Short Story - The Walks

On the coldest night of the year, I park outside my childhood home. A glance at the dash shows twenty-two degrees. I realize I’ve forgotten my gloves. But there’s no point in going back now. I press the button, climb out of the car, and get on with it. 

I blow out a puff of steam, take in the chill, and stuff my hands in my pockets. Walk number twenty marks something important, I suppose. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there’s no reward for what I’m doing. Probably just the opposite. 

Twenty years. Same town, same walk. The first one could’ve been considered therapeutic. The second and third a bit odd, something I didn’t go out of my way to tell people. Now, it’s just plain lunacy. 

Nearly thirteen miles, round trip. Same day, same time. Always in the dark, always in the cold.  

The scenery has changed over the years. Houses have been built, new stores erected, old stores torn down. An apartment complex where the soccer fields used to be. Things change, but my walk continues. 

I clear my throat. The sound of my cough startles me. It’s only a little after nine, but it feels much later. Brittle leaves skitter down the frozen street. Twenty-two degrees can be a recipe for loneliness. It’s a recipe I know all too well. 

I’ve told myself this was it before—much in the way a smoker claims this cigarette will be his last. I’m nearly forty, recently divorced, and walking through the plummeting temperatures toward my high school girlfriend’s house. As though it will change what happened.   

The walks weren’t the cause of my divorce, although they couldn’t have helped matters. When we were dating, Rita thought I just liked to exercise. But then, walks sixteen and seventeen, she asked more questions. Why today? Why so late? By walk eighteen Rita demanded to know where I was going. And so, I told her. 

Again, it couldn’t have helped things. 

I get to the cross section, where Moore and Bloom Streets collide. It’s one of the few traffic lights I’ll have to contend with, but there’s not much happening and so I cross without breaking stride. 

The first walk happened on the night of what is now called the Blizzard of ’95. Fueled by fear and jealousy, I’d set off wearing a hoodie and sneakers against what would eventually be nearly two feet of snow. I was seventeen, and I wasn’t about to let anything stop me from getting to Emma’s house. I would’ve walked across Virginia to stop the thrumming in my chest, and yet, I’m not sure the thrumming ever stopped. 

On the phone, Emma was distracted, her voice without its usual intimacy. Her parents were stuck out of town for the night. School had already been called for the next day. I heard voices in the background. Male voices. Laughter. She was vague when I asked who was there. I simply left the house and started walking. I had to get to Emma and figure things out.

Emma was my first everything. Girlfriend. Love. Experience. We’d met when she starting seeing one of my friends. We’d often get stuck together when he’d had too much to drink. We bonded over our love of music. I was a year older, but she was far wiser. She and the friend didn’t last long. A few months later I ran into her at a party. We ended up in the car, talking through the night. Tom Petty was playing on the radio. When she kissed me goodbye, I was already in love.  

These days, I work in an office and play guitar on the weekends with a local band. The walk is my dirty little secret. My skeleton. My offering to the past. And they haven’t been without drama. I got mugged about ten years ago, around midnight on my way home. I’ve been chased by a dog and had beer bottles chucked at my head. I’ve had more than one close calls with semi-trucks barreling down the road. I’ve written a song about the walks. And while I can’t see myself doing this in twenty years, I can’t see myself not doing this in twenty years, either. 

I’m about three miles in and missing the gloves. The skin over my knuckles is cracked, burning from the cold as I place my fist to my palm. I wiggle my fingers. All the while my feet keep moving. 

Walking helps my brain. I can’t sit for long periods of time, as though I need to outrun my thoughts. My irrational fears. Myself. Nervous energy, compulsion, time travel. Whatever you want to call it. 

Miles four and five are spent meandering inside my head. I’m coming up on the gas station sign glowing in the distance. The sign was different twenty years ago, the station’s been remodeled since my brief run in with Emma’s mother there, almost two years after the funerals. She was a shell of the country club hostess with the wide smile and big, kind eyes. By then her face was hollow and lined, marking the defeat and anguish left by her daughter’s death. I’m not even sure she heard me when I told her I was sorry, that wished things had been different. I never told her how I dealt with it by walking to her house.   

Past a row of office buildings. Almost there. The asphalt and parking lines are sheeted with furry snow where tall grass once swayed in the breeze. Where the old, white clapboard church stood as a landmark against changing times. 

The church had been ransacked, the stain glass windows removed, the copper stripped, the saggy roof given way to wildlife. Emma and I went there some days after school. Walking in, the rafters would come alive, wings fluttering as the birds took flight. We’d bring a blanket, smoke cigarettes, make out as the swoosh of traffic blended with breeze and birdsongs. 

Now, with snow coming sideways beneath the amber parking lot lights, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the lazy afternoon sun streaming through the bullet-shaped windows. 

The church was bulldozed five years ago, around the time Emma’s mother passed away. Emma’s father sold the house, but the current owners have withstood the offers and maintained the large tract of land where Emma’s horses used to roam. 

Rock pillars stand at the entrance to the driveway, where I’d been on that fateful night. I’d watched Emma laughing with Julie, along with Hannah, and Aaron, beaming with an invincible burst of life as she and a long-haired boy walked to the car. Nathan. A friend of Aaron’s. I didn’t know his name then. I read it in the paper with the other names the next day. 

Nathan had his arm slung casually over Emma’s shoulders. It seemed like a familiar gesture, as he kept her close in the falling snow. There, in my soaked hoodie, my heart had frozen in time. I stood without moving, unable to rush down there and ask her what was happening. Up until then I’d considered hiking to her house a romantic gesture. Now, I worried what she might think of me, coming all that way, spying on her from the driveway. 

Part of me hoped she was just seeing her friends off, that she might go inside and try to call me for one of our marathon conversations in the dark. But then she got in the car. One headlight was out as they zoomed up the driveway and past me, into the world, leaving Emma’s storybook smile and unblemished youth etched in eternity. 

The car slid off a bridge a half hour later. All five passengers perished. Perished—is how the paper put it. Casualties of the Blizzard of ’95.  

Maybe I’m walking all this way for a girl who was about to break my heart. But I can’t help thinking she might be alive had I marched down there and started a fight. If I’d shoved Nathan or asked her what was going on. Would it have changed history? I’ll never know the answer. 

All I know, as I turn around to begin the long trek home, is that I’ll be back next year, and probably the year after that. 

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