lucky.
It wasn’t that she was ugly. With only the smallest amount of foundation, she could cloak the scattered scars of teenage acne; and since she’d replaced her chunky, old glasses with contacts, her eyes had taken on an almost chestnut color. Or maybe that was simply her imagination… could eyes really change hue simply because they were no longer trapped behind thick pieces of glass? If anything, shouldn’t her eyes have seemed clearer before, when the thick slabs of glass had magnified them and made them seem oddly disproportionate to the rest of her round face?
She worked a tangle out of her long, black hair and then swept the wispy bangs away from her forehead as she glanced at herself in the mirror. She knew she was pretty now; she wasn’t the same frumpy nerd who’d chewed on pencils in high school, who tended to sit in her secondhand clothes at an otherwise empty table in the lunchroom. In the half decade following her graduation, she’d blossomed and was acutely aware of the catcalls that were sometimes hurled in her direction as she walked down the street. But Matt? He was the type of man sculptors aspired to capture in stone and granite. Rugged, so good looking that she sometimes got moist just looking at him, always so smartly dressed in his turtlenecks and blazers and crisp jeans. For all intents and purposes, he looked as if he were ready to grace the cover of some men’s magazine at any second.
“You want me to take over for a bit, darlin’? You look tired.”
His eyes shifted lightly, just enough so she knew he could see her from his peripheral vision. Something about that brief second of contact made her feel warmer inside than all of the air whooshing out of the heater vents and coaxed a smile. She looked at her left hand and wiggled it from side to side gently as she watched the light bounce off the golden band encircling her ring finger.
“I’m okay… just want to hurry up and get there, ya know? All this driving….”
His voice trailed off as his gaze shifted to the dashboard. He frowned again and pecked at the plexiglass with one finger, as if trying to encourage a stuck gauge into movement.
“Why don’t you see if you can find anything on the radio, Mona?”
She used to hate her name. It caused images of old, chain-smoking women to sprout like weeds in her mind. She always envisioned them so very clearly: fingernails stained yellow, hair all up in curlers, and loose dressing gowns dotted with pinhole burns from falling ashes. But when Matt said it, it made her feel as if she were framed in a gallery somewhere, put on display for long lines of people to admire as they discussed her more subtle features in low whispers. Funny how something as small as the way someone says your name could make you feel so special, so cherished and secure.
Her fingers flipped on the stereo and the car was flooded with static. She scrambled for the volume knob and lowered it until the sound coming out of the speakers seemed more like the hiss of a distant waterfall and began guiding the little needle across the dial with slight twists of her wrist. For the most part, there was only white noise and an occasional high pitched whine that seemed to surf the peaks and troughs of the atmosphere. But then there was a burst of noise and she turned the dial back more slowly, trying to narrow down the transmission into something that could actually be heard.
“… until tomorrow morning.” The disc jockey’s voice was soft and rhythmic, almost as if it were pulling itself into creation from buzz of background interference. “In other news, the badly mutilated body of a Fosterville woman was discovered early Thursday morning. Found in a dumpster at an I-77 rest stop by maintenance crews, police chief Robert Hallohan said it was too early to tell if this most recent murder is related to the string….”
“Turn that shit off, sweetie. I was thinking more along the lines of music.”
The announcer’s voice was swallowed in fresh burst of static that continued until Mona had reached the other end of the spectrum where it finally resolved into the twang of banjo and a nasal tenor that droned on and on about lost love and regret.
“Still can’t find anything but shit-kicker tunes, baby.”
Since they’d left the interstate, the selection and quality of radio stations had decreased exponentially. At first, they’d driven through quaint country towns that looked as if they’d sprung full-blown from a Norman Rockwell Christmas card: snowmen kept silent vigil in yards bordered by picket fences, people hunkered in the cold and shuffled along sidewalks while their scarves flapped like banners in the wind. Though it had still been daylight, it was obvious that the insurance agents and grocers had strung colored lights around plate glass windows and giant green wreaths hung from every other lamppost. Matt and Mona had found a classic rock station and they blew through these towns while the Beach Boys harmonized about The Little Saint Nick and The Boss informed everyone that Santa Claus was coming to town.
As the quiet little hamlets gave way to scattered farms and livestock, however, finding something worth listening to had become more difficult For about ten minutes, they’d tuned in to some station that had the cajones to assault its listeners with the breakneck rhythms of Slayer and old school Metallica; but they lost the station when they entered a stretch of road where the hills pressed against the blacktop so closely that it was like driving through the bosom of Mother Earth. By the time they’d emerged on the other side, heavy metal was nothing more than a memory and hard-drinking country ruled the roost. Now that darkness had fallen and the landscape was nothing more than snow covered mountains and trees as far as the eye could see, the Bluegrass that she’d found was almost like a Godsend.
“How much further did you say it was to this cabin, anyway?”
Matt sniffled and cocked his head to the side as if he’d developed a crick in his neck. He always did that when he was thinking and it was one of the thousand little things that Mona loved about this man.
“About an hour, hour and a half taking weather into account. Daddy liked his seclusion. I ever tell you about the time he brought me up here for my first hunting experience, darlin’?”
Mona giggled and rolled her eyes as she popped open the glove box. She was sure there was a half-eaten Snickers buried somewhere in all the paperwork and receipts and her stomach gurgled as she searched.
“Only about a million times, baby.”
“He was a good father. Maybe not a good man… but a good father, nonetheless.
Mona stopped rooting through the glove box and placed her hand gently on Matt’s thigh. She hated hearing that distant sound in his voice, that tone that made it sound as if everything within her new husband was as hollow and empty as the promises her own father had used to make.
“You miss him, Mattie?”
He looked over at his wife with a smile that somehow didn’t match that pain in his eyes. Steering with one hand, he placed the other on top of hers and squeezed so gently it almost seemed as if he were afraid of crushing her bones.
“I don’t know if I miss him, per se. But he understood, ya know? I could tell him about….”
“Mattie! Look out!”
Mona’s voice was a shrill squeal and her hands flew to the dashboard as if she’d suddenly realized it was rushing toward them and needed to be held back. Matt snapped his head back to the road just in time to see something large and brown in the road ahead. Its eyes were silvery in the oncoming headlights and its white tail twitched as its haunches tensed.
Matt slammed his foot onto the brake as if he intended to ram it through the floor and jerked the wheel to the left. At the same time, the car seemed to be embodied with a life of its own: the tail end swung around in what seemed to be a slow motion spiral while the world outside the windows blurred.
Something hit the front of the car with enough force that Mona felt the dull thud within her chest and there was something rolling across the hood, something with antlers and spindly legs that clattered against the windshield. The glass shattered into a spider web of cracks and she vaguely heard Matt cursing. A tree seemed to hurl itself toward them and Mona’s scream was drowned out by the crash of the car’s hood crumpling around the trunk. She pitched forward so sharply that it felt as if her head were about to wrench free from her neck and for a moment everything seemed to still be spinning even though she knew perfectly well that the car’s inertia had been brought to a halt.
Mona watched steam drift from underneath the buckled hood of the car and it almost seemed to possess some sort of gravity that drew her in. It was so pretty, so ethereal against the dark backdrop of the night. It was how she’d always imagined a soul would look upon exiting the body: soft and billowy, seeming to be trapped somewhere between substance and a dream.
Perhaps it actually was her spirit. When their little Honda smashed into the tree, maybe she’d hit her head or snapped her spine. Maybe she was simply sitting there, watching her soul drift off into the atmosphere while her
