The Crosswalk
{excerpt from THE MERCY RECORDS: Episode-1/The Substitute}
The Crosswalk
She came back on a Sunday.
Route 8, mid-October, the trees stripped to their bones and the dark coming down the way it does in Pennsylvania — sudden and complete, like a decision that had already been made.
She had rehearsed the drive in her head a hundred times.
The slag fields through the treeline. The water tower with MERCY FURNACE in letters that had been fading since before she was born. The long bend past the old furnace grounds where the road dipped and the air changed.
Went heavier.
Like the atmosphere remembered what had burned there.
She had imagined every detail correctly.
What she hadn't prepared for was the feeling that the town had been exhaling for nine years and had finally run out of breath.
At the corner of Deller and Main she stopped for the light.
A man crossed in front of her.
Canvas work jacket. Somewhere in his fifties. A face she almost knew — a face that had aged past the face she remembered, the way all faces here had aged past the faces she remembered.
He looked at her through the glass.
He stopped.
Not a smile.
Not a wave.
Recognition.
And behind the recognition, something that had been waiting behind it for a long time. Patient. Still.
Like something in a jar.
Both his hands were at his sides.
Open.
Fingers slightly apart.
Like a man who had just set something down and was waiting to be told whether he should pick it up again.
He moved on.
Nora became aware of her right hand.
It had come up two inches off the steering wheel.
She watched it happen.
Palm turned slightly toward the glass. The small beginning of a wave. Not a wave she had decided to give.
A response.
Her body answering recognition with recognition.
Before she had agreed to answer.
She sat through three seconds of green light before she noticed it had changed.
Nora Bellamy had not been home in nine years.
Mercy Furnace wasn't surprised.
That was the part she couldn't stop thinking about.
Episode One of THE MERCY RECORDS is live now.