The Hitchhiker

This is a story about the day that I learned that the human soul is unexpectedly wonderful, that God is real but entirely made up, and that I am not anyone but who I am right now. 

The story doesn’t start at the final epiphany of course, they never do.

Imagine how easy that would be, and how boring to read. There is no great joy without the contrast of grief. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. Nothing is set in stone, if the hitchhiker taught me anything, it was that.

Oh yes, this is a story about a hitchhiker, and me, a twenty- six year old woman dissatisfied enough with her life to be open to making it better.

The day I picked up the hitchhiker it was sixty-five degrees, and a Tuesday, and about five minutes before I saw the hitchhiker, it was 10:16 in the morning. I remember this clearly because of the billboard outside the carwash that I drove by, and I remember that because I was still thinking about the billboard when I saw the person on the side of the road, one thumb cocked out, not quite jaunty but not shy either. 

I had been wondering if anyone had ever driven past one of those billboards advertising the day, temperature, and time, and been shocked, stunned that they had gotten so caught up in keeping up with life that they lost track of what day it was, what hour. 

I remember that my first thought when I saw the hitchhiker was that she seemed like just the kind of person to need billboards such as the one I had just passed, and my second thought was not a thought at all, just a sudden wave of disbelief. 

The hitchhiker was my second grade teacher, Mrs. Belfry. 

Underneath the wild gray hair and the worn peacoat was the faint memory of a neat cap of blonde hair, and a forever rotating wardrobe of button down blouses. I could just barely make out the ghost of a Kate Spade duffle in the worn out, brandless backpack she wore.

I pulled over before I could think about it, before the voices of countless adults throughout my childhood emphasizing loudly and severely that I must never, ever, pick up a hitchhiker or even TALK to a hitchhiker, because hitchhikers will always seem nice, and then they will stab you and steal your car and toss your body in a quarry somewhere. 

Mrs. Belfry seemed surprised that someone actually stopped, as though she was out hitchhiking for the principle of it, and she didn’t really expect any success. 

“Why thank you,” she said, opening my door and swinging her backpack into the backseats, as though she had done this before, despite her disbelief that her efforts worked. 

“Mrs. Belfry,” I said, and she looked at me.

It was the same blue eyes I remembered, but I didn’t remember the lines that crosshatched around them, that shaded her mouth with sorrow.

Somewhere in the almost two decades since I had seen her, Mrs. Belfry had caught the backside of life’s hand. 

“Isabelle Jones!” She exclaimed, and put a hand on my shoulder. “How in the world are you?”

“I’m good,” I said, putting the car in drive, pulling out into the traffic, as though this was an arranged meeting, as though I had just picked my second grade teacher up for coffee and a catch up.

“I’m getting married in a week actually,” I said, the words bubbled out, soda shaken and opened, deviously, of course. “I’m going to pick up my dress today actually.”

“Goodness!” Mrs. Belfry’s hand, still on my shoulder, tightened in a perfunctory spasm of congratulations. “It feels like just yesterday that you were seven,” she said, perhaps sounding a bit choked up, “And now here you are, a grown woman getting married! How life gets away from you.”

I glanced at her, uncertain of the protocol regarding how to ask someone about their fall from grace. 

“How,” I began, and then restarted. “Are you still teaching?”

Mrs. Belfry snorted, a sound so undignified and unlike the woman I remembered that I started. 

“What do you think, darling?” She asked. 

Expecting a further explanation, I remained silent, and realized too late that was all she was planning on saying. Then right before I broke the silence, she continued, a delayed afterthought.

“I wouldn’t stop teaching for the world. Although I will say that I have left the classroom. I found that the people who really needed some learning the most were not the sweet little children like you were.” She paused, cleared her throat, and went on, “Although, not all you sweet little children were living fairytales, you sure know that, don’t you.”

It was not a question, and my hands tightened on the steering wheel, and I imagined that was where Mrs. Belfry the hitchhiker might pull a knife from her backpack and put it between my ribs. 

“How’s your father, Isabelle?” She asked, and the knife flashed and the pain was right where I expected, an inch below the heart. 

I am seven years old sitting in a chair that is too big for me, my head barely clearing Mrs. Belfry’s desk. There is a paper mache globe on it, right in front of my face, and I am staring at it, thinking that maybe one day I will know what the shapes mean, and how to get to them.

I am scared of Mrs. Belfry, even though she is being very nice and gave me a peppermint. A lot of the other kids are also scared of her, because she has a long nose, and when she smiles she kind of looks like the kind of witch who would build a house of peppermints and then snatch up the kids who came to lick it and put them in her big oven. If that’s true, then I am next in line for her supper, my fingers and tongue still sticky from the candy she gave me. 

“Isabelle,” she is saying, and her voice is a lot quieter than it is in class, and her face looks different, like the lines have been smudged around with one of those putty erasers we use during art time. 

“Isabelle,” she says again, and I have to look at her scary witch eyes, and I am surprised because they aren’t two different colors like Brody Johnson whispered to me they were the other day at recess, they are both blue as my favorite color Crayon. 

“What happened to your face? You can tell me, sweetie, I promise you I will not tell anyone.”

I can feel the peppermint in my stomach, and I think it must have expanded in there, because it feels like there is an entire boulder pressing against my belly button. I touch my face, the teardrop bruise under my eye. 

“Nothing,” I say, “I fell.”

“Isabelle,” she says my name for the third time, and I kind of like the way she says it, like it’s a secret, between just me and her. “Who did that to you? I promise I will not tell anyone, you can trust me, dear.”

The peppermint taste in my mouth is making me want another one, now that I’m not scared anymore, and if I was the kid in the fairy tale I would probably get thrown into the oven every time, because I can’t resist the sweetness. 

“It’s a secret,” I tell Mrs. Belfry, “Pinky promise.”

My pinky is tiny in hers, but her grip is so gentle I barely feel it at all.

It is two days later and a man and woman in a tie are sitting in my living room, they are asking me questions that I can’t remember, and my mommy is sobbing, my daddy is getting into a car with bright flashing lights on top. 

It is two weeks later, and Mrs. Belfry offers me a peppermint, but the smell makes me want to be sick, and when I look at her, I swear her eyes are two different colors, just like Brody said. 

“I haven’t seen my father in almost ten years,” I said, and pressed my foot into the accelerator, like I can speed past the moment I don’t want to be in. 

“What kind of dress are you going to be wearing?” The hitchhiker asked, and when I turned to look at her, surprised at the sudden conversation change, it was my best friend from when I was twelve, Samantha Duggen, with the same frizzy brown hair and chubby cheeked smile, but with straight teeth instead of braces, and bright green eyes unobscured by the thick lenses of her childhood glasses.

Samantha was clutching the worn backpack in her lap, and a faded blue tattoo of a bird poked out from her cleavage, trying to fly away but clearly trapped. 

“Mrs. Belfry?” I asked, dumbly, and Samantha gave me a blank look, the same one she would give me when we were twelve, and I would mention a band she didn’t like, or when I admitted to liking the same boy she liked when we were in seventh grade. 

“Um, it’s Sammy, silly,” she said, her voice sandpaper to match the smell of cigarette smoke that had suddenly filled my car. “Are you on the pills?” She giggled, and it was just as mean as I remembered. 

“So tell me about this boy you’re marrying, Izzy,” she said, “Is he used to your little quirks yet?”

I felt myself flush, and opened the window, the air outside dense with the same cigarette smoke as in the car, as though everyone passing by was exhaling lungs of smoke right at me. 

“Oh boy,” Samantha wheezed, “So he doesn’t know, does he! Well it’s only a matter of time, Izzy, I found out pretty quick.”

I turned to my passenger, just in time to see the flash of the knife in her hand, feel it slice across my throat just like I had been told it would, an inevitable consequence of generosity. 

I am twelve years old and having a sleepover at Samantha’s house, because her mom actually cooks dinner and is always home and doesn’t let us watch TV past 8:00. We are lying in her bed looking up at her glow in the dark constellations and telling each other secrets. 

Samantha told me that she looked at a picture of a naked man on the internet. 

I told Samantha that I had a crush on Bobby Bryant, an eighth grader, and that I was pretty sure that he liked me back, because he asked our other friend Lily if I had a boyfriend. Samantha has had a crush on Bobby since fourth grade, but we both know that he wouldn’t look twice at her with her braces and muffin top over her jeans and her chipmunk smile. 

After I tell her Samantha doesn’t say anything for the longest time, and I start to get worried, and then finally she says, “You know, you might have a chance with him, Izzy, now that you’ve grown boobs somehow. As long as he never finds out you still pee the bed, that is.”

I giggle nervously, since Samantha is my best friend, and so the only person who knows that every once in a while, I will wake up from a bad dream and have wet the bed, just like a little kid. The first time it happened at a sleepover, I expected her to be disgusted, but instead she made us a pillow fort on the floor to sleep on.

“True,” I say, “Thank god you’re the only one who knows.”

Two days later I work up the nerve to smile at Bobby in the hall, and he looks at me like I have something disgusting all over my face. In P.E. the next day, the seventh and eighth graders have a mixed class so we can practice volleyball, and when Bobby runs past me he whisperes loudly, “I would check yourself, Isabelle, I think I smell pee in here,” and bursts out laughing. 

Samantha, across the court from me, won’t meet my eyes, and when I send the ball in her direction, she turns away, and just lets it fall. 

“He doesn’t know, Samantha,” I said, as a semi truck roared past and drowned out her raspy giggles, “But he doesn’t need to because I am an adult and that thing hasn’t happened since I was a kid. And my wedding dress is a mermaid style dress, and I’m going to wear gold kitten heals and have a bouquet of goldenrod.”

“That sounds beautiful,” a man said from my passenger seat, and I turned, shocked, and Derrick Adams, my junior year boyfriend, is grinning at me, unshaven and bloodshot in the eyes and smelling strongly of cedar aftershave, just like high school.

“Your fiance is one lucky, lucky man,” he went on, still grinning, not quite lascivious, not quite innocent. 

“How in the world did you get here?” I exclaimed, and Derrick laughed, bitter in the same way his laugh used to be carefree.

“I thought it would be fun to take a little trip, memory lane, you might call it. I grew up here, you know.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Next to you,” he said, and his teeth were bared, and I couldn't tell if it was a grimace of pain or a knowing sneer, and I expected the knife even before I saw it in his hand, before I felt it in my lungs, stealing my next breath.

I am sixteen and it is prom night and I am wearing a salmon dress and a fantastic spray tan. Derrick has his hand down the front of my dress and his mouth on my neck surely is going to make my tan uneven. 

“I want you to be my first, baby,” he whispers, and his voice is strained and urgent, like he is starving and begging for food.

“Okay,” I say, because no one has ever told me I am too good for the back seat of a Chevy, and that some boys say whatever they want to get what they want. 

It is afterward, and I tell him I love him, and he laughs, “You’re cute,” he says, “Don’t pretend you didn’t know what this was.” He is gone, and I am still in the backseat of the truck, my salmon dress that cost almost three hundred dollars torn right across the heart.

“Don’t pretend that you were innocent,” I said, speeding now, five and then ten miles over the speed limit. “You had grown up a long time before prom night in your truck.”

“I wish I could have taken you to prom,” the hitchhiker said, and his voice was softer, and I felt my pulse slow as soon as I heard it, but I still drove faster, fifteen miles over the speed limit.

My fiance smiled at me, his hand on my thigh across the gearshift, an unkempt beard not quite obscuring his face. There were his kind eyes, lost in a face that had lived years beyond his age.

“Clay,” I exclaimed, “What happened?”

The hitchhiker, my fiance, smiled wider. “I couldn’t let you pick up your wedding dress alone, could I?”

“No,” I said, dizzy, “Why were you on the side of the road?

“Oh,” Clay said, as though surprised I would ask that. He looked down at himself, like he didn’t know how he had gotten there, how he had ended up in my car. 

“I suppose I was waiting for you to find me,” he said, finally, proud of his own conclusion.

“It should be in the heart,” I said, and Clay looked at me, than down at his hand, at the knife, like he had forgotten that part.

“Of course,” he said, and where he stabbed me, it hurt just the same as falling in love.

I am twenty-four and Clay, my boyfriend of four months, tells me that he loves me. We are laying in bed together, and I have loved him for twenty-four hours now, and I think it is perfect timing that Clay figured it out right after I did. 

Surprisingly, I am not happy. I am scared. I roll away, face the moon on the windowsill.

Clay’s hand touches my shoulder. 

“I’m not just saying it, Isabelle,” he whispers, “I’ve loved you since the second week I knew you.”

“Oh,” I say, because I realize I was the one who was late, not him.

“I love you too,” I say, and start to cry.

I am twenty-six, and Clay still loves me.

“Thank you for loving me,” I said, my foot on the brake, bringing us back to safety, and when I turned to look at my hitchhiker it is a woman with sorrowful eyes and full lips, with long fingers and tangled hair. When she smiled at me, I smiled too, a mirror image. 

“Of course,” she said, “I have always loved you, how do you think you made it this far?”

“Are you God?” I asked, pulling onto the median, ignoring the shudder of my car and the far off echo of a horn.

The hitchhiker laughed. “You know who I am,” she said.

She held out her hand, and placed the knife in mine, palms identical down to the last whorl. 

“You get to choose what to do with this,” she said, and winked.

I unrolled my window, held it out. “I think I’m going to let it go now,” I said and my hitchhiker laughed, and disappeared, and I thought her saw her thumb, back out again.