I’ve never been sure how aware the Ocean Lady really is. I know she can help people. It stands to reason she can hinder them as well, although that usually seems to come in the form of withholding her assistance. She’s a highway. She doesn’t need to take direct action. But it seems she can make more choices than I had ever guessed, and that’s unnerving. We really are walking on the spine of a goddess, one who thrives in quiet darkness, and never forgets, and makes up her own mind about forgiving.
“Is it . . .” My tongue feels too thick. I think I’m thirsty again, but I’m so tired of peeing that I push the feeling to the side and focus, instead, on Apple, the way she shines with her own inner light, so bright that it’s difficult to look at her directly. “Is it all right that I don’t want to stay? Is she going to be angry with me?”
“I think she might be angrier if you didn’t want to go, Rose,” says Apple softly. “You’re not supposed to be one of us. If you were, you would have made it here sixty years ago. You’re too strong to be a living routewitch, unless you plan on deposing me, which you’ve already said you don’t want to do. If you weren’t an ally, and if you weren’t seeking a return to the grave, I wouldn’t be helping you. I’d be fleeing.”
“I don’t feel strong.”
“Having power and knowing how to use it aren’t the same thing. The tiger doesn’t feel stronger than the mouse; the tiger feels like it has always felt, and doesn’t understand why people scream and run away when it approaches. Come.” Apple offers her hand again. “We have a long way to go.”
I slip my hand into hers, and she leads me away, through the dark beneath the stars, along the length of the Ocean Lady, ghost and goddess and road beneath our feet, and nothing is the way it ought to be, and I have never felt so far from home.
* * *
We walk the Ocean Lady for so long that I give in to both thirst and hunger, drinking some of Laura’s water and eating a granola bar that Apple produces from the depths of her jean jacket, which seems to contain all manner of useful things. My legs are tired but my feet don’t hurt, and I’ll take that over the alternative. I can walk forever on tired legs.
“I’ll send out word that anyone who sees a Phantom Rider should grab them and ask them to get word to the Last Dance,” says Apple, as the sun rises on the horizon, painting the world in pink and gold. We’re walking through a birthday cake confection of a world, and it’s beautiful, and I still don’t want it. I just want to go home.
“What’s the Last Dance?” asks Laura.
Apple glances to me, giving me the opportunity of the answer. It feels like a gift. It feels like a burden. I swallow, and say, “A diner. It’s . . . it’s my diner.” Yes. Emma owns it, through whatever mechanism allows for ownership of anything in the twilight, but it’s mine all the same. My home, my haven, my safe place to land. “It’s in the twilight. Um. The ghost world. Living people can’t go there, not even living people like Apple.”
“The power it would take to get there would leave me so drained that I wouldn’t have the power to bring myself home,” says Apple. “The ghost world is not geared to the living, nor should it be. It would consume me so entirely that I wouldn’t leave so much as a shade behind.”
“Oh,” says Laura, and looks at me with something I belatedly recognize as sympathy. “You’ve been cut off from everything, haven’t you?”
“I’ve been trying to tell you that.” I lift my feet; I put them down. The road is gray concrete and faith. The birds that shouldn’t exist anymore are waking up around us, singing a dawn chorus from the branches. We walk.
“It’s hard,” admits Laura. “It’s hard to look at a kid, with their whole life ahead of them, and hear them saying they don’t want to be alive, and interpret that as anything other than wanting to die.”
“I already died once. That was enough. I don’t want to die. I want the world to remember I have died, that I’m not supposed to be here. That I’m supposed to be . . .” I pause.
Cold. I’m supposed to be cold, the kind of chill that wraps around your bones and holds fast, like a fire burning in reverse. I’m supposed to be hungry, hungry enough to devour the world, with none of the consequences of consumption. I’m supposed to need, and know that my needing has nothing to do with anything but memory.
I’m supposed to be a whisper on the wind, a story told around a campfire, a dream. I’m not supposed to be physical, aging, trapped in a body that ages and aches and can be hurt, can be killed. I’m not supposed to be vulnerable. I shiver.
“I just want to go home,” I say. Back to the Last Dance. Back to Emma, and Gary, and the people who’ve only ever known me as a friendly ghost, appearing and disappearing, lending a helping hand without ever being tied down. I’ve been a vagabond too long. I can’t become a fixed point now.
Although if Apple can’t strip me from this body like an ear of corn from its cob, set me free to be what I’m supposed to be, some of those people will be willing to help. Mary can find a way to get me to the Prices without involving the crossroads. I always think of them as living in Buckley, even though they’ve been gone from there for generations, becoming one more gone-away family, one more terminal case of “just passing through.” They’re somewhere on the coast now, outside of Portland in one of those small green cities in the Pacific Northwest, the ones that always seem like they’re one good rainstorm from washing away completely. I could stop being a dead aunt—part of the collection they never intended to start—and become one of the kids, grow up surrounded by people who’ve been so touched by the other Americas, the ones filled with monsters and magic. Forget that I was ever what I was, become something new.
It shouldn’t be tempting. For most of me, it isn’t. But for that thin sliver of a girl who used to love running in the fields behind the school, the one who learned to repair a car’s engine for love as much as for necessity, the one who loved living and never quite got used to death, it’s a thought with a lot of merit. I could go to them. I could be happy.
I pick my foot up. I put my foot down. I try to shove these intrusive, invasive thoughts of a new tomorrow aside, focusing instead on the future I am here to reclaim, the future lived in the cold, anchoring the roads, guiding the ones I love into the afterlife. Mary’s no psychopomp, but I am, and I will hold the hand of every Price living or yet to be born as I lead them to the edge of the world they’ve known, giving them the strength to step over and into something new. This is where I belong. The road. The endless road.
“Hey.” Apple’s voice is soft. I glance to the side. She’s watching me with solemn, understanding eyes.
“You’re thinking things you’d rather not think,” she says. It’s not a question. “You’re wondering if maybe life would be better than death, or whether you could adjust.”
I frown. “How . . . ?”
“Technically, right now, you’re mine.” She waves a hand airily, encompassing this impossible sliver of landscape that surrounds us. “I can’t read your mind, but I remember the first time I walked the Ocean Lady. I remember the things she showed me. She’s more aware than people want to give her credit for being. She’s a highway, she’s inanimate and shattered and only half-awake most of the time, but she was worshipped in her way, and her life was too big to be broken by anything less than the destruction of the coast.”
There are probably people who would see wiping that much real estate off the map as a small price to pay for the true, final death of the Atlantic Highway. Fortunately, as long as the Ocean Lady herself is setting what strength she retains against them, those people will never be able to get a grip on her roots. Not without a lot more power than they generally have accessible to them. Not without—
I pause, giving Apple a horrified look. “Could I be used for that?”
“With the kind of distance you’re carrying? Easily. You could be the earthquake that sunders the shore and sends it crashing
to the sea. Fortunately, those people don’t realize you’ve been incarnated, and unless you’re planning on changing your mind, I don’t have to worry about it.” Apple tilts her head. “Are you planning on changing your mind?”
“No.” I don’t have to think about my answer. It hasn’t changed. I kick at a loose rock on the road, sending it skittering away. Laura looks up from her examination of some little yellow flower that’s no doubt extinct in the daylight and, when she sees how close Apple is walking, turns her face back to her scholarship, giving us what privacy she can. “I don’t want this. I don’t think anything could make me want this. I want to go home. But you’re right about the thoughts. Why . . . ?”
“When I came to the Ocean Lady I was a baby in all the ways that mattered. I haven’t aged a day since then, but I’ve grown up and old. Something you might be able to sympathize with.”
I nod silently, not wanting to break her train of thought.
“I ran away from Manzanar because the road knew my name, and my parents were dead—flu, if you can believe it, coughing until they strangled on their own breath, and the guards were very nice about it, but they wouldn’t have gotten sick if we’d been safe in our home instead of locked behind a wall made from someone else’s fears, someone else’s bad decisions. My parents were casualties of war as much as any soldier, and without them, there was nothing to keep me in California. So I found a hole in the fence that some of the older girls used when they wanted to sneak out and do things that seemed important to them at the time, and I ran until I found a strip of asphalt that sang every time I took a step, and then I ran farther than that. I was already wrapping distance around myself, even though I didn’t know it. People started giving me rides, and not one of them called me a dirty Jap or threatened to report me to the police.” Her gaze is far away, like she’s watching herself take those first steps into what had always been her future. Watching herself when she was young and innocent and ignorant.
How often do those things go hand in hand?
Apple sighs. “I ran from one end of the country to the other, and it wasn’t a straight line. You know about that.”
I do. I know how the crow flies and how the river runs, and I know the road is somewhere between the two, twisting and turning and charting the path that’s best for it, the path some city planner somewhere thinks they imagined. The road does as it likes, and there’s no truly straight line across any continent, no matter how close it comes.
“I never looked back, Rose. I never questioned, never doubted, never thought I should return to the camp—because going home wasn’t an option for me, any more than it is for you, although our circumstances are obviously a little different—never wanted to stop running. Not until I stepped onto the Ocean Lady.” Again, she goes quiet, and again, I can watch her watching the memory of herself, that long-lost girl who would become a queen.
“She wants you to be faithful,” she says. “She wants you to believe in her. Not believe she exists, but really believe. Believe she’s the solution to all your problems. Believe she loves you, that she’ll hold you and keep you and treasure you and refuse to let you drive off the edges of the Earth without putting a safety rail in your way. That means she tests people, as gently as a highway can.”
“She makes us homesick,” I say carefully.
“Not exactly. You’re already homesick. She makes us doubt whatever harbor we’re steering ourselves toward. She’s reminding you that the choice isn’t fully made yet; you could go another way if you wanted to.”
“I don’t want to,” I say.
“I know,” says Apple. We step over a crack in the road. The distant shape of the mother of all truck stops appears on the horizon and the feeling of doubt dissolves, the feeling that maybe I should reconsider bursts like a balloon, and we’re following the sunlight that twinkles off the neon signs all the way to a safe harbor.
* * *
Laura stops studying the local flora and fauna and comes to walk beside us as we approach the rest stop, her eyes wide and wondering behind the lenses of her glasses. “I can’t believe . . . are you seeing this?” she breathes.
“Depends,” says Apple, with an amused sidelong glance at her. “What are you seeing?”
I’m seeing my perfect diner, my archetypal truck stop, the same as I always do. Apple touches my elbow and the image flickers, becoming a gas station a little too old-fashioned for me, with a soda shop connected by a thin umbilicus of a hallway and a sign in the window that should be too far away for me to read and yet somehow says, with perfect clarity, ALL WELCOME HERE.
“It’s the drive-in where Tommy and I used to go before he died,” Laura says. Regret weighs down her voice, turns it into a stone that will drown her if she doesn’t learn how to let it go. “I can smell the popcorn from the concession stand. But it’s not real. They tore the real one down years ago. I still . . . I have a piece of the sign. It’s in my bedroom, above the bed.”
“And yet if you order popcorn from the kitchen, it’ll taste exactly like you remember it.” Apple’s smile is kind. She’s a good person, this routewitch queen, and she doesn’t need to be, not for Laura, not for me. Somehow, she walked out of a terrible place and into a terrible power, and she came through kind. That, if nothing else, is proof that the Atlantic Highway trades in miracles.
“How?” asks Laura.
“The same way we have woodpeckers, and passenger pigeons, and Carolina parakeets,” says Apple. “We hold on to everything worth saving, and it turns out that a lot of things—a lot of things—fall under that umbrella.”
Approaching the rest stop in daylight, with my new jeans chafing my thighs and my bladder starting to complain again, is very different from approaching it as one of the restless dead. I’d forgotten how much a body complains, how many little aches and pains and demands come with the ownership of flesh. My stomach growls. Even that is new, in its way, thanks to my sudden actual need for food.
The spotty routewitch is waiting at the boundary line. I wonder, suddenly, whether he’s actually the age he appears to be, or whether he’s like Apple, somehow putting his own aging on hold as he does whatever it is the road wants from him. His eyes widen at the sight of me, and widen further when he sees my hand is clutched firmly in Apple’s.
“Your Majesty,” he says, offering a deep, archaic bow to the woman at my side. His eyes are on me as he straightens, and his gaze is both narrow and mean. He looks . . . frightened. “You found the missing ghost. Did she forget what a boon she owed you for your help?”
“You’re an asshole,” I blurt. Paul flinches. He can see how strong I am, and it’s terrifying him. I don’t look to see how Apple reacts. If I’ve just broken some major rule of etiquette, well. It’s too late now. “Are you an asshole to everybody, or are you like Laura here? She hates hitchhiking ghosts in general and me in specific, so she’s basically always a jerk to me, but her students probably think she’s lovely.”
“How dare you—” he begins.
Apple cuts him off with a wave of her hand. “Rose is right,” she says. “You’re not kind. You never have been. I don’t ask you to go against your nature, but I do ask you to greet my guests with civility. Or have you forgotten why you’re anchored here?”
Paul pales. “My apologies, Your Majesty.”
“I should think so,” Apple says. “Stay where you are. Consider your sins. Maybe soon you’ll be ready to start paying for them.” She walks on, my hand still in hers, Laura tagging along behind.
My curiosity is a living thing, huge and vast and terrible. It’s going to eat me alive, or at least it feels like it. I glance at Apple. She’s looking straight ahead, at the diner—and I realize that her touch doesn’t wipe away the diner. Is it because this is the first time I’ve approached it while truly alive, or because she’s the Queen, and all visions belong to her?
Another little, potentially useless mys
tery, another thing to worry about later. Apple sighs, and says, “He challenged me for my throne, oh, a decade ago. Made a circuit around the world, gathered enough distance to make himself a threat, and flung his intent like an arrow.”
“What did you do?” I ask. She looks so easy, this girl by my side, she looks so innocent and harmless. Even with the power crackling off her skin like static, she looks like she could never hurt a fly.
Her smile makes a lie of everything else about her. “I snatched it out of the air and flung it back harder than he knew was possible. I took his distance. I took the time he’d used to gather it up, as penance. I left a hardened man of sixty a mewling child on my floor, and now he gets to earn back his majority before I’ll let him loose on the world again. Oh, he might be king someday, might come in here and ask me nicely, in a time when humanity has moved away from the things I want to guard it against, and I might step aside, as the last king did for me. I might make him lord of all he surveys. But not, I think, until he learns humility. Not until he learns, most importantly of all, to be kind.”
I don’t know how things work for the routewitches, not really, not even now that I supposedly am one. Their rules are strange and tangled and contradictory, and I’m happier with my hedgewitches and would-be sorcerers, like Laura. Apple smiles at me like a hurricane coming in to land, and it’s all I can do to hold my ground; it’s all I can do not to turn and run.
“Come on,” she says, and the diner door opens, and she pulls me inside.
Chapter 12
A Rose By Any Other Flame