A Rearview Mirror Held Down

Claire gripped the steering wheel. The dampness on her palms hadn’t dried yet. Tonight’s Frost reading at the community center still had a few lines hanging in her ears—“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” After the laughter faded, she’d stayed a little longer to help old Harold slide his worn-out selected poems into a cloth bag.

Everything was normal, except that the night on Elm Street felt thicker than usual. Two or three red lights left. Every street she passed was so quiet she could hear the rhythm of her own turn signal. She wasn’t in a hurry. The speedometer held steady at thirty-five—not fast, not slow, just right for taking in the light and shadow at every intersection.

In the rearview mirror, a pair of headlights was on. Maybe sixty yards back. She drove past the faded wall of Old John’s Hardware and took a soft left. The headlights left too. Claire pulled her eyes back to the road ahead, waited a few seconds, then checked again. Still there. No closer, no farther.

She remembered the parking lot before she’d gotten into the car. Only her Ford. The lid of the dumpster beside it had been flipped up once by the wind. That’s when the thought slipped in. It wouldn’t leave. It circled inside her head, round and round, like tires rolling over rain-wet asphalt, making a fine, sticky whisper.

She turned the radio on, then off. Fixed her eyes on the road, on the speed limit sign, on the bend up ahead, she could have taken with her eyes closed. But the feeling that something was behind her didn’t go away. Claire didn’t turn around. She just tilted the rearview mirror down a little—just enough to catch the outline of her own chin and the edge of the headrest.

Three streets left. Two traffic lights. She told herself that if something were really there, the forty seconds at the last red light would have been more than enough to see it. But Elm Street didn’t work like that. Elm Street only knew how to make a lit window look like a half-open eye, and how to make the sound of a trash bag pushed by the wind sound like footsteps.

She let out a short laugh. In the closed cabin of the car it sounded unnecessary, so she pressed her lips shut right away.

Finally, only the turn onto Birch Lane remained. She started assembling the sounds of home in her head ahead of time: the crisp click of the soft garage remote button, the metallic scrape of the door rolling up, the faint electric hum of the porch light clicking on as she stepped onto the stoop, the deep, solid thrum of the refrigerator compressor kicking in. She arranged these sounds in sequence, over and over.

The headlights behind her—if they were really there—maybe they were just a thought that couldn’t find its way home. She didn’t tilt the rearview mirror back.

She pulled the wheel to the right, and the nose of the car slid into Birch Lane. The headlights swept across the reflective number 27 on the mailbox, then across the pot of rosemary by the door, half of it gone dry. The garage door rolled down behind her. She killed the engine. The dashboard lights went dark. Everything settled into silence.

Claire’s right hand still held the car key. Her thumb hovered over the remote button but didn’t press down. She didn’t unbuckle her seatbelt either.

Outside, the street lay still in the crooked darkness of the rearview mirror, as if nothing had happened. But the question hadn’t gotten out of the car. It sat quietly in the passenger seat, staying with her in the dark, engine-off car.