CHAPTER TEN
“Why are you better at navigation than my iPhone, with actual functioning cell service?” I asked. Penn was doing his version of sitting in the passenger seat of the old Ford Ranger. A ghost riding shotgun.
“I know where to go,” he said. “I’m not remembering myself here so much as I just know this place.”
“Gotcha,” I said. “How much farther?”
“Not much.”
He caught my glare, matched it with a grin, and swiveled toward the side window. The endless greens and browns and wildflower brights of Oregon whisked by. Over the last hour, we’d passed other towns as small as Sacred and road signs to bigger places. Eugene, Bend, Portland.
And we were testing time. At any moment, he could sense that strange vanishing feeling, the only warning he got that he was heading back to elsewhere. Two hours into his latest visit, it hadn’t happened yet.
We’d made it through coaxing Anne Shirley into eating her kitty kibble from one of the ceramic bowls in the cabin kitchen. Then he’d sat with me on the picnic table while I ate my lunch of cheese, crackers, and some cut-up veggies and ranch dip.
From there, Penn had asked a single question: “Have you ever seen a covered bridge?”
I bit into a chunk of raw cauliflower dredged in ranch, made a face, and abandoned the white glop to the far side of my plate. “I don’t think so. Why?”
“Raw cauliflower should be outlawed,” Penn said, ignoring my question.
“Well, you’re off the hook. You don’t eat or have hunger sensations anymore, right?”
“Right,” he said. “But I do know that cauliflower as a whole is a scam. Anyway, covered bridges are a big thing in Oregon. Like a historical treasure. I think there’s something like fifty across the state. You haven’t driven by one yet?”
“So far, I’ve only been to downtown Sacred. Also, the library and that forest over there.” None of those outings had been anything but unnerving. “I don’t think Oregon likes me.”
He scoffed. “I know that’s not true, and I can prove it to you.” He dashed his hand along his side of the table. “You’ll actually have to see some of Oregon, though. And if you do it when that watch is ticking, I might see some of it too.”
I swallowed a fibrous hunk of celery and needed three sips of water to jam it down my throat. I’d forgotten that none of the most important parts of Penn and me were actually about me. I needed to help him discover what was keeping him from moving on. And for that, he needed to remember.
I glanced up at him. “Since Google searches don’t know you, we need to get you out . . .” I paused, vaguely gesturing toward the property line with my head. “There.”
He wrinkled his nose at the rest of my vegetables and shifted his face into a bloated comic-book smile. “So, how about checking out your first covered bridge?”
Miles on the road with Penn, and I still hadn’t seen one.
I adjusted my sunglasses, but a weird film coated the lenses.
I whisked them off and rubbed them with the edge of my shirt, but they wouldn’t get fully clean.
Had something from the forest gotten on them?
Another Sacred oddity to add to my growing list.
I shoved them back on and made do. “We still haven’t solved the problem of what happens if this watch stops, and you leave me stranded in the . . . Where are we again?” The fact that I was the one driving did nothing to help my terrible sense of direction.
“We’re near Cottage Grove in Lane County,” he said, as if that meant anything. “Hey, take the next exit, and follow the road for a bit.”
I glanced at the sign. “Row River Road? Say that three times fast.”
“Never,” he said on a weak laugh. “Also, it rhymes with ‘cow.’”
“Okay, Row River,” I stressed correctly.
“Bingo. And if we don’t make it back to the cabin together, it could be worse. You could be stuck in this rig without a perfectly good Thomas Guide sitting right there.” Penn pointed to the faded spiral-bound book on the floor mat near the toe of his boot.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s a map book.”
“You sure you’re from this decade?” I teased.
Penn rolled his eyes. “I probably know because someone older in my family had one.”
“You mean to tell me that all those elementary-school geography worksheets with the little trees and roads and interstates are finally going to pay off? I haven’t used calculus once. But maps and keys—who knew? I might even be able to get myself home.”
The words inflated, drifting in the vanilla-rust-scented air. I locked onto his eyes while still minding the road, and the look he lobbed across the seat burned ten times hotter than the heat rolling off his skin.
“I want that for you. To get home,” I said.
He cleared his throat. “Thank you, Sylvie.”
Penn’s voice was always a little rough and ragged; I wondered if this was the way he’d sounded then.
Or had dying knocked this trait into the current version of him?
Curiosity pulled at the edges of me, and Penn might’ve seen my questions that way if I’d shared them.
Had he been just as curious as a child? Anything from that era would help us now—a mother’s name, a last name.
A room in a house on a street, an address learned and parroted in kindergarten.
I could find those, find him from that. But right then, with my hands gripping the wheel and seeing just okay out of dirty sunglasses, I stomped the questions back down.
I focused on the two-lane road that split the grasslands in half.
A steepled church and stowed recreational vehicles and horse trailers claimed space on each side.
A few ranch-style houses lived behind fences or at the ends of long, winding drives.
Spindle-top trees poked from everywhere, and leafy hills rose in the background like the great rounded backs of sleeping dinosaurs.
As I moved deeper along whatever compass direction this road marked, the foliage crowded thicker, tighter, the ground strewn with a net of ivy so dark, it could’ve been the dictionary image for the term “forest green.”
Then the brush loosened, and the sky opened wide over the plains. A strip of river water emerged on our right, behind yellow signs warning of curves in the road.
It was only a few minutes later that we rounded a deep bend. The narrow Row River tracked along with us from here, and finally, a long, pitched roof structure appeared in the distance. “The bridge is red,” I said more than asked. “And it looks like a barn.”
Penn had me turn off the road and stop the truck on a small, paved parking strip. “It’s one of only a few red ones in Oregon. It’s called Currin Bridge, but the actual bridge is really old, grayish wood. Like, nineteen-hundreds old. The cover is red.”
I grumbled. “That’s what I meant. Oregon thinks I’m brainless too.”
“Oregon thinks you’re doing just fine, Sylvie.”
Smirking, I cut the engine and hopped out from the cab, eager to stretch my legs. By the time I locked the truck, Penn had appeared at my side. No slamming doors with this shotgun passenger.
We walked along. I saw now that only the sides of the housing were red. Two bright white portals marked the entrance and exit, with the latter capped off at the end with a rustic white fence. The river ran brisk and wild below. “Why the covers in the first place?”
Penn led me back along the concrete replacement bridge we’d just driven over. He nudged his head toward the orangey-red face of the side wall. “So many of the bridges were wood. There was way more timber around here than iron or steel. But even more rain.”
“And wood hates water.” My tía Viv had taught me that long ago.
“Exactly,” Penn said. “They built the covers so the bridges wouldn’t rot.”
We angled back around to the old entrance and stepped onto the bridge.
Rustic gray-brown planks, bored with knots, sloped upward a little.
Inside was a web of ancient crossbeams. Musk and the scent of green plants and mud from the river underfoot filled the makeshift tunnel.
Just outside, the wind had picked up, and the truss amplified a stadium crowd of rustling leaves and little bird arguments.
I studied Penn, waiting to see if he could fish out a memory of visiting this place.
Something had led him here, and I hoped it would show itself.
He spun a snail-paced circle. His face was soft, drifting close to dreamlike.
Bringing him here had been the right choice, but alongside that deep, blooming feeling was the realization that I could come here anytime I wanted.
Tomorrow, next year. Five years from now.
I could go anywhere, move anywhere. But he could only move on.
I was wholly unprepared for how hard this thought hit.
It became too heavy, too consuming to brush aside the way I always did.
Penn wasn’t a game. I was trying to secure his afterlife, his eternity.
That mattered infinitely more than all the days I’d spent with guys in my LA scene, the way I would dip into their worlds, then fade away when they wanted more than I could promise.
The promises I knew best were broken. But here I’d gone and locked myself right into one as solid as gold.
Restless, I wandered toward the capped-off end of the old bridge and peered into the gray-green water.
Closer and deeper, as if I were a Disney movie heroine seeking clarity from her reflection.
Foolish of me to even try. Foolish to want the golden watch to work its magic on me, to blink me away to a place where I could forget who I was too.
The magic had chosen the wrong girl.
Penn appeared beside me, eyeing my hands clenched over the railing. “If this bridge still led anywhere, looks like you’d be first in line. Everything okay?”
I held back a laugh. A time-trapped ghost was asking me if I was okay? I didn’t know how to answer him. I just straightened up. “Do you remember coming here a lot?”