Survive the Night by Riley Sager

INT. REST STOP BUILDING—NIGHT

Josh is there when Charlie leaves the bathroom.

Right there.

Inches from the door, his hand raised in a knock that never happens.

Charlie shrinks back, startled. A replay of the blond woman in the bathroom when she found Charlie in the stall.

“A woman outside said I should check on you. She said you’re shit-faced.” Josh pauses, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets. “So I have to ask. Are you, um, shit-faced?”

Charlie shakes her head, wishing she were. That, at least, would explain what’s happening inside her head. But instead of drunk, she feels unmoored. Caught on a tide dragging her out to sea, even though she’s paddling as hard as she can toward shore.

“It was just a misunderstanding,” she says.

Josh responds with a curious head tilt. “A movie misunderstanding?”

“Of course.”

They step outside, and Charlie sees that it’s started snowing again. More flurries. As wispy as dust. Josh stops to catch one on his tongue, which is how Charlie knows the snow is real and not just her own personal snow globe à la Citizen Kane.

The fact that she’s not even capable of discerning the weather on her own tells Charlie she’s made the right decision. Yes, she has her suspicions about Josh, but they fade with each step taken toward the parking lot. He’s still catching snowflakes, for God’s sake, his tongue hanging out like a dog’s. That’s not something killers do. Kids do that. Nice people do that.

And Charlie’s leaning into the idea that Josh could be nice, once you see past the lies he told her. Lies that he clearly regrets. Because before they climb back into the Grand Am, Josh looks at Charlie across the snow-dappled roof of the car and says, “I’m really sorry, by the way. I shouldn’t have lied earlier. I should have been up front with you about everything, starting with when we met at the ride board. You have every right to not trust me.”

“I do trust you,” Charlie says, even though she doesn’t. Not implicitly. The simple truth is that right now she trusts herself less.

As for Josh’s lies, she chalks those up to loneliness and not malice. Charlie understands being lonely, having cut herself off from everyone but Robbie and Nana Norma. So she and Josh might as well be lonely together.

“We’re good, then?” Josh says.

“I guess,” Charlie says, which is about as honest an answer as she can muster.

“Then let’s go.”

Charlie gets into the car. Even if she does have lingering reservations, there are no other options. The one other car at the rest stop, an Oldsmobile idling on the far end of the parking lot, belongs to the woman Charlie encountered in the bathroom. She stands next to the car, smoking a cigarette, watching them leave.

As they pass, Charlie notices the concerned look on the woman’s face, appearing and receding in a plume of smoke. It makes her wonder what else the woman told Josh while she was still in the bathroom. Did she mention Charlie’s distrust? If not, does she now regret it? Should Charlie regret getting back into this car?

She tells herself no. That everything is fine. That she should follow the woman’s advice and have some coffee to clear her head. Then she’ll settle in for a long, uneventful trip home.

Josh apparently has other ideas.

“So what kind of movie was it?” he says. “Must have been a doozy if that woman thought you were on the sauce.”

Charlie can still picture Maddy standing before the mirror, putting on that lipstick as bright as blood. Even worse, she can still hear her voice.

You shouldn’t have abandoned me.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says.

“Must have been a bad one,” Josh says.

“It was.”

Charlie wants to forget all about it. And she certainly has no intention of rehashing it with Josh.

“Be honest now,” he says. “Was it really that bad? Or do you not want to tell me because you still don’t trust me?”

“I trust people I know.”

“Then get to know me.” A genial smile creeps across Josh’s face. “Maybe we really should play Twenty Questions.”

Charlie doesn’t smile back. She’s still too unnerved by the fact that she imagined an entire game of Twenty Questions. That a movie in her mind lasted that long. That a whole chunk of time was lost.

“I’d rather not,” she says.

“Then let’s do one question each,” Josh suggests. “I ask you something, and then you ask me something.”

“You already know enough about me.”

“You haven’t told me about your parents.”

“What about them?” Charlie says.

“They died in a car accident, right?”

Charlie’s jolted by the question. To mask her unease, she takes a sip of coffee and focuses on the snow hitting the windshield. “How did you know that?”

“I didn’t,” Josh says. “I just assumed it.”

“Fine. How did you assume that?”

“Because you mentioned that you live with your grandmother, which tells me your parents are no longer alive. You also said you don’t drive, which I assumed was a choice and not because you’re physically incapable of it. Putting all that together, I came to the conclusion that you don’t drive because your parents were killed in a car accident. Turns out I was right.”

A prickle of annoyance joins Charlie’s sense of unease. That’s a lot of assumptions on his part. That they’re all true doesn’t make it feel any less intrusive.

“By that logic, I’m going to assume that since you haven’t mentioned your mother, it means she’s dead, too.”

“She might be,” Josh says. “I don’t know. She left when I was eight. I haven’t seen or heard from her since.”

Charlie doesn’t know what to say to that, so she says nothing.

“It was Halloween,” Josh says. “I remember because I dressed up as Batman that year. And it was a real costume, too. Not one of those cheap masks and plastic capes you get at the drugstore. My mother spent weeks making it for me. She was good with a sewing machine, I’ll give her that. She made a great costume. I was so excited to show it off, you know? I couldn’t wait for people to see me as Batman.”

“Why all this excitement about Batman?”

“Because he was the coolest.”

“Batman?” Charlie says, incredulous. She’s seen both the cheesy sixties TV show and the dark, dour Tim Burton movie. Neither of those Batmen struck her as particularly cool.

“To an eight-year-old, yeah,” Josh says. “Especially one who felt a little weird and awkward and whose parents wouldn’t stop fighting.”

His voice grows soft, confessional.

“When I’d see my dad start drinking and my mom get that disapproving look in her eyes, I knew it was only a matter of time before a fight broke out. So whenever that happened, I’d grab some Batman comic, crawl under the covers, and pretend I was inside that comic book, moving from panel to panel. It didn’t matter if I was scared that the Joker or the Riddler was trying to get me. It was better than being in that house with those people screaming at each other downstairs.”

“They were like movies in your mind,” Charlie says.

“I guess so,” Josh says. “My version of it, yeah. So I was desperate to actually be Batman for a night. I put the costume on and my dad took me out trick-or-treating and I got more candy that year than I ever had before. And I knew it was because of that costume. Because of how great it looked. When we got home, my arms were tired from carrying all that candy.”

Josh gives a small, sad chuckle.

“And my mother, well, she was gone. While we were out, she’d collected a few things, threw them in a suitcase, and left. She wrote a note. ‘I’m sorry.’ That’s all it said. No explanation. No way to contact her. Just that meager apology. It was like she had just vanished. And I know, that’s what all deaths feel like. The person is there and then they’re not and you have to adjust to life without them. But what made it so hard was that my mother chose to leave. She planned to go that way—without a goodbye. I know because of the costume. She’d never spent that much time on one before, and I think it’s because she had already made up her mind that she was going to leave. And so she put all her love and attention into that one stupid Batman costume, because she knew it would be the last thing she ever did for me.”

He stops talking, letting his story—that long, sad tale—linger in the car like smoke.

“Do you still miss her?” Charlie says.

“Sometimes. Do you still miss your parents?”

Charlie nods. “And I miss Maddy.”

What she doesn’t say, because she’d never admit it to anyone, is that she misses Maddy more than her parents. It’s not something she’s proud of. She certainly doesn’t feel good about feeling this way, but it’s the truth. She is very much her parents’ daughter. Her father was quiet and prone to introspection, and so is she. Her mother, just like Charlie, was an enthusiastic movie lover, courtesy of Nana Norma. Charlie has her father’s hazel eyes and her mother’s pert nose, and she sees them every time she looks in the mirror. They are always with her, which goes a long way toward lessening the pain of losing them.

But Maddy was something different. As foreign and exotic to Charlie as a tropical flower growing in the desert. Bright and beautiful and rare. It’s why her loss stings more and why Charlie feels so guilty about it. She’ll never meet another Maddy.

“Why did you tell me that story?” she asks Josh.

“Because I wanted you to get to know me.”

“So I’d trust you?”

“Maybe,” Josh says. “Did it work?”

“Maybe,” Charlie replies.

Josh hits the wipers, swiping away the gathering snow, and shifts the car into a lower gear, helping it climb the slow but steady rise of the highway.

Charlie’s familiar with this stretch of road.

The Poconos.

The place where Maddy had been born and raised.

The place from which she hoped to escape.

They pass a faded billboard advertising one of those big honeymoon resorts that had been all the rage in the fifties and sixties. This one is decidedly rustic. With timber-studded walls and a roof of green slate, it resembles a massive log cabin. Mountain Oasis Lodge, it’s called. Or used to be. A conspicuous white banner with black print has been slapped over the image of the lodge.

ENJOY OUR LAST SEASON!

Judging by the state of the banner—frayed at the corners and faded, though not quite as much as the rest of the billboard—Charlie assumes the resort’s last season ended several summers ago.

Maddy’s grandmother had worked at a place like that until it went belly-up in the late eighties. Maddy had regaled her with stories of visiting her grandmother at work—running through empty ballrooms, sneaking into vacant rooms, sprawling across round beds with mirrored ceilings and scrambling inside bathtubs shaped like giant hearts.

Tawdry.

That’s how Maddy described the place. “It tried so hard to be sexy, but it was, like, the worst, cheapest kind of sexy. The hotel version of crotchless panties.”

It hadn’t always been like this, Charlie knew. Maddy had also told her about the Poconos that existed a couple of generations before they were born. Back then, movie stars often motored the short distance from New York for a few days of fishing, hiking, and boating, rubbing elbows with working-class couples from Philadelphia, Scranton, Levittown. Maddy had shown her a picture of her grandmother posing poolside with Bob Hope.

“She met Bing Crosby, too,” Maddy said. “Not together, though. Now that would have been the cat’s meow.”

Charlie sighs and looks out the window, at the trees skating by in gray blurs.

Like ghosts.

It makes her think of all the people who’ve died on this highway. People like her parents. Killed in explosions of glass. Torched in fiery wrecks. Crushed under tons of twisted metal. Now their spirits are stuck here, haunting the side of the road, forever forced to watch others drive by to destinations they failed to reach.

She sighs again, loud enough for Josh to say, “You getting carsick again?”

“No. I’m just—”

Charlie’s voice seizes up, the words clogged in her throat like a hard candy that’s been swallowed.

She never told Josh she felt carsick.

Not for real.

That was during a movie in her mind, one she only half-remembers now that she knows it didn’t really happen. The state trooper coming up on their right. Charlie’s covert breaths fogging the window. Her index finger slicing across the glass.

But if it didn’t really happen—if it was all in her head—how does Josh know about it?

Charlie’s mind starts whirling, clicking like an old movie projector. It spins out a thought. One that should have arrived much sooner.

“Come as You Are” had just started playing before she dropped into that long, vivid mental movie and was still playing when she woke from it.

That makes sense. Charlie had once read that dreams that feel like hours can pass in mere minutes, and she assumes the same is true for movies in her mind. The song started, the movie unspooled in her thoughts, and when it was over, “Come as You Are” was still playing.

But when Charlie snapped out of the alleged movie in her mind, it was still the beginning of the song that she had heard. That definitely doesn’t make sense, especially since Josh told her she’d been zoned out for more than five minutes.

Then there’s the distance they traveled during that time. On the map at the rest stop, it would have been about the width of her index finger, which meant it was miles when blown up to full scale. Far more ground than can be covered during the course of a single song, let alone a few seconds.

Which means the music hadn’t been continuous.

Josh had indeed turned off the stereo.

Charlie watched him do it. It hadn’t all been in her head, like he led her to believe. It was real. It happened.

And if that was real, then what immediately followed might also be real. Including Twenty Questions.

Let’s play, Josh had said.

Those questions might not have been just her thoughts. They might not have been only dialogue in her mind.

There’s a chance that she truly spoke them. Which means there’s also a chance Josh answered them until she winnowed it down to a single object that on the surface is so innocent but turns out to be terrifying with the proper context.

A tooth.

“You’re just what?” Josh says, reminding Charlie that she never finished her sentence.

“Tired,” she says. “So tired.”

The word clouds the window. Just a tad. In that wisp of fog on the glass, Charlie can make out the edge of what appears to be a letter.

Her eyes go wide.

In shock.

In fear.

Her heart does the opposite. It contracts, shrinking into her chest the way a turtle retreats into its shell, trying to avoid the threat it senses is coming. But Charlie knows it’s too late. The threat is already here.

She confirms it by saying three more words heavy on the sibilant syllables.

“Just so exhausted.”

The fog on the window grows. An expanding gray circle.

Inside it, clearly scrawled by her unsteady finger, is a single word. Written backward. Readable to someone on the outside looking in.

HELP