folded blanket, and a face-down photo she refused to turn over again. Candy shifted into drive, then reverse, then drive. The tires whined. The car rocked an inch and settled deeper. She killed the engine to save fuel. In the quiet, the radio clicked on by itself and slid from static to a woman humming, then back to static. Thirty feet out, the figure was still there. Gray coat. Hair the wrong length. Standing in snow up to its knees and not shivering. It looked almost like her grandmother from the front. From behind, Candy had already seen, it looked like something wearing her grandmother. She curled her fingers around the rosary in her lap. The beads were warm. The figure turned its face away from the car, the way it always did when she held them. Her hand drifted toward the ignition and stopped. It always stopped when she held the beads. Her grandmother had left three voicemails the week she died. A recipe. Are you eating. I miss you. Candy had listened to none of them until after the funeral. She thought of the recipe now for no reason she could name: cherry, lattice crust, the pie cooling on the counter every time Candy visited as a child. She needed traction. She needed to move before the cabin froze. She looked at the blanket on the passenger seat. Wool. Heavy. The kind her grandmother had wrapped around the rosary as if she'd known. Candy shoved the door open against the drift. Snow bit her face. She dragged the blanket out, knelt at the rear tire, and wedged the wool hard under the rubber. Her fingers went numb in seconds. She kept working. She jammed the receipts in behind it for grip, ten years of her grandmother's driving crushed under one wheel. Back in the driver's seat, she turned the key. The engine caught. She eased the gas. The tire bit the blanket, held, and the Buick lurched forward onto the plowed line of the highway. Her headlights swept a red-and-white sign half-buried in the drift. HIGHWAY 9. The marker sat where she had passed it an hour ago. She had not moved forward at all. In the rearview, the figure was closer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.