It was Wynonna who made the plan that sent you on your way, but it was Dolls who sent you the gift that saved you.
You found the gift somewhere just outside of Abilene, in the trunk, in the well where the spare was supposed to sit. Your first thought - practical to the fucking last - was that you were lucky you hadn't had a blow out sometime in the last forty straight hours you and Alice had spent on the road.
Your second thought was how did he know.
How did he know?
You pulled off to the side of the road when his text came, onto the shoulder of some deserted stretch of Highway Something or Other, which you knew was so not the official name, but that was sorta the point, right? It was all about not knowing - something you'd had more than your share of experience with since coming to Purgatory - but at least this time it was intentional.
You'd spent the better part of a day and a half, from the moment Waverly's call ended till the moment Dolls texted, trying as hard as you could to get lost, to make you and Alice both just disappear. And you can't be lost if you know where you are. That's just basic, though, in all honesty?
Right about then, basic was almost a full step up from the best you could manage.
"We'll see them all again," you told Alice, your voice amounting to little more than a whisper in the dark car as you drove on and on through the night, wondering which would give out first: the gas tank, or your control over the wall in your head and heart, the one just holding it all back, at least enough that you could function. Your money, such as it was (and it wasn't much, certainly not the kind of much you'd need to last) was on the gas.
After all, you and that wall were old friends and it had never let you down yet.
(Yet might have been the operative word.)
You knew - you were well aware - that it was the fears that kept you moving more than anything else, a tangible stew of them: worry that Bobo had found a way out, that the Widows hadn't died as much as vanished, that Black Badge was lurking round every bend in the road, black copters set to descend on you at the next crossroads, the men in white coats coming for her and leaving you.
There was no road back to Purgatory as it was. If you lost Alice…
Who says you can't go home again? Wynonna 'you lost my baby and now I'm going to have to lose a bullet in your skull' Earp, that's who.
"She'd never forgive me," you said and Alice didn't disagree and she didn't ask which 'she' you meant cause, really? Even the baby knew it was both.
So you kept rolling, your phone jacked into the cigarette lighter - might as well get some use out of it, right? - so there'd be no way you might miss the next call or text or email or desperate cries from home and no, you didn't dwell on how easily you were already starting to think of anywhere else as that, or how easily you could find yourself thinking of home as her and not the her it had been just days before.
Looking back on it now - and you try not to, but like the wise little green man once said, there is no try, there is do or do not and you, unfortunately, do more than you don't - even with the 20-20 of hindsight, it's almost funny, a laughable bit of dark irony. You kept going (running) always one step ahead of those stewing fears, but no matter how far you got (and the further, the faster, but that didn't matter either) there was no real amount of distance that you could ever put between you and that last call.
And that was last as in the most recent and not last as in final or never to happen again or the end of things. "That's a metaphor," you said, "distance, I mean." You said it out loud, like Alice could understand or, maybe, as if you could. "A call's not really a thing you can run from. Like, it's just a memory, it's just something I did. It isn't like it's a person or a place or a thing that you can…"
Escape.
That was the word you were looking for - escape: verb, to break free of, to make one's getaway, to make a run for it - and it wasn't like you had to look all that hard, it was easy enough to find it right there on the tip of your tongue and the it's been right there since you crossed on out of the Triangle more-than-tip of your brain. It was easy to find but hard to say (impossible) and so you didn't and that was OK.
Not like there was someone around to call you out on it. And no, you didn't avoid her eyes in the rearview because of that.
Not just because of that, anyway.
The text from Dolls came at like one-thirty in the morning and you drove another hour - 85 some odd miles - before you actually read it.
You'd taken to driving at night because the dark and the hum of the engine and the steady roll of the pavement beneath her soothed Alice, put her to sleep better than any bottle or book or poor rendition of a lullaby ever could. She was, you often thought, her mother's child.
Running suited her.
Hotel rooms were the order of the day (literally, you slept in the daylight and it only took a week or so for you to adjust) and, as the time wore on, even that was slowly turning, going from ho to mo as your bank account went from mo to lo. You'd maxed your cash advances on three credit cards, emptied your checking (but not your savings cause can't get blood from a stone) (except, maybe, in Purgatory) and done a mental inventory of anything you had that you could sell.
It was a short list that started with your blood and ended with the baby and no, neither of those was really an option.
Those thoughts did you no good. They bred worry in your mind and regret in your heart and, apparently, made you think like some third rate internet poet. You did your best to keep them at bay, focusing on one move and then the next, trusting that somehow it would all work out, that salvation would find you in the next dirty room, sleeping on the next set of shouldn't be touched but God they felt good (compared to the driver's seat of your shit car) sheets.
Salvation never came, but a port in the storm did, like a life preserver giving you just enough to hang on to so you could stay afloat amongst the waves. Somehow, Dolls knew and he sent the only thing he could: hope. But you didn't know that - not yet, anyway - cause you were a bit too busy driving which, you know, was just code for doing all you could to ignore the absolute fuck out of that text message.
Reading it would have meant stopping and that was just not happening and it wasn't because you were making good time (you'd need a destination for that) and it had little or nothing to do with worrying about what might be out there, in the dark, off in the shadows and no, you didn't think it was supernatural or weird or supernatural weird - regular weird, which you vaguely sort of remembered, was bad enough - cause you had your gun and you had your training and you had a whole load of 'I escaped the Ghost River Triangle and Jack and Bobo Del Ray and, most of all, Wynonna' running through you, and that was enough to make any regular weird seem like a fucking cake walk.
So, for eighty-five miles (eighty-three point seven, to be exact) (you slowed down once when Alice cried and you had to reach back to rub a gentle hand across her cheek) you focused on the white lines and the yellow lines and the thin strips of light-lines from your fading headlights and pretended - as best you could - that your phone hadn't buzzed and that there wasn't some message just sitting there, waiting for you.
You lasted longer than you expected which, you figure, had something to do with being really damn good at pretending except, honestly, you're fuck all at pretending and you always have been.
Just ask every boy who ever tried to kiss you.
Or the woman who stared back at you in the mirror every morning for a week after you first met Waverly. The one who laughed - laughed - when you said (out loud) "She's OK. Not all that or anything. She's just… yeah."
"That's your aunt," you said to Alice as you steered around a bend that was at least forty-five degrees sharper than it had any right to be. "She's… yeah."
So very very yeah and even now, when it's been long enough that you almost can't remember what the gentle curves and slopes of her face felt like beneath your fingers, you still remember that.
You also remember that what you are good at (and always were) is hiding from your fears, and that's exactly what you were doing that night cause that message had awakened a river o'terror inside you. You remember feeling afraid, like deathly, like fucking petrified.
Though only part of that was over the message and what it might say (come home) or what it might not (also, come home.)
Mostly though, you were afraid to stop, terrified that if you did, you'd never start again. "We'll just go a little further," you told her - no protest - and downshifted, wondering, not for the first time, why you'd ever been possessed by the urge to own a stick shift. "It'll be OK," you said, and you swear it wasn't a lie. "You'll see. Whatever it is… it'll be OK."
Alice got OK, you thought. She understood OK, and every time your eyes darted to the rear view, checking up on her back there - quite OK, herself - tucked safely under six or seven or, seemingly, a hundred harnesses, buckled in, strapped up, and locked down, in a seat that it took an engineering degree to work, you breathed just a little easier.
And then your phone buzzed again cause you hadn't checked it yet and it was getting impatient and it was so not OK and, you know what?
Fuck easier. You were just glad you were still breathing. And that 'still', you knew, would last just as long as you kept going.
And going. And going.
Eighty-five miles of going. Eighty-three-point-seven.
To be exact.
About halfway along (forty-one-point-two)(to be exact) you started counting the number of times you peeked into the backseat to check on the baby, which totally wasn't meant as a distraction, something to focus on besides that infernal buzzing, nope, not at all.
It was, you told yourself more than once, something like maternal instinct. You were sure all mothers (real or.. otherwise) did that same thing, always checking, that they all spent hours, especially during those first few days of life, wandering around in a near permanent checking haze of paranoia, all of them waiting for the hammer to fall, for the worst that they were sure would be coming any moment.
And it was, you told yourself (just once), only a matter of time before you stopped thinking of mothers as a "them" and a "they" and started thinking of "we" and "us".
For once, you weren't wrong.
"Most of them," you said, and even then 'them' sounded just… wrong. "They probably don't ever think that worst might be a demon or a witch or even a semi-immortal gunslinging baby daddy, now do they?" Alice didn't answer (she was clearly thinking that you were right.) "I suppose that's what makes us different and different is special, right baby girl?"
(And no, those two words didn't sound wrong at all.)
Alice still didn't answer - even if you feared, for just a second, that through some magic, she just might - but you were sure she'd agree with you. After all, none of the women in her life had ever been much for doing anything the traditional way.
"We're probably safe from all that," you told her, all the while thinking that, eventually, when she was old enough to understand the notion of 'probably', you might have to stop using it. And no, you didn't once pause at the thought that there would, maybe, be an 'eventually'.
You did pause at the buzz of the phone and if the road hadn't been so damn twisty, you'd have reached over and shut the damn thing off. And you knew you would, sooner or later, cause the road had to straighten out at some point, right?
Of course it did.
You know… eventually.
So, about all those eventuallys.
You've had your share of those by now, crossed more than a few of Alice's developmental lines in the sand - first time rolling over, first crawl, first time standing up which looked, honestly, a lot like her mother's first time standing up after one too many (wobbles and bobbles and chock full of oopsie-daisy) - and every one of them was one more border, one more step across that other line, the one running round the Triangle, one more unsteady step out of Office Haught and baby girl Earp and into Nikki and Alice, the Randall family.
Yes, Randall. As in Randy. As in Nedley. As in Dolls' gift and his sense of humor and oh, how you planned to slug him in the arm if you ever saw him again.
You're not sure, like at all, when it started being 'if' and not 'when' and how you didn't notice that it did. Or why that doesn't bother you more.
(And when you say 'more', you mean 'at all', and no, you don't think about that.)
(Much.)
All of those steps she's taken, you've taken right alongside her, the two of you stepping on out of the ghosts and into the real world. It's funny to you, now, that you've realized just how unreal all of it felt, back in Purgatory. You used to think that that was the real, when all the danger and the risk and the peek behind the human curtain (and the Waverly) of it all dizzied you up, made life on the other side - beyond the Ghost River and past the town limits and out where there was no Black Badge and no demons - seem so empty and fake and pointless.
Six months ago, Alice stood, holding herself up with two hands on the tiny ottoman in your tiny apartment and she looked at you with her tiny eyes and…
mama
And there was the only point you think you're ever going to need.
When you think of Purgatory now, when you think of that life, it's almost always as something more hazy dream then vivid memory, a thing you remember - vaguely - but only in the dark of night, when she's sleeping softly beside your bed, there's no more diapers (for a few minutes,
at least) and the stories have been read and the bottles drained and those once in the bluest
of moons minutes of life you managed to schedule in have faded away.
That's when she comes, the thoughts of her. Unbidden and without warning. And you're never sure what breaks your heart more. When she comes.
Or when she's gone again.
But then Alice cries or coos or snores (my God, does she snore) and you're reminded again, that she's real and you're real and the pillow beneath your head and the ceiling above you and the floors beneath you… all real.
And you think of that gift Dolls left you, stashed in your wheel well, like somehow, he'd always known.
When you go to work the next morning at the library, when some tiny kid who's no more yours than Alice is (really) asks you for help finding a book - an actual one with pages and everything and not some digitized lifelike interpretation of one - it's Miss Randall they ask.
And that's thanks to Dolls.
When you come home that night, to the smell of Mrs. Ruth's Wednesday night BBQ chicken and twice baked potatoes and fresh cilantro on the salad and the sight of Alice, smiling and giggling and so excited that you're… home… it's Nikki that comes through the door.
It's mama.
And that's thanks to Dolls.
That's thanks to the papers you found in your trunk when you finally pulled over. The ID's and the documents, the social security and birth certificate and college transcripts and the resume.
A resume.
One that, of course, left off Black Badge consultant and unofficial agent and deputy and all around badass. Instead, he made you a librarian.
A librarian.
Complete with degree and work experience and not too shabby salary requirements and some serious research skills and he made you a librarian.
"It's safe," he wrote in his note. "It's safe and it's quiet and it's probably the one thing you could do that would make Waverly swoon even more so you're welcome."
It's all there, everything you could ever need - including a bank account and debit card and a credit card and which Black Badge off the books slush funds those all trace back to, you really don't wanna know - and it's all perfect, the sort of perfect that would fool anyone who wouldn't think to even look and that you know, is his real gift.
A life. Off the radar, off the line, out of the line of fire. All the things you thought you never wanted.
You closed the trunk, leaning against the car and staring into the dark night, down the twisting road you knew you were gonna be on for just a little bit longer. And right then and there, you promised yourself that you'd tell her. That someday, she'd know the truth. About her mother and her aunt and her father.
About the man that gave her life.
And when you think of it now, of that night and that text and that gift, it's mostly another one of those hazy dreams, another moment or two that's gotten lost in the shuffle of eighteen months and eighteen hundred diapers and a life you sometimes forget you haven't always lived.
But you remember that promise. As clear as a fucking bell, you remember that. And you know you'll keep it.
Eventually.