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There’s a woman standing in the middle of the road, holding up her thumb. Washed out by the car headlights, she looks so much like a ghost Gemma almost forgets to break. Then reality snaps back into place: the red hair, the blue coat, the smell of pine trees. Gemma’s heart beats against her ribcage like a little kid with a drum. She pulls on the steering wheel and makes some sort of ill-advised swerve. Her car comes to a screeching halt on the wrong side of the mostly empty road.
Gemma is still breathing heavy, hunched over the wheel, when she hears a knock on the car window. She rolls it down.
“If you crash your car,” the woman says and her voice is unexpected: low, drawling, “your husband is going to have to identify the body.”
Gemma, reasonably, has no response to that. She just stares at the woman.
When she realizes Gemma’s not going to say anything, the woman continues. “I’m Helly, by the way. Are you passing Kier?”
“Hi,” Gemma says blankly. Then, as sense start to return to her, “Are you alright?”
“Yes,” Helly says. “I’m fine. Are you passing Kier?” The question sounds uncomfortable. Rehearsed.
Gemma has her reservations about picking up random hitchhikers, especially ones prone to ominous utterings. But while she’s searching for a polite way to turn her down, her gaze catches on the smoothness of Helly’s cheeks, the way she’s all but drowning in that coat of hers. A young woman in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, and God only knows how she ended up here in the first place. Gemma needs to stop reading those pulpy crime novels. She reaches over to open the passenger side door. “I can swing by.”
Helly clambers into her seat with an uncomfortable air that dispels any notions of supernaturality.
“I’m Gemma, by the way,” Gemma offers as she starts the car because however weird this situation might be, she has manners, damn it. She looks over and asks, “How did you end up in the middle of the road? For a second there, I could have sworn you were a ghost.”
The skin around Helly’s eyes crinkles at that last part as if it pleases her. “Um, I am a ghost.”
“Oh?” Gemma decides to play along. The caginess sets her more on edge, but it charms her too. “Well, you wouldn’t be the first lost soul in my passenger seat. Tragic death, I presume?” She tries to imagine a character to match Helly’s ghost: some sort of grizzled, disillusioned taxi driver for the dead. Gemma’d probably be good at that.
“Oh yeah,” Helly says. “I was murdered on my wedding day, but like, before the wedding. And now I haunt this road and hitch rides because I never got to drive off in a car that said, ‘Just Married!’ with the, like, with those cans dragging behind, you know?” She wriggles her fingers in emulation. “Are they cans? That’s my unfinished business here, anyway.”
Gemma hums and nods sagely. “That is the saddest part of getting murdered on your wedding day. Missing the car ride.”
“Well, I married him for his money, so…” Helly trails off meaningfully.
It startles a bark of laughter out of Gemma. “Oh, so it was a nice car?” she says.
“A Cadillac.” The answer comes so easily it makes Gemma wonder if Helly’s been through the thought before, either the joke or the wedding.
“Wow,” Gemma says. There are three empty pizza boxes, and one possibly occupied one in the back of her car. “Then this must be a downgrade.”
Helly grins. “Well, I wasn’t going to say anything.” She seems somewhat more at ease. Gemma gets the feeling.
“You’re not dressed for a wedding,” she prods. She’d almost immediately lost track of whatever character she was trying to do. She just wants to know what Helly’s next answer will be.
Helly looks down as if she’s seeing her own jeans for the first time. “I keep my bloody wedding dress in my other—in my other dark, lonely road,” she tries.
“You keep your wedding dress in the road?” Gemma asks.
Helly makes a face and waves her hand like she’s chasing the question away. “Yeah, I—It’s buried. It makes sense.”
“No, it makes total sense. So much sense.” That should’ve been the end of it, but for some reason Gemma can’t fathom, she finds herself saying, “I don’t know where my wedding dress is. I mean, I’m sure it’s somewhere in the house. It’s not like I need it for anything. But the other day I realized I didn’t know where I had put it.” Gemma had known she could be unsentimental, but that unsentimentality had never seemed anything but reasonable until the morning, two weeks ago, when she had realized this. It had taken uncomfortable pride of place in her mind ever since.
“Oh,” Helly says. “Well, I’m sure that happens to more people.”
There’s a slightly awkward silence after that, but Gemma lets it be. She finds awkwardness invariably charming and as such has a higher tolerance for it than most.
Gemma doesn’t like Kier, but the route there is nice. It winds through the forest like a song. The streetlights are slightly too sparse, which means most nights you can see the stars. Not tonight though: there’s a storm gathering. Gemma had hoped to avoid it, but Kier’s a little out of her way. She’ll probably get caught in it on her way back.
Out of nowhere, Helly leans in to say, “Is it me or are these trees, like, scary trees?”
“What? Scary trees? What even is a scary tree?” The road is framed by the same well-loved trees that have always grown there.
Helly gestures past the car window. “Y’know, trees like those. The scary ones.”
Gemma can feel her face screwing itself up at the thought of anyone being anything less than excited to see a tree. “I’m sorry, I’m a crazy tree lady. I think they’re all wonderful.”
Helly shakes her head in disagreement. “They’re like, creepy. Like they’re reaching for you.” Helly pulls a scary face and extends claw hands towards Gemma, but there’s a hesitation to it. It reminds Gemma of some of her students. As a ghost in the road Helly had seemed somehow ageless, made out of wax, but sitting in Gemma’s passenger seat, it’s clear she’s young. A good deal younger than Gemma, at least.
“Well, who doesn’t want to be reached for, now and then?” Gemma says, feeling conspiratorial, and maybe a little bit young herself.
Helly chuckles, but her heart doesn’t seem to be in it. After a second, she says, “You know, I—um, I wasn’t really murdered.”
“Really?” Gemma exclaims, laying it on thick.
Helly continues, ignoring her, “My friends dumped me here. We were coming back from this party. I don’t really—I’ve never hitchhiked before, or anything like that.”
That explains some of it—most of it, even. All the humor flees Gemma’s body in an instant. “They don’t sound like very good friends.”
Helly picks at her sleeves. “Best ones I’ve got.”
Gemma doesn’t have an answer for that, has to let it hang there.
It smothers the conversation for long minutes until something occurs to Gemma. “How’d you know I had a husband?” she asks.
Helly shrugs. “Lucky guess.” She clears her throat. “Actually, I say that to all the girls. You know, so they’ll tell me that they’re single.” The joke comes too fast, armor cracking. Helly probably hasn’t been out that long, probably is still getting used to saying anything out loud. It makes Gemma’s heart swell. It’s like seeing the green head of a fresh sprout peaking up out of the soil.
See, she’s not entirely devoid of sentimentality.
“Well, it’s definitely a novel technique,” Gemma says. She doesn’t want to come on too strong, despite the wave of protectiveness that had just washed over her. She’s glad she hadn’t left Helly to fend for herself. “Let me know if you get any results.”
Helly flashes her a shy smile that’s trying to be confident. “Well, it got me this far.”
It pinks Gemma’s cheeks with implication she immediately tries to forget. She wasn’t expecting this. She doesn’t think she was expecting this. She lets the moment go, tries to steer the conversation away. “What? Murdered on your wedding day?” she says. She probably manages to sound neutral. Playful. “I have to say, old school flirting has kept me alive a good deal longer than that.”
Helly crosses her arms in the passenger seat. “Don’t make fun of my tragic backstory,” she says with mock sourness. “I’m a real scary ghost. I’ll drag you down to hell with me.”
Gemma laughs. “Well, you are making me drive you out to dreary, old Kier. But that’s as far as I’ll go.”