Where road 33 ends

Fiction: a woman with a guilty conscience following the death of her uncle receives a mysterious invitation.

Jodi woke from a dream. She sat up in bed to see the glow of early morning light behind her blinds. Will, who’d slept over, stirred beside her.

“You okay?” he asked, voice groggy with sleep.

“I’m fine,” she snapped, then glanced his way apologetically. “Sorry, strange dream.” Jodi threw the covers off and got up, reaching for her robe from the back of a chair. She stumbled over one of the garbage bags full of her clothing and bedroom items that were piled in places around the floor.

“Shit,” she whispered under her breath as she regained her balance in the dark bedroom.

“Want to tell me about the dream?” Will said.

“No,” she snapped again before she could get hold of herself. “It was these strange gateposts I’m standing in front of. It’s probably something to do with Victor.” Although Victor had been a father to her, Jodi never called him ‘Dad.’ She’d been wondering, among all the things she’d be wondering since his death two weeks ago, whether that had bothered him.

She clicked on a small lamp on her dresser, its drawers having been removed, emptied and stacked on the floor. She examined her fingers under the light, her pinky on both hands was tingling with an almost burning itch.

“That seems like a normal thing,” Will said.

Jodi placated him with a smile in the mirror over her dresser, because she knew the dream wasn’t exactly normal. It was far too vivid—too real—to be normal. She was also sure she’d seen the stone gateposts wrapped in ivy somewhere before, their familiarity prodding at her mind.

Jodi slipped into her condo’s ensuite and clicked on the shower, closing and locking the door. She’d been treating Will poorly the past few months, and using Victor’s death as an excuse wouldn’t last much longer. Will was losing patience with her. Even though Victor was officially dead and gone, Jodi had been unable to take the next steps, to begin the journey of moving forward with life as she was meant to do after the closure the funeral provided.

As the bathroom filled with steam, she stared into her haggard face in the mirror, dark circles having formed under her eyes. Jodi had inherited her dark skin from her mother’s side of the family, who she didn’t have much contact with. Her mother, Gail, sent Jodi from Saint Kitts to be raised by Victor when she was just six years old. She’d long ago lost any traces of the accent her uncle had retained.

Though she hadn’t called him “Dad,” Victor treated her as his daughter. He’d not been a natural born parent, sometimes finding it difficult to show affection, but he’d tried his hardest—Jodi knew that. He’d been a protector above all else, always making Jodi feel safe. That changed when Victor was diagnosed with ALS two years ago. The disease came on swift and merciless, rendering Victor helpless within a year and a half. Jodi knew that the worst part of it for her uncle wasn’t death; it was being helpless. In turn, she’d felt helpless to offer him the protection he provided her growing up, and all she could do as his body declined was to help maintain what little life he had left.

After she was freshly showered, Jodi found a clean set of vet scrubs from a garbage bag in her room and joined Will in her condo’s open-concept living space. He was waiting by the coffee maker for it to finish brewing, the air sharp with coffee aroma. Bell, the twelve-year-old greyhound she’d brought home two months ago from work, trotted over to greet her.

“Good morning to you, old girl,” she said, giving Bell a scratch along the greying fur under her snout. Though Bell was old and slowing down, she retained a youthful affection.

“Sometimes I think you love that dog more than me,” Will said from where he leaned against the counter with a smirk. Like her bedroom, Jodi’s living space was in a similar state of disarray, the result of a bed bug treatment she’d had weeks ago, but had been unable to put her condo back in order for fear that the nasty bugs were still lurking in the bags.

“Please don’t start with me,” Jodi said, standing and facing him, knowing full well that it was she who’d ‘started’ it with Will. “You know I’ve been through a lot.” Will turned away from her, seemingly defeated, to pull down two mugs, and Jodi felt a knot inside her tighten. Though it was true that Jodi had been through a roller coaster of late, the truth she was avoiding was that she’d felt herself drifting apart from Will as many as six months ago, when Victor’s ALS had progressed into the final stages. Jodi was aware of her self beginning to resist Will—a protective mechanism, no doubt, but one that she couldn’t quite resist.

Jodi pulled on a coat and grabbed Bell’s leash, leaving Will in the kitchen as she rode the elevator down to the main floor. The greyhound had long ago retired from racing and then been used for breeding purposes, until the owner brought her into Jodi’s clinic to be euthanized because he was moving overseas and couldn’t bring the dog.

Outside the condo, Bell trotted alongside Jodi as she walked to the condo’s small park where a handful of other condo-dog owners were doing the same. The sky was beginning to brighten as the sun approached the horizon, and the city surrounding her woke up for the day. She followed along behind Bell as the old girl and her wiry body walked about, sniffing here and there, then doing her own business.

Jodi’s thoughts turned to Will. She’d sensed that there six-year relationship might be coming to a close, and that she was simply postponing the inevitable. She hated that she’d allowed it to get to this point—in the past, she was always swift to make decisions and take control. She’d been the fighting this turning point in her life, and wasn’t entirely convinced that Will was meant to be here with her for whatever it was she wanted to do next. The same might even be true for Will, she considered. He’d recently been promoted to a director’s position at his hedge fund management firm as his career picked up pace. He was three years younger than her thirty-four years, and she sensed he was itching to immerse himself in his financial world—he’d set his sights on making it big.

In this moment of uncertainty, Jodi ached for her uncle—not the sick man he became, but the man who always listened to her, and helped steer her in the direction she needed to go.

In spite of Jodi’s troubles with her uncle, she felt quite content in her career as a veterinarian. She’d always imagined herself moving out of the city to a quieter place where she could broaden her focus to livestock—and perhaps now was the time to do that. She loved all animals, but was growing tired of the fussy inner-city pet owners and their designer dogs. It was all too commercial for her; she wanted to sink herself into something more vocational, something that mattered.

Jodi rode the elevator up with a corgi and its owner to find that Will had left for the morning without leaving a note, or a text message on her phone. Though Jodi winced with guilt for being cold with him this morning, she couldn’t ignore that she was relieved he was gone.

She sprinkled some senior’s kibble into Bell’s bowl, then set to making herself eggs, toast and sliced tomato. She ate on her breakfast bar, taking stock off the mess of her condo. At some point, Jodi would have to put everything back together, but she couldn’t deny that she was afraid. The bed bugs had come in on Victor’s hospital bed, which Jodi had set up in the second bedroom. She’d cheaped out and bought a used one, not realizing that the bed bugs were already inside it when the technicians wheeled the thing into her condo. It was months before she realized what was causing the welts on Victor’s skin, who’d lost his ability to speak. Though the bugs seemed to be confined to his bed, the exterminator explained that they could still have begun to migrate throughout Jodi’s condo, and that she’d need to treat the entire place. This had involved emptying her closet and dressers and pulling furniture away from the walls. Everything that couldn’t be sprayed with pesticide had to be sealed inside plastic bags, then put through a dryer to kill any bugs or eggs that may have been laid in them.

It had been a nightmare inside the nightmare she was already having.

Before she left for work, Jodi kissed Bell on the head and promised she’d be back at lunch to walk her, then paused in the second bedroom door to gaze into Victor’s room. The smell of sickness still lingered in the air, even where she stood in the doorway. Jodi let her eyes slip closed as she remembered him lying there in the bed, with nearly all of his muscles paralyzed. It was his eyes that haunted her most, staring up at her in sheer panic, tears slipping down the sides of his face.

He’d been locked inside his own mind as parasites drank his blood.

Jodi lifted a hand to her mouth as a gasp escaped from deep inside her. She’d let him suffer far too long. “Tell me you’ll finish me before I get to that point,” he pleaded with her when he was still coherent. “Promise me, Jodi.”

She had promised, because she knew that Victor wasn’t capable of ending his own life. His belief system wouldn’t allow him to commit suicide because it was a sin. Jodi had attended Catholic church alongside him growing up, but she never fully committed to it, and felt herself drifting further and further from it the older she got. Except that she found old whispers of her upbringing coming back to her of late. Old whispers that told her she’d go to hell too for what she’d done to her uncle.

For taking his life.

It had taken her a month to build up the courage to do it—a month of suffering endured by her uncle. She did it in the most humane way possible, but it hadn’t gone smoothly. Ever since, Jodi found herself seeing fire—seeing her body burn in hell for all of her eternity. She hadn’t realized these Catholic beliefs were so ingrained into her.

She let the dream of the gateposts play through her mind. It must have something to do with her fears about going to hell. It must be her mind’s way of telling her that she has unfinished business related to her uncle’s death.

Deep inside, Jodi stirred with questions she didn’t know how to articulate, let alone where to find answers.

***

The vet clinic was busy all morning, and Jodi found herself fading as lunch hour approached, her focus wavering. She was snapping at her clients without warrant, causing Lynn, her business partner, to pull her aside at one point.

“You sure you’re okay, Jodes?”

Jodi did her best to offer Lynn a reassuring smile. “I’m fine, just been tossing and turning a bit this week.”

Lynn reached out a hand and squeezed Jodi’s arm, her face a blanket of sympathy. “The offer still stands if you want to take some time off, you know,” she said.

Jodi had opted not to take a leave of absence following Victor’s funeral. She wanted to keep working—keep her mind busy and occupied.

“Lynn, I’m fine. Just need to stay focused.”

Julie, one of their technicians, waved down the hallway to Jodi, summoning her attention.

“Gotta run,” Jodi said, leaving Lynn and heading down the hall. “What’s up?” she said to Julie, whose face was creased with worry.

“I’ve got the MRI results on Mrs. Crawford’s German Shepherd. They’re not good.”

Jodi followed her into the clinic room where Zeus lay on his side, panting. Jodi scratched behind his ears as Julie sat at the computer, opening up a series of MRI slices.

“The seizures look to have been caused by a brain tumour,” Julie said, pointing to a frontal mass. “Glioblastoma, more than likely. We can order a biopsy to be sure, but realistically I’ve never seen a dog come back from a tumour of this size, let alone one as old as Zeus.”

Jodi leaned on the computer desk, eyeing the image of Zeus’s brain. There was a very fine line in her practice she had always striven not to cross: the line that separated humane decisions from capitalistic ones. She knew that two-thirds of pet owners would mortgage their homes to save their pets, and she also knew that some clinics took advantage of that.

“Thanks, Julie, I’ll take it from here.” The technician left and Jodi clicked through the image slices once more, all the while knowing she was simply prolonging the inevitable. She glanced over at Zeus, his panting rapid and shallow, a sign he was experiencing pain. Some dogs became aggressive when they experienced pain, but Zeus was too old and tired, and in fact had become more docile as a result.

Jodi had to turn away from him. She picked up the phone and called the front desk, asking them to lead Mrs. Crawford through. Jodi hated this part. She knew that she should detach herself from these moments, but it had never come naturally to her. That was partly why she wanted to refocus her career toward agriculture. Personal pets were just too … personal.

Olga the receptionist led Mrs. Crawford, an elderly woman, into the room, and quickly ducked out. Mrs. Crawford went straight to Zeus, who barely registered her presence.

“Hello, my sweet boy,” she said, stroking his face.

Jodi jumped right into it, not wanting to prolong the inevitable. “I’m afraid the MRI is showing a frontal Glioblastoma—a brain tumour—which we suspect is causing the seizures.”

Mrs. Crawford turned her head from Zeus to view the computer screen Jodi was pointing at.

“Is it cancer?” she asked, a quiver in her voice.

“We’d need a biopsy to be certain of that,” Jodi said.

“It could be benign then.”

“It could be, but Mrs. Crawford I have to level with you. Even if it is benign, I’m not convinced removing it would be the humane thing to do. Zeus will never be right again, even if he does survive.”

“You’re not even going to try?”

Jodi pushed herself up from the chair and placed a hand on Zeus’s back, trying to soften her posture, but Mrs. Crawford wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“Beth,” Jodi said, using her client’s first name. “I wouldn’t recommend putting Zeus through any more hardship.”

“So, what are my options then?” Mrs. Crawford said as the tears started to fall.

Jodi told her.

“Will it hurt him?” Mrs. Crawford asked.

“It will be just like falling asleep. I promise.”

***

After Mrs. Crawford said her goodbyes, Jodi shaved a patch of the German shepherd’s hind leg to help her find the saphenous vein. Then she left him momentarily to retrieve a dose of sodium pentobarbital from refrigeration, where they kept it under lock and key. She retrieved the vial, writing in the date, Zeus’s name, breed, drug and case number on the clipboard they hung from the fridge door. She signed her name, and before sliding the clipboard back on its hook, glanced to the top of the page to read an entry from two weeks back.

It was a lethal dose of “sodium pentobarbital” for “Bell” the “greyhound.”

Jodi hadn’t administered it, of course. Instead, she stowed Bell in a crate at the back of the kennel room, out of sight from her colleagues. Then, at the end of the day, Jodi lingered to get a few things done, as she’d explained to her coworkers as they left. After the sun went down, she snuck Bell out the back of the clinic and into her car.

Sometimes she told herself that she’d brought Bell home out of compassion. But the truth was, it was for selfish reasons. As Jodi slid the clipboard back onto its hook, she heard her uncle’s voice again: “Promise me, Jodi.”

When Jodi administered the drug to her uncle through his IV, he didn’t die right away. Jodi had feared that a dog’s dose would not be enough, and her fears were confirmed as her uncle’s eyes flicked about in a panic and tears spilled down his cheeks. After ten minutes of panic, Jodi began to panic herself, because she knew what she had to do. So, she pinched her uncle’s nose, and pressed his lips together, and wept as his eyes seemed to bug out of his head as they stared hard into Jodi.

Until finally he went still, and the worst moment of her life came to end.

Jodi left the supply room, passing Lynn in the hallway who gave her another of her concerned looks. Back in Zeus’s room, she found the dog in the same position, his eyes moving over to her as she came in, his tail flopping from one side to other.

“Your pain will end very soon,” she said, giving the dog a final stroke across the face.

She turned away, finding a syringe in a supply drawer, and then proceeded to fill it with sodium pentobarbital. Jodi took a deep breath and turned back to Zeus.

He was standing on the examination table.

A sound popped out of Jodi’s throat as the syringe flipped out of her hand, smashing on the floor.

Zeus was staring straight at her with eyes that made all of the blood drain from Jodi’s face.

Human eyes.

Eyes that pleaded with her.

Jodi let a scream erupt from her chest, backing up against the door and fumbling for the handle. She was out in the hallway in a flash, running, then nearly colliding with Lynn, who’d come barging out of an office.

“What happened?” Lynn said, her face tight.

“I … something …” Jodi tried to get words out, but nothing came to her lips. Others had collected behind Lynn—Olga, Julie, Mrs. Crawford—watching her, until Jodi’s shock began to recede into embarrassment. “Can someone please take over for me in Room Three. I need to leave.”

Jodi left them and went the rest of the way down the clinic hallway to the staff room, where she retrieved her coat and purse, then quickly exited the back of the building. She considered whether she was in any state of mind to drive, but she simply had to get out of there.

She pulled out onto King Street in her Toyota, driving faster than was probably safe, but desperately needing to get home.

What happened back there? Her impulse was to classify it as a hallucination, perhaps something post-traumatic related to her uncle’s death. But it felt too real—the dog really was standing there, staring at her.

It really did have human eyes.

She turned the radio on as she got onto the Greenhill Parkway, accelerating fast to merge into oncoming traffic. A pickup driver blared his horn, angry with her for merging in front of him. He sped past, flipping her the bird.

But Jodi’s head was swimming. Something was wrong with her.

She pushed hard on the accelerator, changing in the fast lane and speeding past slower moving cars.

Was she having some sort of psychotic episode? Had she been drugged? Jodi dwelled on the possibilities. She went over the past few days. Tuesday night, she and Will had ordered Chinese delivery. But other than that, she hadn’t eaten anything out of the ordinary, or drank anything. She’d spent her week between home and work, and brought her own lunches.

There were also those strange, vivid dreams she had. She pictured the stone gateposts again, the verdant green ivy wrapped all around them. Through the gates she saw the open landscape with a winding lane running along toward the horizon. And beyond the horizon was a perfectly fluffy, white cloud, floating in space. It looked warm and inviting, a light seeming to glow from the center of it.

Heaven, Jodi remembered thinking when she saw it in her dream. It was a silly thought, even for a dream, because though she believed in some sort of after life, she certainly didn’t believe that heaven was up in the clouds, like it might be in a child’s cartoon book.

She shook the thought from her mind as she hit the brakes behind a slow-moving transport truck, before changing back into the right lane. Her exit was approaching fast, so she slow and signalled, easing into the exit lane.

Three minutes later, and she was pulling into her underground parking spot, locking her vehicle and taking the elevator up to her condo.

Bell greeted her at the door, and Jodi felt more tears spilling down her cheeks. She knelt by Bell and hugged her, the life inside the old dog quivering against her.

Jodi’s cell phone was buzzing.

She stood and slipped it from her purse, seeing Lynn’s name on the screen.

“Shit,” she whispered to her unkempt condo. Rather than decline the call, Jodi let it ring out, then typed out a quick text: I’m gonna need that sick leave, effective immediately - I’m sorry. It was all the explanation she could muster, hitting send, then setting to turn the phone off.

But it buzzed to life again.

This time it was Will calling.

Jodi thought to ignore his call, but then opted to answer it. She owed him that.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi, J,” he said.

It was almost as if Jodi didn’t need to say the words, and somehow she sensed Will was having the same experience on the other end, as though the knowledge that their relationship was fizzling out was shared by both of them.

“You don’t have to say it,” she said.

“But I’d like to. You know I love you, right? I’ll always love you. It’s just, we’ve grown apart.” And I’m holding you back, Jodi thought.

“I’m sorry for everything,” Jodi said.

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry about. You’ve done nothing wrong. It’s just … time for each of us to move on, I think.”

Jodi had expected this to hurt more, but the opposite happened. She felt lighter, as if the hands of some moral obligation she felt to Will were lessening their grip on her shoulders.

“I knew this was coming,” Jodi said, some distant part of her reaching for self-pity. But she was too tired to feel any of that. Will was right. She knew this, she’d known it for a long time.

They finished the call with promises to stay in touch and half-hearted commitments to collect their things from each other’s condos. But somehow Jodi knew she’d never hear from Will again. She’d never see him again, because she decided there and then, in that moment, that she wanted to leave this condo. She wanted to leave this city and find her simpler life in a simpler place. This city, this condo, would never be home. It would always be the place where her uncle died.

Where she’d killed her uncle.

A vision of Zeus and his human eyes, just standing there on the table staring at her, punched into her thoughts. Jodi willed the image away. Whatever had caused it, whatever psychosis or brain disease she was developing, would be a problem for another day.

“Because today, old girl,” she said to Bell, “we’re going for a road trip. Whaddaya say to that?” A glimmer of the puppy Bell had once been came to life in the tiny head tilt the dog offered in reply. Jodi scratched her ears, then set to packing herself a bag. She wasn’t sure where she was going, she just knew she needed to get out of the city that was closing in all around her. And she felt good for the first time in a very long time—she felt free, light, like her old self.

Before leaving, she peeled off her scrubs and showered once more, squeezing out the rest of the soap from the sample of Stone & Ivy she’d received in the mail.

Stone & Ivy.

Jodi’s dream. As she stood there in the shower, hot water beating against her, she saw the stone gateposts in her mind, wrapped up with old ivy that clung to it like a parasite.

The two ivy-wrapped gateposts that made up the soap’s logo, which acted almost like square brackets on either side of the words Stone & Ivy, were the same gateposts from her dream.

Jodi lifted the soap packet up to examine it more closely.

The gateposts were exactly the same.

Had her dream been influenced after seeing this logo? Jodi knew that sometimes her dreams were whispers of things she encountered throughout her day—things she might take note of, in a way, like a brief interaction with someone on the street that was vivid in the moment, but faded into memory after as the day went on. She also knew logos were designed to be remembered at a glance.

The soap packet had been in her mailbox day before yesterday, tacked to a flyer. Jodi never looked at fliers, they always went straight into the recycling, but she’d peeled the soap off because she was out and had forgotten to pick some up on the way home from work.

She’d used the soap yesterday and this morning, the thought occurring to her that there could be something in it she was reacting to—some strange ingredient. She flipped over the soap sample to see if there was a list.

Instead, she found a message:

“What questions do you have? Find your answers where Road 33 ends.”

***

It was after midnight by the time Jodi reached Road 33, having found it on Google Maps. She was cruising along, gravel crunching under the tires of her Toyota. All around her was farmland, the occasional combination of a dark farmhouse, barn and silo dotting the landscape.

Fields of late-harvest corn lined both sides of the road.

“What am I doing?” she asked Bell, who sat patiently in the back middle seat, the black patch around one of her eyes dark. It was crazy that she’d decided to drive out here like this. Crazy that she’d just left work and locked up her condo on a whim. But then maybe I am going crazy, Jodi thought. Maybe this was the early stages of a psychosis or degenerative brain disease that would lock her inside her mind like her uncle had been.

Jodi tried her high beams again, but the fog blanketing the road made low beams the only option. She’d slowed considerably, afraid that something would pop out in front of her—a deer or a sudden dead end.

Jodi realized it had been some time since she’d seen the last farmhouse, and that she was rolling through what felt like a tunnel walled-in by the corn. The tall stalks had begun to die, leaf blades browning as the ears of corn waited to be harvested.

A flash of movement up ahead through the fog made her slow.

An animal, perhaps.

Jodi tried her high beams again, but they made the fog a few feet off the ground impenetrable. So, she rolled to a stop on the road, scanning the ditches to see if she could see whatever had scurried across.

There was nothing.

“Raccoon?” she asked Bell. The dog gave an anxious whine in response.

Jodi continued on, but she didn’t get very far.

She’d reached the end of Road 33.

She’d found the gateposts.

They loomed in front of her on either side of the road, maybe twelve feet tall. And though they were wrapped in ivy, the vines had died long ago, leaving only the dead tendrils clinging to the sides of them.

But what made Jodi marvel the most was the way the corn had been planted across the road just beyond the gateposts, as if a farmer had simply co-opted the remainder of Road 33 for his crops. Rows of tall, lanky corn now surrounded her car on three side.

Jodi leaned against the steering wheel, Toyota idling, trying to see beyond the corn. But it seemed to stretch on forever beyond the stone gateposts.

Bell let out a huff from behind her.

“I know, old girl. I guess this is where the road ends.”

There was no way in hell Jodi was going to abandon the safety of her car and venture farther through the gateposts. She would turn around, head back the other way.

But in making this decision, she realized she was disappointed. She felt letdown. Had she been so dense to think that something miraculous—something divine—would happen if she passed through these gates? She snorted to herself in the driver’s seat, staring into the impenetrable wall of corn not five feet past the gateposts.

Then a set of knuckles tapped against her passenger window—tap, tap, tap—and Jodi screamed.

To be continued.