For miles hers seemed to be the only vehicle on the freeway. Now and then a truck passed in the opposite direction, its wipers sloshing snow off the windshield with what looked like elaborate, sloppy showgirl boas and sweeps. Shelly imagined the drivers in those cabs. They would be hypnotized by the sound of their own wipers. They might be listening to talk shows, to the voices of strangers phoning in from other corners of the country, asking personal questions or expressing heartfelt convictions. Those truckers might be nearing sleep, or jangled up with caffeine and those energy pills they sold at the counters of gas stations. The snow seemed frenzied, suicidal, tossing itself into her path, but Shelly herself wasn’t lulled into any kind of sleep by the sound of the wipers.
She was more awake and alert than she had ever been in her life.
And although she realized that, really, she’d spent all of her adult years alone (or maybe every year of her life since her brother had died and her parents had fallen apart), this was the first night that she was acutely, completely, aware of how utterly alone she was.
She thought of Jeremy.
She thought of the James Joyce story.
The snow falling on the living and the dead.
There was no sense listening to the radio.
It was just more living and dying.
A few more miles, and she passed a truck jackknifed in the center median, surrounded by orange flares, and could see, heading toward it on the opposite side of the freeway, a police car’s flashing red and blue lights beyond the heavy veil of what now could only be described as a nearly total whiteout.
She should get off the freeway. If she could have stood to listen to the radio, she knew that was the advice she would have heard. She had just seen a sign for a Motel 6, a Cracker Barrel, a Quik Mart (Exit 49), and although she did not recall ever having pulled over on this particular exit, or being at this particular town (Brighton), she took comfort in knowing exactly what it would be like.
How many hundreds of Motel 6’s had she experienced in her life?
How many Cracker Barrels? Quik Marts?
Unlike many of her fellow academics, Shelly actually went to these places. She stayed in them. Ate in them. Purchased her snacks and beverages in them. She loved them for the very things for which her colleagues disdained them. Their kitschy sameness, and the way the girls at the cash registers always said something like, “Hi there! What’s up? Find everything okay?”
Shelly could pull off at this exit she’d never pulled off at before in her life, step out of her car blindfolded, and find her way to everything. The laminated menu. The check-in counter. The Slushy machine.
No. She wouldn’t pull over yet. Not at Exit 49. She would keep driving, and she did. Exit 49 blurred right past, and then Shelly realized where she’d wanted to go all along—and although she hated other people who scrolled through the addresses in their cell phones while driving in perilous conditions, she did it herself until she’d found Ellen Graham’s phone number, and then was hearing herself ask this poor woman, this nearly perfect stranger, if it would be okay if she stopped by (in the dark, in a blizzard) for the second time in a day.