“Yeah.”
“You are loved,” Kori says. “No matter what happens, you are loved.”
I hug her again. We stay that way. For a time.
“YOU READY?” Dom asks me, signaling to merge onto the freeway.
“I think so,” I say. Tucson begins to disappear behind us.
He reaches over and takes my hand in his. I marvel when he curls his fingers against mine. The weight and heat of his hand keep me tethered.
All I can do is breathe.
I WAKE and it’s dark, and for the briefest of moments, I can’t remember where I’m at or who I’m with, and I can still hear Mrs. P in my head, her voice echoing from the dream, and she’s telling me I’m going to be just fine. That I’m going to be okay, because I’ve been through too much shit to fall down now. I’ve come too far to ever go back to the way things used to be, and she laughs. She laughs in that way I remember her doing, and she sounds so alive that I’m sure there was a mistake all those years ago, that she didn’t die in the hospital, frail and old and pale. That I hadn’t sat on my brother’s lap and heard her take her last breath while I watched, sure that if she were to die like the doctors said she was, that she’d give me some kind of sign. Some way of saying good-bye, so long, see you later, alligator. But it was one breath in, and then one breath out, a long exhale that seemed to never end until it did with such finality. I waited and waited and waited for her chest to rise again, for the heart monitor to stop its incessant flatline tone, for everything to be like before. She would breathe and breathe and would open her eyes and look over at us and say, Hi, guys. I’m so sorry I worried you. I’m so sorry you were scared. You don’t have to be anymore, because I’m here now. And I always will be, and as she says this, it merges with her voice in my head and she says, I always will be and you’ll be just fine. You’ll be okay now, because you know what to do. That’s all you’ve ever needed. You lost your way, but you’ve found it again. I knew you would, Ty. I—
“—always knew,” I whisper.
“You okay?” Dom asks me.
I look over at him. Lights from oncoming cars wash over his face, and I think I’ve never seen anyone more beautiful.
“Yeah,” I murmur. “Just a dream. Where are we?”
“About to cross into Idaho.”
“Already? How long was I out?”
He shakes his head. “Just the southern part. We still have to go up the whole state and cross into Montana before we hook back west and go into northern Idaho. We’ve still got a ways.”
“You want me to take over?”
“Rest stop in another thirty miles. We’ll stop then and switch. I need to sleep for a bit. My eyes hurt.”
“Sorry,” I say, feeling guilty. “I should have stayed awake with you.”
He grunts. “You needed sleep, Ty. It’s fine.”
The freeway ahead of us is empty, and there’s no one coming up behind us, not even a long-haul trucker or two. It’s like we’re the only people left in the world.
“What were you dreaming about?” he asks me.
“Mrs. Paquinn.”
“I thought as much. You said her name.”
“Yeah.”
He sighs. “I miss her too. It’s weird. Every now and then something completely random will remind me of her. About how she was completely convinced Bigfoot was real. Or that she was sure Elvis was still alive and living in West Virginia.”
I chuckle. “She loved that old black-and-white tabloid. What was it called? The one that said stuff about how a woman was pregnant with a yeti’s baby or that aliens had formed a colony in a Pennsylvania man’s backyard.”
“Weekly World News.”
“Th
at’s it. I don’t think they even print it anymore. It went out of business a few years back, I think.”
“Oh man,” he says. “Could you imagine if she’d still been around when that happened? She would have flipped.”