3. Lacey
LACEY
Ididn’t read Jasper’s letter in the lawyer’s office.
Instead, I waited until George was done telling me what he had to about taxes and forms and other legal stuff, then drove home in a daze, walked into my condo, poured myself a cup of red wine, and slid into the bathtub, drying my hands on a towel before opening the letter and reading it.
Then, when I was done, I cried until the water was cold.
Fucking stupid Jasper. Of course he would keep his illness to himself. Of course he would plan some elaborate scheme to get me out to the cabin when I’d always said no before, using his death as the perfect leverage.
I’m San Francisco born and raised, just like him, and he can’t understand why I’d have no interest in driving or flying to Montana of all places, just to spend a week there without cell service. I couldn’t even game at his cabin; the latency would have me lagging into the next dimension, surely.
But now, here I am. In my car. Driving to fucking Montana.
Taking the first PTO of my entire career at Gaia, a request so unexpected that the HR representative had come directly to my office to ask if it was a mistake.
I’d fought with them in the past about taking mandatory time off.
And I’d fought with them about taking more than a day after Jasper died.
They were foaming at the mouth to make me improve my work-life balance, so of course they were confused when the request came from my side.
At first, when I left San Francisco this morning at the crack of dawn, I’d cursed the decision to drive instead of flying.
I’ve never loved driving — hazard of living in a city with terrible traffic, I guess — but I also knew I’d need my car in Montana.
Jasper’s letter had made it clear that his cabin wasn’t in the kind of place that a person could order an Uber in a pinch.
So I stopped and got a flat white at my favorite coffee shop, then squeezed the steering wheel too hard all the way out of the city.
It wasn’t until I hit the first long, flat expanse of road through Northern California that I turned up the radio, eased up on the steering wheel, and started to sing along with the pop songs I recognized.
Now, just having crossed the border into Oregon, I think that the drive is kind of nice. The views aren’t bad either. It’s a gorgeous sunny day, the sky a bright, deep blue, and being on the highway is giving me a sense of adventure.
It’s reminding me of other, shorter road trips.
Ones Jasper and I took together to a few national parks, or over to Sacramento.
It makes me think about the fact that he’s driven these roads before, exactly like I am — that I’m following the path he mapped out for me, including the stop in Eugene for a hotel.
That he existed before, and now he doesn’t. That if something goes wrong on this trip, I can’t call him for help.
Knowing him, he’d just pull over to a rest stop on the side of the road and lean back in his seat, sleeping for a few hours before setting off again. He was never a hotel kind of guy, which is why it makes sense that he bought the land in Montana to begin with.
Jasper started working in construction when he was seventeen.
He helped pay for my mom to get her real estate license, and he was there for her every step of the way through her pregnancy and my birth.
We all lived together up until my tenth birthday, and I still remember the day he decided to move out, so Mom could take his bedroom as an office.
At the time, I was devastated. I didn’t understand how it could make any sense for him to leave; we all loved each other.
We loved living together. What I didn’t get, at the time, was that two adult siblings probably wouldn’t want to live together forever.
And as much as Jasper loved my mother and me, he wanted his own life, like any twenty-seven-year-old would.
And my mother wanted her space.
While she made it clear that she never would have made it through her pregnancy without him, she also made a point to me that she paid back every single penny she owed him, and more, after her real estate business got off the ground.
By the time he moved out, my mother and I were doing just fine.
By the time I got to high school, my mom proudly told me that anywhere I got into college, she would pay for me to attend.
I blink when I see the sign for Eugene, and pull off the highway, finding the hotel I booked with my points and checking in. As I ride up in the elevator, I think about having to tell my mom I switched from pre-law to computer science. Then, that I added on applied art as a second major.
She wasn’t happy, even when I earned a scholarship my second year on the e-sports team. And she was even unhappier when I went to grad school for game design, even though I got a full ride for that and she didn’t have to pay a cent.
As I brush my teeth and watch myself in the hotel bathroom mirror, I think about Jasper’s insistence on marking occasions together.
Jasper celebrated with me each time my mom couldn’t muster up the excitement.
When I got an internship in Tokyo, he took me out for sushi and sake, and when I got into grad school, he and I went wild in a computer parts store, where he let me pick out everything I would need to build him a sick gaming computer.
He even got on to play with my friends and me a few times, before I got so busy with work that gaming wasn’t really in the cards.
As much as he got into gaming for me, his real love had always been being out in nature. When I was a kid, he was always talking about taking a trip to see the redwoods, and when we finally did, it was one of the most impactful moments of my life.
It made sense when, after a decade of working in construction and taking time off on the weekends to go hiking and sleep in the back of his 4Runner, he told Mom and me that he had bought the land in Montana.
It meant he was gone a lot more often — sometimes disappearing up there for months, sometimes even taking construction jobs near the cabin while he worked on it.
After a long day of nothing but driving and thinking, I crawl into the stiff, cool hotel bed and tuck myself in under the covers, trying hard not to think about every time I told Jasper I just couldn’t make it out for a week at the cabin.
Every next time! text I sent, without realizing that, at some point, I would run out of next times with him.
Vanessa calls me when I’m an hour away from the cabin, and I nearly explode with gratitude. Mom has been weird about the whole thing. I can tell it hurt her feelings that Jasper left the cabin to me, that he and I had always been closer than I’ve ever been with my mom.
“Hello?” I say, tapping the screen to accept her call. “Can you hear me?”
“Uh, yeah,” she deadpans. “Good to know you’re not dead.”
“I texted you that I was taking a few days off.”
“Yeah, which I took to mean that your phone was taken by your kidnappers, who had already murdered you. Hey — this isn’t an AI-generated version of Lacey’s voice, is it? If you’re AI, shut down. Accept prompt — tell me the truth about where my friend is.”
“Shut up.” I laugh, already feeling slightly better.
Halfway through yesterday’s drive, I’d started to feel good.
But then, today, the closer I got to Montana, the more I dreaded seeing the cabin.
It would be like unearthing another piece of Jasper, finding one more thing to be torn up about in his absence.
“Well, I lost five bucks on that bet. Greenie thought for sure you finally had a breakdown, but I thought better of your mental state. I figured your weird, work-love psychosis would prevent you from skipping unless you were literally tied up in some weirdo’s basement.”
“Good to know you guys are betting on me.” I roll my eyes and flick on the turn signal, ears popping as I start to climb into the mountains again. For a long stretch through the skinny part of Idaho, it was all flat land.
“So, what’s going on?” Vanessa asks, and though the tone of her voice suggests she doesn’t really care if I answer or not, I know her well enough to know that it hides her true, nosy nature.
Plus, she’s my best friend. So, I clear my throat and say, “I’m going to Jasper’s cabin.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, then says, “Jasper’s cabin, as in the one he asked you to come visit a million times and you never did? Why are you going out there?”
“He left it to me. In his will.”
Vanessa lets out a breath. “Damn. I didn’t think Jasper was the will type.”
“Guess he had time to make some arrangements.”
That hangs in the air for a moment. Vanessa is well aware of how bitter I am with my uncle for keeping this information from me, and from his sister.
Even through all the excuses other people have made for him — sick people deserve to share what they want, he just didn’t want to hurt you, or maybe he wanted to live to the fullest in the time he had left — I still feel a hot, sticky, simmering rage in the pit of my stomach any time I think of all the lies he must have told us.
And about the fact that he didn’t even try chemotherapy or seek out experimental treatments. If my mother and I had thrown our all into helping him, I’m sure we could have figured something out.
“So, you’re finally going to check it out,” Vanessa says after the moment passes. “I think it’s a good idea. You can get some time away, connect with him.”
“He left it to me,” I correct, not wanting her to get the wrong idea. “So, I’m driving up to see what to do with it.”
“What do you mean, what to do with it? Are you going to sell it?”
I clear my throat as I go around a particularly hair-raising bend, in which there’s nothing between me and the side of the mountain but a single metal railing. “I was actually thinking of making it into a rental.”
“… a rental.”
The thing about Vanessa is that she can communicate a lot through that flat tone of hers. Things like what are you saying and do you really think Jasper would want you to make it into a rental?
“Look,” I say in response to the unspoken questions.
“It’s not like I can come out here as often as he did.
But I also… I can’t stomach the thought of selling it.
So, I figured, why not make it into a rental?
Let other people get some use out of it, keep the pipes running or whatever people say about houses, then I can come up as often as I want. Win-win.”
“Ri-ight,” Vanessa says, but what she really means is Jasper probably wouldn’t like this, and you’re never actually going to go to the cabin again, are you?
This time, I don’t get a chance to answer her unspoken questions, because the signal drops when I go around another bend, and when I glance at the screen, I see the little cancel sign in the corner that tells me even if I call back, it won’t go through.
A second later, the maps disappear, a single white question mark replacing the spot they once occupied.
“Oh, great,” I mutter when I pass by a tiny sign announcing the town of False Summit, which looks to have a population of one mountain goat. “Just perfect.”
I also pass the town of Summit, which does have a real house, but it looks sketchy enough that I decide not to turn in. The drive continues, winding along, and I try to think back to his letter, his instructions about where to go.
When I see a tall, twisting pine tree that reminds me a little of the trees in Dr. Seuss books, I hit the brakes and turn onto the road, remembering that detail from Jasper’s letter.
And, halfway up the road, when I see a tall, scruffy man carrying something out near the road, I remember another detail from his letter: Ask the neighbor if you need any help. He’s very friendly.
Smiling as broadly as I can at him, I hit the brakes and start to roll my window down.