Hitchers

“No. Right,” I stammered.

She took the napkin from her lap and set it next to the plate.

“Do you want to finish? Are you still hungry?” I gestured toward her plate. I didn’t want to go home. I craved a few hours of normalcy in what had become my extremely abnormal life.

“I’m a vegetarian,” Summer said. She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, shrugged.

“Oh, shit. Right.” I stared at the remains of the steak. “And she was eating meat. It never even occurred to me.”

“Don’t worry about it.” She waved off my concern. “Go ahead and finish your meal.”

I didn’t know why, but I felt terribly uncomfortable, as if I’d done something wrong. “Have a drink, at least.” I reached toward Lorena’s half-empty glass of wine, realized that even though only Summer’s lips had touched it, to her it would seem like someone else had been drinking from it. I looked around for our waitress, trying to remember what she looked like.

“She didn’t even get to dance,” Summer said, taking a sip from Lorena’s untouched water glass. She turned and looked at the dancers on the floor, swaying to a Latin salsa. “Probably a good thing. It’s all hips. She’d have trouble dancing like that with my skinny hips.”

The music stopped abruptly. We turned to see what was happening. It looked as if the bass player had been taken over by his hitcher, and the hitcher didn’t play. After a moment he climbed down from the small stage and the rest of the band soldiered on without him.

“Will you help me do something?” Summer asked, turning back to look at me.

“Sure,” I said.

She gave me a look that said I wasn’t necessarily going to like what she said. “I want to see my brother.”

“The one who died?” Even before she nodded I knew it was. “I thought you said you didn’t want to speak to loved ones you lost.”

She struggled for words, then said, simply, “I changed my mind.”

I waited for her to elaborate. It didn’t seem wise for her to mess around in Deadland unless she had good reason. I certainly had no desire to go back. It also seemed a bad idea to use our valuable time running after someone who couldn’t help us solve our problem.

“We didn’t part on the best of terms,” Summer said. “He was bugging the hell out of me and I told him not to call any more.” She poked the dinner roll Lorena hadn’t eaten, leaving a divot. “The idiot didn’t tell me he was dying of cirrhosis.”

“How was he bugging you?”

Summer shook her bangs out of her face, looked up at me. “He’d call in the evening, my only time with Rebecca, and repeat the same things he’d said that morning, because he’d already forgotten he called that morning. I had to take him to his doctors’ appointments because there was no one else, then he’d get into arguments with the nurses, accuse them of stealing his pills or something.” She lifted her glass, drained the last of the water. “I just want things to be right between us, before I—” She trailed off.

“Before you what?”

She stared into her water. “Before I’m gone.”

Her tone made me uneasy—Summer seemed like the last of our little trio who would give up. “We don’t know you’re going anywhere,” I said.

“I know. But we don’t know I’m not, and I’d like to see my brother while I have the chance. Will you help me?”

“Do you even know if you can get to Deadland?”

Summer tilted her head and flashed her best crooked, wan smile. “Oh yeah.” She pointed at a table by the windows. “Someone choked to death right over there.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Welcome back to the land of the living! Wow, you just returned from Deadland for the first time, and you’re not sobbing or anything. You’re Wonder Woman.”

“Nah, I knew what to expect.” She gestured at me with her glass. “You wandered in blind. I would have wet myself if I’d stumbled into Deadland the way you did.”

“Figuratively wet yourself,” I said. “You wouldn’t have had control of your bladder at the time.”

“Sure, figuratively,” Summer agreed, nodding, then blew out a laugh between closed lips. She seemed to have a thousand different laughs, from a musical giggle to an inhaled honk.

“And now you want to go right back in.” I put my drink down. “Hold on. Your brother died in a hospital, didn’t he? In the intensive care unit, I’m guessing?”

Summer nodded. “That’s right.”

How many people had died in that same room? It had to be hundreds. “That’s going to be some scene. Do you think you’d even be able to find him?”

Summer shrugged. “If I can’t, I can’t. I’d like to try.”

I studied her brown eyes for a minute. “If that’s what you want, then sure, I’ll help.”

“Thanks. It means a lot to me. More than I can say.”

An up-tempo song came on, causing some of the dancers to hoot. Summer turned to watch them.

“Do you like to dance?” I asked, making conversation.

She shrugged, causing the sprinkle of stars tattooed across her neck and shoulders to crinkle. “I used to. Not many opportunities lately.”

She watched the dancers longingly, it seemed to me. I wasn’t much of a dancer. Lorena had been the dancer.

“We could dance now,” I suggested.

Summer turned. “You really want to?”

“Why not? Let’s have a little fun. And if you’re dancing, Lorena at least gets to go along for the ride. I would certainly appreciate it if Grandpa would do something marginally interesting once in a while, maybe take in a Braves game. I’m sick of sitting in depressing bars with aging alcoholics.”

Without another word she pushed out of her chair. I followed her onto the dance floor.

Summer watched the woman next to her for a moment, trying to get the rhythm, then closed her eyes and let herself go. She didn’t dance like the woman next to her, or like Lorena, but she was striking in her own way. She reminded me of a Native American priestess, her hands upturned in supplication, head back, shoulders moving more than her hips. Maybe what was most striking was that she was smiling, really smiling. I was glad.

The song changed, this one even faster, more frenetic. Summer let out a whoop, glanced my way to make sure I was game to stay, and smiled when she saw I was.

After a third song, a slow one came on. Sweating, we went to the bar and got drinks.

“It’s been so long since I had fun,” Summer said. “You forget. When things are so bad you forget that you still need to kick back once in a while, or you’ll lose it.”

“You’re a terrific dancer,” I said.

“I feel like Olive Oyl when I dance.” Summer fanned herself with her hand. “That was my nickname in seventh grade. Well, not my nickname; it was what kids called me when they wanted to be mean.

“I can’t believe your classmates even knew who Olive Oyl was.”

Maybe it was the booze kicking in, but suddenly I was acutely aware of how weird this situation was. We were at a bar filled with dead people. I was dancing with the woman my dead wife was possessing while my dead grandfather looked on.

The slow song ended, replaced by another burner. “Ooh!” Summer grabbed my forearm and pulled. I followed. The hell with it; Summer was right, if I didn’t relax and have some fun I was going to have a nervous breakdown.

Some of the dancers were doing this twirling thing, a full 360-degree spin. Summer tried it, laughing, so I gave it a shot. I should have fun like there was no tomorrow. For us, there might not be.

There was an old man dancing on the fringe of the dance floor, his tremulous hands dangling from gyrating hips. Stiff as the movements were, it would have been obvious that a young woman was executing them even if the old man hadn’t been wearing a black dress and lipstick.

Another drink, more dancing. In an odd way I felt like I was getting to know the other dancers, linked by the music and the close quarters. Occasionally I would catch someone’s eye and smile, like our dancing was a shared