Wawa by Ashley LeFever

The man who got out of the car looked like he hadn’t showered in a week. He was tall, with a black goatee that nearly blended into his unshaven cheeks. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was greasy , and his clothes were so rumpled that he had probably slept in them . This was the guy I was trying to get a ride from.

“Car trouble?” the man inquired.

I bit my tongue against several responses that immediately popped into my head. Why else would I be standing in the snow on the side of this godforsaken highway in twenty below weather? I tried for a friendly smile. “Yeah, it died on me about two hours ago. Could I catch a ride with you to the next town?” The snow swirled around my ankles, somehow finding its way into my shoes.

“Sure,” he said. “Hop in.”

As I opened the car door, I imagined my mother reading the paper at her kitchen table. She would put on her gold rimmed glasses, take a sip of her tea, and spew it across the room as she saw my name, my name, used to identify the body of a twenty year old girl with her throat slashed on the side of this highway. Or maybe, in this sparsely populated icebox of a Canadian province, they wouldn’t find me for days and she’d wonder why I never showed up at her house. Maybe she’d even report it.

“You’re letting in the cold air,” the man said, pulling me from my dark thoughts.

Still I hesitated. This guy looked far from trustworthy and the cluttered mess inside his car did nothing to calm my fears. He could be hiding anything in that. But in this weather, I could either take my chances or freeze to death. I climbed in.

“So I saw that you had Michigan plates. What brings you to Northern Ontario?” the man asked, drumming callused fingertips on the steering wheel to the sound of some bad 80's music.

“Visiting family,” I replied vaguely, wondering how far away the next town was. The snow crusted evergreen seemed to go on forever.

“Me too.” The man lit a cigarette and cracked the window, letting in the icy fingers of air from outside. “Been too long,” he said with a smile, taking a long drag from the cigarette.

I mumbled something that sounded like an appropriate response, idly scraping the window frost with a thumbnail. Been too long. It had been two years since I ventured this far north and it didn’t seem like it had been long enough. Ten years wouldn’t have been long enough. I continued to scratch at the frost. Suddenly I could feel the man’s eyes on me and I snatched my hand to my lap guiltily, remembering my mother’s annoyance at the fingerprinted window when I was little.

Chuckling at my reaction, the man asked, “so, how is it that a pretty little girl like you is up here all by yourself?”

Alarm bells went off in my head as all of the thought from earlier came back. Blood on the snow, scavengers picking apart my remains… The warm car suddenly seemed like a cage. I sat up straighter and chewed my bottom lip, trying to think of what to say.

The man raised an eyebrow. “Relax kid, I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, flicking his cigarette out the window.

“Of course not,” I said, trying not to sound as if that wasn’t exactly what I was worried about. Pretty little girl? Creepy… The words “no escape” flashed through my head as I peered through the thickly treed forests, willing a town to appear.

“Look, my name’s Mike. I’m a farmer from Southern Ontario, and I’m not an axe murderer in disguise,” Mike said, chuckling a little. “Feel better now?”

I couldn’t resist a laugh. “Yeah,” I said, a little abashedly. After all, calling me a pretty little girl may have been a tad inappropriate considering the circumstances, but it was hardly anything to feel threatened by. I sized Mike up out of the corner of my eye and decided that I could handle him if I was wrong. “My name’s Lily.”

Mike smiled. “Pretty name,” he said, raking fingers through stringy, dark hair.

“My mom’s name is Rose. Guess she thought it’d be cute or something,” I said, rolling my eyes. Iced over lakes appeared as we topped a rise, surrounded by tree-covered mountain.

“Is that who you’re going to visit?” he asked.

I fished my chapstick out of my purse and rolled the tube between my fingers, trying to unfreeze it. Several moose dotted the landscape outside, goofy looking creatures with long, stilt-like legs that looked too fragile to support their monstrous bodies. My mother could cook moose like no other. I sighed. “No, my sister had a baby,” I replied, wondering how I was going to meet my niece without seeing my mother. “A little girl named Amy.” I smiled as I thought f the picture s Sis emailed me. The day I got them, I was showing them to strangers on the street.

“Cool,” Mike said reaching over to change the radio station. There were limited options for radio stations this far north, but AC/DC was much better than whatever crap he was playing earlier. “We should be in Wawa soon.”

“Good,” I said, a little sleepily. Wawa. After that, it was only one more hour to home. With any luck I could stay the night in Wawa and put off this visit for one more day If it wasn’t for Sis being so insistent, I likely never would have gone. She was right though. With a baby to care for and her husband’s work schedule being so demanding, she couldn’t make it to Michigan to come visit me. Besides, what kind of aunt would I be to Amy if I didn’t make the effort to meet her? It had already been six months. I wrapped my coat around me tightly, snuggling into the warm seat. Two hours stranded in the freezing cold had sucked the life out of me. I closed my eyes and drifted away.

The water was warm against my naked skin. I dunked my head under and popped back up, smiling at the sunshine. Wiping the water out of my eyes, I turned back towards shore. On the beach, there was an abandoned volleyball net and a brightly colored beach ball rolling in the wind. I swam further out into the water, no longer able to touch bottom. The red sun slid down the distant horizon. It was time to go. I dog paddled back towards shore, but I couldn’t see the beach. Panicked, I started swimming in circles, seeing nothing but water. The wind picked up and the water, once as smooth as glass, became rough and choppy. I turned again and saw… Sails? A ship! Desperately I swam toward it , fighting the waves that we re trying to push me back. Kick, splash, kick, faster! I looked up and screamed as I saw the ship was further away. I swam harder than ever, choking on the water, watching the ship float off into the distance. Water flooded my mouth and nose as the waves finally enveloped me, pulling me into their depths…

I sat up with a gasp, amazed to find myself in a car. I took several deep breaths to clear my head, trying to forget the feeling of the water filling my lungs. I realized Mike was looking at me with concern.

“You were thrashing quite a bit,” Mike said, “you okay?”

“Just peachy,” I replied groggily.

“We’re in Wawa,” he said.

The gigantic statue of a Canada goose on the outskirts of town made me smile in spite of myself. When I would visit Wawa with my family as a child, the goose meant the end of an hour-long car ride. It meant Sis and I could play outside in mom’s friend Judy’s backyard, while they sipped iced tea and fed us candy. Judy always seemed to have a steady supply of candy in her house. Idly, I wondered if she still lived in town.

“Want me to drop you off at the coffee shop?” Mike asked.

“How about the nearest bar? I’m not a minor in this province and I could really use a drink,” I said, seeing a flashing sign for “Johnny’s” a block away. Down a side street, I could see a couple of teenagers playing hockey on the road, prepared to pull the nets out of the way for passing cars. I smiled as I remembered the guys trying to teach me hockey when I was twelve. I learned a little about the game, but the biggest lesson I learned that day was to never, never be a goalie without the right safety equipment. Mom and Sis thought it was funny, but those bruises didn’t go away for weeks.

“Sure,” Mike said, pulling up to the bar. The parking lot had two other cars in it, both covered in a layer of frost. Children played in the snow on the edge of the lot, laughing and shoving each other, racing for the tops of the snow banks.

“Well Mike, thanks for everything,” I said, stepping out into the cold. His response was drowned out by the squealing laughter of the kids outside, who had begun a snowball fight. I waved as Mike drove away, and laughed as one of the gutsier kids threw a snowball at the back of his departing car. At least, I laughed until I realized those snowballs were starting to fall in my direction. Grabbing my duffel bag, I tried to cover my head with the hood of my coat and ran to the bar, avoiding the barrage. “Gotta be faster than that!” I called to them as I darted into the bar.

The bar was warm and cozy, a pleasant change from the frigid outdoors. The bartender, a portly, balding man who was probably the owner, looked up from his newspaper with a startled expression at my entrance. His only other customer was too absorbed in a hockey game on TV to notice. I dropped my stuff beside a barstool, still giggling a little, and ordered a beer, pulling my driver’s license and money out of my purse.

“Michigan girl, eh?” the bartender commented in a lilting, Canadian accent, checking my ID. “You’re quite a ways from home.”

I smiled at the accent I hadn’t noticed so much with Mike, remembering how people commented on mine when I first moved to Michigan. “Yeah, on my way to White River to see some family.” I told him about my car and asked if I could give him a few dollars to call Sis.

“Lily! Is everything okay? He expected you here by now,” Sis said. She sounded a little harried, as if she was trying to talk on the phone, do dishes, and chased Amy at the same time.

I explained to Sis what happened, smiling as I heard Amy rattling her toys in the background. Sis told me she’d make the necessary calls about the car for me and asked if I needed her to pick me up

“No, that’s okay. I’ll get a hotel here and we can figure things out in the morning. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Lil, I don’t like the thought of you staying in a strange town by yourself,” Sis said, sounding annoyingly like mom. “It isn’t that late, I can drive out there and pick you up.”

“Sis, I’m fine. I’m twenty years old, I can handle getting a hotel room,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “Besides, by the time you get back home it’ll be way past Amy’s bedtime.”

Sis wasn’t put off so easily, but finally I was able to hang up the phone. I pulled out my tattered journal from my bag, planning to write about the crazy day I had.

Why does Sis treat me like a child? I began instead. I’m not a little kid anymore, she needs to stop treating me like I’m still in diapers. Of course, all things considered I should be grateful she still talks to me. I felt a pang of guilt as I wrote that. I’m happy she does though, at least someone cares. I scratched out the whole paragraph. I closed the book , slung my bag over my shoulder and left. The frigid air did nothing for my mood. Unbidden, memories came flooding back.

My mother looked up from the carefully planned agenda for Sis’ wedding,. She had been so busy with last minute planning that this was the first chance I had to talk to her. She took off her glasses with shaking hands and set them too carefully on the kitchen table. “Lily, what are you saying? You had a miscarriage? You were pregnant? You’re eighteen years old!” She took a breath through clenched teeth. “How could this happen?”

“How do you think it happened? I’m sure it happened about the same way that you got pregnant with Sis,” I retorted brusquely, wondering what could have possessed me to tell my mother about this, especially the night before my sister’s wedding.

Sis looked at the two of us with the same exasperated expression it seemed she had worn every day since I reached my teen years. Shaking her head, she took her tea and walked out of the kitchen, leaving us to our fight.

“I wasn’t eighteen when I was pregnant with your sister!” Hands still shaking, she pulled a slim cigarette from her pack and lit it with a Zippo. “How could you be so irresponsible?”

“Do you think I planned this?” I asked, raising my voice. “You were only twenty when you had Sis! How is that any better?” I screamed, slapping the kitchen table with my palm.

“It’s not! I wound up married and divorced at a very young age with two girls to take care of! Is that the kind of life you want?” she yelled.

Married. I could feel the tears wanting to come as I remembered the talk with my boyfriend after the miscarriage. Heartbroken by the loss of my child, our child, I had gone to him, sobbing. I thought my life was over when he told me that he wanted to see other, apparently less fertile, people.

Mom took a deep breath. “When are you going to grow up?” Mom asked, mashing her cigarette into the ashtray.

“Grow up,” I repeated quietly, shaking with the effort of not crying. Was that all she had to say to me? Grow up? “It’s touching how concerned you are over the loss of your grandchild, Mom.”

Mom looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. “Lily,” she began, stretching a hand out towards me across the kitchen table.

“Don’t bother,” I whispered, pulling back from her touch as if she had the plague. I got up from my chair, went to the guest room, and grabbed my yet unpacked bags. I slammed the door when I left.

“Lily!” Sis yelled from the front door as I threw my bags in my car. “Come back inside! Lily, for Christ’s sake, the wedding’s tomorrow! Please!”

Crying, I got into my car and drove away. I didn’t think I could even look at my mother. How could she be so goddamned cruel when I needed her the most? I didn’t stop crying until I fell into my bed in Michigan.

I realized with a start that I had tears on my cheeks. I was crying as I was walking down a sidewalk where anyone could see. Annoyed with myself, I scrubbed them away with the sleeve of my coat before they could freeze. My poor Sis. How did she explain to the family why I wasn’t at the wedding? I was lucky that she even spoke to me anymore. The fear the she wouldn’t speak to me again if I didn’t drive up here was the biggest reason for the trip in the first place. Two years was a long time.

Two years, to drive all the way up here just to have my car break down and leave me stranded in Wawa. What a name for a town. Wawa. Anyone who isn’t a local always raises an eyebrow at it. Apparently it’s the Native American (Ojibwe dialect?) for goose. Go figure. When I was little, I had asked my mother what the deal was with the bird obsession.

“The goose isn’t just any bird, Sunshine,” she explained, holding my six year old hand as my sister ran a few steps ahead of us. “It’s a very special kind of bird.”

“Special?” I asked skeptically. In my mind it was a big, dumb bird.

“Very special,” she said. “Do you know how geese fly south for the winter in a big V?”

“Of course mommy, everyone knows that,” I giggled, skipping a little on the sidewalk.

“Well, sometimes a goose will get sick when they fly south, and they’ll land on the ground,” she said, smiling at the sudden concern on my face for the poor sick goose. “When that happens, another goose will leave the others and stay with the sick goose until it gets better.”

I was fascinated by this new piece of knowledge when I was six. At twenty, I wondered how many healthy geese ended up dying because they wouldn’t leave one of their number behind. With a sigh, I walked down the street to the statue. Setting my bag down on one of the benches, I ventured closer.

As I looked up at the goose, I thought about what my mother had told me. Why would a goose do that? It went against all survival instincts to break away from the flock? After all, how long would it take before the sick or injured goose either died or was able to fly again? I shivered as a sudden gust of wind slipped down the back of my neck, pulling me from my ruminations. It was past time to be looking for a place to stay the night.

Slinging my bag over my shoulder, I turned my head back towards town and realized I was being watched. Where had that car come from? It looked vaguely familiar… Sis. I should’ve known she wouldn’t let me stay here for the night. Smiling, I ran up to the car, almost slipping on the icy pavement.

“Hey Sis…” I began, before I realized that the soft, brown eyes, shining behind gold -rimmed glasses, didn’t belong to my sister.

“Hi Sunshine,” Mom said, taking off her glasses to wipe her eyes. “Umm, Sis told me to take her car, mine’s in the shop.” She tapped manicured fingernails on the steering wheel, chewing her bottom lip and looking down at her lap. “Are you ready to talk to me now?” She turned and looked at me hopefully, shaking hands clasping a sodden handkerchief.

Stunned, I threw my bag in the back and dropped into the seat. Hands on my knees, I took a deep breath and turned towards her, blue eyes meeting brown. I couldn’t look away.