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I started to look forward to what she would bring next while I waited and drifted.
* * *
On the seventh day of waiting, I heard the sound of a car in the distance.
When it passed me—and my shoe—I mustered all the emotion I could, hoping it would be like the coyotes and the eagle. That the driver—a hunter, by his faded tan-and-olive camo—would sense something and at least stop.
He didn’t even slow down.
The tailgate of his beat-up tan Suburban hit the ruts hard, and I watched as he popped a piece of gum into his mouth during the few seconds I could see his face, peppered with black-and-white stubble and etched with craggy lines.
So I waited and drifted further, through slumber parties I’d attended and books I had read. Conversations I’d had. The feeling of being tucked into bed and even the dreams I’d had while I slept at night. My first kiss. Learning to tie my shoes. Journal entries. Breaking my arm at summer camp in the sixth grade. Sneaking out of my second-story bedroom to meet up with Nolan, my first boyfriend, in tenth grade. The week my grandma Rosie—or “Bubbie Rosie”—had come to stay for a week when my mom was in the hospital for back surgery.
She’d taught me how to make braided challah bread one day while we listened to the radio and she told me stories about my mother as a child that I’d half-listened to at the time but now I hung on every word.
It was the last time I’d seen her alive. Grandma Rosie had died three months later when an aneurism she’d known about since she was in her twenties burst.
“When your mama was a little girl, she begged me not to kill the spiders even though she was terrified of them,” Grandma Rosie was saying. There was a thin streak of flour powdered along her jawline. Her eyes were just like mine, only set deeper in lines that nearly hid them from view when she laughed. “She’d stand there with a cup in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other, just shaking like a leaf as she gently, gently scooted that spider onto the paper and into the cup.”
I watched myself laugh, finally listening fully to this story. I hated spiders too. My mom still scooped them up instead of smashing them into a wad of tissue, and I loved her for it.
Grandma Rosie chuckled louder. “One time, she’d trapped this big old wolf. Big as a quarter. It was too heavy for the paper, and as she was carrying it to the door it fell right off onto the front of her shirt. I’d never heard a child make a noise like that before. She stayed there frozen and screaming her head off until I managed to get it off her.”
I watched myself fidget on the barstool while Grandma turned the dough out of the bowl and started to tell me about the importance of putting the flour on your hands instead of the dough. I saw her smile falter a little as I asked if I could watch TV while she kneaded the dough. But then the corners of her eyes crinkled and she nodded. “Yes of course, Bubbelah.” Little doll. “Go and watch your show. We’ll finish later.”
As ten-year-old me hurried upstairs to watch Sabrina the Teenage Witch, I wondered where Grandma Rosie was. She had died more than ten years ago. If death for her had been like death for me. “I miss you, Bubbie,” I whispered.
I heard her reply as my ten-year-old self reached the top of the stairs.
“I’ll be right here when you’re ready.”
I abruptly stopped drifting and blinked at the quiet, dusty road in front of me. Had that always been part of the memory? Something I hadn’t paid attention to when I was ten? There were plenty of details I’d missed in the moment.
Still, it sounded as if she was speaking to me.
Not the ten-year-old me.
Me, Meghan on the side of the road by a dusty, bloodstained shoe.
A jolt of excitement—followed by a wave of terror—ran through me.
What would it mean if she was?
Part of me wanted to drift back then and there. To find out. To see if I could talk to Bubbie. To know whether she would talk back.
But the part that had been sitting by the side of the road in the middle of the woods wasn’t ready to find out. Because the part of me that thought just maybe she was speaking to me couldn’t quite process the disappointment if she wasn’t.
I wanted to hug the possibility for a while before I tested it.
And that was when I heard the sound of another car.
Distantly droning. Smacking the potholes with muted, faraway thunks.
As the sound got closer, I reached deep for the emotions bubbling at the surface. The surprise and hope at hearing Bubbie and wondering if maybe she wasn’t gone, just like I wasn’t gone. The terror that had brought me here. The rage I felt when I remembered falling asleep in his car and waking up to his black eyes above me in the darkness.
The mix of happy and sad and anger and terror felt effervescent and tight. Like a pop bottle that’s been shaken up.
I couldn’t feel the dead brown pine needles and dirt along the bank where I stood anymore.
