The 2015 Black Knight Short Story Competition

Entry No 9

Detours

by Tracy J. Gates

The traffic on the BQE is killing you.

And then you quickly take that back. It’s not. You have time. Not everyone does. You will be zen. You will crawl slowly along the BQE, watching the buildings and billboards pass by ever so slowly, the Orthodox Jews with their big black hats on the overpass walking faster than you are driving, the beautiful spring day just outside your windshield. You will be fine.

Early that morning, you woke up to the crack of thunder and rain pelting the skylight above your head. You love a good storm, especially in the spring. And the noise drowns out your thoughts of where you are going that day, what you will find. You put out a hand to touch your husband’s back, but you don’t want to wake him. You fall asleep to the rain.

The sun is out when you wake up later and you finish up packing, gathering just enough for a few days. Jeans, a sweater, a few t-shirts. You put in a sports bra and some yoga pants. Maybe you’ll do some sun salutations or go for a hike in the woods. You hope your friend is up for that.

With hindsight, you should’ve taken the Battery Tunnel and gone up the West Side Highway, but then you would’ve missed your first breathtaking view of the day. Just past Atlantic Avenue, the road rises and you see the East River bridges framing the city north of Lower Manhattan. Only this morning, the skyscrapers of mid-town are set against billowing thunderclouds moving slowly north. The Empire State building is gleaming in the sun and the clouds are giant pillows behind it. You reach behind the seat for your purse, thinking of taking a photo, but you realize how ridiculous that is. Someone else will take a photo. You will write it down, perhaps, and remember it that way.

Trucks and cars begin to merge more insistently into your lane, and you finally see the reason for the traffic. At least half a dozen emergency vehicles are blocking two lanes. But whatever brought them here has vanished. It will only be a memory for those who drove by earlier. Not for you.

A few miles later, crossing the Whitestone Bridge into the wetlands along the Hutchinson River Parkway, you remember seeing a wild goose sitting crippled in the middle of the road. As you swerved around it, another bird caught your eye. Its mate was half running, half flying around the crippled goose, trying to get it up, to continue to the other side where their life would go on together. You haven’t passed by that spot since then without the image of the pair clearly in mind.

But the long road to your friend’s house is one you take often and there are many other memories. It’s the road home to New England, the road north to winter and summer vacations, and it’s particularly beautiful in the spring with its canopy of trees feathered in bright greens and soft reds. You can’t help singing with the country radio station even though you can’t carry a tune. But it doesn’t matter. It’s just you, the pickup truck, and the road north.

When you get on the bigger highway, you stop at a rest area—the kind with picnic tables and no fast food shops or anything, just bathrooms, a large road map on the wall, and a few vending machines. After you use the women’s room, you sit at a picnic table in the sunshine and answer some email on your phone. There are a few from your squash mates. One is organizing a doubles match next week. Another asks about a singles game. You had to cancel a game to take this trip. You type ‘yes!’ to both.

Before you get back on the road, you check Yelp for a place to stop for lunch. An all day road trip shouldn’t mean a sad sandwich at a drive-through. You pick out a place that looks like it has good beer and maybe a place to sit outside in a college town an hour up the road.

When you get there, the town is buzzing with lunchtime traffic and you feel lucky to find a parking spot near the center of town. But the windows are dark at the place you picked out and there’s a hand-written sign on the door saying it’s closed. Looking in though, you’re not too disappointed; it’s a nice day and there are many more places to choose from. You end up at a vegetarian place with high ceilings and large windows that let in the spring sunshine. You ate a sweet roll in the truck, so you’re craving something green and tangy. A salad with sea vegetables, tofu, and tamari dressing sounds both odd and appealing, and the waitress confirms that it’s good. It is, especially with the local beer you have with it. You finish the salad, but not the beer. You still have about a hundred miles to drive, but there shouldn’t be much traffic from here on up. You text your friend your ETA and confirm that you’re making dinner for her and her husband. There are bags of groceries in the truck bed and a freezer bag with the fish wrapped in ice.

But an hour later, just when you’ve entered your fourth and last state, and you’re flying along by the fir trees and the last of the snow tucked in the gullies, roadwork signs start nudging you over to the right lane and then off the highway entirely and onto a detour. Now you’re crawling at about ten miles an hour to who knows where. When the traffic stops at a light, you quickly punch your friend’s address into your phone and choose the option that doesn’t include the closed highway. In a few hundred feet, you’re supposed to turn left onto a side street and you quickly run through your options – follow the creeping traffic which will eventually lead back to the highway, or take the mysterious left turn where no one else is going. You put on your turn signal and figure that a roundabout adventure is better than stop and go and safety in numbers.

This is kind of your M.O. The best trips of your life have been detours. On the last trip you took with your friend, you got a text that your planes home were delayed. Your friend went to the airport to wait, but you rented a car and took a side trip through the Mojave Desert, ending up on a sandy beach on the Pacific. Maybe the best detour ever.

This begins to feel like the northeastern version of that. Once you weave through a few side streets, you turn onto a wider two lane road that runs along a river. The water is high and rushing from mountain snowmelt. You remember how just a few years ago this river and many others overflowed their banks after a hurricane. The covered bridge by your friend’s house was swept away while she and her neighbors watched. Your friend contributed quite a bit of money to have an exact replica rebuilt.

Today, though, the water is well within its banks. Spring is in the air, but not yet visible in the trees as it is further south. People are out on their lawns raking last fall’s leaves. A pickup truck passes you heading the other direction, but there’s barely any traffic.

You have a pretty good sense of direction and you think you’re going the right way, but you decide to call your friend’s husband just to make sure. You would normally call your friend, but you haven’t spoken to her since they got the news. You’ve exchanged emails, but you wanted to wait until she was ready to talk. Although maybe it was you who wasn’t ready.

You leave a message on his voicemail when he doesn’t pick up and then pull into the parking lot of a convenience store to look at the map on your phone. It looks pretty easy. Just stay on this road for a while, then turn onto another one which will lead you into the closest town by your friend’s house. You know the way from there.

It’s a relief, actually, to be off the highway. The countryside here is beautiful, even in the dull colors of early spring, and the late afternoon sunlight makes everything glow. The gently twisting road runs by neat clapboard farmhouses separated by small fields, brooks, and clusters of trees. You slow down as you drive through small towns made up of all white houses and buildings, and rectangular white steepled churches.

After the turn, the road narrows and climbs up and up and the fields fade into forest. You steer around potholes and then bump onto gravel as the road turns from pavement into dirt. There’s an occasional vacation house tucked into the trees—a 70’s A-frame, followed by an overbuilt log-home. But mostly it’s thick woods.

Eventually, the road eases down the other side of the mountain and the hard packed dirt turns back to rutted pavement. You see more groupings of houses and then a sign for the town. A mile or so later, you’re turning onto the main street with its two and three story bulky Victorian homes and country-style shops. The town is a few miles from a ski resort and it caters to the b&b crowd who like home-baked muffins and real maple syrup and keep healthy by biking and yoga. Just last summer, you took a yoga class there with your friend at a studio above a bakery.

Your phone buzzes and you see that your friend’s husband has left a message while you were winding your way over the mountain. He’s apologetic that he missed your call and offers to come get you in town. You text him that you’ll be there in a few minutes.

You step on the gas as you drive down the wide, fast road which trucks use to get from one side of the state to the other. They roar by as they pass in the other direction. You put on your turn signal and take the much smaller road that dips down toward the river, the one that flooded and took out the covered bridge. The new one is also made of wood, but it looks strong and secure. It doesn’t look like anything could take it down, even though you know one day something will.

On the other side of the bridge, you will see your friend. She will look different—her hair shorn where the surgeons cut into scalp and bone to get at the tumor inside. She sent you a photo so you wouldn’t be shocked. Her husband joked about her punk rock style. You know they need you to be strong, as strong as this bridge, stronger than the storm that will come.

You look across the bridge to the other side. No one is coming, so you pull onto the single lane and, steadily as you can, drive through.

Tracy Gates lives in New York City and writes about squash, as well as a few other things, on her blog Squeaky Feet.

This story and the stories in this contest are works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, or to any other works of fiction, is entirely coincidental.