Page 2 of Some Kind of Haunted

This must be how the hunter-gatherers felt, scrabbling about outside their caves, in between skirmishes with woolly mammoths.

I’m so overwrought by our retreat back into the prehistoric that I take my earbuds out.

“I am not driving,” I tell him, shivering against the assault of the cold with no taxi in sight.

“You’re just going to passenger-princess it?”

I smile at him. Sweetly. “As an officer of the court, do you really want me driving without a license?”

He knows, but likes to forget, that I don’t have one. The only native New Yorkers who go through the hassle of getting driving licenses—and Logan and I are close enough to native, having lived there since we were less than a year old—use them to drive to their second homes out of the city. Otherwise, why bother? You don’t need a car in New York.

Unless you’re my brother, who likes his flashy toys.

“Besides,” I say, hunching into my puffy winter coat as we trudge across what I can only assume is the literal tundra of Iowa. Or, you know, a parking lot. “I’m only here because you said I had to be, to figure out this ridiculous will. That means you’ve got to look out for your baby sister.”

I try to radiate innocence, a wasted gesture because he’s not looking at me.

“Baby pit viper who can’t control her venom, maybe,” he mutters before stopping at a car I assume must be ours.

I roll my overstuffed suitcase over to him when he pops the trunk. “What a fascinating factoid about snakes.” I continue with the innocent, wide eyes. “When did you become a zoologist?”

He says nothing to this—a rare occurrence—and tosses our luggage into the trunk.

I wrinkle my nose as I slide into the passenger seat. It all smells faintly of mildew and something sharper underneath that I’m glad I can’t identify. Logan climbs into the driver’s seat, having to adjust it way back before he can even begin to fold his long frame into the car, and I have a sudden, more pressing, concern.

“Wait. When was the last time you actually drove?”

“Now you’re worried,” he mutters, sticking the keys into the ignition and studying the dash as if acquainting himself with all the buttons and levers. Like he’s an engineer in his spare time.

But this is golden sunshine boy Logan Darling. Everyone’s hero. Everything works out for him, and so with the ease of someone in their own car and maybe also in their hometown, he drives away from this dreary airport and the surrounding so-called city out into what can only be described as a flat, if occasionally colorful, wasteland.

Field after field. A slight undulation in the otherwise dead straight road. The intermittent red barns that remind me of idyllic visions of the Midwest in the generic calendars my orthodontist stepmother hangs in her office. But mostly it’s old houses, fraying at the edges. Empty, empty fields that would seem deserted if not for the neat rows of dried-out cornstalks.

“I thought grandmothers were supposed to love their grandchildren,” I say as much to the endless fields as to Logan. “Even the ones they never met. Why are we being punished?”

“She left us her effects, her house, and her business.” Logan spares me a look, and it’s not like there’s a lot of traffic out here in the hinterland, so I don’t scold him for taking his eyes off the road. Or scream at him to keep his eyes on the road before he kills us both. “And it’s not like you don’t have a vested interest in yarn.”

I scowl a bit. I can’t pretend that I’m not at least a teeny tiny bit curious about the knitting shop she’s left us.

Mind you, a “knitting shop” can be anything. Piles of sad, ugly yarn in janky cardboard boxes in some dingy warehouse, an aspirational trip through a tactile paradise—with colors and textures to make a person swoon—or really anything in between.

“We’ll be lucky to arrive and find any standing buildings at all,” I say as we pass an empty, yawning field with a crumbling barn or some sort of agricultural structure in the middle of it. I remind myself that as a textile designer I can spin gold out of any yarn stash or fiber, though realistically, there’s no way that some Podunk small-town knitting shop is going to offer me anything that New York doesn’t.

The tiny kernel of hope inside me that whispers that maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised fades as we pass nothing. For miles. Just fields upon fields upon fields of brown emptiness or faded husks of something that might have once been green. Occasionally, a clutch of trees appears on some rise, giving off an autumnal burst of rust orange and shockingly bright yellow.

We drive. Forever. Logan plugs in his phone and tries to listen to some interminable bro podcast about finance before I start writhing in pain—sure, it’s not a real physical pain, but listening to men yammer is a psychic assault. Such is the fruit of the patriarchy.

He is not sympathetic. “You don’t control the music if I’m driving.”

This is fair, tragically. And I don’t love being fair, particularly where Logan is concerned, because annoying him is my true calling. But we have hours and hours of this, so I suppose I can put my earbuds in and turn up the music to drown out all those self-congratulatory male opinions, always presented as unassailable fact.

I stare at the landscape that stretches out. And out. And out. It’s nothing but farms in all directions, and a quickly setting October sun. I can practically feel the chill creeping in the lower it sinks. I’d close my eyes and try to take a nap despite the emptiness of it all, but I have a very careful sleep routine. If I don’t follow it to the letter, complete with sleeping pill, I pay the price.

Case in point: our missed flight.

There are also nightmares, usually, and I don’t need to beg for trouble when these barren, eerie miles are giving me a worming feeling of dread. Like the emptiness fills itself with all the creepy things in my head. This is why I live in a city made of buildings piled on top of each other and endless noise.

I don’t know how many interminable miles and hours we’ve gone when Logan pulls off the highway and into the parking lot of a decrepit, sparsely lit gas station.