Detour
Emily Hawkins
No matter if you were heading east or west, there was always traffic on the eighteen-mile Atchafalaya Basin Bridge. Faith knew this when she packed a weekend bag and filled her Nissan with gas, when she got onto the ramp that would lead back to Lafayette, when cars began to slow as they drove past a cop tucked onto the grassy shoulder. The bridge would be even busier now with the afternoon commuters and westbound construction.
She passed by the Grosse Tete exit and its gas station, a sign flashing to drivers to see the new camel mascot; their beloved tiger had died sometime last year. They claimed it was from old age, but who could really be sure with a gas station tiger? The exhibit — if the concrete and iron enclosure could even be called that — was tucked right by the highway and covered with a corrugated tin roof. When her dad would drive them east, toward Baton Rouge or Mississippi or even further to the part of Florida where they spent most of their summers, she would watch the cage for any sign of the tiger. It couldn’t ever be seen from the road, but she’d waved each time in case he saw her, and though she was older now and knew better, she waved again at the metal cage with the lone camel inside.
Past the gas station, the cars in front of her slowed. It was likely another police officer, people checking their speed so they wouldn’t get a ticket from a state trooper. But then the traffic stopped altogether.
Faith tapped her fingers along the steering wheel. Sometimes there were traffic jams, people crawling by to watch others’ accidents out of morbid curiosity, hoping they might see something tragic before it made the nightly news. Or else some sort of construction was going on that she hadn’t been aware of, the busted roads of Louisiana in constant need of repair. The minutes stretched on and the cars inched forward infrequently, so Faith put her car in park, got out, and walked to the edge of the road to see if there was anything blocking the traffic up ahead. The two lanes of cars stretched on forever, and the sun already angled toward the west.
At this rate, she wouldn’t get home until after dark.
A couple of other college-aged boys followed her to the shoulder and sat in the grass, where they stretched out their tanned legs. It was early April, and they wore neon board shorts and flip flops. They might’ve gone on spring break — to Florida or Alabama, wherever they could get drunk and sunburned — and were coming back.
“Do you know what’s going on?” she asked them.
The boy with longer hair shrugged. “The traffic is just one red line on my phone. All the way past the Whiskey Bay exit.”
“Shit.”
The boy turned to his friend. “I told you we should’ve made a stop at McDonalds. We’ll be here for hours.”
“I have a couple of granola bars in my car,” she said.
One of the boys slapped a hand over his stomach and grinned. “You’re a lifesaver. For real.”
The boys accepted her offering and chewed the crumbling oat bars with their sunglasses pulled over their eyes; they looked nearly identical like this. The now-empty box sat at their feet, threatening to tilt into the wind and blow across traffic. Faith reached out and snagged the cardboard, which she then flattened and sat on. The boys in the dorm where she was resident assistant were no different from these two, always unaware of themselves and their surroundings. She didn’t mind as much as some of her coworkers, who claimed they weren’t being paid enough to be somebody’s mom. Sometimes, she’d be in the middle of picking up after the residents, and it wouldn’t register until afterward — maybe even that night, or days later, or never at all — that she didn’t owe these kids anything. It was second nature, and really, who’d ever stopped her?
Faith remembered the peanut butter crackers she’d left in her trunk from when she’d last gone grocery shopping, and she thought they could have a little pre-packaged feast to kill time. When she pulled the box from the back of her trunk and turned to the boys, they were already piling back into a truck several cars behind.
The traffic was beginning to creep forward again, and someone laid on their horn. She threw a hand up in apology as she jogged back to her car, and with the other, she clutched the cardboard, as if it might also get a mind to leave her.
As she neared the Whiskey Bay exit, the last place to get off the bridge until Butte La Rose some fifteen miles away, Faith called her mom. “How’s Anne?”
“She’s resting. They want to run some tests later. They think she might need to switch seizure medicine again. Just wait ’til you see the bump on her head. It’s like she’s growing a horn.”
Faith’s mother had called earlier that afternoon while she was on a shift at the RA desk, reading an assigned article on the Napoleonic Wars. “You need to come home,” her mother had said. “Anne hit her head.” Faith pleaded with her supervisor, a man who acted like being an RA was a full-time career, until she finally told him it was a family emergency and someone could be dying right now. Anne wasn’t dying — Mom had said it would be reassuring if she came home, how it might lift Anne’s spirits to have her sister at the hospital — but it was the only thing that would sway him, so she didn’t feel too bad about lying. Someone else would come and fill her place, maybe Valerie or Bianca or the new guy who never said hello to anyone. No one in the hall would even notice she was gone.
“It might take me a couple hours to get home.”
“Christ. Is traffic that bad?”
“It’s probably an accident, but I can’t see anything.”
“You’ll get here when you get here, I guess.” She heard her mother’s drawn-out sigh on the other end, then a steady beeping of machines and a rush of muffled voices in the background.
“It’s not like I slowed traffic on purpose,” Faith said.
“I know. But you know Anne needs you here. We both do.”
She told her mom that she’d get there as quickly as she could, that she’d call her once she was in Lafayette and getting close to the hospital. She was already thinking about what little version of the we’re alright, everything’s okay speech she’d give Anne this time.
A couple of the cars up ahead took the Whiskey Bay exit. They’d probably flip around and head back to Baton Rouge. This sort of traffic wasn’t worth it.
The car in front eased to a stop right as Faith drew alongside the exit ramp. Down below, she could see the banks of the Atchafalaya, a couple of tin boats drawn up to the loading site. The turnaround road went back under the bridge and circled onto the highway toward Baton Rouge, but another road tapered off through the trees. She’d been on the Atchafalaya only once, during a field trip in elementary school. They took all the children out on a boat and handed them marshmallows, which Faith threw onto the water, waiting and watching until the alligators, slit-pupiled and ancient, broke the surface.
From the rearview mirror, Faith saw another car edge around the vehicles in front of it and drive along the paved shoulder until it, too, reached the exit. Unlike the other cars she’d seen before it, this one didn’t flip around toward Baton Rouge. It took the road that disappeared like a dark tongue into the trees. Below the legs of the bridges, hazy water swirled out and became swampland. Cypress trees heavy with moss stood alongside one of the busiest interstates in the country, and it somehow felt like peering from a safe distance at a wild animal, something that could easily kill her if she turned her back on it.
The car in front of her began to move forward, but Faith put her blinker on and drove down the exit ramp. The road through the trees had to lead somewhere, and maybe it would lead her home. She stopped at the boat launch to double-check.
According to her phone’s map, this road — the Whiskey Bay Highway — wound along the side of the Atchafalaya River all the way up to Krotz Springs and the old highway. She could pass through Opelousas and then head back south toward Lafayette, which would save her a couple of hours. And Anne would worry if she was on the road for too long. Faith imagined her sister twitching for every extra minute that went by without her there, tics that would then become convulsing, her body literally sick with worry. Psychogenic seizures, they called them.
The first one had happened as they walked home from school, four months after their dad died. Had she said something about him? She couldn’t remember. Maybe she’d been talking about how she wasn’t going to play volleyball that year. Maybe Anne had told her she should stick with it. Maybe that had summoned some image of him, though she couldn’t imagine why it would. But everything reminded them of him now. Anne’s legs had dragged along the asphalt, and she slumped over into a cartoonish walk that made her look like a zombie. Faith laughed, thinking Anne was trying to lighten the mood. But then Anne curled up on the road, right on top of a dirty yellow speedbump. Her hands balled up close to her chest and her neck trembled so that it looked like she was slightly shaking her head yes.
Faith had had no clue what was going on then, and for a while after, with tests and trials, the doctors could only offer suggestions and probable causes. Not knowing was worse than seeing the episode itself; she and Anne used to amuse themselves searching her symptoms to see what the Internet had to say, and they’d laugh themselves silly until they realized any one of them could be right. Or worse still — that there were no certainties at the end.
Even now, driving home and not knowing if this episode was an anomaly sprouted a familiar seed of worry that she’d spent the last few years learning to ignore. More often than not, it wasn’t as serious as they’d thought. But with only Mom or Anne’s word to go by, it was hard to separate what was really happening from their fear of what might happen.
Farther down the launch, a couple of men took an ice chest off their party barge while two women sat in the boat, sipping from beer bottles. They were sunburned on their shoulders, a redness that she could feel in her own body, their hair wet from the bacteria-laden water.
She watched one of the men gesture to the other in the truck. He waded in, attached the boat to the truck’s hitch, and the women made their way off the boat. Their legs broke up the scum growing on the water’s surface, which stuck to their shins like green fur. A primordial second skin. The women fell into each other, threw their arms around each other. As they climbed into the truck’s belly, they laughed.
Faith set her phone’s GPS for Krotz Springs and took the road into the trees.
Sometimes, when she got tired of dealing with all the students who lived in her building, she went out to River Road, which ran near a couple of cow pastures where the university practiced veterinary medicine. She would park her car near the cows and walk over the levee that separated the river from Baton Rouge. She liked to set up a blanket beneath tree cover and watch tugboats and tankers move across the Mississippi’s muddy eddies. Although its name meant “great river,” it looked tame when she watched it. Refineries sat on the opposite bank, and if the wind blew from the west, she could smell the fumes. Still, if she closed her eyes and put headphones in, she could almost believe that she’d escaped from her life.
When it wasn’t the students, it was her mom. Always calling to talk about Anne’s latest health scare, Anne’s improvements, Anne’s trouble sleeping at night, how the psychiatrist said Anne’s grief was something she wasn’t going to be able to shake loose like the rest of them could, and wouldn’t it be nice if she texted Anne to let her know that she was thinking about her? Anne called her, too, at odd hours of the day, and occasionally the middle of the night. Her voice would be high-pitched and panicky, and Faith would talk about the students in her building until the breath on the other end evened out. Sometimes Anne fell asleep while they talked. Faith always stayed on the line for a little while after. Just in case.
She used to keep her phone turned off when she went to River Road, but she couldn’t anymore. Once, when she’d gotten back to her car and turned it on, there were seven missed calls. Two from Mom. Five from Anne. She called Anne back first, but Anne didn’t answer. So she called Mom, who told her Anne had had an episode. She was fine now, resting. Faith said she was at the river. She would’ve picked up if her phone had been on. Of course she would’ve. When she said it out loud, Faith didn’t really believe herself either.
“Well,” her mom had said. “It’s too late now.”
The Whiskey Bay Highway looked nothing like River Road. Faith had thought she was getting away from the real world when she went to the river, but out here, on the Atchafalaya, there weren’t cows, and she didn’t see any boats either. This road was all gravel, like the driveways to the plantation homes scattered throughout the city, only narrower, rougher. She turned up the volume of her GPS so she could hear the woman’s voice over the sound of rocks hitting the bottom of her car.
It was quiet for a highway too. No other vehicles had passed her so far.
Half-sunken telephone poles ran on the righthand side of the road. They were all slanted at forty-five-degree angles like trees struck by lightning. The occasional dead raccoon or opossum lay inflated in the middle of the road, and she closed her eyes when she passed over them, feeling her tires bump against their bodies.
A huge, gray bird flapped just over her windshield. She slammed her foot on the brake, leaning forward to watch the bird careen into the sky and disappear. She couldn’t tell what it was. She knew finches and mockingbirds because they were small and liked to bounce around the university’s parking lots, where they picked at leftover French fries. And the largest birds she’d ever seen were the occasional hawks that would fly above the empty lot near her neighborhood in Lafayette, waiting for the mice that had disappeared into the shelter of the cane fields. But this bird was different, almost prehistoric looking, like something that had been long dead until someone found it again in a remote part of the world, the last of its kind, still alive after all this time.
As Faith followed a bend in the road that curved with the Atchafalaya, the digital car on her GPS began to spin. The woman’s voice, which had been precise in its mispronunciations of local cities and towns, now told her to turn around.
“Make a U-turn in several hundred feet.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding.”
There’d been no other roads that she’d noticed, no place where she might’ve taken a wrong turn. She sped up, heading north, hopeful that the GPS would resolve itself if she kept moving forward. The bends in the river could’ve confused it. Or the road might’ve been too new to show up on the map. But she doubted this. The road needed to be filled in where consistent spring rain had washed the gravel out and left miniature craters full of stagnant water. She dodged a deep rut in the road at the last second, and her car let out a groan.
“Make a U-turn in several hundred feet,” the woman said again.
Faith kept going anyway. As she put her foot on the pedal, the wheel began to tremble in her hands. It made her aware of her fingers, her arms, the flutter of her heart. It felt as if the car might jerk away from her like a shy and stubborn animal. And she couldn’t help but think of Anne, her seizures, how she described them as being aware of everything but completely out of control of her own body. “Like being possessed,” she’d once told Faith.
She slowed down and the tremors stopped. When she sped up, they returned. She tried this several times, and each time, it felt as if she might slip off the road and into a tree.
She pulled over into a patch of weeds and popped the hood to look at the engine. She had no clue what to look for or what a shaking steering wheel might mean. She paced around the car as she tried to call her mother, but there was no service. The car couldn’t blow up from a shaking steering wheel, she assured herself, but what did she know? She pulled out a manual and sat in the driver’s seat with the door open and flipped through pages that didn’t offer any advice except for how to change the presets on the radio and operating on cruise control.
Gnats swarmed near the sweat along her hairline and in her ears, and even with the air conditioning blowing in her face, she was still hot. The sun was beginning to set, and she could hear strange noises came from the trees. Unidentifiable humming things that were not mere crickets or cicadas, the snapping of branches, the whisper of something soft moving in the wind. The air smelled faintly sour. Things were rotting.
In the distance, headlights winked through dust stirred up from the gravel. Faith stepped out of the car and waved her arm over her head.
A white truck sidled next to her. The front fender was dented, the bodies of early-season lovebugs speckling it black. The dust didn’t want to settle, so it took a while for her to see the man inside. He had a frown set into the lines of his tanned face and eyes so blue she forgot the heat. His hair was greasy and slicked back, though a single strand dangled in his face. He pushed it away. It fell back. When he spoke, his voice was gritty, like the singers her dad had listened to: “Everything okay, ma’am?”
“My car —”
“Engine trouble?” His hand moved up to the steering wheel, and she noticed the scratches across his knuckles, the dirt crusted around his nails.
“No. The wheel keeps shaking.”
He nodded his head several times, as if confirming something to himself, and got out of his truck to peek at her car. He leaned all of his weight into his right leg, the other kicked out awkwardly in front of him, a pose like that of an avant-garde model. “How long’s it been going on for?”
She tried not to stare as he limped from her engine to the side of her car. “The past couple of miles,” she said.
“May be a loose axle or the bearings. I can try to fix it if I’ve got the right parts.”
“Right now?” The bed of his truck looked empty, but who knew what he had in the rusting toolbox in the back.
The man gave a short laugh, which sounded a little like he was trying to clear his throat. The lines in his face seemed to catch the shadows, making his face darker. She wondered if what she’d said was stupid, basic information. Dad hadn’t even taught her to change a tire; if she had car troubles, she took it to a mechanic or called somebody who knew better.
“My stuff’s back at the house,” the man said. “But I live nearby. You should be okay to drive there if we go slow.”
Lainie Eisenhower’s name came to mind; Faith couldn’t help it. She saw the girl’s face from the news. Short, curly hair. A dimpled smile. They hadn’t been able to find a body, not even after dragging the nearby rivers and lakes. Some people suspected she’d been dumped in the swamps outside of New Orleans, but Faith thought the Atchafalaya was better suited for it. In one of her history classes, they’d learned about the perfectly preserved remains of those left in peat bogs in Florida or Europe, but Louisiana didn’t have the right conditions to mummify human remains, and anyway, she imagined scavenger birds would’ve picked the corpse bare before it got to that point. Probably Lainie Eisenhower was already fully disintegrated, the swamp having swallowed her whole.
“If I go slow, I’m sure I could make it to I-90. How far’s the nearest gas station?” She couldn’t follow a stranger to God-only-knew-where after Lainie Eisenhower. Not with Anne the way she was.
The man laughed. “Far. Too far with the way these roads are. I’d give your car seven miles, tops.”
As she followed Mr. White back to his place — he’d only offered his last name as he struggled back into his truck — she wondered if she was doing something she’d regret. It was equally dangerous to stay out on the side of the road late at night, where anyone might find her. But perhaps Mr. White was the anyone.
He turned down a dirt road lined with palmetto. Faith nearly missed it; it wasn’t something anyone would know to look for, not with how overgrown everything was, weeds rising up to brush the undercarriage of her car. She wondered whether he was lying about how far she’d get. Faith’s feet hovered over the pedals, and her car slowed to a crawl. She could head onward toward the nearest town, leaving Mr. White to wonder where she’d gone, but as she contemplated it, her car whined and shuddered as if it might collapse then and there. So Faith turned too.
The house, made of brown, lichen-speckled wood, sat nestled in the surrounding forest as if it had been here for as long as the oak and cypress crowded nearby. Mr. White disappeared into the house while Faith sat in her idling car. She checked her phone one last time, noticed the service was still gone, and let loose a long breath. If she missed any calls or texts, it would be out of her hands. Around the front of the house, mosquito netting enclosed the porch and made it hard to see through the unadorned windows, though she occasionally saw the shadow of Mr. White flitting about inside. On the porch, a skinny black cat watched her with eyes that reflected the headlights.
He came back empty-handed. Or at least, she couldn’t see anything in his hands. He pointed her in the direction of the shed out back. She drove over, waiting while he lifted up the garage door, then brought the car underneath the enclosure. Rusting hubcaps, a too-large muffler, a couple of spare tires, wrenches and bolts piled on one side of the shed. If he could find what he needed in this mess, she’d be impressed.
Mr. White held out his hand, and Faith stared at the dirty palm. The scratch along his thumb, scabbed over. “Keys,” he sighed.
She took her time fishing for them in her pocket. When she dropped them into his palm, they clinked together. She felt light without them. Mr. White looked uncomfortable and pushed the hair out of his face. “Mrs. White is inside. I think she’s got something on the stove, if you’re hungry.”
She wasn’t sure what type of woman would marry Mr. White. Who could match his inscrutable expression and rough way of speaking, as if he talked to people once every few months? She pictured all sorts of women. Heavy-set, the type who wore leather, the type who got married straight out of high school, a woman her age, a woman just like her mom. None of them really fit, but thinking about them helped to distract her while she walked across his yard. She took her time. The humid air weighed her down, and insects bumped into her body as if drunk. She thought she heard a siren somewhere in the distance, but she couldn’t be sure. It might’ve been a bird.
Faith walked onto the porch but stopped, unable to bring herself through the inner door. Her sweat was drying underneath her arms and legs, and she shivered. She sat on the edge of the single rocking chair on the porch, though it creaked when she moved, and she kept it still with her toes so she could hear what was going on inside. Only footsteps. The lights above her flashed on, and she looked up to see the bulb draped in cobwebs.
A woman stuck her head out of the door. She looked older than Mr. White, her hair close-cropped and graying, but she had a well-defined face. Full lips, kind eyes. Much too pretty for Mr. White.
“Are you gonna sit out there all night? The bugs’ll eat you alive.”
Faith was considering it when the woman spoke again. “Come help me fix dinner. No use wasting hands.”
When Faith stepped across the threshold, she smelled cayenne. Inside, the house was paneled, lit with warm yellow light. None of the furniture matched, and books were stacked so high against one wall that they almost reached the ceiling. She turned her head to read the titles. War and Peace. To Kill a Mockingbird. Charlotte’s Web. At least they had good taste. She heard music playing from the kitchen. Dolly Parton, she realized. A song she didn’t recognize. Mrs. White’s voice joined in on the chorus, husky, deeper than Dolly’s Tennessee twang.
“Dinner’ll be ready in a few. Just wash up, set down the silverware, and make yourself comfortable.”
After arranging the table, Faith perched on the edge of a plaid couch, and soon Mrs. White joined her. She brought two different cups — one a wine glass, the other plastic with its laminate symbol half-washed off. Mrs. White kept the wine glass for herself. Faith looked into her cup, the drink inside orange and fizzy. Mrs. White leaned back against the patterned sofa but looked out of place, like she’d been edited into this room. “Ron said he found you stranded.”
She nodded. “How long do you think it’ll take him to fix everything?”
“He’ll probably get it done by tomorrow. He’s rather compulsive with his projects.” Mrs. White smiled, revealing her crooked lower teeth, and it made her seem more normal. It reminded Faith of when she and Anne first got braces, their matching aquamarine blue bands, how that was the only time they picked matching colors.
“I don’t want to bother y’all. I can call a tow truck to come get me.” They might not have been what she expected — at least, they seemed less immediately dangerous than she’d expected — but she still didn’t want to spend the night with two strangers.
“They’re probably closed by now. Mr. White retired from the tow company in Krotz Springs a couple years ago, so he might know better than I do. But you’re really no trouble. We have a spare room. A phone, too, if you need to call.”
“Thank you,” she told Mrs. White. “But no one’s expecting me.”
Faith got up from the couch to run her hands over their wall of books. She paused at a stack of Victorian novels. She’d taken a class on Dickens last semester.
“Do you go to college in Baton Rouge?”
She turned to look at Mrs. White. The woman gestured to her collarbone, and Faith realized she was still wearing her work shirt with the university’s logo. “Yeah.”
“My son went there.”
She had to tilt her head to see the tallest books, and even then, the print was too small. “Really? I might know him. What’s his major?”
“He died a while ago. You would’ve been in middle or high school. Hell, maybe elementary school. It’s been so long. I’m bad with ages.”
She turned to look at Mrs. White, who smiled faintly, as if she’d just remembered something. “His favorite was The Jungle Book. We still have it somewhere in that pile.”
“I’m so sorry,” Faith said, glancing away. She saw it toward the bottom; it would be hard to pull out without toppling the whole stack. She stared at the book, the broken spine, its gold-printed lettering, imagining the hands, dead and alive, that had touched it. Her body felt tightly wound.
A few weeks ago, Anne had called and asked her to come home. “Lafayette’s college isn’t any worse than yours,” Anne had said. She sobbed for a while, and Faith let her, until Anne said that she missed her. She knew she should’ve said she missed her too. It was supposed to be natural, missing your sister. All she’d felt then was a dull pain in her mouth from clenching her jaw. Instead, she said, “I can’t.”
Anne hung up on her.
Faith didn’t bother calling back.
She heard Mrs. White get off the couch, the floorboards groaning under her bare feet. “If you decide you need the phone, landline’s in the kitchen. Let someone know you’re safe.”
She was tired. By now, Mom would be pacing the hospital corridor as Anne’s mind spiraled to some dark place as she imagined, always, the worst-case scenario. But would Anne even be awake? The seizures took everything out of her. The nurses might’ve sedated her. Faith was tired of worrying that they might be worrying. She needed her family, too, though she could never say it, and telling them where she was right now would be a weight none of them could bear.
Mr. White didn’t come in for a long time. When he finally appeared in his grease-stained clothes, Faith looked at the chicken-themed clock on the wall — one of three clocks they had in the room — and saw it was half-past nine. It was completely dark outside, except for a single light coming from the shed. For a moment, both Whites appeared in the frame that separated the kitchen and living room.
“You can come on, Faith,” Mrs. White said. “The food’s ready.”
She walked through the galley kitchen to a table in the back corner of the house. Mrs. White prepared her plate with pork loin and rice and gravy with some sort of bean that looked like green beans, only skinnier and brighter than the canned ones she was used to. The first bite reminded her how hungry she’d been. She hadn’t eaten since meeting the boys on the side of the road, and she hadn’t eaten a home-cooked meal in who knew how long.
Mrs. White cut her pork in tidy cubes while her husband took large, ungraceful bites. The two laughed and talked about anything: the price of gas, the road they needed to fix up, the snowy egret whose chicks had already flown the nest, the snake that had killed one of the chicks last year.
As they cleaned the dishes, Mr. White told her that her car should be good to go by late morning. “The guest room in the back is fixed up for the night,” Mrs. White added.
Faith went back to the room she’d pointed out. It was lit by a single bedside lamp, but she could see his face — the face of their dead son — hanging from every bit of wall space they had available. The years of his life were spread out like wallpaper, baby photos above one of him playing in a plastic pool, next to one from his high school graduation, next to one of them in the mountains, maybe Colorado or Montana. They’d even started to stick pictures to the ceiling, though the AC made them flutter, and some had already fallen to the floor. She lay on her side on the musty floral coverlet and looked into the eyes of their son, bright blue, the same as Mr. White’s.
She turned off the lamp, but light from outside — Christmas lights, flashing red and green — spilled through the thin curtains onto the edge of the bed. She could hear the murmuring voices of Mr. and Mrs. White rise and fall with the noises of nighttime.
A door opened, closed. They’d gone outside.
For a moment, as she stared at their son, she felt the brief expanse of his life as if it were her own, a coat she’d shrugged on, and she could picture herself here, where nobody could find her. She could let the outside world fall by while she learned to grow vegetables or fix cars, fall asleep every night with the bayou in her ear, and she didn’t feel guilty at all for picturing this life without Anne or Mom in it.
She walked through the empty house and onto the back patio, which held only a couple of fold-out lawn chairs with rusting legs. Music still played from the house, and Mr. and Mrs. White slow-danced on the moonlit grass to another quiet song she couldn’t recognize, a guitar in the background resonating with sadness, or maybe relief. Mrs. White saw her first.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked, her head perched on her husband’s shoulder. She had to lean a little to press her cheek into him. The injury to his right leg made one side of his body tilt downwards, his shoulders like a levee. But she looked comfortable there.
“No.”
“Would you mind putting something else on the record player? I want something happy.”
Faith flipped through their records inside, picked one whose cover was brightly colored, and walked back to sit on the patio’s steps. Zydeco music started up. Mosquitoes bit at her legs, and moths swarmed overhead in the glow of the Christmas lights, but Faith didn’t care. The Whites pushed each other apart, then pulled each other back in, circling barefooted, matching each other step for step, and the trees behind them seemed to shake with the music, as if the whole world had longed for this too.
