The Road in the Rearview Mirror

The Road in the Rearview Mirror

When Eva left her last patient that Thursday, no one was sitting in the back seat yet.

Later, she would hold on to that. She had put Resi’s cake there, the container with the blue lid. Beside it, her bag, a box of disposable gloves, and her folded rain jacket. The middle seat belt hung in its clip. She’d tucked the right one under her bag because the loose metal buckle banged against the door on curves.

She knew the sounds her car made. The clutch release bearing sang in second gear, the fan whistled on its third setting, and since last winter a small, dry rattle had been living somewhere behind the glove compartment. Lukas had claimed it was a screw. Eva had said the screw must have had babies by now.

Twelve years of home health care turned a car into a room you lived in. Eva knew its smell better than her apartment’s: disinfectant, black coffee, the faint sweetness of the heater. Sometimes it smelled of a meal she hadn’t been able to refuse at a patient’s house. Resi Fenzl’s cake had still been warm.

“Don’t wolf it down while you’re driving again,” Resi had said. “Sit down at home. Plate. Fork. Like a human being.”

She sat in her armchair with her swollen legs on the footstool. Between her thumb and index finger, she held the slip of paper where Eva had written down the next medication order. Resi didn’t need the note; it was for her daughter. She held on to it anyway, so Eva would stay a little longer.

“And take the road by the mill.”

Eva closed her bag. “That’s another four miles.”

“Then you get another four miles of radio.”

“All they do is talk.”

“At least you won’t be alone.”

A clock ticked under a glass dome on the cabinet. Resi’s gaze had moved past Eva to the black windowpane.

“Deer out there?” Eva asked.

“Those, too.”

“Four more miles won’t help with that. A deer stepped right in front of me by the mill last week.”

Resi folded the medication order. Very neatly, edge to edge.

“Well, take whatever road you want.”

Eva knew that tone. Sooner or later, her patients’ daughters began to sound the same. They argued about compression stockings, about the walker beside the stairs, about fluid intake and stair lifts, until suddenly they said something they had hated hearing from their own mothers. Well, do whatever you want. Go ahead and fall. Go ahead and die.

She took Resi’s hand. It was dry and surprisingly hot.

“Kerstin’s back tomorrow. She’ll give you a hard time if the cake’s still here.”

“I’m not baking one for her.”

Outside, the fog pressed every sound toward the ground. A dog barked somewhere above the farm, twice in quick succession, and another answered farther down. Eva zipped up her jacket and used her phone to light the way to the car. The steps were slick. Water was collecting in a broken flowerpot.

She didn’t take the road by the mill.

The Cold Hollow saved eleven minutes. At home, a basket of clean laundry was waiting, along with soup she would be reheating for the second time. On the radio, two men debated whether schools should ban cell phones. Eva switched to music. Someone announced the best songs to help you breathe easy. She turned it off.

Riedbrunn fell behind her, a few windows in the rearview mirrors, then nothing. The road climbed between fields. At the last farm, a string of red lights hung around a barn door, although Christmas was still six weeks away. Eva smiled. The Kramers always started early. By January, the snow would cover their plastic Santas up to their necks.

The forest began without warning. The old granite wall on the left, the drainage ditch on the right. Beech leaves lay flat on the asphalt in her headlights. The birch trunks slipped past the roadside like scattered people who had turned away.

Eva slowed down. There really were deer around here.

At the Cold Hollow, the crowns of two spruces touched above the road. The ground between their trunks stayed wet even in August. In winter, this was where ice formed first. Eva shifted down.

The man stood on the right, just beyond the white line.