“Will do.”
She didn’t realize how unsettling the statues were until she was alone with them. The children were missing chunks. It was an art style she’d seen before — the sculptor used raw hunks of bronze, fusing them in odd and counterintuitive welds that left seams and gaps — but in the darkness, her imagination rendered gore. The boy to her left, the one swinging a baseball bat that Ashley had called the little leaguer, had an exposed ribcage. Others waved spindly, mangled arms, missing patches of flesh. Like a crowd of pit-bull-mauling victims, half-gnawed to the bone.
What had Ashley called them? Nightmare children.
He was twenty feet away, almost a silhouette against the rest area’s orange light, when she turned and called to him. “Hey. Wait.”
He looked back.
“Darby,” she said. “My name is Darby.”
He smiled.
Thanks for helping me, she wanted to say. Thank you for being decent to me, a total stranger. The words were there, in her mind, but she couldn’t make them real. They broke eye contact, the moment evaporating . . .
Thank you, Ashley—
He kept walking.
Then he stopped again, reconsidering, and said one last thing: “You do know Darby is a guy’s name, right?”
She laughed.
She watched him leave, and then she leaned against the statue’s baseball bat, frozen mid-swing, and held her iPhone skyward against the falling snowflakes. She squinted, watching the screen’s upper left corner.
No service.
She waited, alone in the darkness. In the right corner, the battery had fallen to six percent. She’d left her charger plugged into an outlet in her dorm. Two hundred miles back.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please, God . . .”
Still no signal. Breathing through chattering teeth, she re-read her sister’s text:She’s okay right now.
Okay is the single worst word in the English language. Without context, it’s an utter non-thing. Okay could mean her mother Maya was doing better, it could mean she was doing worse, and it could mean she was . . . well, just okay.
People say pancreatic cancer is a swift killer, because death often follows a diagnosis within weeks or even days — but that’s not true. It takes years to kill. It’s just symptomless in its early stages, invisibly multiplying inside its host, not manifesting jaundice or abdominal pain until it’s far too late. This was a chilling notion; that the cancer had been there inside her mother when Darby was in high school. It’d been there when she’d lied about the broken Sears tags in her purse. It’d been there when she drove home at 3 a.m. on a Sunday night, woozy from bad ecstasy with a green glow-bracelet on her wrist, and her mother broke down in tears on the front porch and called her a rotten little bitch. That invisible creature had been perched there on her shoulder all along, eavesdropping, and she’d been dying slowly, and neither of them had known.
They’d last spoken on Thanksgiving. The phone call had been over an hour of crisscrossing arguments, but the last few seconds lingered in Darby’s mind.
You’re the reason Dad left us, she remembered saying. And if I could have chosen him instead of you, I would have. In a heartbeat.
In a fucking heartbeat, Maya.
She wiped away tears with her thumb, already freezing to her skin. She exhaled into the biting air. Her mother was being prepped for surgery, right now, at Utah Valley Hospital, and here Darby was, stranded at a run-down rest area miles into the Rockies.
And she knew she didn’t have enough gas to idle Blue here for long. The visitor center at least had heat and electricity. Whether she liked it or not, she’d probably have to make small talk with Ed and Ashley, and whoever had flushed that toilet. She imagined them — a huddle of strangers in a snowstorm, like gold miners and homesteaders must have shared refuge in these same mountains centuries past — sipping watery coffee, sharing campfire stories, and listening to the radio for garbled clues as to when the snowplows would arrive. Maybe she’d make a few Facebook friends and learn how to play poker.
Or maybe she’d go sit in her Honda and freeze to death.
Both options were equally enticing.
She glanced to the closest statue. “This is going to be a long night, kiddos.” She checked her iPhone one last time, but by now she’d given up hope on Ashley’s magic signal-spot. All she was doing out here was wasting battery and courting frostbite.
“One hell of a long night.”
She headed back to the Wanapa building, feeling another migraine nip at the edges of her thoughts. Snowmageddon had kicked up again, obscuring the mountains with windswept snowflakes. A sharp gust of wind raced up behind her, creaking the fir trees, whipping her jacket taut. She unconsciously counted the cars in the parking lot as she walked — three, plus her Honda. A gray van, a red pickup truck, and an unidentified vehicle, all half-buried by rolling waves of frost.
On her way, she chose to circle through the parking lot, around this small collection of trapped cars. No reason, really. She would later look back on this mindless decision many times tonight, and wonder how differently her night might’ve played out if she’d merely retraced Ashley’s footprints instead.
She passed the row of vehicles.
First was the red truck. Sandbags in the bed, webbed tire chains. Less snow heaped on it than the others, meaning it hadn’t been here long. She guessed thirty minutes.
The second car was completely buried, just an unrecognizable mound of snow. She couldn’t even discern the paint color — it could be a dumpster for all she knew. Something broad and boxy. It’d been here the longest of the four.
Third was Blue, her trusty Honda Civic. The car she’d learned to drive in, the car she’d taken to college, the car she’d lost her virginity in (not all at the same time). The left wiper was still missing, tossed into some snow berm a mile down the highway. She knew she was lucky to have made it to a rest area.
Last was the gray van.
This was where Darby chose to cut between parked cars and take the footpath to the building’s front door, some fifty feet away. She planned to pass between the van and her Honda, leaning on the doors of her own car for balance.
Printed on the side of the van was an orange cartoon fox, like a counterfeit Nick Wilde from Zootopia. He wielded a nail gun the way a secret agent holds a pistol, promoting some sort of construction or repair service. The company’s name was covered by snow, but the slogan read: WE FINISH WHAT WE START. The van had two rear windows. The right one was blocked by a towel. The left one was clear, catching a blade of reflected lamplight as Darby passed it, and in it, she glimpsed something pale inside the van. A hand.
A tiny, doll-like hand.