Chapter 16
My Spindrift Soul
THE DRIVE FROM MAINE TO MANHATTAN takes more than five hours, Laura’s hands white-knuckled on the wheel the whole time. She’s shivering almost from the moment the engine starts, and I want to comfort her, but I’m not sure how. For me, the stroll along the Ocean Lady back to the diner parking lot was almost a return to normalcy: the sky tinted around the edges with colors the daylight has forgotten, the chirping of passenger pigeons in the trees, the hum of the highway under my feet. I’m so used to roads having opinions about things that it never occurred to me that for Laura, this would be the whole world twisting out of true. She’s broken somehow, fractured deep below the surface, and I don’t know how to put her right.
“Are you—” I begin, as we’re crossing the great metal backbone of the bridge that will take us into the city.
She shakes her head, hard and fierce. “Not right now,” she says.
I close my mouth. We fall back into the silence we’ve been riding in since we stepped back into the daylight, since we left the others—Apple, and Emma, and Gary—behind to vanish like phantoms in the night. Which, in a way, is exactly what they are. They span the gamut from truly living to truly dead, and this world isn’t theirs anymore, if it ever was to begin with.
It shouldn’t be mine, yet right now, it’s the only world I’ve got, and I have to admit a certain relief to being in it, watching cars filled with the ordinary living zip or creep past us as we wend our way along the highway. Traffic is always terrible in Manhattan—a natural consequence of cramming this many people into this little space—but that means more time to look out the window and breathe in deep, letting the world of the living fill my lungs.
Being a hitcher means that even though I enjoy being dead, I’ve never been able to entirely leave the daylight behind. I need the living if I want to stay connected to the road, and I need to stay connected to the road unless I want to sink way down deep into the twilight and never find my way back to the surface. There’s something so normal and right about this moment that I almost forget how bad things are, and how much I have left to lose.
“We’re almost there,” says Laura, and I remember everything. That’s the problem with moments of peace: they don’t last. They never last.
Something always comes and washes them away.
The signs say we’re almost to JFK International Airport, our gateway to the world, at least for today. We’re going to England to look for a different gateway to a different world, one that I still don’t fully understand. Apple says Laura and I can get to the Underworld without dying because Orpheus did it already; because the narrative force of his legend has defined, or maybe changed, the rules. But how did he get there if the rules hadn’t already been changed? We can access the Ocean Lady because she’s a goddess of the road and she changed the rules herself to keep her routewitches safe. She’s not the true twilight, more adjacent to it, playing her own long, slow game.
Right now, if I dropped into the true twilight, if I set foot on the real ghostroads, my heart would seize in my chest and the blood would freeze in my veins and I would fall down dead before I had time to realize what a terrible mistake I had just made. Going home is a death sentence as long as I’m alive. So what makes the Underworld different? Is it because Persephone and Hades are more powerful than the Ocean Lady, more capable of changing the rules outside of their domain? Why would they do that? Why would they invite the living?
None of this makes sense. I don’t know whether I hope it’s going to start, or whether I hope it gets even more convoluted, falls into the sort of fairy tale logic that saw a hundred red-cloaked and bloody-lipped heroines out of their forests and into their palaces when I was a child. There’s something to be said for fairy tales. As long as the people in them follow the rules, they tend to end happily.
I could use a guaranteed happy ending right about now.
Laura turns off the highway, following the signs to the airport. The road is a labyrinth of potholes and metal plates, which are probably meant to compensate for some of the asphalt’s many sins, but really only manage to make my teeth rattle in my head when Laura can’t swerve to avoid them. I need to pee again. My butt hurts from sitting on it too long, and my stomach is rumbling, which raises way too many concerns about another cycle of food-digestion-bathroom. These aren’t things I want to need to think about, and I can’t stop. Living sucks.
“I need to return the rental car,” says Laura. “I don’t think Apple is going to pick up the bill if I leave it sitting in long-term parking.”
“Okay,” I say, trying to sound agreeable.
I am at her mercy. I know it, and she knows it, and even if neither of us acknowledges it aloud, it’s still going to be true. I am a child in this world, without the rights of a legal adult, which is probably a good thing, since I don’t have the resources or paperwork of a legal adult, either. Without Laura, I might still be able to make this journey, but it would be a hell of a lot harder. She is the grease that eases the wheels of the modern world. And yet.
And yet.
If she decides she doesn’t want to do this after all—that what I’m seeking is suicide, instead of setting things right—all she needs to do is pick up a phone and tell someone in a position of authority that I’m a runaway thinking of hurting herself. All she has to do is drop a dime on me, and I’m locked up in a room with no hard edges, growing older under the watchful eye of people who won’t take care of me for one second longer than the law demands, who will turn me into a woman while they stand idly by talking about what’s going to be on TV that weekend.
It’s good for people to want to help each other. It’s good to keep real teenagers from hurting themselves. Death isn’t a vacation and it’s not a change to be undertaken lightly. But I died a long time ago, and my situation is different, and I just want to go home. That’s really what this boils down to, all the fear and the panic and the clawing at my own skin when it refuses to cool and turn to mist the way I know it ought to. I just want to go home.
Laura has been talking the whole time I’ve been sunk in the pit of my own thoughts. I snap out of it as she says, “—drop you at the curb.”
“What?”
She shoots me a look that can’t decide whether it wants to be amused or annoyed, and so splits the difference between them. “I said, I’m going to go and return the rental car, but that might take a little while. So I’m going to drop you at the curb. That way you can go and meet Apple’s contact and get our paperwork sorted out.”
Or maybe she’s already regretting her agreement to take me to the Underworld, where all manner of terrible things could happen to either or both of us. Laura wants a psychopomp to make sure she reaches Tommy before she moves on to whatever her reward is going to be, but she doesn’t want to die. Not yet. Death comes for us all in time, and Laura isn’t the kind of person who wants to hurry it up. She still has things she wants to do in this world, before she moves on to the next.
What if this is how she runs away?
My panic must show in my eyes, because she shakes her head, and when she speaks, her voice drips frustration. “I keep my word, Rose. But we’re cutting it close if we want to catch our plane, and I’d rather you tried to get our papers while I put the car back, instead of keeping you with me and doubling the amount of time we’re spending at the airport before we hit security.”
Oh. Oh. “I can try,” I say meekly. I hate that I sound like this. I hate that I need her. I can’t change it. All I can do is keep pressing forward, keep heading down this tangled, unnecessary road, and hope that I can come out the other side with everything I am intact.
The curb in front of JFK Airport is a nightmare of honking horns and anxious security, all of them trying to hurry the cars away as quickly as they can. People are dropping off their friends and loved ones, aware—as the living always are, on some level—that they may never see those dearly beloved faces again, and the police are yelling at them to keep going. Laura doesn’t even try to fight her way through the crowd to the sidewalk. She pulls into a gap, double-parked and blocking at least three cars in.
“Go,” she says.
I do. Backpack over my shoulder and heart pounding, I fling myself out of the car.
“Meet me at the counter,” she says, and the door slams, and she’s gone, merging back into the slow molasses river of the other vehicles, passing out of my reach. Surrounded by the living, I am alone. If Bobby comes for me here, there won’t be anyone with the power to stop him or to save me.
It’s a warm day, for November in New York. I’m still shivering as I turn and walk into the airport, leaving the roads of America behind.
Inside the airport is clean and dry and bleach-scented, like walking into a convenience store the size of Disneyland. There are people everywhere, but they’re quiet, beaten down by the strain of observation. Security is everywhere, some in blue TSA uniforms, others in the characteristic beat cop dark navy of the NYPD.
I never set foot in an airport while I was alive, but I know it wasn’t always like this. Even when air travel was new and accidents were common—at least by modern safety standards—it wasn’t always like this. People used to see it as a gift, this magical ability to cross the country in less than a day. After sixty years with my thumb cocked to the sky, it feels a little bit like cheating. We are all Icarus now. Sometimes our wings are going to get singed. Nobody likes that, and I can’t blame them, but at least we used to believe it. Now there are metal detectors and X-rays and men with guns everywhere I look, like that could somehow change the reality that we’re about to pack ourselves into a metal tube and hurtle across the sky. Daedalus would be so proud. His son would be so jealous.
Apple gave us the name of the airline along with the tickets. I glance along the rows of ticketing counters until my eyes catch on a sign that might be the one I’m looking for, and I start walking. All I have is a fake ID that was good enough for domestic air travel but won’t get me onto anything international, a backpack, and a heart that feels like it’s going to explode in my chest, leaving me dead on the floor. Could I be a road ghost if I died in an airport? I’ve met homecomers who died in bus stations. Maybe this would count. Maybe this would get me onto the ghostroads, into the twilight.
But I don’t think it would get me onto the median. I don’t think it would drape a coat around my shoulders and put a burger in my belly and take things back to the way they’re supposed to be. At best, I’d be like the rest of the homecomers, delusional to the point of completely breaking from reality, willing to do anything, anything, if it would get me home.
I stop in the middle of the walkway, so abruptly I nearly overbalance. My heart is hammering again, even harder, and my gut is clenching tight, like someone has shoved a fist into my stomach, grabbed everything they could touch, and squeezed. Homecomers will do anything to get home. They’ll lie and cheat and steal and never realize that they’re doing it, and they don’t understand they’re dead, and they don’t realize they’re never getting home.
Which is more likely? That Laura and the routewitches are sending me across an ocean to descend into the Underworld and steal my death back from the Greek gods of the dead, or that I’ve already found my death somehow, already walked in front of a moving car because I forgot it could hurt me, already swallowed the wrong kind of berry from a roadside bush, and now I’m a homecomer who doesn’t know it? Oh sweet Saint Celia, am I already lost?
“Her Majesty told me to watch for someone who looked like they were having a quiet little nervous breakdown, and here you are, and here I am, and I suppose that means the day is going the way it should,” says a kind voice beside me. I manage not to flinch as I turn my head.
There’s a man there, dressed in a blue and red uniform that manages to look uncomfortable and formal at the same time, like something from a theme park. His hair is short and neatly styled, and he’s smiling at me. That seems like the important thing right now. He’s smiling at me, he sees me, and I don’t have any desire to demand that he drive me to Michigan. I would, if I were a homecomer. Right? I’d do anything to get home, not just stand here gaping at him like a fool.
“Rose?” he asks, and when I nod, his smile widens. “Hi. I’m Carl. You’re supposed to be looking for me. Do you know why?”
“You have something for me,” I say.
“I wasn’t expecting you to be alone.”
“My aunt is returning the rental car.”
He nods. “Good. Your package arrived. Will you come with me?”
I nod, gripping the strap of my backpack tightly enough that the nylon bites into my palm, and I follow him away from the counters and the lines of weary travelers, already tired even before they board the planes to their final destinations.
Carl leads me to a door marked “authorized personnel,” says, “It’s just a break room,” and swipes a card. The door opens. We go inside. It’s such a small thing—people go into rooms all the time, every day, without remarking on it—but it feels like it changes the world.
The break room is plain, with white walls, a chipped Formica table, and a mini-kitchen, refrigerator and microwave and vending machine. Carl gestures for me to sit down. I do, watching as he crosses to the counter, opens a cupboard, and takes down a box of sugared cereal, cartoon mascot beaming at me from the front of the box like some modern-day Trickster figure. There are so many gods and demons swirling around me right now that I almost expect it to wink and offer some advice.
It doesn’t. Carl plunges his hand into the oat and marshmallow mix, pulling out a plain brown envelope. It smells like sugar when he offers it to me. “Everything you need,” he says. “Tell the Queen I keep my word.”
I blink, unsure what I’m supposed to say to that. “You’re a routewitch?”
“I’m a hybrid,” he says, mouth a bitter twist. “I’m a routewitch and an umbramancer, and that means I got both and I got neither. But the umbramancers don’t have their own Court to keep, so we either work solo or we find a way to win ourselves into the graces of the Ocean Lady.”
I take the envelope. I can feel shapes through the paper, passports and luggage tags for the bags we don’t have with us. “Is that what you’re trying to do?”
“I’m trying to prove that I’m loyal.” The twist softens, becomes a more ordinary frown. “I’m tired, and I’m lonely, and I don’t have a home to go to. I want to go to the Ocean Lady and rest for a while. That means proving myself.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
There’s a conflict on the other side of those two words, something long and slow and bitter as only human divisiveness can be. Carl is courting Apple’s favor, and he’ll tell me, if I ask; he’ll try to make me understand whatever I say I want to know. It doesn’t matter whether it’s something I should know or not. Right now, right here, I’m a routewitch and I’m Apple’s envoy, and he wants to please her by pleasing me.
“Do you know who I am?” I ask, curiosity and concern.
He nods. “I couldn’t miss it if I wanted to. Distance and the dead, that’s what I have, that’s why I live in the liminal spaces. You’re both. You’re Rose Marshall, the girl in the green silk gown cast over in flesh and bone, and you’re like a wound in the world. This shouldn’t be possible. This shouldn’t be true.”
I want to hug him for hating my current situation as much as I do, even if his reasons are very, very different. Instead, I nod and clutch the envelope to my chest for a moment before opening it. Two passports fall out, along with pre-printed tickets to the British Museum, strange plastic transit cards, and a map of London. Quickly, I make all the diverse pieces of my journey disappear into the appropriate places, tucking them into my pockets and the inside of my backpack.
When I look up, Carl is watching me with anxious eyes. “You’ll tell her?” he asks. “You’ll tell her I helped you?”
“I’ll tell her you’re loyal and deserve a chance to rest,” I say. “Everyone deserves a chance to rest.”
He relaxes slightly. “Thank you.” He pauses before he says, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“The things some people say, about you and the truckers. Are they true?”
There are so many things people could be saying about me and the truckers. Somehow, people never seem to talk about the ones I’ve fucked, or the ones I’ve tricked into revealing themselves to the police after I discovered that their vehicles had been transformed from innocent pieces of a supply chain into rolling charnel houses by the desires they couldn’t find the strength to set aside. I’ve been their angel, both guardian and avenging, and people couldn’t care less, because there’s no blood for them in those stories.
“No,” I say. “I’ve never killed a trucker, I’ve never caused an accident. I just try to be there for the ones that have to happen. Sometimes an accident can’t be turned aside. You must know that.”
“I do,” says Carl, and he looks relieved. “I never believed those stories, but . . . you know how people talk.”
Do I ever. “Thank you for your help,” I say, swinging my backpack back over my shoulder. “I need to find Laura before she decides I’ve run away and goes home.”
Carl nods. Again, he’s the one to open the door, maybe because he’d have fewer questions to answer if someone happens to see us. I’m young enough to be taken for a niece or the daughter of a family friend, and clothed enough for no one to assume anything else.
The caution, while practical, is unnecessary. There’s no one outside the little room, and when he leads me back to the counter, Laura is already there, the first signs of panic beginning to show around her eyes. She gasps when she sees me, one hand flying involuntarily to cover her mouth. There is no concealing her relief.
My own feelings are a little less clear-cut. It’s hard to stop the gratitude that floods through me when I realize how worried she was by my absence. She cares about what happens to me.
She’s also my enemy, or she was, before all this started. She’s the one who locked me in a Seal of Solomon and threatened to wipe me from existence; she’s the one whose life has been shaped and defined by my death. If not for me being there the night when Tommy crashed and burned, she could have grown up to be anything. But I was there, fulfilling the role Carl had been so concerned about. The accident had been inevitable. If Tommy raced, Tommy died, and the boy Tommy was had always been destined to race. Laura saw me, Laura blamed me, and the rest is history, stretched out between us in an unbroken, unbreakable line.
I don’t know how to deal with Laura Moorhead being genuinely concerned for my safety. So I swallow my fear and my confusion and my anxiety and say, “Carl was just showing me the bathroom, Auntie. Did you get the car back okay?”
“I did,” she says, with a wary glance at Carl.
“We have a mutual friend,” he says. “She told me you’d be coming. Do you need to check a bag?” He starts toward an empty station, drawing envious glances from a few of the people waiting in line for the attention of one of the people in the same uniform. The sign above it reads FIRST CLASS. I don’t know if Apple ordered Bon to book us first class tickets, but I wouldn’t put it past her.
I actually sort of hope she did exactly that. This may be—will be, if I’m lucky—the last time I ride a plane. It would be nice to get the full experience.
“One,” says Laura faintly. She steps up to the counter, and I am forgotten as she and Carl begin the steps of a dance that seems familiar to the both of them, yet is entirely alien to me. I take the opportunity to look around, studying the people who surround us.
Some of them are so nicely dressed that it makes me feel scruffy and out of place. My shirt is clean, but there’s mud on my shoes, and my hair doesn’t seem to want to behave itself. A consequence of lemon juice applied more than sixty years ago in pursuit of those perfect blonde curls on my prom night. Fat lot of good they did me. I would have been better off buying a pair of brass knuckles and punching anyone I didn’t know who drove through town. Bobby Cross would still have killed me. I could at least have given him a black eye first.
There’s a gaggle of teenage girls in the line, waiting behind their parents and adult chaperones for their turn at the counter. All of them have phones in their hands, their fingers moving even as they chatter at one another, sending messages back and forth through the ether, never slowing, never still. They’re beautiful. They are what I appear to be, and they don’t understand yet how unrelenting the world is. Anyone who says teenagers don’t understand what it is to suffer has forgotten too much about their own teenage years to get a voice in the conversation—teenagers suffer, children suffer, everyone suffers—but teenagers are still fresh and fair enough to believe that someday the suffering will stop, or at least change forms enough to be bearable.
They are bright and shining and immortal, these girls; they know they’re going to live forever, know it all the way to the bottom of their broken, unbreakable hearts. There’s a reason there are so many teenage ghosts in the twilight. When you’re that young, the idea that the world got along before you and will continue after you is just this side of unbelievable. Teenagers can have a hard time letting go of the idea of existence.
I want to ask them how they get their hair to hang just so, to smile and listen and maybe say something clever enough to make them laugh. I’m an urban legend, remembered from shore to shore. I’ve bartered with gods and faced down monsters. The approval of these girls who should be my peers is the one thing I’ve never had, and I don’t know how to get it. My teen years, such as they were, are too far behind me now.
“Rose?” The voice is Laura’s.
I turn. “Yes, Aunt Laura?” It seems safest to keep reinforcing our familial connection now that we’re trying to leave the country together. Better not to risk forgetting.
She’s still at the counter, a half-amused look on her face. “Come show Carl your passport so he can issue our boarding passes,” she says.
I do, producing both mine and Laura’s from the pocket where I’d tucked them. Carl types something on his computer, the screen angled so neither of us can see what he’s doing. When he’s done, he hands my passport back to me and gives Laura hers for the first time.
“Thank you for flying with us,” says Carl, all smiles, as he hands our boarding passes and luggage tag to Laura. “Security is right over there.” He points, looking at me as he does so. Then he winks, and I smile a little. I have more allies than I had any right to expect.
“Come on, Rose,” says Laura, and she walks toward security, and I follow, leaving the highways of America behind me, on my way to something new.