She first appears as a pale-yellow blur in the darkness, her figure solidifying as I approach, all taffeta and ribbon. Her extended thumb seems to glow, accentuated by a dainty white glove. She looks normal. Human. So tangible that I laugh as I pull onto the shoulder, sure she is nothing more than an actress, someone hired by the city council to keep up a steady flow of tourists to our little shit-hole town.
“Thanks for stopping.” She lands heavy in the passenger seat. “It’s freezing out there.”
She looks exactly as people have described her. The dark bob, mildly disheveled. Her eye makeup smudged. Red lipstick caked on. She slumps in her seat, and her lack of grace takes me by surprise. I’d been expecting demure mid-century femininity, but her knees spread under the layers of her party dress. She peels her little gloves off with a scowl.
“You gonna drive?”
I nod dumbly, shifting the car into gear. I’m not sure how this interaction is supposed to go, even after everything I’ve read. Those articles outlining the years the government blocked this road off for tests. The ghost hunters and religious fanatics. The hysteria that died out decades before I was born. The only people who visit her now are out-of-towners and thrill-seeking teens, losers and perverts who show up in vintage suits and hot rods, treating it like a game. They play to see who can get her to say something new, who can drive the furthest before she disappears. They brag online about improbable sexual encounters, trade the gloves she leaves behind like fetish objects.
“Where to?” I glance sideways as she hangs a languid arm out the open window.
“My folk’s place is just up the road.” She points, and I drive wordlessly, continuing on toward the house I know isn’t there. The lot, now occupied by a kitschy gift shop full of embarrassing ghost-related knick-knacks, her parents long dead. When I look next, she’s gone. Just a pair of gloves crumpled on the seat.
I tell no one. My friends and I have spent years laughing at the kind of creeps who go looking for her. Morbid people who don’t care to let a spirit rest. But I curl my hair the next three nights. Trawl the dark country road for hours at a time, the glint of headlights in the distance taunting me. Telling me someone else got to her first.
Each time I’m lucky enough to find her, she doesn’t know me. But over time I learn how to win her over in less time, put her at ease, get into a conversation that feels real. I wear a skirt and do my eyeliner tapered, cat-eyed. I smile and joke, offer her a cigarette the moment she gets in. If the message boards are to be believed, she is usually more buttoned up, but I’m the sort of driver she is ready to trust implicitly. A woman her age. Someone she can relate to. When I fake car trouble, she leans back and puts her kitten heels on the dash. Flicks ash out the window unconcerned, her crinoline hitched at her thighs.
“What kind of a guy would leave you stranded out here?” I ask, and she shrugs.
“We had a fight, and I insisted on walking. Real smart, right?”
The online true crime enthusiasts have settled on the idea that he killed her. They’ve chased down every lead, searched the surrounding fields for her bones, obsessively gone through every detail of the case. When I ask if he would ever hurt her, she laughs like the idea is ridiculous.
I know I should be spending my time some other way, pursuing real, living women. But any friends with money left town after graduation. Bigger cities. Colleges. Real jobs. I’m left to the same old bush parties, the bowling alley, the bar that will only serve underage patrons when the staff is at their most apathetic. My opportunity for upward mobility is nonexistent. The years stretch out ahead of me like an empty highway.
“What would you do if you knew you were going to die tonight?” I light up a joint; the car pulls off to the side of the road, the radio playing some top-40 bullshit she’s mocked on countless nights before.
“Morbid.”
“Seriously though.”
“Seriously, you should rethink the blouse.” She takes the joint when I pass it and breathes in deep. Exhales smoke. “What kind of style is that supposed to be?”
I tell her she’s dead, that she’s special, beautiful, all things she seems unable to hear. I reach out and touch her vanishing hand. I wonder what it would feel like to disappear.
I want to give her the things she never had the chance to experience. I offer drugs and liquor. I try to show her my phone, and she shrugs off the anachronisms, unable to process what they might mean.
“Do you know how to drive?”
“Not a car like this.”
“It’s easy,” I say. “No clutch and the shifter is here.” I open my door and walk around the outside as she slides over the console, loose-limbed from the vodka we’ve been throwing back tonight.
She pulls out with more confidence than I’m expecting, one hand slipping from the wheel to turn up the radio.
“How is it?”
“It feels good to be on this side.”
I hang my hand out the window as she accelerates, the slick road laid out before us, shimmering in the headlights. The rush of wind grows louder until it drowns out the music, everything but her laughter.
In the glove box in front of me, my growing collection of little fabric relics waits, ready to scatter across the pavement. Rose petals on a bedspread. Trailing down the aisle. Confetti erupting in one final celebratory release.