The Girl in the Green Silk Gown

  She turns her eyes on Laura, and she is glorious and terrible all at once. She is a runaway and a lost child, and she is Peter Pan and the kidnapper who claims only herself. I don’t know how I ever worked up the nerve to hug her, who is so much more than I am.

  The road is remembering who you are, whispers a voice, and it doesn’t matter, because I am in the presence of the queen.

  “Who are you?” demands Apple, her eyes on Laura, her voice unforgiving. She has her body tilted to put herself between us, and I realize what this looks like from her side. I went to the Halloween fields. I didn’t come home. Instead, I vanished from the twilight, leaving neither body nor haunt behind, and maybe the Barrowman family told her what happened and maybe they didn’t; it wouldn’t have mattered either way, because by the time Apple had come looking, I was gone, long gone, hiding from Bobby Cross and making my way to Laura.

  Laura looks like the woman who kidnapped me. Laura looks like a threat.

  I force myself to raise my hand, to place it on Apple’s arm, going against every law of etiquette now presenting itself to me, rising through the soles of my feet and flooding my senses. Apple glances at me, surprised by my insolence. I shake my head.

  “Her name is Laura Moorhead,” I say. “She’s helping me.”

  Apple glances back to Laura, her surprise not fading. “Laura Moorhead?” she echoes. “Isn’t she Tommy’s girl?”

  How many names does she keep track of, this little routewitch queen with her highway arteries, her backroad veins? How does she know us all? “That’s the one,” I say.

  “You know Tommy?” demands Laura. There’s no deference in her tone. If she realizes who Apple is, she doesn’t care. I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse than ignorance. Probably worse. Ignorance can be corrected. Arrogance is a harder key to turn.

  “I know all the phantom riders,” says Apple. “They run my roads and they pay me tribute by gathering the miles of the ghostroads up in my name, offering them to me in exchange for permission to keep running. I could stop their engines with a sign, and I don’t, and so they love me. Do you think he loves you, Laura Moorhead of the daylight?”

  “Laura, this is Apple,” I say hastily, breaking in before things can get even uglier than they already are. I’m sure they can get uglier. It seems like things can always get uglier. “The Queen of the North American Routewitches. We’re in a diner that only sort of exists, anchored by the Ocean Lady, which means we’re in her territory. Which means play nice, please; which means remember why we’re here.”

  “What, really?” Laura looks Apple up and down before turning to me in patent disbelief. “But she’s just a kid.”

  “I was a kid the day the government decided my family needed to be locked up for the crime of being descended from a nation that was no longer our own,” says Apple. Her voice is acid and ice. “I was a kid the day I ran away from Manzanar, following the song of the road I’d been denied for too damn long. And I was a kid the day I took the crown, the day I agreed to serve the road and anchor the old Atlantic Highway for as long as I pleased her. I’ll be a kid until I do something to lose my throne, and then maybe I’ll grow up, have kids of my own, tell them how their mother escaped from a time of prejudice and cruelty. But maybe not. Prejudice and cruelty don’t seem to have fallen much out of favor.”

  Laura pales as she looks back to Apple. “I see. You have my apologies.”

  “You never seemed to have a problem with me being ‘just a kid,’” I say.

  “You’re dead. She’s not.”

  “Our kings and queens don’t serve past death,” Apple agrees. “We’re not umbramancers.”

  That’s the first time I’ve heard it implied that the umbramancers might have a phantom ruler. I want to ask about it. I have more important issues to resolve. “I’m sorry if we startled you with this whole diner thing,” I say. “We needed to get your attention.”

  “And you have it,” Apple agrees. She switches her focus to me. “Did this . . . this two-penny midway sorcerer do this to you? Tell me where the sigil is and I’ll destroy it, and you can come home. Gary’s been worried sick. We all have.”

  The thought of a car being worried sick would be funny, if I didn’t love him so damn much, if I wasn’t so eager to get back to him. “No,” I say, shaking my head. “Laura’s helping me. She’s the one who called this diner out of the twilight so you’d know I was here.”

  “Then who—”

  “Bobby.” I’ve been trying not to say his name, for fear that he’ll hear it and follow the sound right to where I’m waiting. I’m less afraid now that Apple’s here. She might not be able to destroy Bobby, but she can protect me from him. I know she can. “He . . . he convinced the Barrowmans to help him. He took one of their kids hostage. They did something to me, so that when the Halloween candle blew out, it didn’t take me with it.”

  The look on Apple’s face is half horror, half grudging respect. “They performed a true resurrection. They actually called someone back from the dead.”

  “Yeah.” I spread my hands, indicating the length of my hated, heavy body. “I’m alive again. Hooray for me. Now we just need to fix it.”

  “Can you hear the road?” Apple looks at me closely. “I should have felt you rise. You were supposed to be a routewitch. You should be mine now.”

  “No.” I shake my head. “It’s not there. I thought it would be there. I’m flying without a compass, and it’s not fun.”

  “Take off your shirt.”

  I glance to Laura, who looks nonplussed. Then I shrug, and turn my back on Apple, and remove both my borrowed jacket and the shirt Laura bought for me, the one that’s too new and tight against my skin. It’s been so long since I wore anything I didn’t call out of the twilight myself that all these human clothes feel like a punishment.

  Behind me, Apple makes a small sound of horror and understanding, and I feel her fingers trace the skin along my spine, glancing so lightly that I can almost tell myself that it’s only the wind.

  “Your tattoo is still here, but it’s so faded that it looks like it’s a hundred years old,” she says, softly. “It’s a ghost. He pulled you into the land of the living and forced your protections into the land of the dead.”

  “Is it still damaged?”

  “Yes—the sacrifice hasn’t been made. You’re still alive.” Apple’s fingers brush across me again. “Not that it matters. It can’t protect you as you are.”

  “What if Bobby kills her?” The voice is Laura’s; the question might as well be mine. “Will that count as the sacrifice this protection, whatever it is, needs?”

  “I don’t know,” says Apple. “This is uncharted ground. What I need to know right here, right now, is why she can’t feel the road. She’s supposed to be mine. She was meant to be mine.” There’s an avarice in her voice I’ve never heard before, a fierce possessiveness that frightens and excites me at the same time. “Are you wearing anything they gave you? Anything at all?”

  “Not anymore,” I say. “And I was naked when I showered. But I ate the things they offered me.”

  “It can take up to three days for the body to fully process a meal,” offers Laura.

  I do not clap my hands over my ears as I realize what she’s talking about. It’s one of the more difficult things I’ve done in a day filled with ridiculous things. “They thought I was going to stay put for Bobby to just take me,” I say. “Would they really have fed me something to block me from the roads?”

  “As a precaution? They might. What did you eat?”

  “I don’t know. Pancakes and bacon and orange juice. Coffee.”

  “Salt.”

  We both turn toward Laura. Apple speaks first. “What?”

  “You put salt in pancakes. You can infuse salt with runic meaning.” Laura shakes her head. “It’s part of binding a ghost. If you’re loo
king for something like Rose normally is, a ghost that can come back to life for a little while, you can use salt to trace certain runes, and then put the salt in something to get that effect orally. It doesn’t always work. It doesn’t work as well as the runes themselves. For one thing, it’s not easy to get a ghost to eat something they don’t want to. For another, unless you can bind them to flesh somehow, they can just disappear, and whatever you did to them won’t follow.”

  “So you’re saying they poisoned me with pancakes?” I wrinkle my nose. “That is a stupid way to get trapped on the material plane. I do not approve.”

  “Salt is easy to flush out of the body,” says Apple. “All you need to do is drink a lot of water.”

  I give her a wounded look. Laura bursts out laughing. I transfer the wounded look to her. She covers her mouth with her hand, not looking sorry in the least.

  “I know, I know,” she says. “It’s just that . . . all right, your majesty, or whatever it’s appropriate to call you, Rose doesn’t like going to the bathroom.”

  “I hate it,” I say mulishly. “It’s disgusting.”

  “You were alive before you were dead,” says Apple. “You have to have been toilet trained.”

  “I was! I am! I just . . . it’s been a long time, all right, and I forgot how awful it was.” I glare at both of them, Apple who looks perplexed, Laura who’s trying not to laugh. There’s a fine edge of hysteria around her merriment, like she’s laughing because it’s better than the alternatives. This must all be a little overwhelming for her, folklore professor who’s been wading in our world but never diving below the surface for so very, very long. “I don’t like it. It’s nasty and it smells and I would prefer not to.”

  “Well, biological creatures don’t really get a choice about whether they use the bathroom, unless you’re looking to experience the joys of a UTI, which I assure you would be even less pleasant,” says Laura. “I can’t wait for the floorshow if you’re alive long enough to get your period.”

  I blanch, spinning around so that I’m only looking at Apple, my queen, my salvation. “Fix this,” I plead, voice low and urgent. “I can’t do this. You have to fix it. Please.”

  “First, you need to flush the salt out of your body. Until you can feel the roads, none of the things I have to offer will work for you.”

  I stand a little straighter. “If I flush the salt out, I’ll be dead again?”

  It’s a stupid question, born more of hope than logic. Apple still winces, and says, “No. You’re alive, Rose. You’re a human being, as much as I am. You could walk out of that door and go out there and have a life. You could grow up. Get old. Die peacefully in your bed surrounded by grandkids, if that was what you wanted.”

  Laura said something similar when she was trying to convince me not to make the trip to the Ocean Lady. I feel like I should be tempted, like the world is trying to command me to choose life over death, and once it would have worked. Once, the idea of being alive again would have been all-consuming, sweet and tempting and worth anything, worth killing for. Now, it only makes me tired. I shake my head.

  “I don’t want any of that,” I say. “I want to go home, and home is the ghostroads. Home is Gary and Emma and the Last Dance, it’s highways and hitching and yes, hunger. It’s borrowing life, not owning it. This isn’t me anymore. I stopped being this girl around the time the moss started growing on my tombstone. I’m happy as I am. As I was. I just want to go home.” My voice breaks on the last word, and my eyes sting, and I look away as I realize that I’m crying. Me, crying.

  There is nothing about this that isn’t terrible.

  A hand touches my arm. I glance up. Apple is looking at me with concern.

  “Flush out the salt,” she says. “Let the road see you. Once the road can see you, I’ll be able to see you, and then I can take you back to the Ocean Lady.”

  “I have water in the car,” says Laura.

  “Can you fix this?” I ask Apple.

  “I have no idea,” she says. “But I can try.”

  “Good enough for me,” I say, and walk out of the diner, into the dark, heading for the car, hoping for a miracle. Also hoping that Laura brought toilet paper.

  This is going to suck.

  * * *

  I am correct: it does, in fact, suck. Drinking a full bottle of water and then pissing at the edge of a deserted parking lot, holding onto a tree branch and hoping you’re not squatting over poison oak, is about as nasty as it sounds. Every noise from the shadows around me is terrifying, a sign that I’m about to die with my pants around my ankles. It is not easy to piss when terrified, which seems entirely unfair, given how many people I’ve seen wet themselves in fear. Apparently, when scared enough, the bladder does the opposite of whatever the bladder-haver wants.

  Biology is stupid and cruel and should feel bad about itself.

  But I drink and I pee and I drink and I pee, and when the water runs out Apple produces a bottle of something red and sticky-sweet from inside her bag. She won’t tell me what’s in it, and I stop asking after her second refusal. I just gulp it down, feel my insides roil in protest, and go back to what I was doing before.

  I’m peeing for what feels like the hundredth time but is probably only the tenth when it feels like something snaps inside my brain, literally snaps, with a crack that should be audible to everyone around me. I have the self-awareness to fall forward, onto the dry, unforgiving parking lot. That’s about the last thing I have control over.

  When I was a kid, we used to take sponges and hold them under the tap until they were so heavy with water they felt like they were going to explode. Then we’d go outside and throw them at each other, breaking the heat and monotony of the summer. I feel like one of those sponges. I am filled to bursting, and it hurts, it hurts, I have no way to stop or slow it down, and it hurts.

  Hands are grasping my upper arms, pulling me upright, away from the ground. A voice I don’t know but should is snapping, “Get her legs. She’s going to hurt herself.”

  I’ve already hurt myself, haven’t I? Something warm and wet is trickling down my forehead, too thick to be urine, in the wrong place to be tears. It must be blood. I’ve already hurt myself, and what’s the point in trying to stop me from doing it again? Pain is the lot of the living.

  Then another snap shudders through me, and thought becomes impossible for a time as I buck and writhe.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Another voice I ought to know, another piece of information missing. The world is shattering, falling down in diamonds of uselessness.

  “She was never meant to be cut off from the roads! They’re all trying to assert dominance at once, and we’re on the old Atlantic Highway. There’s a fucking firehose plugged into her brain.” I recognize this voice now, know the desperation and the fury it contains: Apple.

  “Make it stop.” The second voice has to belong to Laura. They’re the only ones here, aside from me, and I’m not saying anything. I don’t know if I’ll ever be saying anything again. The way I feel, speech is an impossible dream, reserved for somebody else.

  “I can’t.” Frustration replaces some measure of the fury, smeared thick as peanut butter on toast. “This isn’t . . . oh, if I could kill that man, if it were allowed, I would strangle him with my bare hands. I would squeeze until there was no life left in him, and then I’d squeeze a little more to be sure he got the idea.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s no way the Barrowman family would have known she was a nascent routewitch before she died unless they were told. He prepared them for her. He knew I’d send her to a family I trusted, and there aren’t many of those left—the Barrowmans have always been at the top of my list, and they’re going to pay, believe me, they’re going to pay—and he made sure they’d cut her off from even the potential of aid. How much do you know about routewitches?”

 
“I’m a folklore professor,” Laura wails.

  Apple’s snort is amusement and anger and disdain, all rolled up into a short, sharp sound. “So nothing. Swell. We’re the children of the road. We own the paths and the presidios, any place a thinking creature has walked. We mature through distance. A routewitch who never travels may never hear the road singing. One who grows up in an RV train will come into her powers by the time she’s eleven years old. I found mine when the government decided to ship me halfway along the state. I could have been a good girl, if not for them. If they hadn’t made it so essential for me to run away.”

  Laura says nothing. Maybe, for once, she recognizes there’s nothing that’s hers to say.

  “Rose has been hitchhiking her way around North America for sixty years. Even without training, that’s the kind of connection to the road that blows everything else away. She’s fighting with the entire American highway system for ownership of her own mind.”

  Is that what I’m doing? Because it really feels like I’m having a seizure. I make a faint mewling noise, the first sound I’ve been able to make intentionally since this began—although not, I realize, the first sound I’ve made. My throat is raw. I’ve been screaming, and I didn’t even notice.

  “Good girl,” says Apple, voice suddenly close to my ear. She squeezes my hand, bearing down until the pressure is just this side of painful. I seize onto it, trying to use it to anchor myself to this place, this moment, this sliver of the aching, endless road. “Fight, Rose. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I should have guessed but I didn’t know. Hold on to me. I’m bringing you home.”

  This isn’t home. This is a parking lot in the middle of nowhere, night birds singing and the light of the moon. This is a slice of the daylight, no matter what the position of the sun says, and I belong in the twilight, down deep among the dead, where I never need to catch my breath or worry about banging my head against the pavement. This is not where I should be.