This is the Place

Adam stared out numbly at the side of the road as they journeyed along. Trees grew high and densely together. Impenetrable. Some of the trees were elongated and thin, different from any that grew in England. The foliage was very green, lit up by the autumn sun. Cara travelled this route too, he thought. She looked out at these same trees.

Intermittently, as they carried on down the highway, he noticed the American style houses he had seen so many times in films. There were a few chapels scattered at intervals along the road, proudly displaying the US flag.

It all felt so unreal. He felt no joy at coming upon somewhere he had never been before. He was aware that he had never been so far from home.

The bus pulled off the freeway, down a residential street, which the road sign stated as being Hamlin Road. When the bus stopped, Sophie beckoned to him to follow and so grabbing his belongings, Adam jumped up and followed her off the bus.

She led him back down the way the bus had just come and round the corner onto the grass verge at the side of the highway. They walked along it a few yards and then in a clear space, just in front of a Lutheran church, Sophie stopped and her eyes met his. “This is the place,” she informed him.

So this is where the accident had happened. Adam closed his eyes against the thought of Cara dying here, so far from home. The pain he felt threatened to tear him up from inside. He wondered whether she had thought of him as her life was wiped from her.

Cara had been so excited about travelling around the United States with her older sister, Sophie, during her University holidays. She had saved up for ages beforehand and spent hours planning how they would get to every place they planned to visit. Adam had worried but Cara was determined to go. The two girls had been on a bus on its way to Charleston when the bus driver had lost control of the vehicle, causing it to overturn. Out of the twenty eight passengers, there were five survivors. One of those, miraculously, was Sophie.

Adam still remembered when Cara’s mother had rung him to tell him that Cara was dead. The horror of the situation had settled over him and he had been living in a state of extreme shock since that day.  He needed to see where Cara had died. Sophie volunteered to take him there herself and so the two had gone on a journey that had taken them all the way to the side of a highway in South Carolina.

Sophie watched him now, as her eyes, Cara’s eyes, filled with tears. Adam knelt down and placed the white roses he had bought back in Columbia, on the grassy bank. Twenty roses, one for every year of Cara’s life.

They both paused for a while, listening as the traffic roared past. After a while, Adam stood, inhaled deeply and then exhaled, wishing he could purge the anguish from inside him as he breathed out. He smiled weakly at Sophie and together they walked away.