Lost Highways: Dark Fictions From the Road Read online

  Her father leaned down and whispered in her ear. She wanted to pull back her stocking cap to hear him better, but her ears were as cold as her feet. They hurt in the biting wind, so she leaned closer and turned her head, but left the hat in place.

  “You know the drill. Don’t forget the cup holders.”

  She nodded. She never forgot, though when she came back without anything in hand, he worried that she wasn’t looking hard enough. She tried to find what he wanted everywhere she could think of. Sometimes, she even checked under the floor mats in the footwells.

  She crept up the driveway. It was clear of snow, though there was some salt spread out. She tried not to crunch when she stepped, but couldn’t help it. She was small, and the noise was slight. Still, it sounded loud to her. At this time of night, every house on the street was dark; everyone was asleep. She knew how tiny little sounds outside of the car made her wake up all night long. She tried to move as silently as a ghost.

  She hesitated beside the car and looked back at her dad. He’d melted into the shadows of the trees beside the driveway. The shadow he’d become nodded at her and she turned back to the passenger door and pulled up on the handle, gritting her teeth, waiting for the electronic chirp that would tell her to let go and run for the shadows. The door clicked faintly and popped out an inch. No alarm. She lifted and pulled hard and it swung open. And that’s why they were in the town they were, instead of Manchester or Concord. No one out here locked their doors.

  She jumped inside and pulled the door shut to extinguish the dome light overhead. It was still cold with the door closed, but the breeze couldn’t get in anymore. She wished she had the keys so she could start the engine and let it idle for a little bit and heat up—take some of the chill out of her feet and hands. That was as sure a way of getting caught as leaving the dome light on or just standing out on the front step and ringing the doorbell. No. She had to wait. The drive back to Manchester would be warm. She’d snuggle up under her blanket and get some sleep when they were through. And tomorrow was Saturday. No school. She could sleep in. Though she never did.

  She opened the center console, knowing she probably wouldn’t find any quarters in the coin slots, but still hopeful for something. No one out here locked their doors, but they didn’t need meter money either. Free street parking in small towns meant no one kept quarters in their cars. The best she ever seemed to find was what someone got handed back in change from the Drive-Thru window along with their Whopper and Coke. That ended up in the cup holders most often, as her dad reminded her. But she checked everywhere. Her mouth watered at the thought of a hamburger. She loved Whoppers so much! They were better than a Big Mac or those dry, square burgers from the other place with the girl on the sign.

  She gasped when she saw the roll of quarters wrapped in one of those paper bank sleeves in the console. Ten dollars! Whoever drove this car must go into a city a lot. Maybe even Boston if he needed that much change. She’d never found a whole roll of change before and her heart started to beat fast with excitement. Dad would be so happy. Maybe he’d even let them quit early tonight. They could be out for hours on any other night before she found as much. She tried to imagine what his face would look like when she showed him. How the crinkles at the corners of his eyes would deepen and that one eyebrow would arch up the way it did. She loved that eyebrow. It only went up when he really smiled. It was how she could tell when he was faking.

  Still, there was more looking to do before she could go back to him with her treasure.

  She stuffed the coin roll in her pocket, closed the console, and started feeling around in the cup holders. Nothing. As if she hadn’t found enough. She popped open the jockey box and felt around inside. Once, she’d found a checkbook and had taken it back to her dad. He’d gotten excited at first, and then his face fell and he told her they couldn’t keep it. He didn’t say why, he just said he couldn’t write bad checks. She didn’t know what made them bad. If they were filled out they were good, right? Still, he’d thrown the checkbook in the garbage and told her to focus on cash and anything they might be able to pawn.

  Once, she found a toy. Nothing big. Just was a tiny fashion doll of a blue skinned girl with bright pink hair. It had little removable bracelets and a belt that she was careful not to lose and the blue girl was beautiful even though she had little fangs. She knew it was a Monster High figure, though she didn’t know the character’s name. She’d hidden that find from her dad. She didn’t want him to accuse her of having bad toys and throw that in the garbage too. When he found it in their car a week later, he’d asked where she got such a thing and she lied to him and said that her friend at school, Holly, had given it to her. She was ashamed to lie to him, but it wasn’t a bad toy; it was a good toy and she wanted to keep it. The kid she took it from had a big house and her parents drove a big SUV and she didn’t even care enough about the figure not to leave it on floor in the back seat like an empty wrapper. She loved that monster girl better than that other kid had.

  There was a book in the jockey box. Who kept books in a place like that? she wondered. It was some grown up book with a pair of bare feet on the cover. She thought for a minute about taking that too and giving it to her dad. She didn’t know whether he liked books, but maybe it was like the figure. Something he could love better than whoever had left it in a car. Sometimes, they went to the library and she sat and read while he looked at his e-mail on the public computers. He never checked anything out. He never had time to read, he said. This book though, stuffed in with the car papers like it wasn’t anything important, could be his and he could read it and not worry about it being due or late fees or anything. He could take all year to finish it if he wanted. And he could love it like she loved her blue girl.

  It was probably a bad book. Like a bad check. He’d throw it away and then no one would have it. She put the paperback novel with its one-word title back and closed the jockey box.

  Her dad would be getting impatient soon. He didn’t like her to take too long. She had to hurry. She checked the floors under the mats and stuffed her fingers deep in the cracks in the seats, but she knew the quarter roll was all she was going to find. It was enough. Still, she turned to crawl into the back seat and look for other treasures.

  The boy sitting there stared at her from the shadows.

  A shout she couldn’t control escaped her lips. She clapped her hands to her mouth. She lurched away from the boy, hitting her back against the gear shift and then the dashboard. Another cry escaped her lips at the sudden insult of the little knobs that jutted out of the dash jabbing into her back between her shoulder blades. If she’d been in the driver’s seat, she would’ve honked the horn and they’d be caught. She arched her back and her foot slipped. She fell face-first into the passenger seat, dragging her cheek down the cold leather. The quarter roll in her jacket pocket pulled heavily, like a weight, but didn’t fall out.

  She whimpered at the pain of her neck craning back against the upright seatback as she pushed up. The side of her right leg hurt where it scraped against the plastic of the center divider. She wanted to cry and call out for her dad, but she had to keep herself together. At least until they got back to their own car. She sniffled and gritted her teeth and got up on her knees.

  Peeking over the back of the seat in the dark, it looked like a doll. Pale and still and small. And for a single second, an unwelcome thought about how much she’d love to have a baby doll intruded in her mind. But this wasn’t a toy. It was a boy. He sat in his car seat, the harness over his shoulders holding him upright, head tilted to the side on a thin neck. His skin wasn’t like a piece of plastic painted to look like a real kid; it was pale in the moonlight and looked unreal. His eyes were open, but they were dull and unfocused. Not like sharp plastic eyes that looked alert and had bright irises. His eyes weren’t any of those things.

  He had on mittens and a snowsuit with little built-in booties. She didn’t want to know what his tiny fingers and toes looked like
. She didn’t want to know anything. Tears blurred her eyes as she struggled not to scream. But . . . the boy. The tears in her eyes made him waver in the dark, and it looked like he might be wriggling against the straps of the car seat, trying to get free, trying to reach for her and close his tiny little fingers around her throat and squeeze. Once, she’d seen a part of an old movie about dead people coming back to life and they were a horrible blue color that made her laugh because it was so fake-looking and how could anyone be scared by a blue person? And then they bit people and the crazy extra-red blood squirted out and she got scared. Even though that was fake-looking too—like a living cartoon—it was terrifying. Because it was blood, and nobody lost that much blood and stayed alive.

  In the diffuse moonlight, this boy was blue like that. The thought of him biting her and crazy bright blood spurting out of her body onto his round baby face made her breath hitch and she pushed away from the seat back.

  The boy didn’t move. He didn’t look up or cry or even breathe. He sat there in the dark and looked somewhere, a million miles away—maybe in a whole different world. Looking at her from the ghost world.

  She pulled off one of her gloves and leaned forward to touch his cheek with the tip of a shaking finger. She didn’t know why she wanted to touch him, but she did. The boy terrified her, but she needed to touch him. Needed to know he was real and not a ghost. It felt like he needed her to touch him.

  He was so cold.

  The car moved, and she heard laughter and loud talking. She tumbled into the back seat as the car took a corner too fast and she heard a woman say, “Take it easy, Louis.” The driver replied, “I’m fine. It’s fine,” and he gassed the engine. The baby in the seat next to her sat there, his head dropping with heavy sleepiness until his eyes closed and he slumped down. The grownups in the front seat kept talking and it sounded like when her own Dad and Mom had wine and their words got mushy. She could smell wine and bad breath like when her own mom would kiss her goodnight. They turned another corner and the car stopped too fast and the woman snapped at the man and he repeated, “It’s fine. I’m fine.” She said, “Go open the door and I’ll carry the baby in,” and he replied, “Let him sleep for a minute.” He pawed at her chest through her coat and she shoved at his hands and said, “Your hands are cold,” but he insisted and started kissing her neck and she moaned and let him put his hands back inside her coat. They kissed and then got out of the car, laughing and she heard the woman say, “I should get the baby,” and he said, “He’ll be fine for ten minutes.” “Ooh, I get ten minutes, huh?” She fumbled at the man’s pants and he unlocked the door to the house and they nearly fell inside. They kept laughing and then the door slammed. And the baby woke up and began to sniffle and then started to cry. She tried to comfort him, saying, “Shh,” and “It’s okay; they’ll be out in a minute.” But they didn’t come out. Not in a minute, or in ten, or in an hour. They stayed inside, and she knew they fell asleep like Mom and Dad used to sometimes after too much wine and she saw the baby’s breath in the car and he started to cry harder and harder and she got more worried and tried to get out of the car, but she couldn’t move. She was frozen. It was cold. So cold. And the baby cried more, until it started to lose its voice and then his head began to bob again like he was tired and he sobbed and looked at her with glassy, accusing eyes she didn’t want looking at her. She wanted to look away and be anywhere but in this car, but she couldn’t get out. The baby boy looked at her and his lips were turning blue and then his head bobbed down and he stopped crying.

  Everything was quiet for a long time while she watched the little puffs of breath from his mouth grow smaller and less frequent, until they stopped altogether.

  Then she blinked and was back in the front seat reaching out to touch the blue boy’s cold cheek. She drew her arm back like her hand had been burned and fell against the dash again. She started to cry harder, unable to control the hitching sobs that were building in her chest and her throat. She let them out and it was wrong because they could get caught but there was nothing she could do to stop it. She was only nine, after all. So, she cried.

  The door to the car swung open and the dome light lit up the night and she screamed and stiffened, waiting to hear the angry shouts of the owners of the car, demanding to know in that way angry grown-ups did what the fuck she was doing. Instead, the dark blur in the door was her dad, and she lurched toward him, wrapping her arms around his neck.

  “Daddy, daddy! There’s a boy back there! He’s in the back seat and he’s blue and—”

  He shushed her a little too sharply. Angrily. She repeated herself, trying hard to keep her voice down. “There’s a boy in the back seat. A baby.”

  He shushed her again, softer, and held her tightly, pulling her out of the car and turning away. “It can’t be,” he said. “I’m sure it’s just a doll.”

  All she could manage was “no” and “no” and “no” again. She said it and he replied with “Shh, it’ll be all right,” and “calm down,” as if she could. Not after what the blue boy had shown her.

  Her dad looked at the house at the end of the driveway. Her crying was noisy and they had to be quiet . . . like ghosts. Ghosts don’t cry, she told herself and tried to stop sobbing. But they do cry. They were sad and lonely. That’s why they were ghosts on Earth instead of souls up in Heaven.

  But being a ghost meant being dead.

  Like the boy in the back seat of the car.

  He’s dead.

  He froze to death, because his parents left him in the back of the car and they went inside and fell asleep. She’d seen them do it. The blue boy had shown her. He showed her the things she didn’t want to see. The man’s hands on the woman’s chest and her hands in his pants, each other touching their private places, and then laughing and going inside while their baby froze to death in the back of a car. Now he was a ghost and he was sad, and he gave her a little piece of his death and now she was a ghost, too, like him. Except not a dead one. He killed her inside. It felt like she’d never be happy again.

  She tried to calm down, but her heartbeat and her breathing were beyond her control. Instead, she put a hand over her mouth, so at least she wasn’t sobbing out loud. Snot slipped out of her nose and she felt ashamed for being a baby, but she couldn’t help it. She wiped it away with the back of her glove and sniffed hard. The sound was loud and she gritted her teeth when her dad flinched at the noise of it in his ear.

  Her dad whispered, “Are you sure?” She nodded. He set her down on her feet and dragged his hand down his mustache and beard the way he did, smoothing it down. It was the way he moved when he was feeling troubled. Even when he said he wasn’t, if he did that, she knew he was. And that worried her. If the grownups were afraid, what hope was there for a kid?

  “You go stand over there in the trees, okay? Go wait for me over there where it’s dark and I’ll be right over.”

  “Don’t leave, Daddy.”

  “I’m not leaving. But I gotta have a look, okay?”

  She drew in a long wet sniffle and pleaded quietly with him. “I’ll be good, I promise. I won’t shout or cry or anything, I swear. Just don’t go. Don’t touch him!” Her heart thundered in her little body. She didn’t want him to get in the car with the blue baby. She didn’t want him to be frozen with the sadness like she had been. If he did then they’d both be ghosts and nothing would ever be right again. She had been so wrong. The blue boy gave her what she’d wished for and it felt so bad.

  It’s a dream. I’m in the car and I’m dreaming we’re out for The Walk. We’re sleeping and the boy is blue because I found that stupid blue girl toy in the back seat of a car and I’m having a nightmare about her and that movie and none of this is real, it’s all a nightmare. I have to wake up!

  A chill breeze rustled through the trees and it hurt her face and made her eyes tear up more and convinced her she wasn’t asleep and dreaming. The wet lines the tears had traced down her cheeks stung, and she wiped at them with
the glove she hadn’t wiped her nose with. “Can we just go? Look, I found money.” She reached in her pocket and pulled out the roll of quarters. She held it out to her dad, trying to press it into his hand. “I’ll stop crying and be good if we go. I promise.”

  Her dad got that look, the one when he was worried. She knew it because his eyebrows came together and his eyes looked bigger somehow and his lips got so thin and tight they disappeared in the hair on his face. He looked like that a lot, so she knew it very well. He looked like that now. She knew all his looks.

  “You are good, honey. You’re the best. And I’m not leaving. I just want you to go stand over there and wait for me so I can have a look.”

  “I’ll stay with you. Right up next to you. I can be brave.” She wasn’t sure if that last part was a lie, but she wanted it to be true, so she meant it even if she couldn’t actually do it. That wasn’t a lie, was it?

  “Oh, honey. You don’t need to look again, okay? Let me be brave for both of us.” He put his hands on her shoulders and gently turned her toward the tree line at the edge of the property. “Go wait for me over there. Don’t move. Just wait and be brave over there. I’ll be right over.”

  “Promise you won’t touch him.” It wasn’t a question. “Don’t touch him. Promise.”

  He blinked. “I promise,” he said, and nudged her away. She did as he told her and walked toward the darkness in the trees, wanting instead to hold on to her father and hold him back. She hadn’t wanted to touch the blue boy. But then, she had. Something moved her arm like she was in a dream and what she wanted to do and what she actually did were two separate things. Before she realized what was happening, she’d reached out, and there was no way what she wanted was going to stop what happened next. Just like now that her dad had sent her away, and all she wanted was to make him come with her instead, leave the car and the boy in it alone. What if he made her dad do it even if he didn’t want to? She wanted to plead with him to just leave. She could show him the roll of quarters again and say “breakfast is on me,” the way grownups did on TV, and he would smile and kiss her forehead and they could go out for an eggamuffin and stare into each other’s eyes because it was the weekend and she didn’t have to go to school and they could go window shopping at the mall the way they liked to do and look at all the things they’d buy if they had the money to buy anything and she’d promise to get him a big leather chair he could put in his own room of the big house they owned in her dream and she would sit in his lap while he read her books all her own and not borrowed from the library or anywhere else and fall asleep and he’d carry her to her room where she’d lie in a warm bed with cozy Monster High sheets and on a shelf nearby would be a whole collection of beautiful dolls that would be her friends because she would buy all of them so they’d never be lonely or sad ever again. Except for the blue one. She didn’t want the blue one any more.