Highway 221 South

By. Abigail Card

Content Warning- suicidality

I lay in darkness, in the middle of a country highway, lost in the brilliance of a southern night’s starlight, wishing I could be free of the Earth’s pull. My body relaxed as I sprawled across the pavement, still hot from the summer sun’s scorching touch. In the Ozarks, long after farmers hit their pillows, the Milky Way paints the velvety celestial expanse with color and light; an enduring reminder of frailty and mortality. That night, in the middle of nowhere, I flirted with an old companion—Death. In a deep valley, darkness flanked me on a bridge that pushed me towards heaven. The rumbling of the river fifty feet below tumbled with life. Its water was still high with the spring rain and rapids bounced against large, round rocks. Early summer was the magic time of year when the days melted you like ice cream in a blanket of heat, but spring was only yesterday, and the land wasn’t yet parched. It blossomed and flourished. But I was heavy with grief and sorrow, untouched by my favorite season. I was sixteen, on the cusp of life or death, and uncertain which way my pendulum would swing.

The smell of hot asphalt burned my nose. They had paved this road a month before, it used to be dirt and when you’d drive down it clouds of dust followed you in great billows that resettled slowly. But hot asphalt had become a familiar scent as more roads were paved, one I began to associate with my beloved summers. The Earth held the day’s warmth, a natural heating pad, as a cool late-night breeze chilled my face and arms, the contrast dancing between the oppressive heat of daytime and the freedom of the night. You could see headlights for five miles either way, not that it was well traveled in the middle of the night. My heart was heavy and broken as I looked towards my stars.

The ghosts of fallen lives haunted me in the solitude of night. How many more people would I watch die, if I chose to live and how could I consider the choice to die when others would give anything for life? If I stayed on the Earth, instead of fleeing life’s pain, would the deaths of those I now loved be swift? I thought back to a time in my life that was compacted with death. These deaths weren’t the most pivotal in my life. They weren’t the firsts I had seen, and they wouldn’t be the last. They alone hadn’t led me to lie in the highway at night, poking at my lifelong companion. But, they had all happened in the span of a couple of months, compounding the trauma that Death sheds in its wake.

By the sixth grade I already knew how easily light could be extinguished, even when someone was young and strong. Even so, I was not prepared for that cold spring. Gene’s death had been fast. He was riding four-wheelers with his best friend, Jordan, when it flipped over on a steep hill. His neck snapped on impact. Under a sunny sky, Jordan held him as life seeped from his body. Death plucked him from the Earth. One day he was sitting behind me in class, and the next he was gone. Gene had a crush on me, the kind I’d never remember if he had lived, but I was too shy to talk to him that year. He would tap on my shoulder, asking questions he knew the answer to or borrowing unneeded pencils. At home, my aunt lay dying. He was my distraction from death, until he died.

In trauma, some memories fade, while others sharpen. I remember his face in life. Olive skin and buzzed sandy hair, framed grayish-blue eyes, and chubby cheeks, the last vestige childhood. Gene’s smile was easy, but a little shy. He used to lean-in to whisper nonsense, and I’d blush without knowing why. He lay in the casket. A husk. A child. Gone. A boy who was always kind to me when I was in the darkness that growing up side by side with Death brings.

I lay on the road, listening to the late-night musings of the world. At dusk, everything is loud. It’s a veritable crepuscular party in the country. But at night, there is a hush. Occasional rustlings and twigs snapping don’t break the silence as much as they ripple it.

Jordan sat in the front at the funeral. He had thick dark hair and big brown eyes. Before Gene’s death, he always smiled, always had a joke, always laughed. Jordan used to look at me, so happy, with his eyes sparkling, in an endless grin, and I remember feeling nervous. His joy was so far away from me, and I envied his levity. Gene and Jordan did everything together, shoulder to shoulder. Jordan wept in the front row, his smile gone. A few days later, he developed acute appendicitis. My dad was an ER nurse at the time, and he took care of Jordan. Of course, I didn’t know that then, my dad didn’t speak of work. But I remember angry tones and grief behind closed doors. I would sit at the top of our farmhouse stairs, under the skylight, and listen. I never heard anything other than emotion from my dad’s low, quiet voice. He was softness and care, not the sort of bravado heard above the din of a house.

Jordan’s family didn’t believe in western medicine. It was against their religious beliefs. When he arrived at the hospital, his appendix hadn’t yet ruptured, but it would within days. Sepsis set in, then a coma followed as our classroom shriveled. He died within weeks, a light extinguished. They weren’t the first children I had known that had died. I had already watched Death snap light from eyes several times before, but I was heartbroken by their losses. Each death a lash on my soul. The seat behind me and the one diagonally to my right remained empty until they were removed from the room. Our teacher, Mr. Hill looked as broken as the rest of us. Laughter was gone from school and we huddled together in silence, going through the motions of life while numbness, made the world gray in the brilliance of daylight. 

On the highway, a breeze chilled my arms, drawing out goosebumps. I tried to nestle into the asphalt, but it was unrelenting and losing its heat where my body hadn’t trapped it. A series of splashes below me perked my ears, but I wasn’t ready to move, so I returned to the peace of the stars above me. They glittered and cast a light more stunning than the streetlights absent from county roads. A shooting star danced across the sky and I hoped that the people I had loved danced among the stars too, wrapped in their quantum bodies, souls at play in a starry heaven. Headlights crested the top of the hill, a few miles away, but I didn’t move.

I had no haven from death in the sixth grade. I had watched Death as it had ignored me, passing around me like a partner in a square dance, glancing but never connecting. At home, my aunt’s hospital bed was in our living room. I loved that room. It had a big, old radiator I’d perch on in the winter with a book, and wood floors painted aqua. The ceilings were ten feet high and the walls were windows. Our farmhouse was a craftsman built in 1902. The story went that a tornado had briefly picked it up and moved it a few inches to the left and that was why it sat slightly askew on the lot. My aunt’s hospital bed was in the corner so she could be in the center of the house, where she could be close to everyone and everything while her life was consumed by the cancer that ravaged my family.

My Aunt Margaret was young, not yet forty, or maybe just. She had a wild mane of soft ringlets haloing her head. She had lived every second of her life with a raucous bawdiness and a wit so sharp that few crossed her four-foot-eleven frame and left unscathed. Margaret smelled like Calgon lotion and had eyes that were a crystalline light blue, except for when they were lavender. She hugged with her whole body and could make the devil blush with the flick of her tongue. Her life had been brutal despite her laughter and her death was relentless, until it wasn’t. The three-sixty windows doused her in sunshine for the months she lay dying.

I spent my days at school in a waking coma. I don’t know if I read, or wrote, or did math. I sat, usually with my head down. I stopped talking, I stopped laughing, all I could do was exist. At recess, Mr. Hill would let me stay in the classroom with him and I would lay with my head down on my desk. He would look at me with big brown broken eyes that mirrored my own. My desk was a respite. I could block out the numbing pain permeating me, an unrelenting grief that comes from a lifetime of six deaths already and a house full of chronic illness, culminating in a broken child, exhausted under the weight of movement.

I knew when she died. I felt it like lightning. That late March morning spring had erupted. Her twin girls and I were all the same age and we shared the massive refinished attic room. We thundered down the stairs, death rampant in the halls, sunlight cascading through the skylight, tumbling after us. Aunt Margaret screamed. It wasn’t a normal scream, it was more than mere pain, she was already hemorrhaging. We didn’t know that of course, but we felt the flood of death encapsulate the house, rising higher and higher in an unrelenting torrent. I remember her words as I ran away, fleeing my home as she screamed her final screams, relinquishing her life.

“I love you! Come give me a hug, girls! I love you! Girls!” Her voice was desperate and shrill, her skin, a deep yellow. She couldn’t see us, she was already blind from the morphine skating across her pain. And I ran away. I didn’t hug her. I didn’t say goodbye. I ran down the stairs, careening through the kitchen, down the alley, and halfway to school. We ran until we couldn’t hear her screams, though they echoed in our souls.

The car raced toward me in the isolation of a country night, likely speeding at over a hundred miles an hour. Death whispered in my ear, “Not yet. They didn’t have a choice. Don’t throw away what others would give anything to have.” The car had cut the space in half. I knew I had seconds to move, and I turned my head to the darkness, weeping, her screams—everyone’s screams reverberating in my skull.

So, when I heard the knock on my sixth-grade classroom door, I knew. I sat motionless as Mr. Hill crossed the room in his checked button-down shirt and khaki pants. The class was silent, watching him walk towards the loud knock, his loafers a light shuffle on the tiled floors. We had stopped being a regular class weeks ago. No one took that moment to whisper or pass notes. He opened the door and I saw Glenda, with her platinum hair and blotchy face, her hands trembling. She was one of my Mom’s and my Aunt’s best friends and her daughter was mine. He turned to me from the door, his eyes hollowed and his chest sunken, his shoulders slumped with the inevitable.

“Abby,” was all he said in a husky whisper, but in a room void of noise, we all knew.

It was a small town. I had grown up with all of these people and secrets were nonexistent. I left my desk the way it was. I didn’t take anything with me as I crossed the room, thirty feet of space as wide as the Grand Canyon. A room full of eyes staring with a knowledge children shouldn’t possess. In the hallway, Glenda wrapped her arms around me and wept. I think she spoke, but her words evade me now, lost in the sweep of emotion.

At the house, Margaret lay on her bed, peacefully. Her screams silent, her lineless face relaxed, a faint smile on her lips. Sunlight blanketed her, warming her body, daffodil sheets a bed of springtime. Her eyes were closed and her hands were clasped across her abdomen. She was beautiful. Death had saved her from her pain. She had spent her tumultuous life coveting death and only desired life as it escaped her grasp.

My Aunt Margaret’s favorite flower was the daffodil. They had bloomed that morning and sat in a vase by her bed, cheery and yellow, happy—as I imagined she was now. Her body was empty, but my aunt’s presence filled the house, walking amongst her gathered friends and family, inciting laughter at her irreverent jokes and charismatic mania. She weaved through the growing crowd, like a spring breeze, light and free. I wanted to apologize, to tell her I did love her, and that she had always been my favorite aunt. I wanted to have one more hug. Just one more. But she was in the past now, her body was not her own, it had never held her spirit easily anyway. Ignoring my fears at the proximity of death, I plucked a daffodil from the vase and dried the wet stem on my shirt. I carefully placed it in her hands, a final gift, a final apology, a final ‘I love you’.

I looked into my death and rolled over, popping up and dashing out of the road as the car swerved away from me, with no time even to honk. The cool, rushing air from the car still a slap across my teenage skin, I woke up. My aunt’s death hadn’t been the last. By the time I graduated from high school I had watched a dozen people die, some at their own hand. But in that moment, I took the first step towards living. I felt Death smile at me in the empty valley; he nodded and turned away. Forever after that, when darkness shrouds my stars from me, I close my eyes and recall that perfect Milky Way. I remember not to welcome a journey to those stars before I have packed my bags, because Death will find me when it’s time. I no longer leave an ‘I love you’ silent on my lips and I don’t ignore the whims of my heart. I choose to stay grounded to the Earth and to seek her warmth over the cool breeze of night, my pendulum swinging towards life.