CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Alex
Now
He took me to the mountains.
Not Mount Lemmon. Somewhere further north. A trail he knew that wound up through the high desert and broke out along a ridge with a view that went on until the earth curved away from it.
We parked where the trail started and walked.
He didn’t push the pace. I didn’t ask him to. We went the way we always went on trails, which was his pace at the front and mine behind and neither of us feeling the need to fill the space between us with conversation.
The trail rose steadily. My legs remembered it before my lungs did.
An hour in we broke out onto the ridge.
I stopped.
The view was exactly what he’d promised. The valley below us spread out in every direction. The mountains beyond it. The blue they turned at this time of morning, soft and impossible and specific to this place and nowhere else.
I stood and looked at it, the ache of a wasted decade and the specific relief of standing in this exact place again arriving in the same breath, and I made myself not sort them into which one I was allowed to feel first.
He stood beside me.
“Well?” he asked.
“Don’t say I told you so,” I said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were thinking it.”
“Probably.”
I looked out at the mountains. At the distance. At the shade of blue that I had been carrying around in the back of my head for years like a photograph that never faded.
“I need to go back to California,” I said.
He looked at the view. “I know.”
“I need to settle things,” I said. “The house. Arthur’s school. There are practical things that need doing before—” I paused. “Before anything else can happen.”
“How long?” he asked.
“A month,” I said. “Maybe six weeks.”
He was quiet, watching me.
“I’m coming back,” I said. “I want you to know that. I’m not disappearing again.”
He looked at me. “I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you bought a plane ticket and sat outside the clubhouse for three days before you came in,” he said. “People who are going to disappear don’t do that.”
I looked at him.
“They just disappear,” he said.
I turned back to the view. It was an accurate thing to say and it landed the way accurate things do when you’d rather they hadn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’ve said that.”
“I’ll probably keep saying it.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. “I told you. I know.”
We stood on the ridge for a long time. The morning light moved across the valley below us. A hawk appeared somewhere to the left and rode the thermals without effort, banking wide slow circles above the canyon.
I watched it.
“The motorcycle,” I said.
He glanced at me.
“Is it still in boxes?”
Something crossed his face. “Yes.”
“Still waiting?”
He looked back at the view. “Still waiting.”
We stood on the ridge until the morning got warm enough to mean it. Then we walked back down the trail the way we’d come up. His pace at the front. Mine behind. The desert waking up around us.
At the truck, he held my door.
I got in.
He walked around and got behind the wheel and we drove back toward Marana without talking much, the way we’d always driven. The mountains going blue at the edges. The desert doing what it always did.
Like no time had passed.
Like all of it had.
I flew home on a Friday.
Arthur met me at the door. He looked me over the way he always did when I’d been gone. Head to toe. Quick and thorough.
“How was the trip?” he asked.
“Great.” I left it at that.
I was already thinking about what needed doing. The house. The school enrollment paperwork. The boxes in the back bedroom I hadn’t opened since Joshua died. The shape of a life being packed up and moved toward something better.
I had a month.
I intended to make it less.