Fog and Misfortune

I’ve had my drivers license for about a year and a half now, but if my parents knew I’m breaking curfew, in particular doing this, they’d ground me until I graduated from college. I figured on a night like tonight it would be fine. I was supposed to spend the night over at John’s house, but he got a text from one of the girls he’s been talking to asking if he could come over, and I didn’t really feel like staying at his place without him.

I could go anywhere, but looking out the top of my windshield I can see that the moon is full, there’s not a cloud in the sky, and my parents are out of town for the weekend. I could go anywhere, but I just feel like something is pulling me back home.

It’s 11:55pm and my favorite song just came on the radio. I have a 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee with a finicky bluetooth connector I’ve been messing with since leaving Johns. It’s a hand me down from my sister, not the best but it’s fairly reliable. Its headlights are growing dim and need to be replaced, but as isolated as Highway 12 is that connects the town to my house, I don’t think it really matters. The sound of pavement giving way to gravel on the side of the road rattles my Jeep since I veered too wide around a turn.

“Shit” I mutter to myself and look back at the road.

It’s not a great place to drive when you’re alone. Maybe that’s why my parents don’t like me out here. It’s not like there’s been a ton of accidents over the years, and usually when there are it’s because someone was speeding, or drinking, or maybe even high. But unless you count the nicotine pouch I put in earlier, I’m none of those things.

I feel myself start to yawn and my eyes dart to check the dash again. 11:59pm. Another curve is coming and I turn properly this time. Still all clear. I look down to check my speed, still only doing 10 over. I just passed the old Stanford house which means I’m only about 10 minutes away from home, maybe I could speed a little more.

A misty haze has begun to creep up my windshield and all around the Jeep. I look away from the road to adjust my heat settings to clear up the view. It’s not working, and quickly what started out as a normal inconvenience has blown up into a thick fog. And there’s fog everywhere.

My entire Jeep is rattling, and not just another I’m running off the road kind of rattling, it’s shaking vigorously, and I feel the tension in the wheel slipping and catching nearly simultaneously under my hands. I grip the wheel tighter. I know these roads well, and can almost drive them with my eyes closed, I think. It doesn’t matter, her white dress blends in with the fog.

*thump.*

I screeched to a halt in the middle of the road. The windshield conceded slightly to the weight of her limp body, I barely caught a glimpse of her legs when she rolled up and over the top of my Jeep. I shut off the radio, my entire body frozen and refusing to get out of the car. If it wasn’t for the low hum of my engine, I’d be sitting there with only the sound of the collision playing in my head. It was different than I would’ve thought, more blunt than crunchy.

I blinked hard and rubbed my eyes. I fell asleep. This had to be a dream. That was just a deer, right? I could hear my heart thumping deeply in my own ears, my eyes felt as if they were going to pop out of my head. Barely a moment passed, and bright headlights filled my rearview mirror, my stomach felt as if it dropped out of my body. “I’m going to jail.” I finally quivered out loud. I opened the Jeep door and stepped out. My feet were less prepared to hold my weight than I thought, I trembled hard trying to stand up but crashed to my knees.

When I looked up the headlights were gone. I never heard or saw the car drive by, and in that moment I no longer cared, the magnitude of the moment encapsulated me like a weighted blanket, and like a dark blotch against a black background I barely saw her silhouette strewn out through the fog.

“Ma’am! Ma’am, are you okay?” I managed to blurt out when I got to her. I almost pushed her onto her back with more force than I intended, but I caught myself before I even touched her, I was kneeling over her with my hands out, shaking and unsure of what to do. She wasn’t responding, and blood began to drain from the corner of her lip facing the ground.

“Oh my god, no no no.” I started to sob, my eyes were too wet for me to see properly. “I’ll call for help.” The idea finally trembled into my mind. I fumbled around for my phone out of my pocket. No service. “What?” I thought to myself. This road is isolated, but I always had service out here. It must be the fog.

This time, more gentle, I carefully rolled her onto her back. “Come on, you can do it.” I said to myself as I tried to recall how to perform CPR. We had just gone over it two weeks ago in health class. I wiped sweat from my brow and recalled how I spent that time groveling over some social media posts rather than fully paying attention. I remember they told us to push on the practice dummy until we heard a “click” sound, but what they must’ve forgotten to mention is what happens when adrenaline is coursing through your veins.

I thrusted my arms hard into her sternum, and felt the rigid, sturdy bone give way. I cocked my head to the side and gagged, spitting out my pouch of tobacco in the process. Before I got the chance to begin again, headlights came over the hill from the other direction, and this time they didn’t disappear.

“Oh my God, sir! Is she alright?” A man scurried over to my side and shouldered up next to me. I couldn’t manage to stammer out any words, but he seemed to know just what to do, and took over.

With a finger to her neck he said, “She’s still got a pulse. There’s still time. Help me get her to my car, take yours and meet us at the hospital.”

I grabbed her feet while he hooked his arms under her armpits. It was up to me to open the door to the backseat, and that’s when I felt my bearings coming back to me. He drove a car that looked like it was from the sixties with a little bit of wear and tear. The interior stank of stale cigarettes, and the radio was playing some 70s country artist I recognized from my dads collection. The yellow fluorescent hue from inside the car gave me enough light to finally see the man I had been talking to. He was wearing khaki pants, penny loafers, and a leather belt with a button up shirt. The kind of outfit an old teacher would wear, except he looked only a few years older than me. I couldn’t get a good look at his face.

“We’re going to Bramford’s hospital. Meet us there, got it?” His sharp gaze pierced through me. I nodded.

He jumped in his car and sped off into the night. I caught a glimpse of his license plate before he disappeared through the fog. My mind still is not processing everything that just happened, but I swear his tags expired in 1972. I quickly shook off the notion. I had to get to the hospital. The feeling began coming back into my body so I hurdled into the driver's seat and whipped a hard U-turn as fast as I could. No sooner than I could speed off after them did the fog start lifting and my phone rang in my pocket. I already had two missed calls from my dad.

“Where the hell are you? John's mom called half an hour ago and said you left.”

I don’t know if it's because I hit that woman, but my dad yelling at me was enough to send me over the edge. Tears began streaking down my face while I talked to him.

“It’s bad dad, it’s really bad. I hit someone. I’m on the way to the hospital now and I hit someone. I don’t know what to do.” I anticipated an even bigger outburst. I thought maybe he’d call my mom over, and I’d listen to her screaming over the phone.

“Listen to me son.” He spoke calmly, breaking a silence I hadn’t realized was being stretched out a few seconds too long. “Don’t go to the hospital.”

I ripped my steering wheel hard to the right, almost missing a sharp turn at the speed I was going. “Why would you say that? I have to go!” I blurted.

“Because the woman you hit should’ve died forty years ago, and now we have a big problem.” He never stuttered, his tone never changed.

My sister lives roughly four hours away and right outside the city. She works at a fairly unassuming bank. Not much happens there besides people from the suburbs coming in to ask for loans they already know they’ll get. By 2am, my dad and I were on the road, hoping we’d make it in time.

“Dad, this has been such a terrible night, can you just tell me what is going on?”

He let out a deflating breath, as if he’d been holding it for quite some time. He never took his eyes off the road. “In 1971 on highway 12, Mary Sue Ashley died at 12:01am after being struck by an unknown vehicle while presumably wandering around lost. He aggressively reached into his pocket and pulled out a newspaper clipping. I reached to grab it from his hand, but he pulled back.

“No, you can read it while I hold it, if I stop touching it, it’ll change.” I began to worry about his sanity.

“Dad, maybe we should go to the hospital. I don’t think… I don’t think you’re handling my news well.” I softened my voice, trying hard not to trail off at the end.

“This is why I don’t tell you.” He gruffed, mashing the clipping back into his pocket with a balled up fist.

We got to her work around 7am, which means they wouldn’t be open for a little less than two hours. Our dad seemed determined to sit in the parking lot with last night's gas station coffee and stale donuts until then. I tried to wait him out. I tried to feel comfort despite the tense silence he created with his eyes, darting across the parking lot like homing beacons searching for their target.

Within the next hour my eyes began to grow heavy. It was as if the closer we got to the opening, the harder it was for me to keep from dozing off. Quietly, all around me, the world faded to black.

Until I heard the gunshots.

I awoke disoriented and assessed my surroundings. My dad was nowhere to be seen, people were running away from the bank screaming and panicking. My heart felt as if it misfired, then beat as if it needed to claw out of my chest. I grabbed the door handle, but hesitated. I scanned the front of the bank and saw a man running around the side of the building, a large shotgun in his hands. His eyes darted around too. Panicked, uncertain, I think for a moment we locked eyes. Then he disappeared.

I ran to the bank entrance. The lobby mirrored a post-apocalyptic scene. There were papers strewn out all over the floor. The glass separating the tellers from everyone else had shattered in certain sections, and the blood and brains painting the walls behind it made me too scared to look over the counter. But my dad wasn’t back there. He was slumped against the base of the counter, with his head hung to the side. The life already drained from his eyes, his hand tucked in his shirt pocket.

I reached in and pulled out this thing he felt he needed most right before he died. Hot tears began streaming down my face as touching him made the scene feel all the more real. It was his phone. I unlocked it to see our text conversation was already pulled up. He had sent me a video, dated about thirty minutes earlier that I didn’t know about. I started to fumble for my phone but heard sirens off in the distance. I turned and started running back to my dads car. I was on the highway before I clicked play.

“Hello son, I’m sending you this because whether I’m successful or not, I don’t think I could ever tell you what I did face to face. I managed for the first time, but the look you gave me…” He sniffled and wiped his eyes. “I guess I should just come out and say it. You've hit that woman before. But it’s not your fault, so did I. I don’t know if this is God's way of punishing me, but in 1971 Mary Sue Ashley died in a hit and run incident on Highway 12, they never caught me. I’ve lived with that guilt ever since. I never knew I’d be forced to relive it. You had your license for 3 weeks when this all started. It’s the reason your mother and I never let you drive at night, but you just couldn’t listen.” His eyes grew red with tears, and he looked away to clear his throat.

“Somehow, when you’re driving past midnight on Highway 12, the veil between time thins just enough, that you end up there on that fateful night, and you’re the one that hits Mary Sue Ashley. The man who drives by shortly after is me, only for some reason without the guilt of murder on my mind, I actually do take her to the hospital. She does make a full recovery, then she goes on to have a daughter. That daughter grows up, gets a boyfriend, and moves to the same outer city as your sister, and gets a job alongside her as a bank teller. But it’s her boyfriend. When they break up, he loses it. He buys a gun, drives to the bank, and in the end your sister always dies.” The phone shakes in his hand, he grits his teeth and points hard at the camera. “But you listen to me. This time could be different. We’ve never made it this far. This is the fourth time we’ve been in this situation. I have an idea, it could work, but you need to follow my directions. I need you to drive back down Highway 12. You’re going to drive into the fog, back into 1971, and you need to make sure she dies this time. We need absolute certainty. It’s the only way to reverse what will happen here today if you don’t. I trust you son. Be good.”

That night I found myself weaving back through the twists and turns of Highway 12, bound and determined to set things on the right path. It had only been a day since the incident happened, but it already felt like a lifetime had passed. I watched the clock, ensuring midnight came to pass before I reached the same stretch of road I had been on before.

I watched the fog creep back into view and engulf my line of sight. I stepped on the gas even harder, knowing there isn’t a hard turn coming up, knowing what will happen next. My stomach churned, my heart palpated, my palms grew damp on the steering wheel. Just ahead I caught a glimpse of my own Jeep parked in the road, my own eyes staring into the headlights of my now approaching Jeep before they disappeared, erased from time.

The panic I saw in my own face, the words of my father, engulfed my mind all at once. The guilt my dad has carried his whole life for what he’s done. That isn’t my pain to bear. I swerved. There was a slight thunk on the side of my car. I watched as the woman rag-dolled behind me, but immediately clutched her side as she hit the ground. She’ll live.

I focused on the rearview mirror, just to make sure. I never saw the headlights coming. The sickening crunch and the jolt to my neck knocked me out instantly. I blacked out and awoke to a red warm thickness dripping from my forehead. I reached up and felt the gash with my fingers. It was bad. But what I saw through my cracked windshield was even worse.

I couldn’t find the words, so instead a guttural sound escaped my throat. The old car from the night before was far too familiar, and the dead man in the driver's seat is my dad.