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Charlie sits completely still. She should say something. No, sheneedsto say something. But her tongue sits dead inside her mouth, useless. After a few more seconds of struggle, she’s able to croak out a word.
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She almost snorts out a bitter laugh. The feeling is mutual. But then Josh says, “Let’s get off the highway,” and the laugh withers in the back of Charlie’s throat.
“Why?” she says.
“To look for a place to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I am,” Josh says. “And I think some food will do you good.”
Charlie knows it’s all a ruse and that it’s time for the inevitable. The moment they’ve been leading up to since she first got into the car.
An exit ramp appears, and Josh slides the car into the right lane. Charlie tells herself to stay calm.
Don’t let him know she knows.
If she can do that, then maybe she’ll be okay.
But Charlie’s not sure shecando that. Not with the Grand Am sliding off the exit ramp and onto a road far different from the interstate. Once they get past the competing gas stations and a shuttered Burger King clustered near the off-ramp, it becomes just two lanes of blacktop slicing through mountain woods, dark as far as the eye can see. The road is devoid of other cars. It’s just them and the woods and the dark night and the snowfall trickling to a halt.
Charlie tenses when she sees a street sign bearing the name of the road for which they traded the highway.
Dead River Road.
Not the name of a place anyone would willingly go. It sounds to Charlie like the name of a place people try to avoid. A place frequented only by the lost or unsuspecting.
But Josh doesn’t seem lost. He seems to know exactly where they’re going, steering the car confidently through the forest, the sweep of the headlights brightening the trees that hug the side of the road. Charlie assumes this is because he has a spot already picked out. He’s done his research.
She knows now is the time to act and she should finally make a leap from the car. But fear, that heavy, unwieldy thing, keeps her pinned in place.
Charlie wonders if Maddy was in this same situation two months ago. She hopes not. She hopes Maddy had no idea what was about to happen to her. That the last moments of her life were as grand and vivacious as she was.
“We should turn around,” Charlie says, her voice robotic because she’s trying to keep her fear from peeking through. “There’s nothing here.”
“There is,” Josh says. “I saw a sign for a place back on the highway.”
The only sign Charlie remembers seeing is the billboard for that now-defunct lodge.
“It’s late,” she says. “The place is probably closed.”
Josh remains focused on the road, driving with his fingers tight around the wheel and his forearms rigid. “It might still be open.”
Charlie keeps disagreeing, because it’s all she can do at the moment, even though it’s clear Josh isn’t going to listen to her.
“It’s so late and we’ve wasted so much time and I just want to go home.”
Her voice breaks on the last word. A bit of sadness slicing through it.
Home.
Nana Norma is there right now, probably waiting up for her. Charlie pictures her on the couch in a robe and nightgown, nursing a bourbon, her eyeglasses reflecting a Busby Berkeley musical playing on the TV. The thought makes her heart crack just like her voice.
Arriving on the heels of that desperate ache is an urge to fight. A surprise to Charlie, who’d spent so much of this drive thinking only of flight.