“They were like movies in your mind,” Charlie says.
“I guess so,” Josh says. “My version of it, yeah. So I was desperate to actually be Batman for a night. I put the costume on and my dad took me out trick-or-treating and I got more candy that year than I ever had before. And I knew it was because of that costume. Because of how great it looked. When we got home, my arms were tired from carrying all that candy.”
Josh gives a small, sad chuckle.
“And my mother, well, she was gone. While we were out, she’d collected a few things, threw them in a suitcase, and left. She wrote a note. ‘I’m sorry.’ That’s all it said. No explanation. No way to contact her. Just that meager apology. It was like she had just vanished. And I know, that’s what all deaths feel like. The person is there and then they’re not and you have to adjust to life without them. But what made it so hard was that my mother chose to leave. She planned to go that way—without a goodbye. I know because of the costume. She’d never spent that much time on one before, and I think it’s because she had already made up her mind that she was going to leave. And so she put all her love and attention into that one stupid Batman costume, because she knew it would be the last thing she ever did for me.”
He stops talking, letting his story—that long, sad tale—linger in the car like smoke.
“Do you still miss her?” Charlie says.
“Sometimes. Do you still miss your parents?”
Charlie nods. “And I miss Maddy.”
What she doesn’t say, because she’d never admit it to anyone, is that she misses Maddy more than her parents. It’s not something she’s proud of. She certainly doesn’t feel good about feeling this way, but it’s the truth. She is very much her parents’ daughter. Her father was quiet and prone to introspection, and so is she. Her mother, just like Charlie, was an enthusiastic movie lover, courtesy of Nana Norma. Charlie has her father’s hazel eyes and her mother’s pert nose, and she sees them every time she looks in the mirror. They are always with her, which goes a long way toward lessening the pain of losing them.
But Maddy was something different. As foreign and exotic to Charlie as a tropical flower growing in the desert. Bright and beautiful and rare. It’s why her loss stings more and why Charlie feels so guilty about it. She’ll never meet another Maddy.
“Why did you tell me that story?” she asks Josh.
“Because I wanted you to get to know me.”
“So I’d trust you?”
“Maybe,” Josh says. “Did it work?”
“Maybe,” Charlie replies.
Josh hits the wipers, swiping away the gathering snow, and shifts the car into a lower gear, helping it climb the slow but steady rise of the highway.
Charlie’s familiar with this stretch of road.
The Poconos.
The place where Maddy had been born and raised.
The place from which she hoped to escape.
They pass a faded billboard advertising one of those big honeymoon resorts that had been all the rage in the fifties and sixties. This one is decidedly rustic. With timber-studded walls and a roof of green slate, it resembles a massive log cabin. Mountain Oasis Lodge, it’s called. Or used to be. A conspicuous white banner with black print has been slapped over the image of the lodge.
ENJOY OUR LAST SEASON!
Judging by the state of the banner—frayed at the corners and faded, though not quite as much as the rest of the billboard—Charlie assumes the resort’s last season ended several summers ago.
Maddy’s grandmother had worked at a place like that until it went belly-up in the late eighties. Maddy had regaled her with stories of visiting her grandmother at work—running through empty ballrooms, sneaking into vacant rooms, sprawling across round beds with mirrored ceilings and scrambling inside bathtubs shaped like giant hearts.
Tawdry.
That’s how Maddy described the place. “It tried so hard to be sexy, but it was, like, the worst, cheapest kind of sexy. The hotel version of crotchless panties.”
It hadn’t always been like this, Charlie knew. Maddy had also told her about the Poconos that existed a couple of generations before they were born. Back then, movie stars often motored the short distance from New York for a few days of fishing, hiking, and boating, rubbing elbows with working-class couples from Philadelphia, Scranton, Levittown. Maddy had shown her a picture of her grandmother posing poolside with Bob Hope.
“She met Bing Crosby, too,” Maddy said. “Not together, though. Now that would have been the cat’s meow.”
Charlie sighs and looks out the window, at the trees skating by in gray blurs.
Like ghosts.
It makes her think of all the people who’ve died on this highway. People like her parents. Killed in explosions of glass. Torched in fiery wrecks. Crushed under tons of twisted metal. Now their spirits are stuck here, haunting the side of the road, forever forced to watch others drive by to destinations they failed to reach.
She sighs again, loud enough for Josh to say, “You getting carsick again?”
“No. I’m just—”
Charlie’s voice seizes up, the words clogged in her throat like a hard candy that’s been swallowed.
She never told Josh she felt carsick.
Not for real.
That was during a movie in her mind, one she only half-remembers now that she knows it didn’t really happen. The state trooper coming up on their right. Charlie’s covert breaths fogging the window. Her index finger slicing across the glass.
But if it didn’t really happen—if it was all in her head—how does Josh know about it?
Charlie’s mind starts whirling, clicking like an old movie projector. It spins out a thought. One that should have arrived much sooner.
“Come as You Are” had just started playing before she dropped into that long, vivid mental movie and was still playing when she woke from it.
That makes sense. Charlie had once read that dreams that feel like hours can pass in mere minutes, and she assumes the same is true for movies in her mind. The song started, the movie unspooled in her thoughts, and when it was over, “Come as You Are” was still playing.
But when Charlie snapped out of the alleged movie in her mind, it was still the beginning of the song that she had heard. That definitely doesn’t make sense, especially since Josh told her she’d been zoned out for more than five minutes.
Then there’s the distance they traveled during that time. On the map at the rest stop, it would have been about the width of her index finger, which meant it was miles when blown up to full scale. Far more ground than can be covered during the course of a single song, let alone a few seconds.