Visiting Cassie / In Transit
by Wendy Oleson
In Transit
After hours of delays, the plane lifts into clouds, softness like trailing fingers or the whisper of static. In the air, I read the Joan Didion book about death (none of us knows how to grieve) because missing you, I no longer know how to live. The night landing is inky black-blue without chains of brake lights painting freeway figure eights.
At the airport the driver finds me, the new teacher, a paper sign with my name held to his chest. He’s thick-white mustached and wild eyebrows and tired. I’m so late, and we still have the drive back to the little school in the little town. His wife’s in the car, cranes her neck as I climb into the back. She’s tired, came along because it’s so late. At home she’d just worry. A 90-minute drive, she says, back to the school.
It’s an old car, dark, rectangular, and hulking. Not a hearse, it’s owned by the school that sent the driver who brought his wife. Cold-damp gusts from the vents until she’s chilled, then it’s warm as yawning breath, thick with the banana I’ve peeled. They talk to each other up front, so I mash soft flesh against the roof of my mouth, unable to see well enough to eat around the bruises. I don’t know where we are—have never been to this state—and already I’m crying. I’d hoped the dumb Didion book would have me crying for Joan’s losses, but they’re always my own (you called me self-pitying). I’m deep into silent weeping when a tire pops.
Oh my! She gasps.
He maneuvers the car to the shoulder that isn’t a shoulder, just a space giving way to a ditch. The sky’s dusty with distant light. A curving road. Two narrow lanes. Trucks speed past.
They talk to each other up front. I’m useless in back with a half-eaten banana. Their cell phone goes in and out of range until he reaches someone. He hangs up and laughs. He tells her who it was on the phone. They share good-natured chuckles, but her face pinches thin.
We’ll be here a while, he says, and his laugh isn’t right, and maybe I say something because I don’t understand the joke—is there a joke?—and on the highway there’s no safe place for the car—no proper shoulder—just this patch where we shudder each time a truck spins by. He turns to me finally: See, I tried to call the school to tell them we need help. Instead of the school, I dialed the town mortician—
–What a coincidence, she says.
He can’t help us. We’re a good hour out.
He can’t help us! she says.
Like sitting ducks in the front seat, they laugh and wait for a big rig to careen into the car. I’m crying in back, wiping my face with my blouse, not trying to be quiet, until the dark certainty’s too hot and blunt—anvils falling from the sky impossibly slow—and I’m out of the car easing my body into the ditch because I want to survive.
Visiting Cassie
Cassie asked if I was going to take Drivers Ed spring semester.
Her room was the same: Beanie Babies and ruffled curtains. She had more pillows though, extra blankets, and a special bed with metal bars.
I told her I wasn’t, but I should have lied.
You’ve always been too scared to do important things, she said. You thought a stranger was going to kidnap us when we rode bikes.
My mom knew the mom of that kid, I said. She had to book the woman’s haircuts every six weeks.
You’re still really anxious.
I’d forgotten scary things didn’t frighten Cassie. Not true stories about serial killers or more suspect stuff about ghosts. Not strange rashes that turned out to be bird mites (a kid back in fourth grade had that) or highway decapitations due to building materials flying from a truck bed at high speed (our fifth-grade teacher’s sister died that way). Even propped up in bed and surrounded by flowers and balloons, Cassie’s expression was more annoyance than concern.
Maybe I’m scared of dying, I told her, because my life is so good.
I wanted her to know I wasn’t sad that we weren’t friends anymore—that it hadn’t hurt me to see her with the shiny girls who didn’t realize backpacks made purses redundant.
Your soul is tranquil water, she said, smirking. You’ll be fine.
Her face was rounder, puffy from the treatment. It made her look like a kid again, like when I’d loved her so much I believed we were parts of the same whole.
Smooth sailing, I said.
At the grocery store three weeks later, Cassie’s grandma told me how quickly it happened. She was the grandma who loved Jesus and hated sex, who had the enormous boobs Cassie and I had whispered and giggled about so many years ago. The gold cross was flipped upside down on Cassie’s grandma’s blue sweater. I rubbed my thumb against the can of mushrooms Mom had sent me in to buy.
Life is probably too short to be afraid.
Still, things don’t fit together once they’ve broken—too many critical bits get lost in the violence. It’s not like I’m suddenly inspired to take Driver’s Ed. My soul is concrete. Or liquid metal hardening in its mold. And probably Cassie was messing with me when she said I’d be fine. She would have known I was nervous visiting her, that I didn’t know what to say.
We used to have our own language of eyebrow movements and gestures—it was so easy. Cassie’s soul was the best blue. Not the sad blue of her grandma’s sweater but a slate-blue ocean without green, endless rough water chasing the horizon. We were closer than sisters, and during tornado season we had played outside, daring the sky, waiting in Cassie’s driveway for rain to fill our mouths. Ready to be carried away from everything but each other.
Wendy Oleson is the author of two award-winning prose chapbooks (Gertrude Press and Map Literary). Her writing appears in Passages North, The Adroit Journal, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. She serves as managing editor for Split Lip Magazine, associate prose editor for Fairy Tale Review, and lives with her wife and dogs in Walla Walla, Washington.
