Incredibly excited to get to feature another Russell Brakefield story! His last story here on SSL, “Weatherball Blue,” was published almost exactly two years ago.
Russ is one of my favorite poets and just one of my favorite people, and has kinda sneakily across the last handful of years evolved into one of my favorite short story writers. His stories often feel classic, recalling an almost kind of “dirty realism” vibe from the 80s that I can be a real sucker for, while also always feeling incredibly contemporary and fresh and new. A little familiar and also always uniquely Brakefieldian.
I love getting sucked into the worlds of his stories — spending time with his characters, his sentences — and I hope you all enjoy this one, too.
—Aaron Burch
Editor, Short Story, Long
“The Woman In White”
They had just passed the Four Corners when the snow hit. Big flakes smacked the windows like someone was dumping flour across the desert. The sudden spray of starlight over the hood might have been beautiful, had it not been Brad’s decision to pass over the motels in Cortez and keep on driving through the night.
They were talking again about having children, repeating the same conversations they’d had for the last half-decade. Brad was making his usual arguments about love and connection and purpose. Robyn was making her usual arguments too. She was just wrapping the one about imminent environmental apocalypse when the storm came on.
“I give it a decade,” she said, staring out the passenger window. “Ten years and we’ll all be sucking water off jellyfish in state-sanctioned camps. Ten years until the start of the end. Why bring a new human into that?”
Brad tightened his grip on the wheel, ten and two like he hadn’t done since high school. The storm had snapped to white-out conditions, and one of his wipers was shoddy, bent so it left a football-shaped swath of windshield untouched. He should have replaced them before they left. He should have gotten a tune up. He should have just let Robyn pay for a rental car like she’d wanted. And he definitely should have agreed to stop when they’d had the chance.
“This is nasty,” he said, squinting through the snow. “I think we should pull off.”
“Pull off?” Robyn swiped at the condensation inside the front window. “Pull off where?”
They’d stopped an hour before at a travel center on the reservation where Brad had peed and Robyn had bought a cherry flavored pickle out of a tub at the register. He could still see the neon red stain on her lips, even in the dark of the car, even in a snowstorm. Since then, they hadn’t seen a single gas station or town or truck stop.
“I told you we should have stopped in Durango,” said Robyn. “You always do this.”
This was the part of their argument about having children that usually went unsaid, and though Robyn didn’t say it now either, Brad could feel it in the car with them, snuggled up next to her ideas about climate disaster and overpopulation: Brad’s competence never quite matched his confidence. His optimism about the world, which was nearly spiritual, vastly outmatched his actual ability to navigate that world. In other words, words that Robyn had never said but that he knew she thought, he was sort of a loser. A screwup. A deadbeat. Even this trip—Robyn’s suggestion of a winter getaway to the Grand Canyon—was actually, Brad knew, meant to be a distraction from the fact that he’d been out of work for eight months. It was her way of trying to get him off the couch, and perhaps her attempt to restart their relationship as well.
Brad tried to focus on the road. Snow and ice whipped across the windshield. He set the image of the Canyon in his brain, drew a straight line and willed them there. He had wanted, more than anything, to see the Canyon at sunrise. Now it was looking like they wouldn’t make it at all. If we could just see the sun come up, he thought, just sit for a moment at the edge, then everything would realign. All would be set right again.
*
When Robyn poked the map on the dash, it showed nothing but grainy green desert in front of them. No towns or landmarks. Not a single icon for gas or fast food. She shifted in her seat and watched the two bars of reception blink in and out. Brad was still talking about the weather report he’d heard on the radio. “Clear sailing all the way. I swear that’s what I heard.”
Robyn picked up her earlier argument where she’d left off, anything so she didn’t have to focus on the snow battering the windshield. “I’m just saying, the world is already becoming less hospitable every day. I can’t imagine ten years from now.” She leaned and gripped the dash. “Air quality alone is reason to stop populating. I read a study from Mexico about how all the birds are falling out of the sky. Because of the smog. The bad air. A few years from now kids won’t even be able to go outside. They’ll suffocate on their way to school—”
Robyn stopped talking mid-sentence. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
Brad had fallen silent at the wheel, squinting into the squall.
“Really, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go there.” Robyn put a hand on his shoulder. “Just nervous talking. I wasn’t talking about Brynn. Really.”
“Enough,” Brad snorted. He had never raised her voice to her before, but these two terse syllables were as close as he might get. “Just let me focus on the road.”
Among the things that went unspoken in these conversations about forecasted climate collapse and hypothetical eco-catastrophe was the all too real devastation that had marked Brad’s childhood. His younger sister Brynn had drowned while the two of them were swimming in a reservoir when they were kids, Brad having to run the two miles back to his parents’ house to tell them that Brynn had gone under the cold water and had never come back up. Brad had been twelve at the time. Brynn only nine.
For Robyn, the senselessness of this tragedy was such an obvious tally in the “don’t have kids” column. This was not how Brad thought about it of course, and not a position Robyn could argue in good faith. What resulted was a muteness on the topic, an avoidance that tipped their conversations always back into more conjectural territories, back to microplastics and population growth, to childcare and finances and the state of global politics.
Now, in her corner of the car, Robyn held her breath, picturing a smaller version of Brad submerged in a bottomless lake, his skin running a deep, inky blue. “I’m sorry,” she said again, though she wasn’t totally sure she needed to be.
*
The snow kept coming, the windshield getting dirtier, the wheels spinning on ice. Brad slowed and punched his high beams, searching desperately for a lane. He tried to tune out Robyn’s voice, tried not to think about his sister’s lungs filling up with dirty snow.
“Robyn, we’ve gotta stop. I can’t see a thing.”
Robyn was staring into her phone like it was a crystal ball. “We can’t just stop in the middle of nowhere. The shoulder’s a mess.”
Brad knew she was right. If they pulled off now there was no guarantee they’d make it back onto the road. He grasped the wheel tighter and kept driving, nearly blind, into the snow.
It was here, in the quivering eye of this blizzard, that Brad saw something. In front of him, suddenly, appeared an apparition, a swirling figure that took the shape of a woman in a white gown or swirling white robes in the middle of the road. Her figure emerged suddenly, her white contours popping from the icy backdrop as in one of those magic eye posters Brad had on his wall as a kid. He smashed the breaks and skidded. The car lurched right then left, then launched into a spin. Robyn screamed and braced herself against the side of the car. Brad pulled the wheel, trying to stay on the road and avoid the woman at the same time, and sent the car careening, Robyn’s side first, into a snowbank in the ditch.
In the eerie quiet after they skidded out, Brad patted himself down, feeling to make sure he was still there. Then he grabbed at Robyn in the passenger seat, checking her too, touching her shoulders and torso and face to make sure she was unharmed. “You’re hurt? You’re ok? What hurts?” He was shouting, even though the only other sound was the low hum of the engine and the uneven thwack of the windshield wipers. “You’re ok?”
“I’m ok,” she choked. “I’m ok.” She was sobbing but seemed uninjured, shivering as he pulled her close. He held her, feeling his own body rocking with adrenaline. Then, just as his breathing began to slow, Brad remembered the woman. He let go of Robyn and stepped quickly out of the car, scanning in both directions. Robyn was shouting at him, but he ignored her and turned in circles, searching for the woman in white. The snow was still coming down, the silver strip of highway behind them interrupted only by their woozy skid marks. Just as quickly as she had appeared, the woman in white was gone. Brad stared into the darkness for a long time, his brain humming with the sound of squealing tires, snow sucking across the desert. When he drifted back into himself, Robyn was still yelling his name.
“Brad!? Get back in the car. What are you doing?”
He got in and blasted heat on his bare hands. “There was a woman,” he said, but his voice was feeble beneath the blowing hot air.
“A what?” Robyn stared at him. “A woman?”
“I saw a woman in the road,” he said. “A woman in white robes. Sort of floating there.” He tried to describe the woman, but even as he talked, he realized that he probably hadn’t seen a woman after all, that it was more likely he’d reacted to some other spark in his eye or in his mind’s eye, some shift in wind or weather that had nearly killed them both. “I’m sorry.” He pushed his palms to his yes. “I thought I saw something. Must have just been the snow.”
In response Robyn simply shook her head and got out to fetch the shovel from the trunk.
It took the two of them nearly an hour to dig the car out, Robyn behind the wheel and Brad pushing from behind. They worked in silence, apart from Brad shouting occasional instructions. It wasn’t until Robyn wedged the floor mats beneath the wheels and shifted into second that the tires caught and sent the car back onto the highway.
“I’m sorry I didn’t think of that,” Brad said when he got behind the wheel again. Robyn stared out her window in silence, radiating with anger, or perhaps something even worse, worry or frustration or simple disappointment.
Back on the road, Brad throttled down so that they were barely moving at all, as if the desert wind and not the overworked engine were pushing them through the night. Finally, mercifully, after they’d limped another twenty grueling miles, both of them tensed to utter silence, a light appeared. What first looked like a moon cutting through the storm turned into a flickering gas station neon, hovering in front of them like an angel’s dirty halo.
Brad pulled in and parked under the awning beside the pumps. His jaw ached from clenching. His collar sagged with sweat. When he clicked off the car, they both sat listening to the ticking of the engine.
“Should we talk about it?” said Brad. “I feel like we should talk about it.” The cold bumper echoed in his palms, the weight of the car in his back and shoulders.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” said Robyn.
In front of them, the empty gas stations sat like a mirage, a flickering shelter in the storm. One lonely street dog huddled by the doors gnawing a hot dog wrapper, its black coat slicked with snow.
“Dog,” said Brad, pointing. “Unless I’m seeing things again.”
Robyn shook her head. “No.” She unbuckled to get out. “That one’s real.”
Robyn was still shaking when she stepped inside, her body still regulating, still moving between fits of bone-deep shivers. Her anger had fallen away, but in its place cut a sharp adrenaline edge, like a needle being thread beneath the skin.
“Hey,” said the cashier, as if this were any ordinary gas station at any ordinary time of day.
The overhead lights flickered as Robyn studied the young woman standing behind the counter. She was young, seemingly too young, a skinny white girl with one side of her head shaved, a row of garish stitches arcing in a jagged U shape above her ear. Gauge earrings. A honeybee tattooed in thick black lines above her right eyebrow. Her eyes were rheumy and bulging, but a baby-face hung somewhere behind the scars and thick blue mascara. A bolt of steely recognition ran down Robyn’s spine.
In appearance, Robyn actually shared no similarities with this young woman. Not in hair or eye color, not in height or build, not even in complexion. But there was something else—something in the way the young woman carried herself, in the way she slouched and slightly swayed, and in the desperate threads of rebellion she’d woven into her clothes and hair and face—that made Robyn feel as if she was looking into a broken mirror.
“You ok lady?”
Robin had been staring. “Sorry. It’s been a long night. The weather…” she motioned outside. “We skidded out back there and had to dig through the snow. I thought we were going to freeze.”
“Yikes,” said the girl, but did not change her expression. She stared at Robyn, her mouth slack, a wad of blue gum hanging. “There are a couple hotels not far. Tuba City. Cameron.” She looked out the window, then behind her at a security camera mounted on the wall. “You can’t stay here long though. Company policy. It’s a safety thing.”
“No. I get it.” Robyn moved closer to the counter, and they stood in awkward silence.
Robyn couldn’t put a finger on exactly what it was she recognized in this young woman. Though avoiding the tragedy of Brad’s childhood took up an outsized amount of the couple’s energy, Robyn did have her own past, and there were things from that past that she too worked to keep off the table. She had no untimely deaths to contend with, no prolonged years of bereavement as a young person. From the outside, her life had been perfectly privileged and pedestrian. But of course there are ways that privilege and pedestrianism can form another sort of sadness, perhaps especially if you are wired a certain way, perhaps especially if you are a young woman, pressed by the terrible constructs of the world, constructs that men like Brad are not bothered by.
Outside, Brad was still fumbling with the gas pump.
“Not sure what’s taking him so long,” said Robyn.
The girl shrugged
Robyn searched for something else to say. “Do you spend much time in the Canyon? Being so close?”
The girl brought a hand to her mouth and bit at one of her nails. “Haven’t in a long time,” she mumbled. “I work third shift mostly. Plus…” She paused, and her face blanched. “My father used to guide there when I was young. I don’t go there anymore.”
The girl let her statement mix with the humming lights and rotten gas station air, the past tense of her father pulling at different strings in Robyn’s brain. Dead? Estranged? Lost to the mysterious winds of the desert? She thought about her own parents, who she hadn’t talked to in years, and about all the ways they’d tried and failed to speak to each other when she was a younger woman. She thought about the way Brad’s family had been torn apart by the shrapnel of their loss.
“Frankly, I don’t really understand the appeal. It’s just a big hole in the ground right?
The girl shrugged again.
“I wanted to stop earlier, but my husband has this thing about seeing the Canyon at sunrise. Then the accident. He thought he saw something in the road. I think night driving is getting to him. And the snow.”
“Not the snow,” said the girl as she tapped at her phone on the counter.
“What?”
“Maybe not the snow. People always see things on this road. No matter the weather.”
“What, like animals?”
“No, not animals.”
Robyn waited for the girl to elaborate, but she kept staring at her phone. “Like ghosts?”
The girl shrugged. “Could be ghosts. If you want. Or spirits. Ancestors. Aliens. Messages from beyond.”
“Omens?”
The girl shrugged again. “Omens are bad right? So not just omens I guess.”
Robyn forced an awkward laugh. “Now you sound like my husband. He’s always looking for signs.”
The girl shrugged again, like it was automatic, like it was the only movement available to her. “People see these glowing orbs out there sometimes, spheres sort of floating around. Tourists are always crashing out in here.”
Robyn felt a flush rise on her cheeks. “Sorry,” she said. The cashier shrugged again.
Brad walked in then and put his hand on Robyn’s shoulder. “Says the card reader’s down.”
The girl punched some buttons on the register in front of him. “Should be good now,” she said. “I was just telling your wife that there are some hotels not far.”
Brad nodded. “I think we are going to try to make it to the park tonight. Snow seems to be slowing down.”
The girl looked behind her again at the security camera mounted on the wall.
“Thanks,” said Robyn, and led Brad back out to the car.
By the time Brad had gassed up and cleaned the windshields, the snow had lightened to a thin mist.
“You ok?” said Brad, getting back behind the wheel. “Still up for this?”
By “this” he meant the trip they were currently on, and his obsession with getting to the Canyon for sunrise, but of course he also meant all of it—their relationship, their endless conversations about the future, the future.
As they pulled back onto the highway, Robyn worked the image of the young cashier over and over in her mind. Where would she sleep that night? Who would be waiting for her when she got home?
“She was so young,” said Robyn.
“Who?”
“That girl. She was so young.”
“I worked at the gas station in high school,” said Brad, giving the car some speed now that the roads had started to clear.
“All night? Alone?”
“Well, no,” said Brad. He was still wet and disheveled from bailing the car, but a new spark sputtered in his eyes now that he’d recalibrated his mission. He turned on the radio and picked up speed. “She seemed ok to me.”
In the darkness they passed a farmhouse and a scattering of low outbuildings, stables and barns rotting into the earth. Beyond, a few white horses moved through the mist. Probably just ranch stock, penned and saddled like any others. Still, a part of Robyn wanted so badly for them to be more, wanted them to be wild stallions loping untethered across the frozen desert. Ghosts of horses past or specters of an earlier age walking out to greet her. But just then, she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe.
They got to the park just before dawn, so early that the ranger station gates were still lifted, no one inside the little booth to take their toll. Another sign, thought Brad, that this was a consecrated journey, even with the near catastrophe the night before. Robyn had fallen asleep beside him in the passenger seat, and he didn’t wake her as he eased through the park’s winding roads out towards the Watchtower, the viewing stage he’d been holding in his mind for the last several hundred miles.
When Robyn suggested the trip, Brad had seen that as a sign as well, and he’d agreed to it without telling her that he’d been to the Canyon before, that he had visited as a boy. The memory surfaced again now, sharp in contrast to foggy pre-dawn light. Sitting beside his sister and his father on the Canyon’s edge at dawn, eating the most delicious, smashed, car-warm peanut butter sandwich. It was a memory that Brad had held close, had protected so ferociously his entire life, he couldn’t bring himself to tell Robyn, couldn’t add it to the pile of mysticism and cosmic trauma he’d brought to every other aspect of their relationship. If he said it aloud, he was sure it would drift away, scatter like dust into the Canyon’s gaping maw and disappear forever. But also, he had convinced himself in the leadup to this trip that if he could recreate this moment with Robyn, it would surely mean something. For weeks he’d been imagining them walking to the edge and casting their problems into the Canyon, holding hands and aligning together beside the wonders of time and nature and geology. He had also imagined, if he was honest with himself, his sister walking up from one of the Canyon paths to greet them, still wearing her orange striped bathing suit. He imagined putting his hand in Brynn’s and squeezing it lightly, then letting her go, for good, and turning back into his life utterly renewed.
But when they finally got there, when they parked and he woke Robyn and they bundled up and followed signs out to the Watchtower’s viewing stage, there was nothing to see. The snow had stopped, but a thick fog had set down on the Canyon at dawn so that everything around them was cast nearly invisible. Brad’s hand, when he extended it in front of his face, disappeared completely.
“We can come back tomorrow,” said Robyn, taking his arm. “Maybe it will be better tomorrow.” Her voice still wobbled with sleep.
“For sure,” said Brad, but by the time they got back to the car he felt pummeled by waves of shame, angry at himself for putting stock in this pilgrimage, just as so many times before he’d put too much weight into this or that gesture or journey or symbol or guidepost, all the answers he’d found that were not really answers at all. Of course there’d been no woman in the road. Of course Brynn was not waiting for him here in the desert. Of course seeing the Canyon at dawn would not actually change the trajectory of his life, or the relationship he had to his past, or the way he was with Robyn.
“We came here with my Dad once,” he said, staring down at the keys in his lap. “When I was a boy. Just my father and Brynn and I.”
“You never told me that. Why didn’t you tell me that?” said Robyn, though she did not look surprised.
Brad shrugged. “She was obsessed with geology. With rocks and things. She used to carry so many stones around that her pants would sag. My dad got her one of those things…” Brad cupped his hands in the shape of a barrel in front of him and twisted.
“A tumbler,” said Robyn.
Brad nodded. “A tumbler.” He put the keys in the ignition but did not start the car. “Maybe I’ve conflated things again. Our stuff and my stuff.”
Robyn pushed her arm around Brad’s neck in the darkness, stroked the back of his head, and for a brief moment he thought about their earliest days together, steamy sessions in his car or in Robyn’s tiny studio apartment. But then Robyn merely pushed her hand against his head, sweeping his hair back as if he was a feverish child.
“You would be good at it,” Robyn said. “It isn’t that.” Her hand pressed his temple, and he felt a faint pulse reverberate there. “You’d find a way to be good at it. We would.”
Brad pulled away slightly and straightened in his seat. Through the window the foggy horizon looked like its own geologic specimen, its own canyon wall, the fossilized surface of a trilobite or the inside of a webby agate.
“You’d at least be good at the rock tumbling part.” Robyn smiled. “And the ghost stories.”
*
When they finally backtracked and found a hotel, Robyn couldn’t sleep. She lay awake for two hours before she eventually gave up, got dressed and went down to the lobby instead.
The lobby was still clouded by a sticky-sweet syrup-and-coffee smell from the meager continental breakfast in the corner. All Robyn wanted to do was walk, to put her body in motion in a way that made sense biologically, rather than in service of Brad’s cosmic quest, but when she stepped outside, the cold wind beat her back, and she was forced instead to walk laps in the lobby until her fatigue caught up with her.
“You ok?” the lobby attendant asked on her sixth or seventh lap. “Anything you need?”
Robyn began to apologize, trying to explain about their long night, about the walking and the cold. She was aimlessly spinning a rack of postcards as she talked when something caught her eye. In a row of cards printed in faux sepia, she flipped to one featuring a woman in billowing white robes floating above a silver strip of river. The card had been badly photo-shopped, the woman’s photo clipped from some other time and pasted sloppily on a more contemporary print of the Canyon from above. But there she was anyways, the woman in white, the woman Brad had swerved to miss in the snowstorm, hovering in robes and a wispy flower crown.
“What are these?” asked Robyn.
“Oh just old ghost stories,” said the woman. “I think there’s a price here—”
“This one though,” said Robyn, holding the card in front of her. “What is this one?”
The woman stared. “I think there’s a little blurb on the back there. Probably says ‘The Woman In White’ or ‘The Wailing Woman.’ That’s what we called her in high school at least. Lots of different stories about her. She died in the Canyon or she’s an angel watching over others who died. Sometimes she’s a guide for lost people. Or lost souls. Sometimes she ushers in fertility. But then sometimes she’s a herald of death, so who knows.” The woman smiled now, as if she was remembering an old friend. “People tend to see her more on the North Rim though I think, so you might be spared a visit.” She laughed. “Unless you are meant to find her, I guess.”
Robyn felt as if she’d been punctured, all the nervous energy from the night siphoning out of her and being replaced by something else, a heavier feeling, a feeling of dread, a feeling of her reality being split open like soft rock. She thought of Brad upstairs asleep, his dreams filled with hopeful spirits. She thought of the girl at the gas station, her nights filled with sleepy premonitions. The woman was still talking about The Wailing Woman when Robyn dropped the postcard back in the rack and hurried upstairs to her room.
The next day, they drove back into the park, this time stopping at the gate to pay the fee. The fog had lifted, and Robyn watched eagerly as they drove through the trees and as they walked the path from the parking lot. A few families wandered near the Watchtower, but Robyn and Brad were mostly alone as they made their way to a bench beside the edge. As they approached, and as Robyn peered for the first time over the brink, her stomach lurched into her throat. She had a sudden, strange feeling that she was being buoyed, being pulled by some elemental magic towards the rocks and river below.
“Wow,” she said, which felt idiotic and insignificant. She had not anticipated being so moved. Brad, for his part, stared ahead, perhaps as stoic as he’d ever been in his life. Robyn thought about the postcard in the lobby, and how she might form some sort of all-encompassing apology to Brad. “I’m sorry we didn’t see the sun come up,” is what she came up with instead.
“It’s ok.” Brad began to apologize himself, but Robyn cut him off.
“Tell me how it was, when you were here before. With Brynn.”
Brad talked about waiting in the darkness with his father, about the dramatic colors and light falling onto the rocks, about the long, ghostly shadows, about how the cliffs warmed beneath them as they sat in silence and watched, about the incredible quiet of the canyon at dawn. He talked about Brynn and about peanut butter sandwiches.
“I’m not doing it justice,” he said eventually, and waved the air in front of him. But Robyn was seeing it clearly in her mind, as clearly as anything. And as she formed the image of the three of them, she saw herself there too. In her reverie the four of them sat on the edge in silence, the horizon slowly brightening. And as the darkness faded, the sun tipped up and poured buckets of pink paint into the Canyon. And somewhere below them in the reaches of the Canyon, Robyn imagined the girl from the gas station, following her father down the winding trails. She too was made young, in this imagining, a young girl, but still with her shaved head and her stitches and her thick-lined tattoos. And of course Robyn saw The Woman in White, The Wailing Woman floating across the surface of the river, guiding them along the endless bottom of the Canyon. And the Canyon was singing, singing to Brad and his sister, singing now to Robyn as well, singing for a thousand dead sisters and fathers and mothers, a thousand wild horses, a thousand lost dogs. A thousand children, born and not. A thousand ghost orbs and wailing women in white. But singing too another song, not just an elegy, but something else, a chorus of the dead, voices calling across time to the land of the living.
Robyn leaned her head against Brad’s shoulder. “I feel like I’m floating,” she said.
Brad nodded and exhaled, as if he had just finally, after all the miles they’d travelled together, caught his breath. “Maybe you are.”
STORY:
Russell Brakefield is the author of the poetry collections Field Recordings, My Modest Blindness, and Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West. He received his MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program and is Assistant Professor in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver.
*
ART:
Nina Semczuk’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Sinking City Literary Journal, Coal Hill Review, and elsewhere. Her art, pottery, and comics can be found online and around the Hudson Valley.
Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Russell about this story.
Gorgeous story.
Beautifully told story. Thanks for posting this.