CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Alex
Now
Arthur and I left California on a Friday morning, before the fog had finished burning off the water.
Martina followed in her own car with what she deemed essential, which filled her sedan to the headrests and still somehow left room for the plant she’d had on her kitchen windowsill for years and refused to leave behind. I drove my SUV. Arthur rode shotgun.
He’d asked to sit in the front the night before, formally, with the seriousness he brought to requests he considered important. I’d said yes without making him negotiate for it.
He adjusted the mirror on his side within the first five minutes. He didn’t need it. He did it anyway.
I recognized the impulse. It was mine.
We took the coast road first, because I wanted one more look at it before I gave it up, and because some part of me, the part that had grown up on a cliff above this exact water, needed the goodbye to happen slowly instead of all at once.
Highway 1 south of Monterey doesn’t let you drive fast even if you want to.
It curls along the cliffs above Big Sur in long, deliberate bends, cypress and fog and a two-hundred-foot drop on one side, and for the first hour neither of us said much, because there wasn’t a sentence that improved on just looking at it.
“It’s like the edge of the world,” Arthur said, somewhere past Bixby Bridge.
“It felt that way to me too, growing up,” I said. “Like everything real happened somewhere else, and we just got to look at the ocean while it did.”
He thought about that for a while. “Is that why you left?”
I hadn’t expected the question, not phrased so plainly, not from a child with his forehead against the window. “Partly,” I said. “I think I left because I wanted to find out if anything real would happen to me, too, if I put myself somewhere it could.”
“Did it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Eventually. Not the way I expected.”
He didn’t ask me to explain that, which was its own kind of mercy, and we drove on through the fog and the cypress and the long green quiet of it, and I let myself feel the specific grief of leaving a coastline for good, underneath the larger thing I was driving toward.
We picked up 101 near San Luis Obispo by early afternoon, the road straightening out, the cliffs giving way to gold hills and vineyards and the flat gray ribbon of a highway that no longer asked anything of the driver.
Martina called it in from the other car twice, once to report she’d found a rest stop with clean bathrooms and once, unprompted, to tell me the plant was doing fine.
By Santa Barbara the ocean had gone from slate-colored and dramatic to postcard blue, palm trees lining a highway that ran close enough to the water that Arthur could see surfers out past the break.
“Can we stop?” he asked.
“Not today,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of road left.”
“How much?”
I did the math I’d already done three times that week, lying awake. “About eight hundred miles, all told. We won’t make it in one day. We’ll stop somewhere tonight and finish tomorrow.”
He accepted this the way he accepted most logistics, filing it away without complaint, and went back to the window.
We stopped for the night outside Palm Springs, in a motel with a pool Arthur was not allowed to swim in because it was already dark by the time we checked in, a fact he raised twice at dinner and then let go of with visible effort.
Martina took the room next door. I lay on top of the covers in mine for a long time before I slept, looking at a stucco ceiling that belonged to no one, in a town I’d never see again after I woke up, thinking about the drive still ahead of us and what was waiting at the end of it.
I thought about the notebook, still folded into the bottom of my suitcase under the winter clothes I probably wasn’t going to need where we were going.
I hadn’t told Riley about it yet. I turned that over for a long time in the dark.
Not because I’d changed my mind about telling him, but because I understood, lying there, that once I did, there would be no version of the life waiting for us in Arizona that didn’t include the question the notebook raised.
I could arrive and simply live for a while first. Let Arthur have a school, a bedroom, a normal Tuesday.
Before I handed Riley something that might reorganize all of it.
I didn’t know yet if that was mercy or cowardice. I suspected, lying there, that it might be both, the way most of my decisions that year turned out to be both.
I thought about Riley on the other end of the drive, going about an ordinary Friday in a town Arthur had never been to, with no idea what was coming down the highway toward him.
Not just a woman he’d once loved and a boy he hadn’t met, but a version of the last ten years he didn’t have, sitting quietly in a suitcase, waiting for its moment.
I thought about what I wanted, and found I still didn’t fully trust the answer, because wanting things for myself was a muscle I’d spent years letting atrophy.
I fell asleep before I finished the thought, which felt, in its way, like an answer too.
We crossed into Arizona a little before noon the next day, and the desert did the thing deserts do, which is announce themselves all at once after miles of pretending they might not.
“There,” I said, when the first saguaro came up along the shoulder, alone and enormous and entirely unbothered by our arrival.
Arthur sat up straighter. “They’re huge.”
“Wait until you see them up close.”
He pressed against the window as the desert unrolled on both sides of the highway.
Creosote and ocotillo and distant mountains gone the particular hazy blue that meant they were farther away than they looked.
We came through Phoenix a little after two, traffic and heat shimmer and a skyline that looked, for a stretch, almost like any other American city, before the road opened back up into desert again on the far side of it.
“The mountains are blue,” Arthur said, somewhere past Picacho Peak, where the saguaros started coming in thick enough to look like a forest instead of a scattering.
“They always are,” I said. “In the afternoon especially.”
He looked at them for a long time.
“I met a guy when I was in college. Before your father,” I said. “Here in Arizona.”
“Are we moving where he lives?”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Not with him, no. But the same area.”
“Okay,” he replied.
He went back to studying the landscape.
I left it alone, at least for a while. We had plenty of time, if he had any questions.
I looked at the road, and let myself do the thing I’d been rationing all morning, which was think, in full sentences, about what was actually at the end of it.
I thought about the notebook. About the word wonderful sitting in the middle of Joshua’s handwriting like something I still couldn’t see around.
About Arthur beside me, who had no idea yet that the man we were driving toward might turn out to be more to him than a family friend his mother used to know.
I thought about years, and how strange it was that they could feel, from this exact angle, both like an entire lifetime and like no time had passed at all.
I thought about the version of myself who had driven away from the state once already, in the opposite direction, certain of almost nothing.
I was not that person anymore. I didn’t entirely know yet who I was instead.
I supposed that was part of what this drive was for.
Not just moving furniture and a family from one state to another, but giving myself eight hundred miles and one motel ceiling to start becoming whoever I was going to be on the other side of it.
Some questions don’t get answered in the asking, Martina had told me at that kitchen table. They get answered in the living.
I was beginning to understand that living, in this particular case, involved a great deal of highway.
We arrived a little after five in the afternoon, the light already going long and gold across the yard.
The house was a rental. Three bedrooms. A yard that backed up to the desert.
Riley had found it. I hadn’t asked him to.
He’d texted me two weeks prior with an address and a photograph of the backyard, which was mostly gravel and one enormous saguaro that appeared to be standing guard over the property.
It’s close to the club, he’d written. Schools are good.
That was the whole message.
I’d looked at the photograph for a long time.
I’d written back: Perfect.
Arthur walked through the house once.
Front to back. Systematic. He opened the door to each bedroom and looked in and moved to the next. He opened the back door and stood on the porch and looked at the yard and the saguaro and the desert beyond the low fence.
He stood there for a moment.
“I like it,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“It feels like something,” he said.
I stood beside him. “Like what?”
He thought about it. “Like something’s going to happen here,” he said. “Good things.”
I looked at the yard. At the saguaro standing its post at the back fence. At the mountains visible above the roofline to the east, going blue at the edges in the afternoon light.
“Yes,” I said. “I think so too.”
Martina appeared in the doorway behind us. She looked at the yard. She looked at the saguaro. She looked at the mountains.
“It’s very brown,” she said.
“You’ll get used to it,” I said.
“I won’t.”
She went back inside.
Arthur looked at me.
I looked at him.
We both laughed.
Riley came the next day.
He knocked. I opened the door. He stood on the front step with his hands in his pockets and looked at me and then past me into the house.
“How was the drive?”
“Long,” I said. “Good. Come in.”
The house was half unpacked. Boxes everywhere. Martina had established the kitchen as her domain and was doing something purposeful in it. The living room was in progress.
Riley looked around. He looked at the boxes. At the kitchen. At the hallway.
Then Arthur appeared from the hallway.
He stopped when he saw Riley.
Riley stopped.
They looked at each other across the length of the room.
I stood between them and said nothing.
“You must be Arthur,” Riley said.
“Yeah,” Arthur said. “I am.”
Arthur looked at him with the directness he’d always had. The kind that didn’t ask permission and didn’t apologize for itself. “Are you Riley?”
“I am.”
“Mom told me about you,” he said.
“Did she?”
“Not much.” He shrugged one shoulder just a little. “But some.”
Riley glanced at me.
I raised my eyebrows.
He looked back at Arthur. “Good to meet you.”
“You, too.” Arthur extended his hand.
Riley looked at the hand. He shook it. Firmly. Two pumps. The way his father had always shaken hands.
Something in Arthur’s face settled.
Then he turned and went back down the hallway.
Riley watched him go.
I watched Riley.
He turned to me. Something moved through his face that didn’t quite reach the surface. He looked down the empty hallway for a moment longer than necessary.
“He seems like a good kid,” he said quietly.
“The best,” I said.
He looked at me.
I looked back.
He nodded once. He left.
I shut the door.