The horse accident was a fable by the end of the week. The boys who lived in the neighborhood told wide-eyed girls that they had seen it well after graduation. Some even took the brag to college parties, and the paper ran the story every few years in the “Remember When” section. This was fine because no one had died besides Chestnut, strapped with red ribbons, sleeping (or so the paper wrote) with fair fatigue as the semi slammed into her trailer. Brent had been home when it happened, and while he didn’t see the accident, he heard the crash and watched the cleanup for a while from the living room window, which overlooked the thruway. He was four then, and even firetrucks and ambulances couldn’t hold his attention when the cartoons were on.

When he remembered to look again, the thruway was back to its boring self. The trees behind it caught his eyes. Had they always been there? He hadn’t given the road much thought before.

“Why is there an island between the roads?” he asked his mother.

“That’s a median, dear,” she responded. “It keeps all the cars going this way on this side, and all the cars going that way on that side.”

Brent narrowed his eyes. All leafy and green, the median looked like a good place for a horse to live. Instead, there was the face of a little girl, bobbing in the thick of the trees. She was pale like the underside of a hawk’s wing. Maybe she was looking for Chestnut too. Before he could shoot his arm up to wave, she ducked into the grass.

Brent’s parents didn’t tell him that Chestnut had died until he was six. Looking back, the talk was much like the Santa-isn’t-real chat he got a few years later. “So no more talk about Chestnut and a little girl, okay? You’re too big now to believe in imaginary friends.” Brent nodded. He knew the word dead. He never saw Chestnut with the girl anyway. She was always alone, running, sometimes climbing the trees, though she never got very high.

            This talk took place in front of Brent’s aunt and older cousins, Luke and George. His aunt said, “It’s because he is an only child and you refused to take him to daycare. He needs to socialize.” Brent joined the scouts that summer. Worms appeared in his pickle jar terrarium despite his Boy Scout leader, Mr. Brown, saying, “Nothing can get in a terrarium, and nothing goes out. It’s its own little world.” Brent noticed them a week after the meeting. They were long and wiggly, and settled in clumps just below the surface Brent had created. He waited three more days before showing his mother, when the wiggles had stopped, and the clumps had started to turn drippy. His mother asked, “Where did you get the dirt?” and Brent told her they had dug it from the Mr. Brown’s yard. “And the water?” Brent told her about the hose connected to the leader’s house, and how they had sprayed inside the jars and then at each other. “There were eggs in the dirt or the water, that’s all,” his mother said, reassuring him that his terrarium was fine, but didn’t he want to throw it away, to make room for something else on his windowsill, and so the cat wouldn’t break it?

When he asked his mother about the girl in the road median, and she said, “No, honey. That’s impossible. No one could get there,” he remembered the worms and understood that his mother could be wrong.  He imagined an eagle dropping her into the median, a baby flung from a car window, a girl raised by coyotes, a baby tied to the strings of some fat birthday balloons.

For a long time, the highway had too many lanes for Brent to count. When he was old enough to distinguish the four lanes from each other, he was old enough to understand that four lanes were too many to cross without getting hurt, and that he couldn’t visit her in a normal way.  He tied his drawings to his kite and flew it as close to the road as his mother allowed. Sometimes the note flew off, but he was never able to see where it landed. It danced between the cars and then was whisked away. When his mother went inside to check on whatever she was cooking, Brent would try to roll a cookie to the median. Usually the cookie was flattened, but sometimes a car struck it at just the right angle, and it was ripped apart, reduced to puffs of white, too fine to even frost the pavement.

In kindergarten, Brent learned about starvation. The pilgrims starved. Bring in canned beans for the Thanksgiving food drive so people don’t starve! Santa Clause is starved, so leave him cookies! Extinct animals starved because people ate all their food. Brent worried about the girl that winter. Big trucks came down the streets and glazed the thruway in salt. In the morning, if he was very quiet as he waited for the bus, he could watch the deer cross his yard, treading toward the thruway. “Why do they always want to go over there, Dad?” he asked, hopping from one foot to the other to stay warm.

“They smell the salt and they want to eat it,” his dad said.

After school that day, Brent went through the pantry and pointed at food. “Can you make this out of salt? Can you make this out of salt?” he asked his mother. His mother opened up cookbooks and tried to get Brent to measure out flour and oil for her, but instead he chanted, “Salt. Salt. Salt.” After some sighs, his mother put the ingredients away, and listed off salty food. Potato Chips. Chicken noodle soup. French fries. Crackers. Brent looked through the window and across his snow-covered yard. That was a good list. Those were good foods. She would not starve.

He imagined the deer and the deer babies walking across the yard, getting tired, and going to sleep in the median. He imagined the girl was friends with the deer. Maybe she made food for them. Maybe the deer carried her food in their mouths. Maybe she cuddled with them, like the princess on the Saturday morning cartoon. Brent took eggs and carrots, and other food that he knew that girl couldn’t make with the salt, and left it in the grass so the deer could take it to her.

Brent’s best friend was named Robert. Robert’s dad worked for the highway department, and this meant that when Brent rode into school with Robert, he got to sit in a plow. This also meant that Robert knew things. He knew when school would be closed for a snow day hours before the news did. He knew that adopting a highway just meant cleaning it. And he knew that the deer lying in the median weren’t sleeping, they were dead. “My dad hates the deer,” Robert said when they should have been listening to the morning announcements. “He says they’re too stupid to run away from cars, even though they’re so fast they could, and then he has to get the dead ones off the road.”

Brent didn’t ask where they put the dead deer. He knew. In the median. It took a few years, but eventually, he dreamed of the girl eating the dead deer, snow speckling her face, the frozen bodies cracking beneath her like a twin pop, eggs falling from the deer’s mouths. She took many forms, maturing as Brent’s imagination did. She was a princess abandoned by an old witch. She was a pale, leaf-clad enchantress that floated about him as he slept. She was just a girl who got lost on the way home. She was a member of an uncontacted tribe. She was an abducted girl chained to a plastic playhouse, just like the one Brent saw on the news when he was in his dentist’s waiting room.

And then she was nothing.

Brent forgot her. His parents threw his first real birthday party and his last, and both times they exclaimed, “You’re such a big boy now.” He started eating broccoli. He broke his thumb, and it healed. He broke his arm, and it mostly healed. He grew tall and hairy and pimply. He joined a basketball team and quit. He went hunting with his dad. He picked out social media profile pictures. He slammed a door and stamped his feet when his mother said he had to go to the neighbor’s slumber party. “I know you’re too old for it, honey,” she said. “That’s why they want you there, because you’re the cool middle schooler.”

At the slumber party, Brent read to the little kids from an illustrated collection of scary stories that weren’t really scary. A high schooler meandered in and out of the room, bringing them pizza and napkins. When Brent finished the book, the high schooler shoved his way into the group to tell them about Bloody Mary. The girl came back to Brent sharply and painfully. He grabbed for his heart, ready to shove it back in place. His breathing stopped. When it started again, his inhale came out of him as a shriveled whimper. At the sound, the little kids shrieked and flung their sleeping bags over their heads. Brent laughed with the high schooler. Yes, he was cool. He could scare third graders too. But when he laid down to sleep, he thought, yes, yes, she could be a ghost. That’s what she was all along.  

            He printed off local ghost stories he found online and kept them in a folder. He had a conversation with the school librarian about her self-published book, Ghosts of Chelsei County. He convinced the scouts to focus their community service on the Rich Wood Cemetery, where he could search for graves in the shape of weeping angels and lambs. These, he read online, symbolized the unexpected death of a child. He was old enough then to know not to mention the girl, so when his mother and his scout leader asked, “Why are you so into this cemetery shit?” he responded, “I want to be an architect.”

            He did all of this, but he did not look for the girl. He had her in his mind as a shimmery, slippery thing. He only imagined her face, but even that did not stay constant. All he knew was that she was beautiful and the same age as him. He did not allow himself to fantasize about her. Before he did, he wanted her to be rooted in proof. He wanted to know that he wasn’t falling in love with nothing. He wanted to know that he wasn’t wasting his time.

            He rode the architect lie out for years, and by the time he was in high school had forgotten it was a lie. His senior research project focused on the homesteads of Lilith Creek. He wanted to know what the town had looked like before it became a line of storefronts along a thruway. He learned that the median contained the foundations of some brick houses too old to rip up. There wasn’t much available information on the owners of the homes, or the daughters and young wives they had, but if the ghost shows Brent had watched were any indication, he knew that the girl had to be a witch. Women from that long ago were either ordinary and unremembered, or accused witches and otherwise forgotten.

            Brent wanted a photo for his presentation. He drove his dad’s car the length of the median, identifying the best places to park, and then he took an exit that allowed him to drive past the other side. He bought McDonalds and ate as he drove. He could listen to roughly two songs, depending on the genre, to drive past the whole thing. He saw hawks and the pale shooting limbs of fawns. He never stopped the car.

            In college, most of his friends were girls. Girls, he found, were unembarrassed of their crushes. Even as legal adults, they were unashamed to hang posters of boy bands in their dorms. His best friend, Karen, had mastered the art of loving someone from afar. Brent and Karen went to hockey games together, so they could watch Corey play. Karen gripped her phone in bars afterward, using the likes and shares and tags on Corey’s social pages to find out who he was fucking. “I’m in love,” Karen said into her screen, and Brent rolled his eyes and asked, “How can you love someone you’ve never met?” Brent thought she was silly until Corey died in a car crash, and Karen skipped classes for a month. She lost ten pounds. She stopped wearing makeup. She switched her major from graphic design to accounting and suddenly started calling her sister, whom she had always claimed to hate.

            Brent started dating. He got engaged. He got engaged again. He got married. He found the folder in his old bedroom and burned it. What a terrible phase, being in love with an imaginary friend. Why couldn’t he have longed for underwear models instead? He saw the girl in his dreams.

His wife told him stories. When she was younger, she had a crush on Scar from the animated Lion King. She once stole a paper doll from the Hallmark store because she thought he was handsome, and still had it, somewhere, tucked in a book. His wife’s stories grew in ridiculousness. When she told him that her first kiss was with a Benjamin Franklin reenactor, they both knew that she was lying. He knew what she wanted. She felt that Brent had loved someone else, and she wanted him to say it.

            Brent drove the thruway to work every day. He thought of his college debt and the mortgage and how expensive diapers were. He went weeks without looking at the median. And then one day he saw her. She floated through the sickly trees like a sheet caught in the wind. He parked his car on the shoulder, and ran across the lanes. He went inside. He found the foundations. They were piles of rocks. He recognized where a chimney had once been. He picked up a few candy wrappers and turned back to his car. He saw the sheet. It was just a sheet. Someone had probably lost it during a move.

            It was almost the anniversary of the horse accident. In his dentist’s waiting room, he looked for Chestnut in the paper, but instead there was a new accident. A woman had been struck crossing the thruway, and then managed to crawl into the median, where the driver had found her curled up in a tent. She died there: in her home, the median. Brent squinted at the photo someone had provided the paper. She was wearing a homemade necklace made of clunky, primary color beads, weighed down by a heart pendant that had “grandma” painted on it. She was someone’s grandmother, then. She was someone’s mother, then. She was someone’s lover, then. Brent brought the photo closer to his face. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. He had always imagined her as a girl.

The dentist called him in. Brent was getting a molar pulled. He had a few moments alone to numb. He had never told anyone about her. She never had a name or face. He didn’t have to lose a thing.

Brent looked at photos of his wife on his phone. He texted her: “You’re suddenly the most beautiful woman in the world.” Later, she tried to start a fight about his use of the word “suddenly,” but Brent had nothing to say. He couldn’t remember why he had texted her at all.