Dead Echo

  *

  She drove away from the Motel 6 like it harbored a pestilence. She’d come all this way, all the way to the End of Nowhere and once here, there, of course, was nothing. She’d driven aimlessly down the highway for a while. The cornfields ranged off in all directions and her solitude was complete. The miles washed away the confusion that’d clouded her mind since the postcard and she began to get hungry. She hadn’t eaten since…she really had no idea. Ten minutes later she passed a ragged sign posted by the side of the road, just between the ditch and the first row of corn. Go Eat, it said, with an equally ragged red arrow pointing straight up, almost like an obscenity. 4 miles, it added, as if an afterthought. And right on schedule the close-packed field on her right relinquished its hold on the highway, squaring itself around a ramshackle frame structure with a matching Go Eat sign hanging sun-washed and exhausted from its tin roof. She pulled into the gravel parking lot, dragging behind her a cloud of dust that blew against the front of the building like a dry wave. The windows were shells of accumulated drive-ups and allowed no sight-line at all as to what the place was like inside.

  But at the End of Nothing so what.

  She killed the engine and walked over to the door, went inside, eyes on the floor as she made her way to the counter. A lone waitress stood behind it talking on the phone and smoking a cigarette. There had been three other cars in the parking lot but the place was light in numbers even from them. There was one middle-aged trucker-type pushed back in the corner off to the right thumbing his way through a thin newspaper and a skinny, younger guy with his back to her, hunched over a plate of something. Patsy picked a spot four down from him and sat down. From the kitchen drifted the faint murmur of a radio evangelist “sowing the grain for God.” She happened to glance left and found the guy just down from her staring. Chewing and staring, his eyes wide. She looked away and then back. He was still doing it though this time he looked a little embarrassed. He swallowed what he was chewing and said, “Excuse me?”

  Patsy just stared back, a little nervous now.

  He raised his eyebrows and lowered his head. “You say something?” he asked.

  “No.” Now she raised her eyebrows and almost muttered something under her breath. But the look in his eyes stopped her.

  “No…seriously, I…” and he stopped, looking at her like he’d seen a ghost.

  “What is it?” she said louder this time, looking around to see if the trucker might be of some assistance with this clown. The young guy shook his head and held up the hand that clutched the fork.

  “Do I know you?” he said, and the honesty and (let’s face it, what got her right from the start) desperation in his face cooled her down a few degrees.

  “No, I don’t think so,” she’d said, but softer, no longer laying out the daggers on his approach.

  “I swear you look like…” and he stopped again, smiled. And really, looking back, that had been it. She’d left with him, followed him actually, with the Civic getting closer and closer to empty. They’d ended up at a row of apartments, each identical to all the others. He’d stopped the truck in front of a short staircase leading up to the second floor and got out. She’d killed the Civic and done the same. And with hardly a word they’d gone upstairs.

  And that was how it’d gone with John. Poor, sweet John. The long, sandy-blond hair and green eyes, his infectious smile. The little boy, really, who’d only recently lost his mother, the only real friend he’d ever had, he’d told her. The woman had died of lung cancer the summer before and he hadn’t been back to the community college since. In fact, he never did. He was twenty-one, an only child, fatherless since age four, motherless on the day Patsy met him. He worked for a small construction company just outside a little burg called Campbell. Patsy was almost seventeen, told him she was nineteen and he’d never batted an eye. He’d been struck dumb from the first glance.

  They were married a year later, two castaways set adrift.

  Three years later he ditched the construction company and they headed south. Ended up in Louisiana where he knew a friend who worked for a car dealership. And it was there his infectious smile flourished. He was the leading salesman on the lot when they’d gotten the small four-room apartment in downtown Baton Rouge. Within six months he’d been promoted to sales manager and Patsy had quit her job at the bakery, thinking her stint in hell over. But she should have known, she should have smelled it coming.

  The next two and a half years were spent saving up for their “dream home.” John had wanted at least twenty percent to put down and there was no reason to find any place bigger because children were not in the picture. Not that they weren’t trying. But their generosity and frequency with each other did not keep them that way for long. The pregnancy had been a surprise, but not a big one.

  Terri had been born in the summer of ’91 at a real hospital, covered by insurance that Patsy had been so sure would never exist. They’d begun shopping around for a home then, combing through the real estate pages of the newspaper, watching the home shopping channels for that perfect place. And they’d found the moderately new subdivision within their range with a nice little fenced-in yard for the baby. It had been then, also, that Patsy had begun to have nightmares. Visions of flames and the smell of gasoline. John wrote it off as nerves, a new mother’s inchoate fear, and she’d even begun to believe him. The smile was hard to deny, the confidence with which he spoke of their future and all the little ones they’d surely fill the new place with.

  And then came the weekend drive. It’d been raining slightly when they left the apartment, the sky a dull, slate-gray. The car inexplicably blew a tire on the wet interstate, veered wildly left into a Covenant tractor-trailer. They’d slewed into the side of the rig at sixty miles an hour, John fighting the wheel for all he was worth, almost disengaging them from the wheel well of the semi before they got somehow hooked on the frame. Then the car had lurched back to the right, the driver of the big-rig fighting against their pull as they went into the ditch. Patsy remembered little of the actual accident besides these few scattered images: the sparks flying from the driver’s side, the tortuous scream of metal as the car met with the frame of the truck. Then the silence of the grave and nothing more. When she came to, lying on the grass beside the interstate, the silence continued and for just a moment Patsy had thought it was just another bad turn of the series of nightmares, had even rolled over in the grass to get closer to John’s side of the bed. Then she’d seen the flames rising from the car, the tractor-trailer flipped onto its side, its wheels still turning. She’d fought to her knees in the muddy ditch she suddenly found herself in and the next thing she’d seen was the little body lying by the side of the road, the limp hand resting on the white warning stripe. And with that she’d begun to scream, for what she thought to be years and years.