I don’t know why I went to her wedding. I don’t even know why I was invited. But when I got the envelope in the mail, with the expensive paper and delicate calligraphy, I felt like I couldn’t say no.
Maybe Olivia was sending it out of politeness to me, or maybe it was just pity, but I checked the box next to “I will attend” and the box next to “vegetarian option” and I mailed it back.
Everybody I told it about said it was a bad idea and I shouldn’t go. What’s the worst that could happen, I said.
Mark, my roommate, said I should just throw the envelope away. You keep doing the same thing. You gotta let her go, he said. You’re in a loop.
I don’t like her anymore, I said and he rolled his eyes.
Sure, dude.
I could have brought someone with me, but in the end I decided to go alone. It wasn’t entirely a bad thing. Being by yourself at a grand event really allows you to level up to a cinematic level of sadness. I always yearned to be a maudlin figure, alone in a crowd, or romantically wondering about on moors. Wuthering through some fucking heights He looks so sad, a pretty girl would say from across the room, staring at me. Then maybe we’d fall in love. Or, baring that, at least sleep together.
The wedding was at an hour away, at a newly built church across the street from a strip mall. There was zero sense of the divine.
I arrived a few minutes before it began, sat on the bride’s side, and instantly regretted my decision to attend.
I recognized friends of Olivia’s I hadn’t seen since we broke up. Her family in the front row. Her brother and I made eye contact and he nodded, stiffly.
The Once and Future Husband — beaming, tall —stood at the front of the church. His friends surrounded him. All wore pink ties and their hair was immaculately, obsessively gelled and parted. The bridal party stood to the left. Olivia’s best friends, lined up in order of emotional closeness. Their dresses made them look ugly.
The music started and she walked down the aisle with her father and then she stood in front of everyone and the priest repeated magic words and her and the Once and Future Husband kissed and everyone applauded and I wondered why I was even there.
Afterwards, at the reception, I was at a table with a few people I didn’t know, drinking white wine. Whenever I looked up I thought I could see her dad or mom turning away from staring at me. I couldn’t help but feel like they were watching me, that I was here for some kind of reason, something I didn’t understand.
I took another drink of my wine, checked the time on my phone, thought about when I could leave, and when I looked up and she was standing in front of me, smiling.
“Do you want to dance?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said. What else could I say.
We danced under the Instagram friendly exposed light bulbs to an old American Football song. The DJ was playing stuff we used to listen to all the time, The Replacements and Beach House and Real Estate. I thought of the Once and Future Husband listening to them with her.
“This is nice,” I said.
“Thanks. It’s costing my dad a fortune.”
“That sucks.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “He’s happy.”
“He likes the Once and Future Husband?”
“He does.”
“More than he liked me,” I said.
Olivia shrugged. “He doesn’t like a lot of people.”
“I know.”
She laughed and we danced. Everyone seemed to be looking at us, but when I traced the trajectory of their glances it was really just at her.
“I watched The Graduate last night,” I said and she began laughing again, a helpless unending giggle.
“I didn’t watch it to help me plan how to break up your wedding. Mark put it on.”
“Mark’s a real card,” she said.
“I know.” A few seconds of silence. The song was nearly over.
“So, you weren’t planning on banging on the doors, screaming my name, dragging me out?” She stared at me, blue eyes luminous.
“No. Should I?”
She smiled. “I was thinking about that movie the other day. The party scene? Where the guy tells Dustin Hoffman’s character the secret of the future?”
“Yeah, of course,” I nod. “Plastics.”
“Exactly. Back then, plastic was going to change the world. The future was fake but it was a future. A plastic one. Now, look at us: plastic is in the ocean, in our stomachs, in the rain that falls. This -“ she touched my tie. “is polyester. Polyester is made out of plastic. And plastic leaks microplastics everywhere. The whole world is going to be plastic, and a million million years from now, when plastic is sentient and the apex species on earth, it will have hazy myths of humans as the gods that created them — and died from them.”
The song ended. She let go first.
“Be careful, Tim. Get something real in this world and hold onto it.”
I walked out of the hotel where the reception was still happening into the parking lot. The night air was cool from those late summer breezes off the lake and the trees were dark shadows, silently watching. Noises trailed in and out of the building and I saw other guests making their way to cars. My pink and white checked tie was loosened and I carried my blue suit jacket draped over my arm.
Nobody was parked around my car. When I had pulled in, a few hours ago, the whole lot was packed; now there were less than thirty cars.
As I walked, I began to get the feeling that someone was following me.
Who would do that, I thought, trying to walk quieter, trying to see if I could hear other footsteps. Nobody would be following me. I didn’t want to turn around, because that’s a ridiculous thing to do. Nobody is behind you, I told myself. Or even if it is, it’s only another guest from the wedding.
I could swear I heard breathing.
I stopped walking. Froze entirely. No noise behind me. I looked.
Only an empty parking lot.
I went to my car, turned it on. Music came up that reminded me of her and I turned off the stereo. Just drive home, I thought. Just go.
I pulled out of the parking lot and as I turned onto the main road I saw the headlights of a car in the parking lot flick on. Then they appeared behind me, glowing white in my rear view mirror. Just somebody else leaving, I thought.
Out onto the streets, past the forgettable rows of mid-price family restaurants, past where you could pick up the interstate, past where the old mall was before they tore it down, the whole way I could see the headlights in my mirror like cold, dead eyes staring.
Was it a cop? How many glasses of wine did I have? Two, right? Two and that was with dinner.
Or was it three?
The road was long and dark, just two lanes out there, in the liminal space between one suburban sprawl and another suburban sprawl. This was the dead zone in between: spread out houses and curving streets and old woods on either side of the road.
Nobody out there but me and the car form the parking lot, still following, a little too close.
A street sign came up, on my right. It looked like a residential street. A neighborhood. I thought about turning. If I turned, and the car turned in behind me, I’d know if was following me. If it didn’t, I was just being paranoid and everything was fine.
I got closer. Should I turn? Did I want to know?
At the last second I clicked on my turn signal and made a hard, sharp right.
I drove into the unknown and slowed down, my heart pounding. I was staring in my rearview, barely even driving. Bright headlights filled my car and then …
They disappeared. The car that had been behind me drove away, still on the road we both had been. I exhaled and turned forward, getting ready to turn my car around and get back home, when I almost hit the girl standing in the middle of the road.
I slammed on the brakes.
She was wearing sunglasses and a white sweater and a white fluffy dress, like she was going to a dance. Even though my car had stopped only a few feet away from her, she hadn’t moved. Just stood there, alone, brown hair tumbling down to her shoulders, holding a white purse.
I stared for a moment, too dazed to get out. My headlights illuminated her like a spotlight, making it startlingly clear there was no one around. The houses on the rad were set far back from the street, dark and silent.
Finally, I was able to move. I waved but got no reaction. She only stared straight ahead.
Glancing back in my rearview I saw no cars, no lights, no signs of life. Breathing deeply, I opened the door.
“Hello,” I called. My voice echoed. “Are you ok?”
No response, but at least she looked at me. Had she been in an accident? Was she concussed? No signs of trauma, though. Any blood would have shown on her dress.
Moths danced in and out of the lights glowing all around her.
“Do you need help?” I couldn’t tell how old she was. Probably seventeen or eighteen. She didn’t speak. Just stared at me.
“You could have gotten yourself killed,” I said as I walked to her. “Why were you standing in the street?”
“I need help,” she finally said — at least I think she spoke, but now I can’t quite remember how her voice sounded.
“Are you lost?”
She nodded.
“I can drive you home, if you want.”
“It’s not far,” she said and the next thing I knew we were both back in my car. She was sitting in the backseat, I was in the front.
“Where do you live?” I asked, disoriented.
“Not far,” she said. “I’ll tell you when to turn.”
I looked at her in the rearview mirror. Her purse was on the seat beside her and she was looking out at the trees and houses like she had never seen them before. The strange emptiness of her earlier expression was gone. Now there was almost a hunger in her face, an unmistakeable joy. The world reflected against the black of her glasses. We drove down the winding back streets in silence, going further and further into a neighborhood I had never been in. It felt dreamlike and strange and I rolled the window down, let in the night air.
“Is it around here?”
“Almost there,” she said. There was a weird catch in her voice.
“Where?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. I looked in the rearview but she was gone.
There was nobody there.
I spun around halfway in my car seat, shouting. The doors were closed. She was gone. I heard a strange noise, and my car jerked forward. I hadn’t stopped the car, I realized. I spun around and saw my car had run off the road. There was a tree coming straight at me.
I jerked the wheel to the left but not fast enough: the car slammed into the tree. An airbag exploded from my steering wheel and the car was filled with its strange vacuum packed smell. I looked back. She was still gone.
I got out of the car and looked at the front hood. It was damaged, but not too bad. I could probably drive it home. I circled to the rear of the car, pressed my face face against the window. Had I just imagined the girl? That seemed impossible, but everything about her had seemed unreal. Maybe I had imagined the whole thing. Maybe the wine at the wedding was laced with DMT and the machine elves would be here soon.
That’s when I noticed the white purse on my back seat.
I opened the door and took it out. It was real. Cold to the touch. Plastic.
Almost there, she had said.
I looked around at the semi-deserted road and saw, set off the street, a small little house.
We were almost there.
Still holding the purse I walked across the street.
The house was dark and quiet, a mid century bungalow. No porch, just a little walkway to a slightly raised concrete step. A doormat with flowers on it. There was a light on and it turned the night soft and yellow all around it.
I rang the bell and stood, feeling suddenly like an idiot. What if I was wrong?
A man opened the door. He was looked to be in his early fifties, wearing slacks and a button up shirt, freshly shaved with his hair combed. He looked like he was waiting for me.
I saw his eyes move up and down, then stop at her purse.
“You met her,” he said. “Why don’t you come in.”
He put tea on and we went into the living room. He had been waiting for me or somebody like me. It happened on the same day every year. was Courtney’s father — that was the girl’s name. The girl in white who had vanished. Courtney.
He hadn’t said ghost. He had used words like ghost — appearance, vision, image. Stuff like that. But never ghost. As I sat on his floral print couch in his sparsely decorated living room, I began to tell myself that the only word to describe her was the word he wasn’t saying.
She was a ghost.
The teapot whistled and he excused himself. While he padded off to go pour us two mugs, I stared at the room. A piano in the corner. Bookshelves with big coffee table books on them: histories of jazz and brutalist architecture and Weegee crime scene photos. Against one wall was a tapestry with a drawing on it, a figure wrapped in sheets in a field, birds flying down all around it.
And, of course, photos of Courtney.
Courtney on the wall in frames and under glass, smiling from senior portraits and photo shoots. She looked exactly like the girl in my car.
I stood and walked closer to one. I was staring at her face. What had happened to her? What was happening to her now?
“Here is your tea,” Courtney’s father said. I spun around to see him putting the teacup down in its little plate on the wooden coffee table. He was breathing heavily.
“Thank you,” I said, sitting down. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said. He made it to his chair and sat heavily in it, massaging his temples. “I try to act like this is nothing, that I’m so used to it but…” he looked up, gave a weak smile. “It takes a toll.”
“I can go,” I started to say but he was saying no, don’t go, at the same time. He motioned for me to sit. I settled back onto the couch, waiting for him to talk. He took a deep breath and began.
“Ten years ago. There was a school dance. Courtney wanted to go, but she was grounded.”
“Why?” I don’t know why I asked. He looked surprised too, like he hadn’t been expecting me to say that.
“She was dating a guy I didn’t like. Seems dumb now, that I was so upset. But I didn’t like him. Didn’t think he was good enough for her. He was going to take her, but I said no. She snuck out. Was waiting for him in the street when —“
He starts to cry, just a little. He wipes his eyes, clears his throat.
“Excuse me. I just feel responsible, still. If I had just let her go, none of this would have happened.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” I say. “Things are sometimes just messed up. It’s not always someone’s fault.”
“Sometimes, though, I think it is,” he’s staring at me and I fell strange. I reach up and grab my head.
“Are you alright?” His voice sounds far away.
“Yeah, I hit my head in the car. I’m okay, I think.”
“That’s good. The car.” He takes a drink. The tea darkens the white of his mustache that touches it. “She was standing there. A car came out of nowhere and slammed into her. They never found the driver.”
“God, that’s horrible,” I say. My drink is done and the room and what is happening is beginning to feel claustrophobic. The pictures on the wall. The tapestry on the wall seemed to pulse. It looked like the birds were flying.
“Whoever it was didn’t stop,” the man says. “He just kept driving. Left her to die on the street. Her spine was broken. Her eyes weren’t there when we found her the next morning. She was paralyzed. They think an animal ate her eyes as she was dying.”
“Jesus,” I said because I can’t think of anything else to say.
“Drove away,” he said. I saw spit connecting his upper and lower lips. His teeth are decaying. “Can you imagine doing that to anyone?”
“No, God, no. How could anyone do that?”
There’s a pause, a long moment. He’s staring at me, breathing heavily. I’m starting to worry he’s having a stroke when he shakes his head.
“I don’t know.”
The big clock in the room dings, loud and menacing. He looks over at it.
“Eight o’clock. That’s when she died.”
I felt helpless and strange. “This has to be really difficult for you…”
“It would kill most people to go through something like that,” he said. The lights in the room gave him a pale, waxy look. He was breathing heavily and his hands were shaking. “If you saw your daughter like that it would kill you.”
“I’m sorry, I should go,” I said, standing up in the chair. The room was making me feel claustrophobic. “Let me give you the purse at least -“
I stop. I had left the purse on the table in front of me, but now it was gone. I looked behind me, at the chair, and at the ground.
“I just had it,” I said. “Where could it have gone?”
“It never stays,” he said. “Just like her.”
I walked out of his house and to my car. It seemed fine, mostly. I backed it up, out onto the street. No other cars around. I looked at the house and all of the lights were dark.
“He must have been waiting for that,” I said. “Now he’s going to bed.”
“Do you think that’s it?”
I jumped in my seat, spinning around. I expected to see her but there was no one. My heart was racing. I put the car in park and stepped out, walked all around, opened the back doors. Nothing.
I exhaled, pushed my hair back from my face. It had been warm but the night was getting cold. The sweat on my forehead was ice temperature.
Getting back in the car, I slammed the drivers side door. I really wanted to get out. I felt sick, overwhelmed. Pressing the gas I drove off and then stoped.
She was standing in the middle of the road but now her white dress was all red and her eyes were missing.
My headlights illuminated and went through her at the same time. She was transparent. I could drive right through her. She waved, her neck permanently crooked.
The radio was making a noise, I thought, but then I realized it was just me, screaming.
She walked right toward me, slow halting steps. White dress dragged on the ground. Blood all over her purse.
I wanted to accelerate, drive right through her, but I couldn’t, I didn’t want to hurt her.
I closed me eyes but I knew she was still in front of me.
Just drive, I thought. Just drive. You can’t kill her again. She’s already dead.
Without opening my eyes I gunned the car.
I rushed straight ahead and I felt something strange and soft like a spider web. For a moment I thought I wasn’t going to get out and then it seemed to rip and the car was going straight again.
I opened my eyes. Nothing in front of me but suburban houses, lawns, sidewalks, all lit up in the soft glow of my headlights.
Starting to breath again, I looked in my rear view. No sign of her. Not in front of me either. I looked around trying to find a way out of the neighborhood that didn’t lead back there.
I turned down one street and another, turned my radio on but it was just static.
Then I heard a voice from the back seat.
“You don’t know why you’re here, do you?”
I stopped driving.
“Keep going,” the voice said. “I’ll get you out.” It sounded wet. Dripping. I couldn’t look in the rearview. I didn’t want to see it there on the black seats. The girl with the missing eyes.
“Why are you doing this?” I started driving again.
“Why am I doing this?” She sounded amused, almost. “Turn left.”
I turned. “What do you want?”
“The same thing everybody wants,” she said. “Justice in an unjust world.”
“Do you want me to find who hit you?”
She started to laugh and I trailed off.
“Sure, I’d love that,” she rasps. “Do you have any clues? Any guesses?”
“How am I supposed to have any clues? I’ve never met you?”
“You haven’t?”
We pulled up at a stop sign and I felt sick.
“Turn right.”
We drove in silence. The houses seemed to repeat. They looked like teeth in an infinitely consuming mouth.
“Where are we going?”
“To know where we’re going you have to know where you’ve been.”
She’s in the passenger seat next to me. I can smell the rot of her. How can I smell her when she isn’t solid, I think. How can something exist in two different places?
“What did you do today, Timmy?”
“I went to a wedding,” I said, not looking at her.
“Didn’t it seem familiar?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, did it feel like the first time you were there? Or did it feel like you’ve been there a million times? Go straight here.”
“It felt like a wedding, I don’t know. What do you want me to say?” The car is gliding. Above us, clouds roll endless over the dark sky. She shakes her head.
“I always think you’ll remember. You never do,” she says. She touches the radio, turns off the static. Her window rolls down.
“What am I supposed to remember?”
“You had four glasses at the wedding, Tim. Plus a shot at some point. You got lost on your way home. Thought a cop was following you. Turned down a side street. There was a girl standing in the middle of the road. You never saw her. I can’t see anything anymore either, Tim.” She turns and i look at her, at the holes in her face. The black looked like the universe. Unknown, unimaginable, cold. “I know exactly how you felt.”
“Something is wrong —“ I said.
“Drive faster,” she responded. I pushed down on the gas pedal.
“I’m going too fast.”
“Faster.”
“What did I do?”
“You don’t get it?”
Flashes of images. Flares of white. Something hitting my car. Impact. Lights.
“It wasn’t — I didn’t do that. Did I? I couldn’t have?”
She started to laugh.
“You drove right through me. The last thing I saw. With human eyes. Keep driving.” Her voice gets stranger. “Faster.”
“How could I have done that but be here now?”
“It isn’t now.”
“I don’t understand what is happening,” I screamed The car was shaking. “What happened?”
“You went to a wedding. Then you hit me with a car and killed me. Now, every day you will go to a wedding. Every day you will see me again. Tomorrow we’ll meet here, again.” She grins. Her smile is bloody.
“How many times have you driven down this road, Tim?”
The white of her dress is the same white of the headlights in front of me.