Christine

“I said, “If this is a matter of money to you, Rollie, someone stole what was left of your heart and replaced it with a piece of stone. Do you want your wife looking at it every day? Riding in it? Good God, man!”

“That look never changed. Not until he looked at the car, sitting there in the sunlight… sitting there behind the hearse. That was the only time his face softened. I remember wondering if he’d ever looked at Rita that way. I don’t suppose he ever did. I don’t think it was in him.”

He fell silent for a moment and then went on.

“Marcia told him all the same things. She was always afraid of Rollie, but that day she was more mad than afraid—she had gotten Veronica’s letters, remember, and she knew how much Veronica loved her little girl. She told him that when someone dies, you burn the mattress they slept on, you give their clothes to the Salvation Army, whatever, you put finish to the life any way you can so that the living can get on with their business. She told him that his wife was never going to be able to get on with her business as long as the car where her daughter died was still in the garage.

“Rollie asked her in that ugly, sarcastic way he had if she wanted him to douse his car with gasoline and touch a match to her just because his daughter had choked to death. My sister started to cry and told him she thought that was a fine idea. Finally I took her by the arm and led her away. There was no talking to Rollie, then or ever. The car was his, and he could talk on and on about keeping a car three years before you trade it, he could talk about mileage until he was blue in the face, but the simple fact was, he was going to keep her because he wanted to keep her.

“Marcia and her family went back to Denver on a Greyhound, and so far as I know, she never saw Rollie again or even wrote him a note. She didn’t come to Veronica’s funeral.”

His wife. First the kid, and then the wife. I knew, somehow that it had been just like that. Bang-bang. A kind of numbness crept up my legs to the pit of my stomach.

“She died six months later. In January of 1959.”

“But nothing to do with the car,” I said. “Nothing to do with the car, right?”

“It had everything to do with the car,” he said softly.

I don’t want to hear it, I thought But of course I would hear it. Because my friend owned that car now, and because it had become something that had grown out of all proportion to what it should have been in his life.

“After Rita died, Veronica went into a depression. She simply never came out of it. She had made some friends in Libertyville, and they tried to help her… help her find her way again, I guess one would say. But she was not able to find her way. Not at all.

“Otherwise, things were fine. For the first time in my brother’s life, there was plenty of money. He had his Army pension, his disability pension, and he had gotten a job as a night watchman at the tyre factory over on the west side of town. I drove over there after the funeral, but it’s gone.”

“It went broke twelve years ago,” I said. “I was just a kid, There’s a Chinese fast-food place there now.”

“They were paying off the mortgage at the rate of two payments a month. And, of course, they had no little girl to take care of any longer. But for Veronica, there was never any light or impulse toward recovery.

“She went about committing suicide quite coldbloodedly, from all that I have been able to find out. If there were textbooks for aspiring suicides, her own might be included as an example to emulate. She went down to the Western Auto store here in town—the same one where I got my first bicycle many many years ago—and bought twenty feet of rubber hose. She fitted one end over Christine’s exhaust pipe and put the other end in one of the back windows. She had never gotten a driver’s licence, but she knew how to start the car. That was really all she needed to know.”

I pursed my lips, wet them with my tongue, and heard my voice, little more than a rusty croak. “I think I’ll get that soda now.”

“Perhaps you’d be good enough to get me another,” he said. “It will keep me awake—they always do—but I suspect I’d be awake most of tonight anyway.”

I suspected I would be, too. I went to get the sodas in the motel office, and on my way back I stopped halfway across the parking lot. He was only a deeper shadow in front of his motel unit, his white socks glimmering like small ghosts. I thought, Maybe the car is cursed. Maybe that’s what it is. It sounds like a ghost story, all right. There’s a signpost up ahead… next stop, the Twilight Zone!

But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it?

Of course it was. I went on walking again Cars didn’t carry curses any more than people carried them; that was horror-movie stuff, sort of amusing for a Saturday night at the drive-in, but very, very far from the day-to-day facts that make up reality.