Gary helps as much as he can. He handles the shifting while I steer, letting my vague familiarity guide us. The Ocean Lady is a straight shot from one side of the world to the next, and that should be enough, but it’s not. We both know it’s not. Not if she doesn’t want it to be.
We coast around a curve in the road, still surrounded by those strange and unforgiving shadows, and there it is, lighting up the night in neon and chrome. If the Last Dance is a candle, this is a bonfire, the mother of all truck stops, the truck stop next to which all others, however beloved, must be considered pale imitations and dollar store dreams. Its neon is bright enough to sear away the fog and blank out the stars, and there’s no way we didn’t see it a mile back, two miles back, all the way from the parking lot of the damn Last Dance, but we didn’t, because until we came around the curve, it wasn’t here to see.
Sometimes the metaphysics of the twilight make my head hurt, and I’ve been here so much longer than I belonged in the daylight. But I was human before I died. I still think like a human, and odds are good I always will. So I flex my hands on the wheel, and I keep on driving.
If an ordinary truck stop is a testament to mankind’s need for a burger and a shower no matter where it happens to roam—someday we’ll have truck stops on Mars—then this one is proof that the trucker’s heart beats as honest and open as any other. This is a church of the road, built one brick and piece of neon tubing at a time, calling the penitent to come and make themselves known. It calls for them to worship, and they do, oh, they do. We are neither in the lands of the living or the dead: we are on the Ocean Lady, and she sets her own rules.
I should probably have thought about that before we got here. I should probably have warned Gary that things here aren’t like they are in the rest of the twilight, that the first time I walked here I wound up in my death-day dress against my will, all green silk and borrowed innocence. Hindsight is a rearview mirror, and the view it gives will always make you second-guess your choices.
We round that curve as a girl and her car, and then the wheel is gone from beneath my hands, the seat is gone from beneath my thighs, and I’m tumbling head over heels along the length of the Ocean Lady, leaving layers of skin and silk and a not-inconsiderable amount of my pride behind. It hurts, one more fun side effect of the position she holds in the twilight. Here, there is no difference between a ghost and a girl, save perhaps for the fact that the ghost has already died once, and hence doesn’t need to worry about doing it again.
I roll to a stop, my dress torn, my hair hanging in my face in a mess of lemon-bleached curls, all of me disheveled. My palms sting when I push myself up, hissing through clenched teeth. Pain is such a rare thing these days, an undesired afterthought. It’s not bad—just some bruises and a few layers of skin—but that doesn’t mean I like it.
Then I see the body sprawled on the concrete, face down and motionless. It’s a boy, no more than eighteen, teenage explorer standing on the cusp of manhood, long and lanky and dressed in a suit I recognize from the prom night we never got to have. I spare a thought that it’s unfair that Gary apparently got to choose his own death-day clothes, since he was not wearing that when he died, but only a thought. I’m already scrambling to my feet, already running to drop to my knees beside him. What’s a little more skin in the service of the Ocean Lady?
“Gary!”
I roll him onto his back. You’re not supposed to do that with accident victims—something about spinal injuries or whatever—but he’s not an accident victim, he’s my dead boyfriend who is also my car. The rules we’re working from are a little different than the norm is what I’m saying here. And then I see his face, and I have to bite my lip to stop myself from gasping, because damn. Sometimes I forget how beautiful he was.
Gary Daniels was never the cutest boy in school, at least not according to the other girls, who would whisper and gossip about their prospects like they thought I wasn’t even in the room. Maybe to them, I never was. They were well-to-do, the children of parents who kept the refrigerator full and the house heated during the winter, while I was just another Marshall brat, destined to be no better than my mama, no matter how hard I tried. There was no social capital in including me, and no loss to incur by shunning me.
Gary was too tall and too lean, all without turning it into an athlete’s build. He walked through the world like he was trying to decide whether he wanted to be a mortician or skip straight to becoming a human spider, but he played football like a dream, and he loved me. Even back then, with both of us among the living, and him with his entire future ahead of him, he loved me. Enough to spend his whole life trying to find me, to make certain I was all right. Enough to cheat the rules that bind the living and the dead to stay with me on the ghostroads.
I look at him now, and he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. So I do like they do in fairy tales. I lean forward, and I kiss him, soft and slow and sweet. His lips taste like salt and, very distantly, motor oil. That’s a change. I was always the one who tasted like motor oil, greasy from my time in the shop, wrench held between my teeth and unspeakable fluids dripping into my hair.
I kiss him like it matters, and I kiss him like I mean it, and I’m still kissing him when his hands come up and wrap around my waist, pulling me closer. We’re a pair of teenagers making out in the middle of the highway, and nothing has ever been more perfect, or more correct.
A throat is cleared behind us. I keep kissing Gary. This is a rare opportunity. As soon as I let myself get distracted, I’m going to remember that we’re here for a reason, that I need to talk to Apple about a dead routewitch and the blood on my back. So I don’t let myself get distracted. The crisis of the moment can come later. Kissing needs to happen now.
“You know, a bucket of water generally makes the stray cats cut this shit out. Think it works for horny ghosts?” The voice is female, amused, more Irish-accented than Emma: unlike our friendly neighborhood beán sidhe, this woman hasn’t been away from home for more than a few years.
“I’ll get the bucket,” says another voice, this one male, and far more familiar. Regretfully, I break my lip-lock with Gary and glare over my shoulder at the pair of them.
The woman is old enough to be my mother, which means she wasn’t even born when I was buried, with hair dyed black and streaked with lilac and a T-shirt whose silver foil printing is too faded to tell me the name of the band it’s advertising. She virtually crackles with power, distance traveled and converted here, on the Ocean Lady, into visible strength, and I immediately mark her as the more dangerous of the two. Not “stuffing ghosts into spirit jars and selling them to museums” dangerous, but “maybe only fuck with her as a last resort” dangerous.
The other voice belongs to a boy a few years older than Gary looks, with acne scars on his cheeks and temples. His lips are wind-chapped, and there’s a shape to his sunburn like a helmet’s visor. A cyclist, then, which might explain why he’s looking at us with a sneer on his face and no forgiveness in his eyes. Bikes have a much lower margin of error than cars. It would be easy for him to forget that we’re dead, and hate us for surviving the accident that dropped us here.
Easy, that is, except for the part where he’s met me before. He knows me. Which means he knows I’m dead, and he knows any boy he’s going to catch me kissing on the ghostroads is almost certainly dead as well. It’s simple logic. Dallying with the living is for the daylight, where their love can give you things that might otherwise be unobtainable: warmth and breath and cheeseburgers. Down here in the twilight, the dead only dally with the dead.
“Rose?” Gary sounds so confused that I look back to him, just in time to see confusion blossom into purest joy. “Rose! I can talk! I can touch you.” He presses his hands to the sides of my face in demonstration.
I smile at him. I can’t help it. “You can,” I agree. “Right now, though, you need to let me get up, because I have to deal with so
me jerks who don’t know how to respect a moment.”
“Is that what the kids are calling it these days? Because see, I thought it was public indecency.”
The amusement in the Irish woman’s voice is sharp enough that I have to fight the urge to check that my tattered skirt is still falling past my knees. Gary lets me go regretfully, recognizing the urgency of our situation, and I stand, running my hands down the front of my dress to smooth it. The gesture wipes more than just wrinkles away: the dirt and snags from the road fall out of the fabric as I lower my hands. The Ocean Lady blurs the lines between the living and the dead. She can’t change my essential nature. I am Rose Marshall, the phantom prom date, and when I’m in a wreck, I’m the one who walks away without a scratch on me.
I turn to face the routewitches, jabbing a finger at the boy. “This is where you say ‘What is your name and business, traveler,’ and I say ‘My name is Rose Marshall and my companion is Gary Daniels, and we’ve driven the Ocean Lady down from Calais to visit the Queen, if she’ll see us. I have a question to ask her about a boon she granted to me.’ Your turn.”
The boy looks flustered. The woman laughs. “I believe the next line is ‘Be you of the living, or be you of the dead.’ Which is silly, as you’re both quite clearly deceased. What kind of ghost is your companion, little hitchhiker? I’ve never seen his like before.”
“Mine,” I say sharply. “He’s haunting me.”
“A ghost haunting a ghost? Every time I think I’ve seen everything the road has to offer, it goes and shows me something new. The last question, then, before we move along: the dead should be at peace and resting. Why are you not at peace, little ghost?”
Gary finally finds his feet and moves to stand beside me, slipping his hand into mine. I squeeze it tightly, glorying in this simple, so-human point of contact. Man or car, I love him, but there’s something to be said for having a hand to hold. “Right now, because I’m being harassed by Bobby Cross despite your queen’s best efforts to keep him away from me. I need to talk to her. I need to tell her what he’s done, and find out whether she can do anything to fix it. Also, I have answered all these questions before, and been here without answering them, so what the fuck?”
“I told you she was trouble,” mutters the boy.
There’s my answer. The first time I came to the Ocean Lady, I embarrassed this boy in front of his peers by following him and making my way to Apple without his help. Apparently, he can hold a grudge. I roll my eyes.
“Hello, I’m the dead teenager here! If anyone is going to be immature and unreasonable, it should be me.”
The woman laughs. “Your point is fairly taken, Rose Marshall of the hitchhiking kind. Follow us, and be not afraid, for none here will bring you willingly to harm.” She turns then, and starts toward the glowing palace of the truck stop. The boy goes with her, only stealing a few angry glances back at me.
Gary’s hand still clutched firmly in mine, I follow.
* * *
Sometimes I wonder what the road ghosts of Mexico or England or Russia use as way stations to guide them through the endless twilight, where the stars are always bright and there’s always another mile to go. They have to have their own symbolism, their own signs of faith to keep them going. We may all love Persephone, who went willingly, and Hades, who welcomed her with open arms, but the form of that love changes depending on the age and alignment of the dead.
Some ghosts look at this truck stop and see a saloon, or a speakeasy, or even a Starbucks. Whatever made them comfortable and complete when they were alive, that’s what the twilight will give them now. Me, I am a daughter of the American diner, which is why the Last Dance has become my home away from home, and the closer we get to the truck stop, the more that’s what I see. The perfect diner, the diner where the cooks work for free, just for the sweet satisfaction of burgers sizzling on the grill and whipped cream standing up proud and tall as a new-carved headstone. Where the waitresses are always smiling and their feet never hurt; where the patrons always tip and never slap an ass or cross a line. It’s too good to be true. I know that, but I drink it in all the same. How often does a body get to look at heaven?
Gary was young the same time as I was, but he lived a lot longer, and the awe in his eyes tells me he’s seeing something other than a diner. I’ve never met anyone who died past the age of twenty-five who could still look at a diner with the kind of awe I hold for them. I want to ask him what he sees. I don’t want to at the same time. Some things should be kept secret and sacred, between a body and the road.
The routewitches get to the door first, and when the woman touches it the diner flickers, replaced for the duration of a heartbeat by a gray stone mound crowned in the greenest grass I’ve ever seen. They slip inside, and the diner reasserts itself.
Gary stumbles to a stop, turning to look at me with wide, wild eyes. “Did you see that?”
“I think it was an Irish burial mound,” I say, which is the same as saying “yes,” just with more detail. “The Ocean Lady gives us what makes us most comfortable.”
He starts to say something, then catches himself and smirks at me. “You’re seeing that diner, aren’t you? The one where I used to take you on Friday nights.”
“I’m seeing the platonic ideal of that diner,” I say primly. “Why? What are you seeing?” He asked me first. I guess that means it’s fair game.
“The concession stand at the drive-in where I used to take you before we went to the diner.” His smirk deepens, curls around the edges, turns lustful. It occurs to me that before he died, he’d said I was the only woman he’d ever loved, and he’s been a car for most of the time we’ve been back together. His memories of the drive-in probably aren’t entirely pure ones.
They aren’t exactly impure, either. He didn’t get to see me naked until after I was already dead, and all my mother’s dire threats of teenage pregnancy seemed less important than the fact that I couldn’t feel anything but cold when I wasn’t wearing a coat. If he’d thought it was strange that the first—and only—time we’d had sex, we’d done it with his jacket wrapped around my shoulders, he’d been too busy staring at my breasts to say anything about it.
“Shut up,” I say, and punch him in the shoulder with my free hand. “Okay, look, I didn’t think you’d be able to come in with me. Speak when spoken to, answer any questions you’re asked honestly, and no matter what Apple says, don’t fight with her.”
“Meaning you’re absolutely going to fight with her, and you’re hoping if I look pathetic enough, she won’t smite you in front of me,” he says.
“Got it in one.” I start walking again, pulling him with me for the rest of our trek across the parking lot. I don’t want to have this meeting by the flickering light of some terrible old monster movie, no matter how appropriate that might be, and so I make sure I’m the first one to reach for the door handle, burnished steel that looks so new it might as well have been installed yesterday. The sound of the jukebox slithers through the crack under the door, some old, sad song about a boy’s dead girlfriend and broken heart. Gary stiffens a little, and I know he’s thinking of my funeral, of being that boy all the way to the core of him as he watches them lower me into the ground. I squeeze his hand.
He squeezes back, and together we step inside.
As happened the first time I came here, the diner melts away, taking my fears of a drive-in meeting with it, and we’re standing in a saloon that wouldn’t look out of place in a spaghetti Western thrown up on that same drive-in screen. It is to the real American West as my diner is to the real highway pit stop, perfected, refined, and idealized without becoming sterile. Our feet knock against the bare plank floors, sending sawdust scattering, and the routewitches turn to look at us, watching. Waiting.
There are at least two dozen of them here, which isn’t a surprise: this is their place, after all. Some of them are focused on their food, or
on each other; judging by the amount of activity happening in one of the corners, there’s at least one pair seeing if they can’t make even more routewitches before someone orders them to go and get a room. But most of them have found their focus, and it’s us.
I snap my fingers and point to the boy. “Paul,” I say. “I knew your name would come to me if I just thought about it long enough. Paul, go get Apple for me, okay? Tell her it’s an emergency.”
The woman lifts her eyebrows. “Pushy for a dead girl, aren’t you?”
“Most of the dead people I know are pushy, and being around this many routewitches makes my skin crawl, so I’d rather be pushy and get it over with quickly, instead of hanging out here being polite and slowly itching myself out of my mind.” Routewitches carry the miles they travel with them, a physical manifestation of their power. With this many of them, this close together, the power has weight. It puddles in the shadows, stretching and distorting them.
I do not like it here.
“Do you swear, little ghost, on the coats you’ve yet to wear, that you intend our queen no harm?”
“I think Apple’s more of a danger to me than I am to her,” I say, and look around the room. There’s no Japanese-American teenager perched at any of the tables, which means she’s not here. “Please. Get her for me.”
“You’ve done your jobs,” says Apple’s voice. I turn, not making any effort to conceal my relief. She’s standing in a doorway behind the bar, a cup of coffee in one hand and what looks suspiciously like a chocolate-cherry malted in the other, two straws sticking out of the mountain of whipped cream. She smiles at the sight of me. “You can let her talk to me, if she remembers what to say.”