Tonight Looks Good on You

I remember that day, the day she left me. I was beside myself; my thoughts raced a mile a minute, and I wanted nothing more than to cease to exist. Three years of my life with her was now three years wasted. What felt like a lifetime’s worth of a connection finally severed due to God knows what. In the moment, I tried to talk myself out of it all, but the pain of her leaving was too much to bear. I put too much emotional stock into her, and it wasn’t coming back.

I got into my car, with no intention of coming back.

I sat for what seemed like an eternity in my driveway before I decided to start the engine. I knew where I was going. I had known since she sent that damned text; when the crying stopped and the quiet seemed to become deafening.

There is a bridge between Boothton’s Cross and Edsel. The old Millacre Bridge. It sat some forty feet or so above the roaring Miami River. I had driven over its thousands of times, nights to see her, and mornings to come back.

I figured it would be fitting. Oh, to see her face when my name came up on the local news.

Before I pulled out of the driveway, I put on the playlist I made her when we first met. I thought the music could say all the things I couldn’t. “Just Wait Til Next Year” by

John Maus bled through the speakers first, then a few songs from The Cleaners From Venus, and something by The Cure that she said, “made me feel like I was floating.” Come to find out, because hindsight is always 20/20, she never actually listened to it.

I let it all play.

The drive to Millacre Bridge from my side of Boothton’s Cross takes about fifteen minutes on a normal night. I drove slowly. I wasn’t in a rush to get where I wanted to go, and to tell you the truth, something in me wanted a light to turn and stay red, something in the engine to malfunction, or a cop to pull me over and make me sit with my decision a little while longer. None of that happened. The lights were all green. The road was empty.

The playlist kept droning on.

I pulled onto the bridge and stopped in the middle. One other car darted past me as I looked and leaned over the side of the bridge. The darkness of the water below was hypnotizing. This is where everything will bookend, with Boothon’s Cross behind, and Edsel ahead. I kept the playlist on. Joy Division came roaring through the speakers. “Atmosphere”, the hymn for people who’ve run out of options.

I stood there for some time. I felt the seconds drag on and on.

The wind off the water was cold in a way that felt deliberate, like it had been waiting to take me into its cold embrace. The river was black and rushing against the jagged rock. It looked like it had taken in everything that had ever been thrown into it.

It started to down-pour. That’s when I saw her.

She was standing on the Edsel end of the bridge. She was wearing a dress that was bright white and too thin for the weather and hanging off her drenched body. Her hair was dark and plastered flat against her face and neck. She was barefoot on the asphalt.

I was taken aback by this. I blinked. She was still there.

I started to walk towards her. She looked pitiful. I noticed that the air started to get heavier as I got closer. Up close she was beautiful in the same way old photos were beautiful. She stood still. There was a light emitting from her. Not a literal one, but a feel, or a vibe. Her eyes were pale, like color had decided to fade away some years ago.

“You look like you need something to drink,” she said.

She was flat and certain in her statement. It was hypnotic.

I looked at the railing, then at her. “Yeah,” I said. “I probably could.”

She tilted her head toward Edsel. “There’s a place I know. Just follow the road down past my place. You’ll find it. I’ll show you.”

“How could there be a ‘your place’ when the only thing between here and town is a-” and at the blink of an eye she was gone.

I looked around only to find her in the passenger seat of my car.

I ran to her. “What the hell are you doing?!” I asked her. She sat with her hands folded in her lap. “Just drive.” She said coldly. Something about the tone of her voice held me in her grasp. I got in the car and noticed it was colder than normal. The temp had to have dropped by a few degrees. I noticed that the coffee i had left in the cupholder that morning had a skim of ice across the top.

It caught me off guard, but I didn’t say anything about it.

New Order came through the speakers. “Ceremony”. The song the living wrote about the dead.

She didn’t react to the music, but something in her posture settled the way people settle when they hear something familiar from their past. I pulled off the bridge and into Edsel as she directed me through streets that got narrower and older the further we went on, and I followed without question. We were in a part of town I’ve never seen before.

I’d grown up in and around the Edsel/Boothton’s Cross area. I knew every road, every dead end, and every shortcut that saved you a couple minutes on a good day; but this street had an air to it, an air that spelled one word. Uncanny.

Between an old granary and a chain-linked fence that was covered with dead Kudzu vine lay a brick building that had lost its color due to weathering. A Pabst Blue Ribbon sign hung in the only window with a few letters burned out. It had a gravel parking lot that held a half a handful of cars in it and a red neon sigh hung over the entrance of the building that simply read “BoBo’s!”.

I could hear loud blues music playing through the walls before I was able to cut the engine.

“What is this place?” I asked. Before I realized what was happening, she was already outside and opening my car door. “Just a place,” she said. “It’s been here a while.”

Inside had low ceilings and wood paneling that covered every wall. It looked like something straight from the seventies. It had two pool tables sitting under hanging lights with pull-chain switches. There was a bar that ran across the back of the place. There were maybe six or seven people total scattered like they’d each arrived with an express purpose but silently agreed otherwise. No one looked up when we walked in. The jukebox was playing old George Thorogood songs, which gave the place a quality that existed only inside cheap dive bars.

The bartender was an old man with a face that looked rigid like the surface of the moon. He placed two cold beers in front of us. We hadn’t ordered anything. I looked at him, puzzled, and he looked past me. He went back to polishing glasses.

I looked at the mystery girl sitting beside me. She had her hands around her bottle, not drinking. You could tell she was freezing. It was radiating off of her.

“So, what’s your name?” I asked.

“I could tell you, but you’re gonna have to guess.”

“I don’t know, Gurtrude?”

“Cold.”

“Uh, Sheba”

“Warm.”

“Look, we’re gonna be here all night with this stupid game. What’s your name?”

She took a sip of her drink.

“Kelly,” she said with a jilted grin. “You wanna talk about her?”

I was stunned. I never brought up my ex’s name. There was something about the way she said it, the way she seemed genuinely interested; so, I did, I told her everything.

I honestly don’t know what loosened me to it whether it be the beer, the late hour, or the odd sway that she was attentive to every word I said from then on out. She didn’t shift in her barstool, didn’t look at her phone, she didn’t do anything. I haven’t had that in a long time. She received it. All of it.

I told her about how Kelly and I met. About the good stretch in the middle when I was certain in that specific stupid way you’re certain once or twice in life. I told her about the playlist; how I’d spent three weeks meticulously building it song by song. I told her about how I found out she never listened to it, and how that small fact had arrived on top of everything else like the last book on a stack that finally tips.

She listened to all of it.

When I was done, the bar was quieter than it had been. The jukebox moved onto something by The Cramps, “Fever”, that long slow exhale of a song. It sat over the room like a storm cloud.

“I had someone too,” she said. Her voice was the same temperature as the air around her. Cold.

“A boy. He used to pick me up after the dances out on Archer Avenue. Same spot every time, leaning on the hood of his father’s car. I used to see his headlights from a quarter mile away and feel like everything was going to be alright.”

She paused. Looked down at her bottle.

`”What happened?” I asked.

“December,” she said. “The road was icy. The other car came through a stop sign.” She stopped for a second. “I was on my way back to him.”

The song moved on. Nobody else in the bar seemed to be breathing.

“He waited for me that night,” she continued. “Stood out in the cold for two hours before somebody came and told him. And after that-” she stopped. Something moved across her face that wasn’t quite grief because it was too old for that, grief that had been worn smooth by decades of repetition. “After that he waited anyway. A different kind of waiting. The kind that doesn’t end.”

I stared at the bar top.

“I couldn’t reach him,” she said. “That’s the part I carry. Not the other thing. The not being able to reach him. Watching him wait.”

The jukebox shut off. There was heavy silence in the room. She started talking again. Her voice was loud and booming, compared to the silence.

The mystery girl turned in her barstool and looked at me the way she did on the bridge. Direct, pale-faced, and without any form of social cushion.

“Is there anyone waiting on you tonight?” She asked.

I thought about my mother, who always told me she loved me. I thought about my buddy Zusman who always seemed to have something positive to say about everything. I thought about the playlist still running in the car outside, and how I’d made it for someone. Someone I loved. I could love again.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think there is.”

She nodded once, like that was the answer she’d been holding the door open for.

I’m not sure how much later it was when I noticed she was gone.

There was no moment of it. Not as dramatic as Kelly’s exit from my life. Nothing. I just reached out for my beer and glanced to my left and the barstool was empty, as if it was empty all night.

I looked at the bartender.

“The girl I came in with,” I said. “Did you see where she went?”

He stopped polishing his glass. Looked up at me with those moon-crater eyes for the first time all night.

“Thought both of the drinks were for you. You look like you needed them. You came in alone.” He said.

I almost argued. I decided he was old and the bar was dark. People miss things. I left more cash than I owed on the bar and got into my car.

The playlist cycled back to the beginning. John Maus again, the way it started. I sat there for a moment, reeling from the night. I reached for my phone.

My hand stopped.

From the corner of my eye, I saw that there was a flower on the passenger seat. It was white, dried, and brittle; holding its shape the way pressed flowers do after years between the pages of a heavy book. I hadn’t seen it before.

I brought it inside when I got home and set it on the kitchen table and sat across from it until the sun came up.

I didn’t sleep a wink that night. I couldn’t stop thinking, thinking about the events of the night previous. It was all striking to me. I couldn’t stop thinking of the words that the mystery girl said. ‘There’s a place I know. Just follow the road down past my place. You’ll find it. I’ll show you.’

Those words kept repeating in my head. The only thing between Millacre bridge and Edsel is a crash site memorial. A memorial for Gabriela Bednarczyk. She died December 14th, 1978.