Chapter Nine

Gus discovered two things while he waited for Meghan to finish cheerleading practice. One was that the school did indeed have a chess club, but they met during lunch, not after school. The other was that Unionville High School had won many sports championships over the past 100 years. But out of those, only one was a state basketball championship: 1948.

Gus chowed down on Fritos in the school’s old cafeteria. It had become a break room some twenty years earlier when the new cafeteria was built, and its 1980s-era snack machines—which accepted the stray quarters Gus found in the (messy) front pocket of his backpack—were what led him to wait there for Meghan.

While he sat in an ancient wooden chair at an ancient wooden table, Gus pondered the aspect of looking without looking that he couldn’t wrap his mind around. Both times he had seen the Soul Car, it sprang into existence at the same location, drove its fatal track, and smashed into the tree. He was certain—or nearly so—that it was the exact same location both times.

If Mrs. Miller (oh yeah, “Judy”) was right when she said the souls were “reliving” their deaths, why did Gus see the car starting in the same spot each time? Was it coincidence? Had he “come in at the same part of the show,” so to speak? That’s where he got hung up. If he had to be distracted in order to see the Soul Car, but the car’s entire journey was identical each time he saw it, did that mean that the soul’s existence was dependent on Gus in some way? Why would a guy from fifty or sixty years ago need some random teenager in order to relive his death?

Gus shook his head and blinked a few times to rid himself of the image of the crash. There was no point overthinking the logistics of the Soul Car until he had watched it a few more times. And focusing on it now would make looking without looking later even more difficult than it already was.

Gus left his backpack on the table (there was no one else around) and crossed the hall from the old cafeteria toward the even older gymnasium. They still taught some gym classes in there, and it was the venue for the Homecoming dance in a few weeks. But to Gus, the old gym was first and foremost the massive stone castle his bus passed on its way to drop him off.

Gus checked the handle on the door to the gym. Locked. He peered through the door’s tiny reinforced-glass window. The old gym was empty, and the lights were off. Sunlight barely pierced the sooty windows—the soot was an artifact of Unionville’s heyday as a railroad junction. The gym’s darkness was offputting, but mysteriously alluring, too. Had the door been unlocked, Gus would have gone in for a look around.

But it was locked, which is why Gus learned about Unionville High’s sports legends. There was a trophy case situated in the wall between the old gym and cafeteria, housing the first sixty years of the school’s accomplishments. Gus spent the rest of his wait for Meghan examining every plaque, ribbon, and ornamental brass baseball bat the school or its students had won from 1920 to 1980. (Everything more recent than 1980 was in a different trophy case down by the new gym.)

The sole basketball trophy caught Gus’s eye when he realized that the team played in the very gym to his left. State champions, 1948. He wondered what the gym looked like back then. Were the windows already sooty? Probably. Maybe the floor was shinier. He grinned as he remembered watching Hoosiers with Mom and Deb two nights before—he bet it looked a lot like that.

The names of the players on the state championship team were engraved on the trophy. There were two Dales, a Vernon, a Francis, and one that made Gus laugh: Dick Tingle. He assumed the name sounded less funny when his parents chose it in the 1930s, but if good ol’ Dick Tingle were alive today, he would have to be the star of that basketball team or he’d be teased relentlessly. Gus—Augustus Solomon—and his brother Delbert knew something about parents and weird name choices, so he felt a certain kinship with young Master Tingle.

Meghan’s car was a 1997 Toyota Camry, 245,000 miles and still going strong—or, at least, still going. It wasn’t built for offroading, so delving into the woods was out of the question.

“We can’t just park along the road,” Meghan said. “Too many people would recognize this old thing.”

Gus proposed a solution. “What about that place on 50 where all those crappy cars are parked? If they moved the intersection, that’s probably about where the old road came out.”

Meghan turned left at the 50/119 intersection. Sure enough, right where several junkers were parked—abandoned, it seemed—there was clearly a path where the woods’ growth was newer. This was almost certainly where the old intersection had been.

Gus was elated. “This is perfect! No one will notice your car mixed in with…” and he trailed off as he realized he was insulting Meghan’s car.

As Meghan squeezed her old Toyota into a spot between a rusted out Pontiac and a fiberglass topper from the bed of a truck that didn’t seem to be parked here, she picked up where he left off. “…mixed in with the rest of these piles of garbage, you mean?”

“No offense.”

Meghan laughed as she put the car in park. “None taken.”

Gus and Meghan hopped out of the car and grabbed their backpacks. Though they had been lying about the group project in history class, Judy had assigned the Seven Years’ War paper and it was due tomorrow. Working on the paper—separately but together—was as good a way as any of distracting Gus.

Gus shut his door and threw his backpack over his shoulder. “Ready to find a soul?”

Meghan gave Gus a thumbs-up, then burst out laughing.

“What?” Gus asked.

“It just occurred to me,” Meghan said between laughs, “that this is the most literal ‘soul searching’ I’ve ever done.”

Gus laughed with her as they hiked into the woods.

The oak that bore the brunt of the crash fifty years before was easy to recognize. Not only was it the largest tree in the immediate vicinity, but it stood at what was clearly a significant curve in the grade of the old road.

They found a spot across from the tree, on the inside of the curve, obscured from the current road—and any passing drivers—by a thicket of rhododendrons (That’s West Virginia’s state flower!, Gus could hear his dad saying). Had it been a couple of months earlier, the perfume of white and purple flowers would have been delightful to the point of overwhelming. But it was September, and only a few weeks remained until the leaves in the canopy would turn bright orange, gold, or red. All they could smell was the deep, mulchy musk of the forest floor.

Gus and Meghan dropped their bags under the rhododendrons. Meghan scanned the old road grade. “Where does the car start out?”

“Now that we’re actually this close,” Gus said, “I’m honestly not sure. Maybe a quarter mile that way?” He pointed north toward the bottom of Sophia’s driveway, which was just visible through the undergrowth.

“Can you really picture how far a quarter mile is?” Meghan asked. “Because I can’t.”

Gus nodded. “Yeah, but only because it’s about the distance from the road to Will Yepp’s property line. At least, that’s what Dad said.”

“Do you think it’ll show up with us here?” Meghan wondered. “Are souls, I don’t know, camera shy?”

Gus shrugged. “I only know what Mrs. Miller—”

“Judy—” Meghan corrected.

“Right. Judy.” Gus smirked. “You heard everything I heard. I guess as long as I can be distracted, he might show.”

“How do you know it’s a ‘he’?” Meghan asked.

Gus hadn’t thought about that. “I guess I don’t.”

“Typical soul sexist,” Meghan teased, and they laughed.

The writing on their Seven Years’ War papers went easily enough. They compared notes and tossed ideas to each other as they wrote. If Meghan found a particularly apt turn of phrase, Gus would give it a twist and use it too. Their papers would be similar, no doubt, but not identical. And besides, it was Judy grading these. What could go wrong?

(Had Judy Miller known both Meghan and Gus were thinking along those lines already, she would have deeply regretted offering them first-name basis—even more than she already did regret it.)

In about an hour, the papers were done. They weren’t Hemingway, but they weren’t drivel either. Problem was, Gus never forgot the deeper reason they were in Soul Car Woods. He kept a peripheral eye on the car’s starting point even when he willed himself not to.

Meghan had expected this. She remembered what it was like when her mom died. Her mom told her not to obsess, but for a time, not obsessing became the obsession. As a result, Meghan became quite adept at distracting herself. She intended to help Gus do the same.

She knew she had to ease into it. She couldn’t flap her arms and sing the Star-Spangled Banner. Even though Gus already knew she was here to distract him, it wasn’t helpful to draw attention to that.

Meghan gestured toward where they parked, up into the treetops. “What’s that bird that keeps singing the same note over and over?” She had noticed the bird a few minutes earlier, and since it was away from the Soul Car’s starting point, it was a good “distraction starter.”

Gus looked where she was pointing. “No idea. Dad talked about birds sometimes, but he didn’t know a ton of them.”

Damn, Meghan thought. Not only did the bird not distract Gus, but it also reminded him of his dad! She watched him as he pulled a can of Coke out of his backpack (which he had purchased alongside the Fritos earlier) and—pffsstt—opened it. Time to ramp up the distraction.

“When was the first time you kissed a girl?”

Gus, taking his first sip, nearly choked to death. While he recovered from the Coke going down the wrong pipe, Meghan doubled down on her distraction. “My first kiss was Landon. You remember Landon?”

Gus nodded through his coughs. Of course he remembered that stupid bully Landon. Though he had forgotten that Meghan dated Landon. Gus took another drink of Coke, briefly pondering the paradox that the liquid that caused his distress was also the cure for it.

Meghan shared a few details about her first kiss with Landon—what she liked about it, what she didn’t, how she didn’t regret it per se but that she was glad she was with Deb now and that Landon was on the other side of the country.

As Gus caught his breath, Meghan asked again about his first kiss.

Gus coughed twice more then cleared his throat. “I don’t know if this counts.…”

“If it’s a kiss—on the lips—it counts,” Meghan assured him. She was surprised. She assumed Gus hadn’t had his first kiss yet. She had counted on it, really—she wanted to distract him, not force him to share secrets.

“It was kindergarten,” Gus started, and Meghan chuckled. Maybe this didn’t count. “We rode the bus home together and we would sit in the same seat and make out.”

Meghan roared with laughter. “Make out?? You can’t use that word about kindergarten!“ She could feel Gus paying less attention to the car. “What was her name?”

Gus laughed. “Don’t judge me. I don’t remember. Andi? Ali? Something like that. She moved away, just like Landon did.” He made a kissy-face and leaned into the word Landon, teasing Meghan. She rolled her eyes.

Eager to keep pulling his attention, Meghan pressed on. “What about Deb? Who was his first kiss?”

Gus honestly wasn’t sure. “I know he’s kissed you.”

Meghan feigned horror. “How scandalous!”

Gus thought back through Deb’s list of girlfriends. Eighth grade had been Kimberly and Kendra Connors, twin sisters that Deb had dated, as far as Gus knew, only one at a time. Gus was pretty sure those were chaste—even awkward—relationships.

Ninth grade there was Ashley Parsons, now the star of the soccer team. Ashley was awesome—loud, brash, and funny. Gus always assumed they had kissed, but he couldn’t say for sure.

First part of tenth grade was Heather Mason, one of the show choir girls. She visited the house often to study with Deb, but Gus never believed their sessions focused solely on Algebra.

And of course there was Sarah Skinner, a recent National Honor Society inductee and sister of macho quarterback Mark Skinner. Of them all, Sarah was the closest to a lock for kissing Deb. They were together for almost a year, and Deb and Mark were good buddies, so Deb was over at their place all the time.

Gus shared most of that with Meghan. As he neared the end, he thought he sensed the car. But when he looked over his shoulder there was nothing there.

Meghan feared losing ground, and she wanted desperately to help Gus see the car, so she pressed forward quickly. Had she taken a moment to consider the direction of their conversation so far, she might have picked a different topic for further distraction. Indeed, later that evening she would sit in her bedroom on the second floor of her house kicking herself for saying what she said next. But in the moment—in the need to keep her momentum—it seemed right.

“Why won’t Deb sleep with me?”

When Gus’s jaw dropped and he audibly gasped, Meghan realized she had overshot her mark. She didn’t really want an answer to that, any more than she had wanted Gus to disclose secrets about his first kiss. And it wasn’t like she had asked Deb and he had refused—or that she was even sure she wanted to, at least not right away.

Spasms of What have I done?! blasted through Meghan’s brain. But the spasms stopped cold when she saw in Gus’s eyes that, for better or worse, her distraction succeeded.

It’s Soul Car time.

Gus whirls. The car is where he expects it to be. Or, rather, a hundred feet closer. He lost a second spinning around.

Now it’s two-tenths of a mile and bearing down fast. Seventy miles per hour, maybe seventy-five. Blazing fast even when the old road had been an actual road. But in the woods, passing through trees, it seems more like a hundred.

Two hundred feet closer and Gus sees the car is pale yellow, almost ivory. He had seen that from the bus, but assumed it was the off-white he associated with ghosts. No, it is a yellow car.

Another two hundred feet. Gus hears the engine roaring. He’s surprised he can’t hear leaves crunching or branches snapping, but of course, the car isn’t really in the woods. In its time, it’s on the road.

Two hundred feet more and it’s less than a tenth of a mile from Gus, a bit farther than that from the tree where its journey will end. He sees five letters over the grille—DODGE, he suspects, though it’s just at the edge of his vision. Had Will Yepp been here (and able to see souls), he would have said it’s a 1966 Dodge Dart. Will’s a weirdo but he does know cars.

The car is now two hundred feet away, and Gus realizes to his horror that he’s about to see the driver’s face. Up until this moment he has seen a car and a tractor. Vehicles, not people. One second from now, and he’ll see his first soul. And one second after that, the soul will be dead.

She will be dead. The car is close enough for him to see her. He can tell at this distance that the car is slightly transparent. The soul—a woman no older than twenty, and probably younger—is also translucent. Her blond, wavy (translucent) hair is blowing straight back. Her window is down, Gus thinks, and instantly he is ashamed: here he is, meeting his first soul, and his only thought is so mundane as to be irreverent. Her window is down?! It’s disrespectful to this poor girl driving a 1966 Dodge Dart.

Another second, and an earsplitting crunch of glass and metal rips through the forest. Gus sees the old oak shimmer as its translucent 1960s version wobbles in and out of the 2016 version.

Gus bolts from the rhododendron toward the crash. He can’t imagine the horror he’ll find there, but he has to see it. To see her.

Utterly forgotten, Meghan watched Gus follow the car for about eleven seconds. When he ran to the tree, she followed.

Gus can’t tell if the blonde girl is conscious. Her eyes are glazed. There’s a trickle of (translucent) blood at the corner of her mouth. The steering wheel is lodged in her chest. A 1966 Dodge Dart isn’t equipped with airbags, and she‘s not wearing a seatbelt, though at seventy-five miles per hour, it’s doubtful modern safety measures would make much difference.

Her breaths are shallow, raspy. Her hair, no longer windblown, is a frizzy mess draped across her face and over the steering wheel.

Meghan arrives at the car. In fact, Meghan arrives sort of in the car. It doesn’t exist in her time stream (whatever that means), so she stands partway inside the back seat.

Gus glances at Meghan straddling the frame of the car. It occurs to him that his hands would pass through the car, too, were he to reach for it. But then again… would they?

Despite the gore, despite the girl dying in front of him, Gus grabs at the door. In fact, he doesn’t just grab at it. He grabs it. He touches it. He’s in a forest in 2016, leaning against a yellow car that hasn’t been in that location since the 1960s, gazing into the empty eyes of a teenager (he‘s sure now she‘s under twenty)—a girl old enough to be his grandmother.

From Meghan’s angle, Gus is now holding onto, and leaning against, empty space. He seems to go fuzzy. She can see him fine, but it’s as though her eyes forget how to focus on him. As she struggles to bring him into focus, she notices that, based on the way he‘s leaning, the car must be passing through her. Creeped out, she backs away from where the car must be.

Testing his powers, Gus tries to open the driver’s-side door. It won’t budge. He isn’t sure if it crumpled in the accident, or if he simply isn’t allowed to open it because that’s not the way it happened fifty years before.

The girl’s face twitches—involuntarily, no doubt—and catches Gus’s attention. He has never watched someone die, but he recognizes that she’s taking her final breath. The breath rattles in, shallow and small, through spit and blood, then ends with a raspy sigh.

Not sure what to do, and wanting to be respectful, he reaches to close her eyes. As he leans through her window, braced against the door, the car and its soul driver disappear.

What Meghan sees would be funny under most circumstances. Gus, who had been leaning against nothing, looking fuzzy, suddenly snaps into focus and falls flat on his face into a carpet of dead leaves.

From Gus’s perspective, it isn’t remotely funny. The girl is there, and then she isn’t. He’s hardly even aware that he’s spitting out acorns and moss. His attention is on the car that was, then wasn’t. On the soul that had come, then gone.

As she helped Gus to his feet, Meghan puzzled how best to ask him what happened. She settled on the most direct method. “What happened?”

Gus brushed himself off. “How long was that?”

“How long was what?”

Gus tapped his watch. “Time. How long was she here?”

“So it was a she!” Meghan cheered, in a tone that veered a bit too close to gloating for Gus’s taste, given his current state of mind.

“Yes,” he snapped. “What would you say? Two minutes? Three?”

Meghan hadn’t run a stopwatch or anything, but she thought Gus’s guess was way too high. He’d been caught up in the moment, though—easy to do when you can actually see what’s going on, she semi-grumbled to herself—so he could be forgiven for overestimating.

“Less, I think. Thirty seconds?” she guessed.

Gus was incredulous. “Really?”

Meghan nodded. “A minute, tops.”

“Wow, okay.”

Gus looked back along the car’s approach path, trying to will it back into existence, knowing he was wasting his time without the requisite distraction. It hadn’t occurred to him, yet, that he probably didn’t want the car screaming down the old road at seventy-five miles an hour right this moment, since he was standing in its path. After all, if he could touch the car, it might be able to skewer him to a tree.

Another thing that hadn’t occurred to Gus yet, but which later that night would provoke gut-wrenching sobs, was that he had just watched a girl as she was crushed to death. Her ribs shattered, her heart and lungs compressed into barely functioning—and shortly thereafter non-functioning—mush. The realization that sparked his tears later that night was simple: his dad had been crushed, too. Whether it was a Dodge Dart’s steering wheel or a Satoh Bison’s tire was irrelevant in the grand scheme. His dad was shattered, just like this poor girl.

For the moment, though, Gus was fixated on the logistics of his experience.

“I could touch the car, Meghan.” Gus recounted the crash, and Meghan interjected how strange it had been watching him lean against something that, to her, was invisible.

“Could you get in the car?” Meghan asked.

“The door was wedged, I think.”

Meghan shook her head. “No, could you ride in the car?”

Gus hadn’t even considered this. “When it shows up it’s already flying. How would I get in?”

Meghan shrugged. “That’s why I asked.”

“If I can touch it, then it can touch me, so….” This was the moment Gus realized he was standing in the path of the car, should it materialize again. He took Meghan by the arm and pulled her away from the tree. They walked back to the rhododendron thicket.

“I think it would rip off my arm if I tried to open the door with it going that fast,” Gus speculated. “And I think I’d die if the car crashed with me in it.”

“Maybe you can control whether you touch it or not,” Meghan suggested.

“You mean like if I want to grab it, I can, but if I want it to pass through me, I can do that too?” Gus asked.

“Took you about ten extra words to describe it, but yeah, that’s what I meant.”

“No idea,” Gus answered. But that wasn’t entirely true. Somewhere inside him he suspected he could control whether he touched the car or not—whether he existed in the 2016 or the 1960s time stream. He just didn’t know how. Yet.

Gus and Meghan tried to bring the Soul Car back, but with Gus’s mind positively fixated on it, and with Meghan being a bit more tentative in her attempts to distract him—no more sleeping-with-Deb references, please—they didn’t really stand a chance. And they knew it, so their attempts were halfhearted.

The sun was still up when they packed their bags, gleaming gold through the deep green of the late summer leaves, that trademark gold that predicted sunset within the hour.

“We’ll come back tomorrow—” Gus began, but Meghan interrupted.

“Can’t. Football game.”

“Oh right. Duh.” Gus was disappointed, but he knew he had to go to the game, too—Deb would be putting on another show for the college scouts. “Saturday, then.”

Meghan shook her head. “Dad and I are going to the Mountaineer game. And besides, how are we gonna make up an excuse to meet on the weekend?”

Gus was getting frantic. “Next week??”

“Cheer practice every night.”

“Until?”

“Six or seven—” Meghan answered, and before Gus could interject, she added, “—I want to be here! But we have a cheerleading competition coming up. She’s gonna keep us late.”

Gus stomped in frustration. “Damn it! How am I supposed to practice seeing the car if I can’t even be here?”

“If you can find a way to get here, I can join you after practice and take you home when we’re done,” Meghan offered.

“Big ‘if,’” Gus grunted, then realized he was being exceptionally rude to her. “But thanks. Let me think about it.”

They walked for a few seconds in silence.

“Listen,” Meghan started, but Gus stopped her.

“It’s fine,” he assured her. “I know you were distracting me.”

Meghan was relieved, to some extent. “I know, but I didn’t even mean…”—she couldn’t bring herself to say that I want to sleep with Deb—“…please, don’t tell him.”

Meghan’s car was another hundred yards or so ahead, still mostly hidden behind undergrowth in Soul Car Woods. They walked a few more feet in silence as Gus considered his response. The pause scared Meghan—would he actually tell Deb about this? Why??

Gus stopped, and Meghan stopped with him.

“A few minutes ago,” Gus began, “I looked into another universe.”

Gus looked down for a moment, and as he raised his head back up, Meghan was surprised to find a smirk curling his lip.

“No matter how many universes I see in my life, no matter what times or places I reach out and touch, there is no universe in existence where I’m gonna talk to my brother about his sex life with his girlfriend.”

Gus’s smirk opened into a smile as he resumed walking toward her car. Meghan stood frozen for a moment, then burst into laughter and jogged after him.

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