Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan(86)

My hand is shaking as I let go of the wheel and slide the key into the ignition. The engine rumbles to life, all but purring as it wakes, and the radio, unsurprisingly at this point, turns itself on. The sound of Bing Crosby's voice flows into the cabin, sweet and strong and perfect, singing a song I haven't heard almost since the year I died. "You'll never know how many dreams I've dreamed about you, or just how empty they all seemed without you," he sings, and there are tears in my eyes, and I don't bother wiping them away. "So kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again. It's been a long, long time..."

"Oh, my God, you crazy bastard." I lean my head back against the seat and laugh, and laugh, and wonder how many years he spent planning this: how many days he spent with the car, just sitting in the driver's seat, letting himself sink into it. Letting himself imbue it. Cars can leave ghosts behind, when they're loved enough, but that wasn't what he was doing; he was trying something much stranger, and much more difficult.

And somehow, through some insane bend in the rules, it worked.

"I missed you so much," I whisper, and lean forward, resting my head against the wheel. This isn't an embrace, not really, not as such, but then, when you're dead, you learn the art of the compromise. You learn that sometimes "almost" is the best option of them all. And maybe, if you're very lucky, you get the chance to learn that nothing is forever—not even saying goodbye.

The radio station changes, abandoning the year I died for something a lot more recent: Journey, singing about how loving a music man ain't always what it's supposed to be. I'm laughing through my tears, and somehow, that's exactly right.

I sit up, wipe my eyes, and put my hands back on the wheel. Gary's engine is still purring, a sweet bass line beneath the radio's crooning. "All right, you crazy bastard," I say. "Let's drive."

***

"Can I talk to you for a minute?"

She turns around, all suspicion and wariness, those big doe eyes of hers shadowed with the fear that I'm here to make fun of her, to join the list of boys who've thought that "poor" means the same thing as "easy." "Sure," she says, and clutches her books a little tighter.

"Do you have...I mean, I was wondering...would you like to go to the Spring Hop with me?"

She studies my face like it's an exam question, fear fading in the face of pure amazement. When she realizes I mean it...I think I'd do almost anything to make her give me that look again. How did I let this wait so long?

"I would love to," she says, and it's 1944, and we're going to live forever, and I'm going to marry her someday.

Just you wait and see.

***

A wise man told me once that love—true love—never dies. It's just that sometimes, we can't see it clearly. As Gary and I blaze down the ghostroads, a gray streak in the twilight that never ends...for the first time, I think I can believe that he was right.





Thunder Road

A Sparrow Hill Road story

by

Seanan McGuire

Well, now, I'm no hero, that's understood;

All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood

With a chance to make it good somehow...

Hey what else can we do now

Except roll down the window

And let the wind blow back your hair

Well the night's busting open

These two lanes will take us anywhere

We got one last chance to make it real

To trade in these wings on some wheels

Climb in back

Heaven's waiting on down the tracks

Oh oh come take my hand

Riding out tonight to case the promised land

Oh oh Thunder Road...

— "Thunder Road," Bruce Springsteen.



There's one thing every journey—and every story—has in common. Then again, stories and journeys are the same thing, aren't they? Every one of them begins somewhere, trembling and frightened, like a green-clad ghost-girl who doesn't even realize yet that she's left her body in the burning wreck behind her. Every one of them moves onward from that point, little ghosts growing up to become full-fledged urban legends, letting their legs and their longings carry them from one side of the American ghostroads to the other. Every one of them gets more complicated as it goes, harder to predict, harder to understand unless you've been there since the very beginning.

Every one of them eventually ends. Whether you want them to or not.

Sometimes we're excited, eager, yammering "Are we there yet?" and demanding the driver to hit the gas a little harder, begging the storyteller to feed us the hints and tastes of what's to come a little faster. Sometimes we're reluctant, like children on the way to see an adult they already know they don't like visiting; we drag our feet, we whimper and cajole, we do everything we can to stretch things out a little farther. Whichever way we go, we know there's no real point to it; we know that we can't change anything. Journeys end. Stories end. Everything ends.