Chapter 21 The Long Road

Cole drove east for three days without a destination. He did not need one. The road was wide and straight, and the mountains fell away behind him in long grey slopes, and the sky was the color of washed denim. He drove because stopping would have meant sitting in the apartment he had left on the second floor of a walk-up on Atlantic Avenue, and sitting would have meant thinking, and thinking would have meant the spiral mark on his wrist glowing again, bright as a match head in the dark. The mark had faded during the drive out of Millhaven, almost gone by the time he passed through the state line. He had watched it fade the way a man watches the last light go out of a room he is leaving. It was nothing, really—a pale line, the color of old chalk, circling his wrist and breaking where the circle should have closed. He had pressed his thumb to it in the motel bathroom before he left, hard enough to redden the skin, and felt only the ordinary pain of skin against bone. That had felt like victory. It felt like a mistake. By the second day on the road, the mark was back. Not bright. Not threatening. Just there, a whisper against the skin, a pale thread connecting him to a place he had told himself he was finished with. He rubbed at it when he thought no one was looking. He covered it with his sleeve. He stopped looking at his wrist altogether, which was worse, because the not-looking was its own kind of attention. He slept in twenty-minute stretches, wakeful the whole time, and each time he woke he was somewhere new—some diner, some gas station, some motels with names he could not recall the next morning. He ate alone. He drank black coffee. He spoke to no one except the attendants at the pumps, and even that was too much by the third day. His hands were steady on the wheel. His voice was quiet when he used it. He looked like a man who was going home. He was not going home. Home was a two-bedroom apartment with a window that did not close properly and a fridge that hummed like a problem that had never been solved. At a rest stop outside Syracuse, he filled the tank and went inside for coffee. The woman behind the counter was young, her hair in a ponytail, her name tag reading Kayla. She asked him if he wanted cream, and when he said no, she set the cup down and said, almost casually, "Rough night?" Cole did not answer. He looked at her hands. They were steady. They were pink. They were real. "You don't have to talk," she said. "I've had people in here at four in the morning who just sit and stare. I don't ask why. Everyone's got a place they're driving from." Cole looked up then, and for one terrible second he saw—not her face, not anything—but he felt the shape of her laughter, and it was Ellen's laughter, and it hit him in the chest the way a physical blow hits, and he had to set his cup down before his hand shook too much. He stood very still. He breathed. He looked at the form on the wall behind the counter, the one listing the hours and the break times and the health code ratings, and he counted the letters in each word, one by one, until the feeling passed. "Sorry," he said. "Nothing to be sorry about," Kayla said, and she moved on to the next customer, and Cole stood at the counter with his empty cup and thought about how much of his life had been spent standing in places like this, waiting for something that was either coming or already gone, and he did not know which was worse. The road out of Syracuse was long and flat, and Cole drove with the window down and the wind in his face, and the spiral mark on his wrist felt warm for the first time in years, warm the way the room at the Hollow had been warm, warm the way a living thing feels warm when it is being touched. He rolled up his sleeve and looked at it. The mark was there, pale but definite, and it seemed to him—though he knew this was nonsense—that it had moved, shifted a degree, as if turning its face toward the road behind him. He drove on. That night he stayed at a motel called The Skyline, which had a sign out front that listed the vacancies in neon, one of the letters missing so that the word read on and off, VACANCES, VACANES, VACANCS, the way a door opens and closes and opens again. The room was small, the bed was firm, the shower worked. Cole sat on the edge of the bed and took off his watch and set it on the nightstand and looked at his wrist. The mark was visible even in the dark, a thin pale line glowing faintly, like a compass needle pointing toward something he could not see. He lay down and closed his eyes. He dreamed of a kitchen he had never stood in, with a window he had never looked through, and a child's voice calling a name he had never answered to. The voice was soft, uncertain, the voice of someone standing in a doorway and not sure whether to step through or step back. He woke before he could see whose kitchen it was, whose voice it was, and he lay in the dark with his heart hammering and thought: the door is still inside me. Not the room. Not the flesh walls. Just the shape of it. Just the idea of a threshold, and what stands on the other side of one. In the morning he found a letter on the windshield of his car, slipped under the wiper blade, addressed in a handwriting he knew immediately because it was precise and careful and slightly slanted to the right, the way Anna Calloway wrote. He sat on the bumper and read it in the parking lot, with the engine cold and the sky the color of old concrete. "Dear Mr. Cole," it said. "I hope this finds you. I am writing because something has happened at the chapel, and I think you should know. They have started meeting there again. Not the same ones—different people, younger, some of them from out of town. Mara Venn was released two weeks ago, on a technicality, the doctor said her mind was healthy enough for supervised release. She went straight back to the chapel and began preaching. I went to hear her. She said the door is only sleeping. She said the key returned to the world, and when the key returns, the door wakes up. I did not tell her that you had come and gone and driven away, because I did not know if that was the truth or just what you wanted me to believe. I am writing because I need to know whether you are safe, and whether I should be afraid, and whether the thing you closed is actually closed or whether it is just waiting for you to come back." Cole folded the letter and put it in his pocket. He sat on the bumper of his car and looked at the empty parking lot and thought about keys, and locks, and doors that do not end but only wait. Then he got in the car and drove west. ---