Marty. This is all about focus.
Think about Alice. Keep driving. Eyes on the road.
The hitchhikers will step out eventually. They always do.
Just don’t look back at them. Don’t ever look back.
Don’t think, just drive.
————————————–
I hold a lot of love for my parents, having the generosity to take Alice and me in after her leukemia relapsed, but goddamn do they live far from civilization. Or maybe there just ain’t a lot of civilization in Idaho to go around – not in a bad way. The quiet is nice. I’ve been enjoying the countryside more than I anticipated. That being said, local government could stand to spend some taxpayer dollars sponsoring a few more Walgreens locations.
Feels like I’ve been driving all night. Must almost be morning. They have to be worried sick. Alice may actually be physically sick without her antinausea meds.
I shook my head side to side in a mix of disbelief and self-flagellating shame. Took a left turn when I should have taken a right – a downright boneheaded mistake. The price for overworking myself, but I mean, what other option do I have? Chemotherapy ain’t exactly cheap.
For a moment, I forgot where I was and what I was doing. Accidentally looked in my rearview mirror at the five hitchhikers in the backseats. Silent and staring forward with dead and empty eyes at nothing in particular.
Furiously, I snap my head forward, not wanting to linger too long on them. Wasn’t sure what else I might observe.
Can’t be doing that on this road. Maintaining focus is key.
Despite my near-instantaneous reaction, I did see the new hitchhikers, but only for a moment. No surprises this time, thankfully. They wore suits like all the others, monocolored with earthy tones from head to toe. Same odd fabric, too: rough and coarse-looking, almost leather-like but not exactly. It’s difficult to describe, and honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it before tonight.
That said, I haven’t ever been in a situation like this before, either. Whatever backwoods county I got myself turned around in, it likes to follow its own rules.
For example, I didn’t pull over to pick up these hitchhikers. Somehow, they just found their way in. Or maybe I did pull over and let them in? Been so tired lately, who could even be sure. They don’t say much, no matter how many questions I ask. Would love to know where I am, but I guess it isn’t for them to say.
My gaze again drifted, this time from the road to the car’s dashboard, and I let myself see the time. Big mistake.
7:59PM.
Nope, that ain’t right. I rapidly blinked a few times, adjusted myself so I was sitting up straighter, and then looked back to the clock again.
Now, it didn’t show any time at all.
Marty, Jesus. Focus up.
I blinked once more, this time for longer. Not sure how long I was blinking, couldn’t have been longer than ten seconds. If I close my eyes for too long, they become hard to open again. Requires a lot of energy. Anxiously, I peered back at the dashboard for a third time.
4:45AM.
See, there we go. Now that makes sense. By the time dawn arrives, I’m sure I will have found a gas station to pull over in. Ask for directions back to…whatever my parent’s address is.
I’ll figure that out later, right now I need to focus.
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Funny things happened in this part of the country when you didn’t focus. Sometimes, the yellow pavement markings would change colors, or disappear entirely. Other times, the road itself would start to look off – black asphalt turning to muddy brownstone at a moment’s notice.
At first, it scared me. Scared me a lot, come to think of it. Made me want to pull over and close my eyes.
But Alice needed her nausea meds, and judging by the time, I had work in two short hours. I needed to make it home soon so I can check on her, give her a kiss before school. Hopefully, I’ll have time to brew a pot of coffee, too.
My eyes, though: they just don’t seem to want to stick with the program. Dancing around from thing to thing without a care in the world, making things more difficult. They have one job: watch the road for places that might have a map or someone who can tell me where I am. Well, two jobs. Watch the road and focus on the road.
At least it wasn’t treacherous. The path has been pretty much straight after the wrong turn.
————————————–
Initially, Alice was nervous about starting at her new school. I get it. That transition is hard enough without factoring in everything she has had to manage in her short life. We’d been lucky though, finding a well-reviewed sign language school: in Idaho, of all places.
She’s amazing. You’d think that the leukemia and the deafness from her first go with chemotherapy would have crushed her spirit. Not my Alice. She’s tough as nails. Tough as nails like her dad.
I smiled, basking in a moment of fatherly pride. Of course, you can’t be doing that on this road. You’ll start to see things you don’t want to see.
When my eyes again met the rearview mirror, I noticed there was now only one hitchhiker now, but he had transformed and revealed his real shape.
His face was flat like a manhole cover, almost the size of a manhole cover, too, but less circular – more oblong. He was staring at me with one bulging eye. It was the only one he had, or the only one I could see, at least. No other recognizable facial features. Just the one, bloated, soulless eye.
What’s worse, I saw what was behind him. Behind the car, I mean.
I closed my eyes as soon as I could, but I’d seen too much. My mind was already rapidly reviewing and trying to reconcile what I had noticed.
There was a wall a few car lengths away. No road to be seen, just an inclined wall with tire tracks on it. The atmosphere behind me had a weird thickness to it. Lightrays shone through the thickness unnaturally from someplace above. The ground looked like dust, or maybe sand, why would the ground look like –
FOCUS. Think of Alice, and focus
When I finally found the courage to open my eyes, it all looked right again, and I breathed a sigh of relief and chuckled to myself from behind the wheel. Straight road in front of me, framed by a starless black sky. That same starless sky was once again behind me. Everything in its right place. Until I saw something snaking its way into my peripheral vision.
The hitchhiker was now in the passenger’s seat.
He turned to me and leaned his body forward over the stickshift; his lips were pursed and nearly pressing against my ears, rhythmically opening and closing his mouth but making no sound. I could have sworn he was close enough to touch my ear with his lips, but I guess he wasn’t because I couldn’t feel it. Instead, I felt my heartbeat start to race, or I imagined what it was like to feel your heartbeat race.
Why did I have to imagine…?
Don’t turn. Don’t look. Don’t think. Just focus.
But for the first time, I couldn’t. Something was wrong.
I thought about closing my eyes. For a while, not just for a little. I was curious what would happen. Had been all night, actually.
But then, like the angel she was, Alice’s visage appeared on the horizon. She was standing at her second-story window in my parent’s home, watching and waiting for me to return from this long night. I wasn’t getting closer for some reason, but she wasn’t getting any further away, either.
She was far, but even at that distance, I could see her doing something in the window. When I squinted, it looked like maybe she was waving.
Alice was waving at me. Alice could see me.
Must mean I’m close.
Eyes on the road.
Focus, Marty.
————————————–
Every night around eight P.M., Alice would stand and watch the road from her bedroom on the second story of her grandparents’ home. What she was waiting for didn’t happen as often anymore, but her birthday was a week away – the phenomenon seemed to be more frequent around her birthday. As the clock ticked into 8:03PM, she saw a familiar sight: two faint luminescent orbs traveled slowly down the deserted road in her direction, creating even fainter cylinders of light in front of them.
Like headlights from an approaching car.
The first time this happened, Alice was nine. To cope with her father’s disappearance, she would watch the road at night and pretend she saw his car returning home. One night, she saw balls of light appear in the distance, and it made hope explode through her body like fireworks.
The balls of light turned into the driveway. And when they did, Alice noticed something that made hope mutate into fear and confusion.
The headlights had no car attached, dissolving without a trace within seconds of their arrival.
For months, this was a nightly occurrence, and only she could see it, which scared Alice. But when she formally explained the phenomenon to her grandfather for the first time, how they looked like headlights without a car, a weak and bittersweet grin appeared on his face, and he carefully brought up his hands to sign to her:
“I’d bet good money that’s Marty making his way home, sweetheart. He just loved you that much.”
From then on, the orbs comforted Alice and made her feel deeply connected with her long-lost father, wherever he was. But in the present, at the age of nearly seventeen, she had modified the purpose of her vigil.
Originally, she liked the idea of her father’s endless search for her. It made her feel less alone. But as she lived life and matured, she realized how alone he must be looking for her from where he was. All she wanted was for Marty to stop looking. She wanted her father to finally rest.
Now, when the orbs passed by, she would sign to them from her window, desperately hopeful that even from where he was he could see her hands move, communicating an important message to him:
I love you, and I miss you. But please, Dad, let go.