Marie Anderson  Wrong Way                          

 

Carissa is stopped at a red light on Highland Avenue in her Chicago suburb. It’s late, nearly midnight. No other cars are around. She can hear interstate traffic through her minivan’s open windows. She stares at the signs to her right. They are as stern as The Ten Commandments.

Wrong Way. Do Not Enter. No Right Turn.

The signs guard the interstate’s exit ramp. They are supposed to prevent distracted or impaired drivers on Highland Avenue from mistakenly using the exit ramp to get on the interstate.

The Commandments have never stopped determined sinners, though, Carissa thinks. Just look at the man she’d married.

The ramp is empty. Moonlight paints it the color of bone.

The sound of the interstate traffic is soothing, like a waterfall. It’s not heavy at this time of night. But it’s not sparse either. A person couldn’t run across the six lanes without getting hit.

Carissa can’t stop looking at the forbidden ramp. It tempts her, especially on this hot July night alone behind the wheel of the Chevy Venture minivan that, over the past decade, safely took her and her family—one husband, three children, one beagle named Whimm—all the way to Yellowstone and back. To Key West and back. To Myrtle Beach and back. To Disneyworld and back. To New York City.

It was during the New York trip that she and her husband sat in on a taping of David Letterman. Their children, all preteens, were too young to attend. They’d hired a babysitter through their hotel. The guest on Letterman’s show was an actor whose name Carissa can’t remember now, though she can visualize the young man’s porcelain face, high cheekbones, and blond hair. He’d played a villain in a superhero movie, and later died of a drug overdose in a Manhattan hotel room.

Suicide, the tabloids said.

The hotel babysitter had been as pretty and well-groomed as a starlet from the pages of People. She had dimples and an adorable Brooklyn accent. She’d just completed her sophomore year at New York University, a political science major with law school ambitions.

Carissa’s husband was a lawyer who’d just made partner at Winston and Strawn in Chicago. He’d given the babysitter so many tips on law school that he and Carissa had almost been late for the Letterman taping.

After Letterman, Carissa’s husband had driven the babysitter back to her home in Brooklyn. He’d been gone a long time. All night.

“Got lost, Babe,” he’d explained. His cell phone had died. He couldn’t call her. She and the children had already finished breakfast in the hotel’s coffee shop. Carissa had been ready to call the police, report her husband missing. She’d been fighting tears, worried he was mangled in an accident.

But he’d just gotten lost.

The first of many losts.

 

Carissa isn’t lost on this warm July night, stopped at a red light.  She knows exactly where she is. She’s navigated this intersection on Highland Avenue countless times going to and from her nursing shift in the hospital’s emergency room. She’s passed the exit ramp countless times.

The ramp is empty. Beckoning, despite the signs warning do not enter, wrong way.

Her light changes to green. But she doesn’t move. There are no vehicles behind to honk their drivers’ impatience. She waits. Looks at the ramp.

The light changes back to red. She listens to the waterfall rush of interstate traffic. At night, car headlights glow like pearls. Pearls are the birthstone of each of her three children.

They’re all old enough to not really need her now. They don’t seem to like her much these days. She’s the bad cop in their lives. They prefer the time they spend with their dad, in his new home with the inground pool and cool young wife with the adorable Brooklyn accent who texts them and rollerblades with them and likes all the same musical groups they like. Groups with frightening names like Of Monsters and Men and The Killers and Death Cab for Cutie.

And they adore their new baby half-sister, cute as a button.

Carissa’s children are at their better home now—with their father’s better family—for the entire month of July.

Yesterday, Carissa held Whimm in her lap while the vet injected the beagle with a drug to end the dog’s suffering from the infirmities and indignities of old age. Whimm had been in her life longer than her ex-husband and her children. Whimm had always loved her best.

Other cars are to her left and behind her now. She must get on the interstate to get home. But she’s in the wrong lane for that. The entrance ramp for the interstate is past the traffic light, a protected left turn for when the arrow turns green.

When she gets the green left turn arrow, she’ll have to gun the engine and outdrive the cars to her left so she can turn onto the entrance ramp and join the interstate flow that leads to her empty home. On the interstate, she’ll spend the last 15 minutes of her drive trailing tail lights that sparkle like rubies.

She dislikes rubies. Ruby is her ex-husband’s birthstone.

Her own birthstone is emerald.

The traffic light blinks from ruby to emerald. She doesn’t move. Drivers behind her honk their horns.

She wrenches the steering wheel and hurtles the wrong way up the exit ramp.

Pearls it is, but headlights blind her, a horn blares, she slams on the brakes, and the exiting car screams past her, knocking off her sideview mirror.

“Oh my God,” she gasps. Slowly she backs down the ramp onto Highland.

Her legs shake. Her heart pounds. Her head aches. She keeps driving on Highland, away from interstate ramps. What was she thinking? She would’ve possibly, probably, killed innocent drivers. Wrong way. Wrong way.

She keeps driving. She finds herself on another road, Wolf Road.  She passes a concrete wall supporting the Interstate 294 Bridge over Wolf Road. She envisions accelerating onto the shoulder and slamming that wall. She sees her car flipping, landing upside down, the engine compartment bursting into flames.

There’d be an autopsy, of course. They’d find no alcohol or drugs in her blood. The conclusion would be accident, some unknown reason causing the vehicle to slam into the concrete wall.

It’s the final gift she can give her children. An accident. Not suicide.

She keeps driving, then turns and heads back to that concrete wall. DSS

 

  Marie Anderson, of Western Springs, IL., is the author of 67 stories in 52 publications.  She has compiled "The Covid Chronicles," an "illustrated collection of 19-word stories (!) by 23 writers." It's free at Railslibraries.info/news/182481.

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