On the drive back to her apartment (snow giving the world the appearance of a moon, another world, an empty, perfect one) Shelly drove by the site of the accident.
Of course, she’d driven by it hundreds of times over the months since, and watched the changes to the shrine it had become to Nicole Werner. The teddy bears were occasionally replaced, the flowers rearranged. The crosses continued to accumulate. There must have been fifty of them out there by now, spread across the spot where the accident had been, lined up along the ditch. At least a dozen had been organized into the shape of an N at the edge of the field.
Eventually, Shelly thought as she approached the shrine, the sorority girls who saw to all this would graduate. Things would dissipate, decay. Maybe every year or two a relative would make the trip to town on Memorial Day, leave behind a bouquet.
She would, herself, Shelly thought, try to avoid this spot from now on. She would leave this town, but when and if she returned to it again, she would arrive from the other direction.
She wouldn’t even drive by.
Her eyes watered in the snow glare.
She hadn’t expected to slow down as she passed. She hadn’t even wanted to see it—but she also hadn’t expected to see someone out there wading through snow four feet deep, wearing no coat, at eight o’clock in the morning, staring straight ahead as he made his way toward the snowed-over photo of Nicole Werner nailed to that tree.
No car was pulled over anywhere on the road that Shelly could see. How had he gotten here?
His shirt was white, and her eyes were watery, and Shelly wondered if maybe she was seeing things. Maybe this was the kind of hallucination people had in Antarctica when there was so little of anything real left to see. She rubbed her eyes.
No.
This was a young man, and he was talking to himself, or to Nicole Werner’s photo, holding out his hands as he drew closer to it, not even glancing up as Shelly’s car came closer—although certainly he must also have noticed her slowing down, approaching, as she was the only thing on the road.
When she did slow down, she found herself nearly letting out a little cry, thinking, looking out at him, Richie, her brother, he was—
No, God.
Of course not. What was wrong with her?
Of course not.
It was that boy who reminded her of her brother, the roommate.
The buzz cut. The nicely pressed white shirt. What was his name?
Shelly braked. She pulled over as far as she could near the bank of snow that was now the shoulder of the road. Like the first time, the last time, like the accident, she unrolled her window, called out, knowing he would never be able to hear her in the great white space between them—the snow and the white annihilating everything, especially the sound of her voice.
Still, he must have heard her pull over, because he turned around. He looked at her. She opened her mouth as he began to shake his head—a slow back-and-forth no, no that made Shelly close her mouth, and put her hand to it. She didn’t need for him to say a word to know what he was telling her:
No.
There was nothing she could do for him.
He was telling her to go.
Shelly lifted a hand before she rolled her window up again, and watched him walk away until she could no longer see him at all in his white shirt in the snow.