Chapter 11 #2
"Her name was Dawn Ellery Marsh," I said.
"She was my father's sister. She made a terrible pie and she called everybody 'bud' and she was going to get that contract because she came in eleven percent under, and she was thirty-eight, and I was eleven when you killed her and I have been putting crosses in the dirt for the people you used to spell her name and I am the last person on this earth who is ever going to say it out loud. "
His eyes were on mine. Nothing behind them. A rut with a face.
"It's finished," I said. "You spelled it. I read it. I'm the one who read it, Roy, I'm right here and I got it, and there is nobody left who needs to be told."
Something went out of the car.
I don't have a better word. The idle didn't stop — it lowered, it came down and down like a hand being taken off a throat, and the two dirty yellow lights went from yellow to nothing at all, and the man behind the wheel put his arm down off the back of the seat.
And then he looked past me, up the road, north, at the thirteen miles he had left to go.
And there weren't any.
That's the last thing I saw of Roy Ballard: a man realizing there was no more road.
The car was gone before I finished standing up.
Not fading. Not smoke. It was there and then the space where it had been had a wind in it, and I was standing at a mile marker on State Route 9 at nineteen minutes to one in the morning with my hand out in the air holding onto a door that had stopped existing.
I was still looking at where his face had been.
And that's when I got mine.
I'm not going to tell you what I saw.
I've thought about it every day since and I'm not going to tell you, and if you've read this far you're owed better and I'm sorry.
What I'll say is this: it was not on that road, and it was not that night, and there was a ceiling I didn't recognize, and there was something in it that I have not yet earned and don't understand, and it went through me like cold water going through a house.
I stood there for eleven seconds.
I know it was eleven because Rafferty told me later that he counted, fifty yards south, in the dark, with his eyes on the ground like he'd promised, and when he got to eleven he broke his word and looked up.
"Sunday!"
I sat down on the shoulder.
He got to me somehow in about four seconds, which is not possible over fifty yards of loose gravel, and he was saying my name and I was saying, "It's done, it's done, it's over, don't — I'm fine, it's over."
"You're not fine."
"It's over, Rafferty."
"Your nose is bleeding."
"That's from the — " I put my hand up. "Huh."
"Don't do huh."
"It's contagious," I said, and then I put my face against his jacket and stayed there a while.
The engine noise never came back. Judah says the whole thirteen miles went quiet at nineteen to one, all at once, from both ends, and that he sat in his truck for a full minute before he could make himself believe the difference.
We rode south at two.
Twelve minutes. Exactly twelve minutes.
I timed it, with my watch, with my face against a man's back, on a road that was finally just a road.
"You saw something," Rafferty said, at the south end, with the bike ticking.
"I saw a lot of things."
"Sunday."
"Later," I said, and got off the bike, and let nine men in a gravel lot see me be a person who'd made it back.
I did not tell him.
I have not told him. It's the last one. I've got exactly one thing left that's mine, and I'm keeping it, and I know exactly what that makes me and I have made my peace with it at approximately three in the morning on the ninth of a month, which is when I make all my worst peace.
Emmett handed me a sandwich.
"Well?" he said.
"It's done."
"Huh," said Emmett Shaw, and I laughed until I had to sit down on a bumper.
Judah came over and stood in front of me with his hands in his pockets.
"So it's over."
"It's over."
"Just like that. You talked to it."
"I told it something true."
"That's it?" Judah looked genuinely put out. "I've been sitting in a truck for five hours with a shotgun I'm not allowed to use and the answer was conversation?"
"The answer's always conversation," Bishop said, from somewhere behind him. "That's what I've been saying for eleven months and nobody in this club has ever once believed me."
"You say it smugly, though."
"I say it correctly."
"Those aren't opposites," Judah said, and went to find the cooler.
Nash was there. I hadn't known he was coming. He'd gotten a ride out with Delgado and stood at the south end on a cane he was not supposed to be standing on, and when I came down the line he said, "Did you get him?"
"Yes."
"Did he say anything about—"
He stopped.
I want to be honest about what I did next, because it's the only thing from that night I'm not sure about.
I did not tell that kid that his friend wasn't in the stack. I didn't tell him the road never had Teodor, that whatever happened to him happened somewhere else, or that I'd looked at a photograph on a shoulder at Mile 68 and known it and said nothing since.
I said, "He wasn't suffering. Whatever it was, it wasn't the thing on that road."
Which is true. Every word of it is true.
It's also not an answer, and Nash was twenty-four and took it like water, and I stood there and let him.
I have a whole shelf now of things that are true and aren't answers. I've started to think that's just what a person becomes if they live long enough with something like this.
Somewhere behind me a man with sixty-eight dollars in his pocket was already coming across the gravel to find me.