She drives and she drives. Hands soft on the wheel, face and throat lit by the dashboard dials. She drives down the center of roads, headlights capturing both ditches—ditches like convicts long gone. Through town, up and down alleys, across parking lots.
She hums. But she doesn't hear herself. Neither does the DJ queuing the music and sending the songs into the away where they fall down to her like dead birds, tailfeathers lifting in the wind. The wind blown up by her driving. He doesn't know she's out here driving around, though he imagines her—vaguely, as one imagines a ghost in a story from a faraway place.
But the woman she looks for is never out there, not even an outline, not even a quick movement in the side mirrors. The woman never appears on the side of the road, thumb out or both arms slack at her sides. And when the sky begins to lighten and the woman still hasn't appeared—and even after that, she drives home and sits in her parked car, imagining opening her wrists and bleeding out, filling the car with blood or exhaust. This is the closest way she can think of sadness. All the trees in the yard would break if she hung herself, and she'd fall into a heap, ashamed as her skirt billows around her.
The sky keeps lightening, and she keeps driving home without the woman she looks for. She parks the car and walks back to the glass house. And when she sleeps, she dreams, and as she dreams, her body quivers and her lips tremble and her fingers curl into fists so tightly that in the morning, the moon appears five times as bruises in her palms.
Rubbing her palms together, she goes into the house and sits in the chair and waits. Waits for the knock that always comes, and that she always answers—to another strange face, another stranger saying, You won't believe this—I normally don't believe in ghosts, but when—Until last night, I thought death—She was standing on the side of the road—pulling an oxygen tank—she asked for a ride and gave me this address—drop her off here—sat beside me—in the backseat, and just before we got here, I turned—I turned—I turned, and she wasn't there.
But she had left this tube of lipstick, this bathrobe crawling with ladybugs, this picture of you and your best friend here, here, there, from that time before she became a picture in your locket, from that time before she wore scarves to keep warm, that time before her funeral when she was saying the words that would become part of the eulogy:
Don't worry, there's a cure, let me tell you about my children. Don't worry, there's a cure. Let me tell you. My children. Let my children.
The stranger knocks, the door opens, the stranger tells the story, and then the stranger waits for the woman who answered the door to help.
After so many years of meeting grief the way grief likes to be met, no longer does she ask the stranger if this is a prank. No longer does she demand why the stranger is doing this to her. She doesn't crumple against the doorframe or into the stranger's arms. Now, she doesn't even step back for balance. She has stopped telling the strangers that the hitchhiker they picked up last night is dead, much less that the woman's been dead for a week—two months—a year—five years. She can't say it anymore. It hurts to see their face, to hear the awkward muttering, to see their sidestepping and back-stepping and turning back to their idling cars.
Now, she just takes what her best friend left that the stranger has brought. She leaves it by the door in the hall. Her body feels like the hallway, nearly filled. She thinks that surely the house will soon burst apart. She hopes so. But every time a stranger leaves, and she returns inside the house, the house has grown to accommodate last night's grief.
For a while, before she had learned how difficult it is for people to fall in love with dead strangers, she made a museum of the found objects and led people through the house, narrating. These are the chocolate eggs we bought from the corner store every day that April. This is a stone from the parking lot that divided our apartments.
But the people she turned into tourists never returned. One suggested on a comment card: Too dark, too sad, a few jokes would help. Would not recommend. A few told her to quit it, that her museum was a shrine, but shrines should be for the living. She thought, Let me tell you about my children.
Years will pass like this: driving, collecting, strangers. Then one day, she'll drive into a telephone pole and be done. But people will keep telling the story of picking up a woman on the side of the road who gave them an address but vanished before they could turn from one road to the other.
Just as she asked them at her doorstep, when they pick her up from the side of the road, from the backseat, she will ask them, What did she say to you? Did she say don't worry? Did she tell you about her children? Did she say she didn't think it would happen so fast?
And the strangers say, She was out of breath.
They say, She said she was cold.
But what was she thinking? Did you ask her what she was thinking when she died?
They hold out their empty hands, and just before they glance up into the empty rearview mirror, they say, I didn't know she was a ghost until she was gone.
Originally from Illinois, Erin Pringle now lives in Spokane, Washington where she writes and teaches. She is presently at work on a book-length elegy entitled Midwest in Memoriam. "The Vanished Hitchhiker" is based on the folk-story typically known as "The Vanishing Hitchhiker". Her first book, The Floating Order, is published by Two Ravens Press (2009). For more information about Pringle or her work, please visit www.erinpringle.com
