Even now, when someone asks me about where I’m from, I feel a surge of panic. It’s like I still haven’t escaped from that awful place. I’m back there, trapped in the darkness of that night forever. I blink, and that jet-black patrol car pulls up alongside me. They lean over and open the door. I get in. Tires crunch over the gravel strewn asphalt as we pull slowly back onto the highway, and our red taillights disappear into the black.
Then the first golden rays of sunshine peek over the horizon, and my husband’s and children’s crystalline laughter floats from inside. I’m sitting on the front porch sipping warm, steaming coffee, and my breath is blooming into the cold morning light. Song sparrows sing to the sun as it warms my cheeks, and the sky shifts from gray to a glorious blue. This life is my forever. I’m no longer lost in the dark…only, I can’t be sure.
Maybe we’re all just stumbling around and any moment we’ll awaken to our own non-existence. Maybe you and I are back there together. Maybe we’re already dead.
I guess that’s why I needed to write this all down. So that someone might find these pages someday, and even though they’ll say to themselves, “Anna Clarke, no, I’ve never heard of her,” when they’re done reading, they’ll think of me. And because they’re thinking of me, I’ll exist. And maybe, just maybe, because I’m thinking of you, you will too.
•••
The town I’m from, you’ve driven through on the way to somewhere else. Along much of that stretch of highway, there’s no light other than the stars overhead and the moon when it chooses to shine. The sporadic headlights of lonely travelers cut through the gloom, like the unsteady beams of flashlights, and on nights when storms are trapped between the mountains, blocking heaven’s dim glow, it’s almost as if the universe ceases to exist.
Although there was no storm that night, the highway was as dark as the space between dreams, and the only thing standing against the darkness, just past mile marker 59, where the road smoothed to straight, was a billboard, a sentinel. The sign was lit up, Exxon, Town Pump, and the ghost of an advertisement for a 4B’s café—the memory of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches still steaming in our minds.
Half a mile farther, the offramp descended steeply and curved around a granite boulder, jutting from a copse of beetle-sick pines the color of dried blood. On the far side of the trees, a neon canopy bathed an empty parking lot in artificial white. Beneath it, six glowing fuel pumps. And finally, beyond those, a wood paneled building, its blue awning emblazoned with the Town Pump logo. Ironic, since the property was located just past the city limits.
The half of the building that used to be 4B’s before the franchise folded was dark. One of the windows was busted out, and nailed in its place was a piece of plywood spray-painted with green capital letters, part of a word. Whatever the word the letters originally spelled had long been forgotten, LACK was all that remained.
In stark contrast, the other side of the building was brightly lit, like a fish tank in a dark room. Luminescent refrigerators were packed tight with energy drinks and domestic beers. Aisles overflowed with Doritos, Swedish Fish, Chocolate Cow Tails, and other brightly colored snacks. A slushy machine churned vats of ice, bluer and redder than any American flag, and trapped between a wall of cigarettes and a cash register, adjacent to a glass case stocked full of jalapeno corndogs and off-brand pizza pockets. Sitting in a highbacked stool, wearing a uniform blue vest with a white nametag, long brown hair pulled back in a tight braid, wishing she was anywhere but here, was me, Anna Clarke.
And crouched between myself and the counter was a man with a gun.
“Act normal,” he said as tears leaked from his pale blue eyes.
I remember thinking I had no idea what that meant. What is normal when there’s a man hiding and crying? What’s normal when he has a shotgun? What’s normal when the reason he is telling you to act normal is because a jet-black highway patrol car is rolling up out front?
I tried to sit as still as possible, but my whole body felt as if it was vibrating beneath my skin. If they come inside, I thought, and I open my mouth to speak, I’m going to scream. All I ever wanted was to leave this shitty town and now I never would.
The patrol car crunched over the gravel strewn asphalt and stopped at pump number three. Two officers, Sarah McGreggor and Sean Jones, climbed out. Looking back, I don’t know if those were their names or not, but they seem right, like that’s who they should have been.
Sarah got out of the driver’s seat and went around the side of the patrol car, stomping her feet and blowing in her hands. She lifted the nozzle from the pump and jammed it into the gas tank. Sean swaggered toward the building.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” the man said, “but if you let them know I’m here, I’ll have to kill you all. If I don’t, I’ll forget all about my children and I can’t let that happen.”
I didn’t understand what he meant, but that too felt right.
“They know me,” I tried to warn him. “They’re going to know something is wrong.”
Sean was a few years ahead of me back when we were in high school, a senior when Sarah and I were freshman. He was every bit the small-town cliché. Kind, almond shaped eyes paired with a perpetual five o’clock shadow; good looking in that ruggedly masculine sort of way. His voice was deep and confident. The star athlete who quickly found out after graduation that the big fish didn’t stand a chance in the ocean beyond the pond. That realization had rounded his once muscular shoulders over the last several years, and his once chiseled abs hung over the belt of his untidy uniform. Yet still, he swaggered.
“Just be normal,” the man beneath the counter said again, “and whatever you do, don’t forget I’m here. If you forget I’m here, I may not be, and it will just be you.”
Before I could ask him what he meant by that, the electronic bell chimed above the door and Sean came in, flashing a cocksure smile full of glaring white teeth. The man beneath the counter held his breath. I put my hands in my lap, not knowing if that was normal or abnormal, but not knowing where else to put them.
“Slow night?” Sean said.
“Not any slower than usual. You?” I thought that sounded normal enough, although my voice may have quavered a bit if I’m being entirely honest.
“Actually, no.”
“Oh yeah?” I felt a tear slide out of my left eye and roll down my cheek. My whole body was trembling. That didn’t seem normal. Not normal at all.
“Hey, you okay?”
“Yeah, fine. Just allergies.” My heart pounded so hard I thought Sean would certainly see it. He would see it and reach for his gun. The man beneath the counter would pull the trigger and my chest would explode, then he’d pop up and fire at Sean. Maybe back when Sean was in high school, he would have moved fast enough to shoot the man first, but these days, Sean would be too slow, and the top of his head would evaporate in a cloud of red mist, and he’d fall to the floor like the two-hundred-and-sixty-pound sack of meat that he was.
“I hear ya,” Sean said. “Allergies suck. I used to get them in the spring until I started eating a bunch of local honey. You ever try that?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“You should. I used to think homeopathic medicine was a sham too, but come lilac season, I’m sniffles free. I swear on my mother.”
I stared at him. The printer next to the register buzzed, and I almost jumped out of my chair as it printed out a receipt for the gas outside.
“Woah there,” Sean said. “Too much coffee?”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine. Everything is normal.”
Sean raised his eyebrows. “Okay…” After a long moment, maybe minutes, he walked over to the coffee maker next to the slushy machine and side-eyed the sludge in the bottom of the pot. “This fresh?”
“It was here when I came in.”
“When was that?”
I couldn’t remember.
He took out two paper cups and filled them to the top with the steaming black liquid, capped them with plastic lids, and turned toward me. He held the two cups of coffee up and raised his rounded shoulders along with them.
“On the house,” I said.
“Thanks.”
The door chimed and Sarah walked in. As opposed to Sean, she looked almost exactly the way she did back in high school, except maybe even more radiant. Certainly, she was in better shape. Her blond hair was pulled back beneath one of those stupid flat brimmed hats the highway patrol wear and the cold had made her cheeks glow rather than look chapped like mine would have under the same circumstances.
“Freezing out there,” she said and blew into her cupped hands again. “Hey, Anna.”
“Hi.” Normal.
“Slow night?”
“Yep,” I replied.
She turned to Sean. “You about ready?”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “Me and Anna were just catching up.” He winked at me, and I had no idea what it meant. Did he think we’d been flirting? Did he know the man was there and didn’t want to give away what he knew?
“Did you show her the picture?”
“Sorry, Sare, completely forgot.” Still holding the two cups of coffee he approached the counter and set them down. For the briefest of moments, I thought he was reaching for his gun, but instead, he dug into the pocket of his jacket and removed a blue sheet of paper. He unfolded it and smoothed it on the counter between us.
I looked down. At the same time, I could see a black and white security photo of the man hiding beneath the counter and the man himself, hiding beneath the counter. The man, the real one, the one with the shotgun, seemed to still be holding his breath. Thinking about it now, that doesn’t seem possible. It had been so long since Sean had come in from the cold outside and Sarah had joined him. No one can hold their breath that long, can they? Maybe he was dead. I pretended to study the printout.
“You seen this guy tonight?” Sean asked.
“Nope.”
“You sure?”
“It’s been pretty slow, Sean. I think I’d remember.”
“Yeah, I guess you would.”
Then for some reason, I needed to know. I didn’t want to know, but I needed to know what kind of man I was dealing with, so I said, “What’s with this guy?” And as I tapped the photo on the counter, I thought I saw the real version of him shift ever so slightly, my heart beating faster, and I swallowed hard in a way that I didn’t think was normal at all.
“He came into the police station over in Butte and confessed to killing his wife and two kids.”
“Jesus.” And I thought, he’s going to kill me. Sean and Sarah are going to leave. And this man in this picture, and also this man hiding behind the counter, are going to kill me.
“Except when the sheriff looked into it, he didn’t have a family. Never did,” Sean said.
“What do you mean?”
“Yup. They figured he had gone crazy. Had some sort of psychological break or something and one of the deputies took him in his squad car over to Warm Springs for an eval, only he stopped at a rest stop to take a piss, and when he came back out the guy was just gone. No idea how he got out of the backseat, but he took the shotgun they’ve got mounted to the top of the transport cage. No idea how he got that thing unlocked either. It’s almost like he just vanished into thin air. That was hours ago, and no one’s seen him since.”
I thought I might throw up.
“You okay?”
“I’ll keep an eye out. If I see him, I’ll let you two know.”
Sean cocked his head to the side and furled his eyebrows as if he were perplexed.
“What?” I said.
“You said, ‘I’ll let you two know, but it’s only me.”
“But what about…” I couldn’t remember her name. Someone else had come in with him, hadn’t they? I studied the single cup of coffee on the counter between us, my stomach full of worms. “I, uh, I thought you had a partner.”
“Nope.” He shook his head. “Not since a few years ago when the department lost funding. Just been me for a long time now. Mono o mono as they say. You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” But I wasn’t. I’m still not.
“Well, I’ve gotta hit the road. A pleasure as usual.” He folded up the piece of paper with the man’s picture on it and put it back in his pocket. He picked up his cup of coffee and tipped the brim of his flat brimmed hat with his free hand. “Thanks again,” he said, and winked.
When he was almost to the door, he paused like something had just occurred to him and he turned back around. “If you see that man in that photograph,” he said. “Just act normal and then call nine-one-one. Okay?”
I stared at him.
He shook his head again, swaggered back out the door, got into the driver’s seat of his patrol car, and pulled onto the road, heading toward the interstate.
I watched the taillights disappear into the darkness, and in the distance, the billboard advertising the Town Pump blinked out.
After he had gone, I had a sense that I wasn’t alone, like there was someone inside the gas station with me. I felt sad and afraid, but I didn’t know why. My stomach churned. What the hell was going on?
I glanced at the floor behind the counter and thought I saw someone flicker there, or rather a shadow in the shape of someone, but when I pushed the stool back and stood, there was nothing. You’re just tired, I told myself.
I used to have beautiful dreams. In the morning I’d wake up, to the sound of the squelching alarm clock and want to go back to sleep so I could experience the next moment. Something amazing was going to happen, but I couldn’t quite remember what. Not the tip of the tongue, but the tip of the mind. But for the last several months before that night, my sleep was dreamless, and I didn’t like that at all. I didn’t want to be in the dark, so I rarely slept.
I hated being at the Town Pump, alone at night, and this time of year, almost no one came in. Occasionally, there would be truckers, or drunks, but with the gas station being nine miles from the closest town, I was almost always alone. Other than that, the place remained empty.
It wasn’t so bad when the restaurant next door had been open, but ever since the franchise closed, I’d get these surges of anxiety, sprinkled with dashes of irrational fear. Feelings like someone was there if only I could remember their name. I took a deep breath and stared out into the distance where the dark highway should have been.
The electronic bell above the door chimed, and I jumped. A thin, pale man with greasy dark hair wearing faded jeans and a sweat stained white T-shirt came through the door. Clutched in his hands, knuckles several shades whiter than the shirt, was a shotgun.
I froze.
The man rushed up to the counter, stopped, and his pale blue eyes darted back and forth studying my own. “Anna?” he said. “Do you know me?”
I didn’t. Or at least I think I didn’t, but I had the sudden urge to reach out and brush a strand of hair to the side that had fallen over his left eye. I tried to answer, and my response came as a short sharp inhale.
“Have they been here yet?”
“Who?”
His features clenched and he seemed to think about the question for a long time. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. What’s important is that you remember me.”
“I don’t remember you,” I said. But that wasn’t entirely true. I think I may have remembered him then and I’m obviously remembering him now. So he must have been there, but I couldn’t remember his name, but David feels right, or maybe Dave.
In the dark where the off ramp descends from the highway, there was a flash of light, and I knew that meant someone was coming. Dave must have thought the same thing because he began to panic and this was terrifying because he had a shotgun, and now he was scared.
“I need to hide,” he said. “If it finds me, I’ll be lost. And if I’m lost, my family will be lost too. You’ll be lost Anna because I won’t remember you.”
I stared into his eyes and there was a faint, distorted version of myself reflected in his pupils. I remember feeling like that was where I belonged. It was like I’d been held there a million times and only now had found my way back.
Then tires crunched over the gravel-strewn asphalt out front, and he frantically looked around the Town Pump. That’s when I remembered the door. It was tucked into the wall next to the churning slushy machines. The glass was covered in brown paper except at the edges where in places it had peeled away over the last several years. Behind the brown paper there was nothing. Or rather, there used to be a restaurant, but the franchise had folded years ago and since then it had remained dark.
“What about in there?” Dave said.
There was something about him. Something familiar that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, as if we were old friends. As if we had known each other for years and years. It was that same feeling you sometimes get when you meet someone for the first time, and everything feels right. The conversation flows and you just fall into one another. Only Dave was in a panic and had burst into the Town Pump in the middle of the night with a shotgun and now needed somewhere to hide. And without knowing why, I knew I needed to keep him safe.
I opened the cash register and tilted the tray up from the drawer. Beneath it was a key—a key to the door. I had forgotten all about up until then. I held it out to Dave, and he took it. He didn’t say thank you except with his eyes, and he rushed to the door, opened it, and went into the dark where the restaurant had been.
A jet-black highway patrol car came around the beetle-sick copse of pines outside and crunched over the gravel strewn asphalt out front. Two officers climbed out. A man and a woman. Both looked to be in their mid to late thirties, about my age. The man had the body of an athlete that had let it go soft—big arms, a barrel chest, and a gut that hung over his belt. The woman was breathtaking. She had a long blond ponytail pulled back beneath her flat-brimmed hat and even in her boxy uniform, she looked more like a model advertising the highway patrol than an actual officer.
I could tell it was cold outside by the clouds of steam pluming from their mouths, but neither of them seemed to notice. The male officer went around the other side of the car and jammed the nozzle in the gas tank and the woman sauntered toward the building.
For some reason, I had a tremendous amount of anxiety, and it felt like my stomach was full or worms. I glanced at the door tucked next to the slushy machines. Some of the brown paper had peeled back from the edge, and for just a split second I thought I saw a pale face with ice blue eyes staring out, but then I blinked and there was no one there. Just the dark empty restaurant as usual.
The electronic bell above the door chimed and I watched the female officer come inside and look around. “Evening,” she said, like she was the sheriff in a John Wayne movie. “Slow night?”
“Pretty slow,” I said, trying to act normal, but feeling as if I may panic.
The woman made her way to the coffee machine on the far wall and glanced back over her shoulder. “This fresh?”
“It was already made when I came in.”
“When did your shift start?”
I wanted to answer, but I didn’t remember. It was like I had always been there, but also, maybe I had just arrived. I blinked, confused.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, just allergies,” I said, trying to act normal.
The officer took out two paper cups and filled them with the black sludge at the bottom of the coffee pot. “Oh yeah, I get allergies in the spring,” she said. “You ever try honey?”
“Honey?”
“Yeah, local honey. The lilacs used to get me all stuffed up, itchy eyes, the whole shebang, but then I started putting local honey in my tea and ta-da, I’m sniffles free.”
“Huh.”
The printer next to the computer spit out a receipt, startling me.
“Woah there,” she said. “Too much coffee?”
“No. A normal amount.”
After a long pause she held up her coffee as if to say, how much?
“On the house,” I replied.
“Thanks,” she said.
The electronic bell above the door chimed and the officer looked back over her shoulder, but the door remained closed and there was no one there.
“Strange,” the officer said. “That happen often?”
“Yeah,” I replied, not knowing whether it was true or not, but it felt true. And thinking about it now, I think that maybe the electronic bell above the door chimed randomly like that all the time.
“That’s spooky,” she said. “No wonder you’re jumpy.”
When I didn’t say anything else, she went back outside and got in her patrol car. I watched as the car pulled back onto the road and her taillights disappeared as she went around the boulder, heading back toward the interstate.
Outside, the glowing neon canopy above the gas pumps flickered and went out. I got up from the stool behind the counter and went to stand at the front window. I hated being way the hell out here alone at night, and whatever had just happened with the canopy made it that much worse. I didn’t know why they would call it a Town Pump. I mean, it was the name of the franchise, but it seemed like some kind of sick joke since there was nothing around for miles and miles.
The lights on the pumps outside began going out. First, number six, then five, then four, it skipped over three, then two, and one also went black. I stood there squinting into the gloom. The single number three pump glowing in the vast emptiness of the night. Me inside, like a fish in a glowing fish tank in a dark, dark room. The empty black looking in, and me unable to look out.
The electronic bell chimed above the door and my heart hammered. I got the sense that someone was now watching me from behind and I spun around. The brown paper that usually covered the dark door that led to the abandoned restaurant next door had all been peeled away from the edges and somehow, it was darker in there than it was outside. And from that blackness, it felt as if someone were watching me with pale blue eyes.
A car’s tires crunched over the gravel strewn asphalt out front, and a jet-black highway patrol car glided into the dim glow of the last remaining pump. I watched it for a long time. Maybe a minute, maybe an hour, or maybe I’m still watching it now. No one got out.
The car pulled away, and pump number three flickered, and it too went black.
Fuck this, I thought. No one is coming in anyway. I’m closing up.
I went to the register and opened it.
I tilted the tray and grabbed the key beneath it. I took one of the tiny keychain flashlights in the display by the register and wound the key onto the ring and headed for the door. Just before I went out, the electronic bell above the door chimed. It had been on the fritz, chiming like that randomly, for a long time. I shuddered, feeling like I was being watched. I hated being out there alone at night, especially on nights so slow that no one came in.
I took a deep breath and opened the door. For a long time, I stood there on the threshold, that vast emptiness glaring back, and sometimes I wonder if I’m still there. Sometimes on nights when I can’t remember my dreams, I am. Finally, I turned on the flashlight and stepped into the dark. A moment later, behind me, all the lights in the Town Pump vanished.
The whole universe was black. No stars or moon in the sky. Every direction the same, like I was at the bottom of forever with no way to see out. I had a feeling like I was forgetting something, or maybe someone, or maybe even myself and my stomach felt as if it was full of worms. The flashlight’s dim beam barely cut through the darkness.
I made my way around the building and the beam caught the letters on the plywood they had used to board up the broken window of the business that used to be there, but no matter how hard I try to remember what they spelled, it’s like something is missing. Like it should be there in my mind but isn’t.
I kept walking and walking, not knowing how I’d gotten there or where I’d been. I traversed a big granite boulder and a copse of beetle-sick pines the color of dried blood and the whole time I felt as if I was being watched. It seemed like I had been walking forever, when at last I found myself stumbling along the shoulder of the interstate.
Then I saw headlights coming through the darkness and a jet-black patrol car pulled up alongside. The window slid down, and a familiar face leered out—large pale blue eyes, five o’clock shadow, and a long blond ponytail dangling from beneath a flat-brimmed hat. It was almost as if these features had been cobbled together from three different individuals: nothing inherently wrong, but all wrong too at the same time. As the car slowly rolled by, they flashed me a cocksure smile full of glaring white teeth and spoke in a familiar voice.
“Slow night?”
I kept walking.
“Have you tried honey?”
I tried not to scream.
“This fresh?”
“No,” I said.
“Just act normal.”
The red taillights disappeared in the black distance, and just before my flashlight faltered, it illuminated a piece of plywood on the side of the road. It was spray-painted with large green letters, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t remember what they spelled.
•••
Sometimes when I wake in the night from dreamless sleep, and the darkness is so thick I can’t tell if my eyes are closed or open, I’ll see that sign. And still, I tell myself that this life I’ve built with my husband and our two beautiful children is real. But even now, writing these words, I don’t know if that is true.
But if you are reading these pages, I think it means I wrote them. If you hold me in your mind, it means I exist. If you and I continue dreaming of each other, maybe, just maybe, we can pretend our breaths are blooming into the golden morning, and the song sparrows are singing to the sun. Then again, maybe these words, those letters, this story, are all that remains, and you and I, maybe, we are both lost in the dark.
