Chapter 92: the heart of light, the silence

Maybe the world knew.

It makes a kind of morbidly romantic sense, and something the last few months have taught Daryl is that he's possessed of a healthy sense of morbid romanticism, which isn't the best thing to have when you get yourself immersed in a lake of shit like this, though really it probably explains why he's in this lake of shit anyway.

Or maybe not. Whatever.

But maybe the world did know. Because here, the farmhouse growing large in front of him, looming so much more than that fucking monstrosity of the night before, it seems like the process that's been going on all week, the slow bleeding-out of the world's color, has reached its final stages, and there's almost nothing left at all. Black, white, and gray.

He supposes that's all you need in the end.

Except that's bullshit. All his ridiculous little ideas of fate and rule-suspension aside, he and Beth are ultimately of no consequence at all where this universe is concerned, and this is just random fuckery on top of random fuckery, and none of it ever meant anything. None of what seemed like magic was real. It was there, and it was wonderful, it was beautiful, it was precious - none of that was a lie. It was good. It was all so good, and everything he knows, everything he learned, it's all still true. She's not a goddess but she is a girl, and she was always totally without artifice, always honest, always wise, and everything she gave him is still there.

He didn't sleep - heard Carol come in around one, sounded like she was alone - but when dawn slunk up and that no-color light seeped into the room it was like waking up, and he knew it was all still there, and everything sucks but that was one thing. That was one good thing.

The nice thing he always did deserve.

But the rest of it was his imagination. His fucking morbid romanticism. And now it's all burned away and there's only this flat, colorless world, and what he's about to do, which is probably not the single most ill-advised thing he's ever done but which has to be somewhere in the top ten.

He told her he would come out. He told her that without thinking and only after did he really understand what he'd said. But what the hell else is there? She didn't leave him the option of doing nothing. And he doesn't want to do nothing.

And he has no idea what the fuck else to do.

He turns the truck up the drive. He is fully expecting to be shot.

Wouldn't that be nice. The horror of last night, whatever she was put through when she got home, and now seeing her secret lover gunned down in front of her house by her enraged and honor-stricken father. Brother. Both.

He laughs. It's a horrible laugh, silence would be better, but it happens anyway.

He also isn't getting shot at. That's possibly a good sign.

It's mid-morning. Normally some chores would be getting done, Hershel and Shawn might not even be here, but the snow is still lying thick on the ground and some things aren't possible, and even regarding the things that are, he doesn't think anyone will be doing much work today. Especially not after they discover he's here.

He stops and cuts the engine. Waits a moment or two, hands loose on the wheel. They have to know. They have to have seen him by now. Heard the truck. Something.

And in those moments he looks around. Not at the house but at everything but the house. The old barn. The silo he helped to rebuild. The chicken coop around the side, the pig's pen. Annette's vegetable garden. The old trees under which he used to eat lunch, sit in their shade, listen to Beth strum her guitar and sing. The paddock. Inside the barn, the cows and the horses in their stalls, and Nellie, and the thought that he might ride her across these beautiful fields, the fields from which he helped bring in a harvest, that he cleared and he put to sleep for the winter. These fences he mended, all these tiny details he created and altered, all the things here that his hands have touched, and that's when he realizes that he's fallen in love with this place. This whole place. He fell in love with it like he fell in love with her, completely and hopelessly, and he loves it so much even now.

And he doesn't really believe he'll be able to be here anymore.

He squeezes his eyes shut and wipes at his face, angry, so angry at everything, because he was stupid but it was good.

It was all so good.

He shakes himself, a hard jerk of his shoulders, and as he opens the door and climbs out of the truck, the front door opens and out comes Shawn.

Out comes Shawn carrying a fucking shotgun.

He almost laughs again, because this is such a fucking cliche, and he's playing his part to a tee. Hitting all his marks, remembering all his lines.

Wouldn't his first grade teacher be proud.

"I told you," Shawn is snarling, steps quick and sharp like the ground itself is Daryl's face, "you fuckin' come out here and I'll-"

"Shawn."

Shawn doesn't stop dead, but he does stop and look back, and Daryl looks with him. Hershel standing on the porch steps, hands thrust into his coat pockets. He looks cold. He looks just as tired as Daryl feels. He looks furious, but it's a chillier kind of fury, tightly contained, tightly controlled. It's exactly how Daryl suspected Hershel might look when enraged - the idea that Hershel might shoot him was way off and he knew it but was lost in the sheer pageantry of it all - and he's not sure he can deal with it any better.

He's used to yelling, bluster, impulsive violence. Used to be an expert in it. He thinks this might be a lot worse.

Shawn returns his gaze to Daryl, brows folded together in a murderous glare. "He's got the balls to come back here, you know he'd-"

"I really don't think he'd come back in here to storm the castle," Hershel says coolly. "That doesn't seem like his way."

"You don't know him." Shawn's attention is locked on him, still hotly murderous, the gun not raised but easily could be. "You didn't see him with her, you didn't see how he had his fuckin' hands on her."

He expected this to be misery. He didn't expect it to be quite this surreal brand of misery, standing here with his entire body hanging pointless and pathetic off his bones, listening to them talk about him like he's not even here. Talk about him like he's some kind of thing, an animal who's stumbled in from outside and torn up the living room, shat on the carpet, bitten people. Hershel isn't saying as much but it's in his tone. Beneath that coolness. Contempt, and contempt nothing like what poisoned Shawn's voice the night before.

There's no place for him here. There never was.

"No, I didn't." Hershel starts down the steps, moving slow and calm, and Daryl watches him come like a prisoner watching the approach of the hangman. Cliche on top of cliche on top of fucking cliche. "Go inside, Shawn. I'll call you if I need you."

Shawn's mouth twists, everything twists, his whole being threatening mutiny. But then he seems to wrench himself into some kind of obedience, and he grips the shotgun and takes a step away, turns, stalks toward the porch and up to the door without a look back.

Then it's just him. Him and the father of the girl he's been fucking for three months, staring at each other.

Him and the father of the girl he loves enough to die for.

Hershel stops a few feet away from him, hands still in his pockets, still with that cold mask fixing his features, all the wrath of hell behind it. Looking at it, seeing the difference, Daryl understands, and knows that he was right: it's not even about a rough drifter twice her age putting his hands on Hershel's teenage daughter. That's bad enough, plenty bad, but it's not that, not really.

Daryl was trusted. He was trusted, and he betrayed.

And that's simply true.

"How long?"

Very quiet. The wind howls some distance away, but here, all around them, nothing moves. Daryl's gaze flicks past Hershel, just for a second, and he can't help it: he's searching the windows. Looking for a small, pale face. Looking for her. If she knows he's here. If they're keeping her inside somehow, if she wants to run out to him, if she will.

Stay, girl. Please stay.

But it's just a second. Then it's all Hershel again, that iced-over face and nothing else in his field of vision.

"You talk to her?"

"That's none of your business. Right now I'm talking to you. How long?"

He's been lying. He's been lying to these people who have been nothing but kind to him, nothing but generous, who opened their doors to him and broke bread with him, told stories and prayed and sang and gave him permission to be there in their nice, bright world while they did so. They didn't welcome him in as a son, but they did welcome him, and he's been lying to them all.

The fact remains: he doesn't have to lie anymore.

"Three months. Give or take." He swallows, and he can't bear it; he looks down, away, and he's a fucking coward but that's fine. He already knew that. "Since... around beginnin' of September, I guess."

"Beginning of September," Hershel echoes, still quiet. "Three months. This has been going on under my... Three months."

She didn't tell him that. She couldn't have, if this is how he's reacting. Maybe she didn't tell him anything.

Daryl can't decide if that's better or unimaginably worse, and if it's worse, he's not sure for whom.

"How far did it go?"

It's like being slapped. The question, the bluntness - more than slapped. He can't quite breathe. Can't look; he squeezes his eyes shut again and gnaws at the insides of his lips. How far did it go, and what he can't say, can't hope to put into words for this man, is exactly how far it went, what they did together, what they found together, all those incredible little discoveries, revelatory pleasures, those seemingly endless floods of joy, all the ways he could touch someone, be touched, that it was all right and he was all right and he didn't have to be afraid and it didn't have to hurt and it didn't have to be this dead mechanical job, that it could be falling down into the grass and being so idle and blessed together, rolling and playing in the sun, laughter, tears, that he could be so happy and at home in his own skin, that he could feel so good. Riding with her in the moonlight, flying with her, releasing, giving her everything. Resting inside her. Making a bed for them. Holding her in the night.

How fuck is still the best word he's managed to find for how far they've gone, and it's pitiful.

There are no words for what they've done.

So he says nothing at all, floating behind his eyes in a burning knot of darkness, and Hershel exhales heavily and otherwise lets the silence be, for a moment that stretches out.

Then, very soft and very cold and very terrible: "In this house? Under this roof?"

He can't. That night. Her trellis. The book, the words. Her body so hot under his, a little flame in his arms, the sound that escaped her when he finally satisfied his obsession and made her come, made her feel that way, gave her that. How she let him follow her. Rough and clumsy and the slick of her cunt, all gasping and sticky fingers - and suddenly he sees it from the outside, sees what it would have looked like to someone else. This nearly middle-aged redneck asshole cradlerobber rutting on top of her, fumbling under her shirt. Groping into her pajamas and between her legs, coming in his own fucking pants. His thick, scarred hands and his body holding hers down, his harsh panting, his groans.

It's obscene.

It wasn't. He knows it wasn't like that. He remembers and he trusts that memory, he remembers how it felt, he remembers what it was like to hold her after. The sweetness in it. Yes, it was awkward. No, from the outside it probably wasn't very pretty. But it was so good.

And he loved her so much, and all he wanted to do was show her.

He opens his eyes and from somewhere inside him he finds the strength to meet Hershel's gaze, and that contact is the only answer he can give, and it's the only answer he needs to offer.

"My God," Hershel breathes, looks down at the flat gray ground between them, and for a long time he says nothing else.

Please, let her not be in any of those windows. Please let her not be watching.

Please let her not see this.

"I want you off my land." Hershel raises his head and his eyes are clear as polished crystal. "I don't want to ever see your face again. If we meet in town, if by some chance that happens, I want you to keep on walking. That goes for my whole family. That goes for her. Don't come near her. Don't look at her. If I could keep you from thinking about her, I would."

Daryl thinks there might be more. It feels like there should be. A real exchange. This is so... short. So sharp. He's startled into silence. It's ending so suddenly. But Hershel is already turning away, and his silent back has all the finality of a slammed door.

But it's not totally final. Over his shoulder, words without a look, and they're cold and hard but also so disappointed: "I thought you were better."

"I love her."

It just comes out. He doesn't mean to say it. If it were up to him he would have said nothing at all; nothing can make this any better and surely it can only make it much worse. But the words come anyway, tear out of him in a hoarse whisper, and he can't take them back.

He can't lie anymore.

Hershel stops. Turns. This shouldn't be happening. It shouldn't make any difference. He's done what he's done and whatever he was thinking, feeling, as far as this man is concerned it shouldn't be worth shit. But Hershel is turning slowly, looking at him again, and while there's no surprise and no sign of mercy...

He's listening.

He said it to her, the night he fucked her in the ruins. The night she was ready. He said it and it was easy, because it was true.

"I love her," he repeats, and he's shaking all over, but even now it's not hard. "She-She made me better. I'm not askin' for nothin', I'm not... But she did. She made me better. And I love her. I love your daughter so much."

Nothing. And he has nothing. So he drops his head, and tears are threatening and he doesn't want to stop them.

It doesn't matter anymore.

"And I wanted you to know."

There was never going to be any change of heart here. There was never going to be any bending, any giving of ground. He knew that the second he started to speak. He knew it the second he came up the drive. The second he started driving. The second he told her he would come here at all. This was never going to swing back into his favor. There is no favor.

But suddenly there's a question.

"What can you give her?"

For a second he's sure he's imagining it. It makes no sense. Hershel shouldn't even have turned around just now; he definitely shouldn't be asking any other questions, and very fucking definitely not this one, which doesn't even belong here in this conversation. But Daryl raises his head and blinks the tears away and meets that clear, impassive gaze, and he knows he heard right, and he knows an answer is expected of him.

And he knows that his answer can make no possible difference.

He shakes his head slowly. Helpless. At least he doesn't have to search himself. At least there's only one answer.

"Just me."

Hershel nods, as if this was expected. And something opens in his face, opens a crack, and there's no more anger there - or if there is, there's no more fire under it. There's just that weariness, that disappointment - and something like sadness.

Something very much like that.

"I'm sorry, son." Hershel turns away again. Finally. The ice sets back into his voice and it's over. "You have to go."

Yes, he does. He always does.

He always has to leave.

She might be in there. She might be coming out to him, she might be there any second, bursting past whatever is between them, through the door and tearing down the porch steps and into his arms.

That might happen. Probably will.

So he's gone before it has a chance to.

He still could.

Parked somewhere between the farm and town, sitting on the tailgate and smoking and staring numbly down at his phone - and also at nothing in particular - he knows he still could. It's an option. It's a feasible one. And just because he wrote it off a week ago, that doesn't mean it has to stay written.

He has a home here, sure. He has a life he was starting to build. But it's not overwrought and it's not melodramatic; it's simply correct to say that about seventy percent of that life he was building just shattered like a fist into a plate glass window. Thirty percent is better than zero, but what was keeping him here, keeping him off that road... There's a lot less of it than there was.

So he could. Right now, he could. He can. Under this gray, roiling, end-of-the-world sky, he can call her and he can ask a very simple question. And if she says yes, there's nothing anyone can do to stop her.

He has money and wheels. The only thing missing in this equation is her.

And this is a very old story.

He pulls up her number, oblivious to the cigarette ashing onto his leg. The wind barrels across the field to his left and whips angrily at his hair; he doesn't notice. The entire world has narrowed, compressed, packed itself into the shapes of ten bright digits. All he has to do is send and ask and it could all still be his.

She could be his.

Because he knows she'll say yes.

Say she did run off with you. Say she married your redneck ass. Got a tumble-down shack in the middle of fuckin' nowhere. Pumped out a couple kids.

Say she did that.

But it wouldn't be like that. He knows that too. He's learned better since that day: he's not his father, and he's not poisoned. He's not cursed. Whatever else happened, it wouldn't be like that.

So what would it be like?

He asks. She says yes. She gets away, she meets him in town - or here, he waits for her here, or he goes back close enough to the farm to pick her up on foot. Drives her back to his apartment. They pack. He leaves enough money to satisfy the time period within which he's supposed to give Cathy notice. Apologizes to Carol. Goes. Maybe they stop off and pick up a few things, but then they just go. They find that road. Get out of town.

They don't look back.

And it's amazing. It's so amazing, on the road and free with her, and they're so happy - they bed down in motel rooms, some shitty and some not so shitty, but it doesn't matter either way because every night they lie down together and every morning when they wake up the first thing they see is each other. And it's perfect. It's everything he wants, needs.

After a while they look for a place to settle. Maybe in Georgia; maybe they do what he was thinking and head north. Maybe to the Carolinas, maybe further. Or west. There's so much out there to see. So many places they could stay, so many places they could find to call at least some kind of home. A cheap little apartment somewhere - cramped and not fancy, but again, if they have each other it's more than enough. He finds a job - rough, labor, something with his hands, something that probably doesn't pay well. Maybe under the table. But it's okay, she can get something too - waitress, maybe. She's pretty and she has an incredible smile; she'd make great tips. Possibly she works somewhere she can also sing. It's not easy but they scrape by, and it's still amazing.

Within the first few months they go before the magistrate, sign the papers, make it official. It's not a church wedding, no friends or family, just her in a plain white dress and him in the best he has, which is cheap and clean. It shouldn't matter to her; the grass and the moonlight were good enough for her first real fuck, why shouldn't this be fine? She says no, it doesn't matter. She smiles. It really looks real, that smile.

Lying beside her that night, lingering taste of sugar icing from a store-bought cake and twenty dollar champagne, he thinks about that smile and allows himself to wonder.

One year. Two. By the middle of the second year she's pregnant, and at that point people mostly stop assuming she's his daughter. Except now they look at them both in a different way when they're out together. That old, distasteful assumption is gone, sure, but now there's a new one in play. He shouldn't care and much of the time he doesn't, but he knows what the two of them look like, and even if it's not like that...

Isn't it?

She doesn't talk about her family. Neither of them do. Not one word in all this time. But she gives birth and she's holding their baby in the maternity ward the day after, cradling this tiny little creature in her arms, and she's crying, and she won't tell him why.

And she doesn't say very much to him, and she doesn't sing, and something isn't right with her and the baby, and the term postpartum depression gets thrown around but he's not an idiot and he knows that's not all it is.

She said yes and here they are.

She can't go back to work right away so he pulls double shifts, but she's struggling at home. A neighbor helps out as much as she can - an elderly woman whose kids have grown up and gone away and don't really call or visit anymore. It's something and he's grateful, but he comes home dead tired and looks at his wife, looks at his child, her on the couch staring dully at the TV and the baby crying in its crib, and it's not horrible. It's not as bad as it could be.

But God, it's not good.

So maybe he doesn't spend as much time at home. Maybe there's a bar between home and work. Maybe he starts stopping there after shifts, just for one drink, and one becomes two and two becomes three and one night he doesn't go home at all, not until the next morning, smelling like stale beer and stale cigarettes and stale vomit, and she looks at him when he staggers in and she's disgusted with him.

Okay, it's just that one time. It was stupid, he's an asshole, he won't do it again.

And he doesn't.

For a while.

Another year and she's pregnant again - an accident - and she's been working, trying to pull her own extra shifts because as it turns out a baby is expensive as hell and neither of them gets health insurance through their jobs and what they do have is now eating through paycheck after paycheck, and the bills are stacking up no matter what they do. And he wants to be happy about this new baby, he wants to be overjoyed, because this is his family, isn't this what he wanted, but in silence they look at each other across their tiny kitchen table and in silence at night they lie down facing each other, look at each other in the dark, and everything they won't and can't say is hanging between them like a stormcloud just waiting to break open and bring the flood.

That scar on her cheek is getting sharper every day. She still doesn't sing much. She's getting old right before his eyes.

She's not even twenty-four.

He lies there after she falls asleep and he thinks about the bed he made for them in the House of Light, that sweet, soft night, and all the beds before, the sun and the grass they fell into and the water, their baptism, that wild and precious summer and their last days as children, and he didn't know what it was going to mean. He didn't know it meant this.

He didn't know what he was asking her.

He pitches headfirst into the black and dreams about that pulsing red light, until the screams of the baby wake him up and he stumbles out of bed, this bed, the one narrow creaking bed they have.

Their second child is born.

So there they are in the hospital, and they're trying not to think about more bills, about how much this is going to cost them in the end, and they're supposed to be happy about this, this precious tiny life held between them, but all he can do is look at it and look at her, her pale, exhausted face - and she's still beautiful, she's still the most beautiful thing he's ever seen and he still loves her so much it's agony - and wonder if at some point he'll try to tell her that he's sorry. Because it wasn't supposed to be like this.

This isn't a tumble-down shack in the middle of fucking nowhere, and he's not a drunk - regular after-work drinks and the occasional all-night bender aside - and he's not beating her. He never so much as raises his voice to her, let alone his hand. He loves her. He wants to take care of her. He does, the best he can. It's better.

But this isn't how it was supposed to be.

He used to know poetry. He used to know line after line of it; he has a very good memory and without meaning to he learned many of his favorites by heart. He used to whisper them to her, used to give her words so much more beautiful than any he could ever write, words that were him even if they didn't come from him, but he tries to remember them now and he comes up mostly empty.

Except.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

He forgot them. He forgot a lot of things. He used to know so much more than he does now. Something happened, something went wrong, and he doesn't know what it is, but he stands in their bedroom in the middle of the night and he watches her stir in her uneasy sleep, his wife, the mother of his children, the greatest love he will ever have, and he thinks about the high school she never graduated from, the college she never went to, the family she never sees and never speaks of. The songs she doesn't sing anymore.

And he does know. What happened is that he asked her a question.

He asked her a question and she said yes.

He doesn't have a lot of time.

He practically runs up the front walk, takes the iron stairs two at once and slips twice, nearly falls. He doesn't have a lot of time and he's not even sure why, except that the sky overhead looks and feels and smells like impending disaster. It's not about not having as much to keep him here. It's not about having nothing to keep him here. It's about how he has to get out, he has to get away from her, and he has to do it as fast as he can and go as far as he can, because she'll be coming, of course she will, and he has to save her from that. He can't let that happen to her, that nightmare vision. He can't do that to her. Can't drag her into it by the love she feels now.

He won't.

But in the doorway he halts, briefly frozen, gazing at the room. At his room. His bed, his lamp, his shelf and his books and the crystal wolf. His curtains. Dishes in the kitchen cabinets, towels in the bathroom. Little by little, he was filling this place. Little by little he was making it his.

He was making it home.

It's worth it. He's telling himself that as he stumbles through it with the pack he brought here, shoving things into it, half blind - not with tears. His eyes are dry. Clothes. Toothbrush. A few other things; he doesn't need much. He always traveled light. Really he doesn't need anything, he's traveled before with nothing but the bow and what's on his back, but it seems prudent to take at least a few semi-essentials with him.

Pack. Bow. Money. Semi-essentials. Check.

He left his phone back on that road. More than left; he threw it, hurled it at the ground, watched it break. Shatter. Made sure it did. He would have run the damn thing over but it seemed like overkill. He doesn't need it. Needs to not have it. That's essential.

Okay.

He doesn't want to look at the bed. He doesn't want to know that he could drop the pack and the bow and fall into it now, bury his face in the sheets like burying his face in her hair, and he would still smell her. He doesn't want to know that. He wants to cut that information out of his brain and leave it here in a bloody lump on the floor.

So instead he looks at the shelf. The books. The wolf.

This is all wrong.

He drops the pack. He drops the bow. He goes back to the kitchen and rummages in a drawer full of loose, random shit until he finds what he's looking for. Three things.

He puts them on the counter and bends over them and does what he has to do. What he's doing isn't going to make anything right. Nothing he could do now will. But it's something, and it's real and true. His brother...

His brother was a fucking prophet.

He straightens up and goes back to the pack, the bow, picks both up and slings them over his shoulders. Only two things come with him from the shelf. He's going to embrace the simplicity of this. One more stop. Just one.

But God, it's so bright in here. In this house. So much light.

He doesn't look back.

Carol stands in the doorway and stares at him. Stares at the envelope he's holding out. Stares at him again.

"You're... leaving?"

He nods. There's not a whole lot else to be said about it. Above them the sky is darker than ever and a wind is picking up. They've been insisting no storms are coming but he's calling bullshit, and he wants to be well on his way before anything hits. He holds the envelope out a bit more firmly.

"Three months' rent in there. Should be enough. Tell her I'm sorry." He swallows. He's still not crying. He might actually get out of here without doing so at all. "And there's... somethin' else in there. Pretty sure Beth's gonna be comin' 'round. Sooner or later. You see her, you see she gets it. Alright?"

Carol doesn't answer. She takes the envelope from him - takes it like she's half expecting it to cut her. Her gaze is still locked on his face, worried and keen. And knowing. Because of course she would know what this is about. At least in general terms. Probably figured it out about ten seconds ago.

"You shouldn't run, Daryl."

"Ain't runnin'."

"Really?" She glances past him at the truck. "From where I'm standing, it looks a hell of a lot like exactly that."

"I ain't standin' where you're standin'." Hard. Flat. He's not going to argue about this. He has to go. "Don't matter. Just see she gets it."

Carol sighs and looks down at the envelope again. She's going to argue anyway. She's sure she is. She's not a fucking doormat and she knows him by now and he knows her, and she's not going to let him go without making him even sorrier for it than he is.

But instead she lifts her face to him and her expression is as flat as he feels.

"I can't stop you," she says softly. "But you shouldn't. Don't do this. Don't be stupid. Whatever happened... You earned your place here. You shouldn't."

"I gotta." He takes a few steps back, shakes his head. He's not going to cry. He's so close to making it. He's not going to. He's not. He's almost free.

This is all wrong. But it's also right.

"Daryl..."

"I gotta," he says again, and he turns and shoves himself down the walk, head hanging, the gray world blurring away.

Merle, the prophet. The fucking oracle.

I told you, brother. This ain't headin' nowhere good. Can't. Never does. Ain't headin' nowhere good, 'cause believe me, if she don't break your heart...

Man, if she don't break your heart, you are sure as shit gonna break hers.

He no longer clearly remembers the day he came here.

It feels like a lifetime ago. In a sense he supposes it was. A memory a lifetime old, looked back on with all the unreliable memory of great age - there are fragments of sound and image, and he knows what he probably did, what he probably saw, knows that a day after their arrival he had that shit job at the feed-and-seed and they had that pathetic little excuse for an apartment - but he remembers no specifics. Clouds or sunshine. Temperature. What time of day it was. What kind of music he might have heard from passing car windows, what was happening on Main. Any of the people he must have seen. Whether they stopped anywhere to eat, and if so, where. What he said to anyone, what anyone said to him.

He's no longer even sure how they got here. It was like he opened his eyes and here they were.

He doesn't think he's going to forget the day he leaves.

But there isn't much to it. He doesn't tour. He doesn't linger. He doesn't drive around, he doesn't visit old haunts. Old ghosts of the days. Doesn't go to Aaron and Eric's place; he wonders dimly if they'll miss him, if they'll wonder whatever happened to that guy, if eventually he'll just be another indistinct face in a long succession of them. Probably; they only saw him a few times. He can't have made that much of an impression, alleged life-saving aside.

He doesn't drive past the feed-and-seed. Doesn't drive past the place where the park used to be. Doesn't drive past the high school. Doesn't go near that fucking coffee shop. There aren't any goodbyes to say here and he's not going to say them anyway. It was all real, it all meant something, but it's done. It's over. He's leaving.

And it's not even a bad thing that he is, really. He knows that, and on some level accepts it. It's not a bad thing, aside from how it's happening, and maybe it's even what he should be doing. Because there's the road and there's what's on it, where it goes, and maybe he was always supposed to be there. Maybe eventually this had to be part of what's happening to him. Maybe it's time.

Letting go.

He tells himself this. He believes it. Mostly.

On the shitty end of the outskirts, back in the general direction of the farm, the scrubby grass and shacks and trailers - all black and white and gray, all flat and stiff as an antique photograph - he tries the radio. He doesn't know why; could be habit. Could be a kind of unconscious desperation. Could be that the silence is the silence in which he'll be living from now on, the silence of the absence of her voice, and just because it turns out that he has songs in his bones, that doesn't come within light years of replacing what she gave him. Could be that silence is eating him alive.

The radio is silent too.

He flicks it off. On again. Twists the dial - like that ever did anything. The volume knob. For the fuck of it he pushes all the buttons on the tape deck - punches them so hard his fingertips come away feeling bruised. Nothing.

He doesn't realize he's slamming his fist against it until it cracks. Crack right down the face, and his knuckles are bleeding.

Again.

He'll get through this. Gone are the days where he would just collapse and slump in the middle of the floor, pulling inward and closing off all points of entry and exit, giving up in every meaningful way. Gone are the days when he would look at this now, the whole fucking fiasco, and conclude that his life might as well be over. His life isn't over. His life just fucking started, and this is not the end of it, because he loves her and he wants her and the sheer monumental force of this is pulverizing him from the bones out, but he doesn't need her in order to survive. He doesn't need her in order to live. He can do that on his own.

He'll get through this. He just doesn't know how yet.

Time to let go.

He swings off the main road out of town - the one he's taken so many fucking times he could drive it blindfolded - and out onto the long two-lane road he knows will lead him to the road, to The Road. He never really intended to find it before, those times he found himself on it, but he will now. The periodic houses fall away on either side of him and twist into trees, bare and harsh and black. Behind him, receding, is the swimming hole, the field where he told her he wanted her, the ruined mill with its fresh fire scar, the forest that hides their clearing - theirs, always. All of those places are still there. Nothing can change that. He's leaving, yes, but they never depended on his presence in order to exist, and they won't now.

And that's good.

That expanse of water under the moonlight and all those childhoods that went into it, dripping and laughing, and came up a little less pure. Came up changed.

The trees gather in and the shadows stretch - it can't even be noon yet but it's getting darker and darker with every silent mile he drives. He realizes, somewhere in those miles, that he's looking for the radio tower, that red beacon - something to guide him, because there's nothing else now. And it has to be dark, or he won't be able to see it.

There's a hiss through the stillness, sudden and angry, and he peers out through the windshield and sees that a fresh wind is kicking up around him, ripping at the skeletal treetops, those bony fingers almost touching a dangerously low sky. That storm they said wasn't coming - well, it's almost here, but if he's fast enough it won't touch him.

She's going to wonder why he's not answering her texts, her calls. She's going to worry. She's going to come looking for him. She's going to find what he left for her.

Maybe someday she'll forgive him. Maybe she'll even understand.

And maybe she'll understand better than he does. Because that night on the road, on the ledge, he called her, and she asked him if he was coming home and she knew. Fuck, she knew. Maybe she won't even be surprised. Maybe she saw this approaching.

Maybe she'll just hate how it happened.

He's going to be okay. He's going to get out of here, ride the road, see where it takes him. Find something else. Learn something new. It hurts so much, but he doesn't have to be afraid of this; it's not a long, slow death sentence. It's not a downward spiral and it won't drag him in. It won't hollow him out like he feared it would. It won't gut him. It won't leave him a shambling and vaguely humanoid shell of a man.

It won't leave him walking dead.

He's going to be okay. He has a wing. Half a set is better than no wings at all. It's healed and dry, and his flight is going to be unsteady and unbalanced and he might fall more than once, he might fall many times, but he's going to be all right.

So is she.

He isn't crying. He isn't crying and he's not going to cry, not anymore, but suddenly his throat is locking up and it's so hard to see, because when he doesn't look to his right he's sure she's sitting there beside him, window down and her hand extended out into the slipstream, graceful dolphin arc, sine waving in the air. Singing to herself, feet up on the dash, the wind toying with her hair.

He could reach over and tuck a loose strand behind her ear. She would let him do that.

He could dare.

And he smiles, almost, and he closes his eyes for the briefest of seconds and he wishes she was here. Just for a second. Because she would understand, and leaving everything else aside, all the bullshit... He wants her to see this. He wants her to know. What she did. What she did to him, for him, when she took him to the water and drew him out again. What he's strong enough to do now, because of her.

He doesn't know what a prayer is, but there's this. As he speeds into the gathering dark, there's this. In the distance directly ahead - baleful against the sky - is the pulsing red light, and there's this.

Beth.

I'm ready.

And there she is.

He measured his life in weeks.

That was wrong. We divide our lives up in all kinds of ways - decades, years, months and weeks and days, and there are those few of us fortunate enough to look back and count one full century - and each incremental measurement is a form of perception, a way of knowing, but the truth is that lives are lived and should therefore be measured in seconds.

Seconds are all it takes for everything to change.

Seconds to meet someone, to speak to them. Seconds to start down a road you don't even realize is there, seconds to get into something and have no idea what you're getting into. Seconds to hear a voice, touch someone's hair, skin; seconds to inhale and breathe them in. Seconds to break something open, something you'll never be able to close. Seconds to see something and never see anything the same way again.

Seconds to look at someone and see only them, and never want to see anyone else for the rest of your life.

There's a story - not this one, but you may know it. Death is in that story, and one day, accompanied by her brother, she does her work. Makes her rounds. She visits people, she takes their hands and leads them away, and one man gets philosophical about everything. He looks around and says that he had quite a run, didn't he? Fifteen thousand years, in fact. That's pretty good.

Death tells him that he got what everyone gets. He got a lifetime.

We only get one of those, and it's wild. And it's so precious.

Because it's seconds long.

There she is. Honest to fucking God, there she is, standing in the middle of the fucking road with her cornsilk hair dancing, staring at him with those wide doe eyes, and he jams the brake pedal into the floor, is sure he jams it through the floor, and this road was never all that well traveled or all that well plowed and ice streaks its surface like pale veins in black marble. And this is a piece of shit truck in every way possible - really kind of a deathtrap, he's thought that more than once - so he's not even shocked when he feels it sliding out under him, spinning past and away from where

it's her it's her she's right fucking THERE

that delicate, lovely little creature is standing, all warm soft brown with the spots on her flanks long faded, staring at him with her wide doe eyes, her long ears pricked, watching as he watches her and watches the world tilt and then jolt, everything sideways and then all ways, nothing pointing the way it should be, dark above and below him and all around, and ahead of him - still - that pulsing red light, the only light he can see now, always out of his reach.

Doesn't everything?

And too soon?

He doesn't know exactly what a prayer is. But there's this. And right now, in these final seconds, he's paying very close attention as the world shoots him into itself like a bolt and his head cracks open and the scalding, aortal, all-color light pours in. A universe full of it. Before her, he never knew.

He doesn't have to follow any light. It's everywhere. It's all around him.

Her.

Girl.

I'm bad with words. I always have been. And anyway even if I wasn't I couldn't find any that would make what I'm doing ok. I know that. I won't insult you by asking you to forgive me and I won't ask you to try to understand. I'll just say maybe it's better how I'm not saying goodbye. I hate goodbyes. I think you do too.

And I'll say I love you. I love you more than I ever loved anyone and I don't think I'll ever love anyone like this again. I think there's just you for the rest of however long I have. Only you and no one else. That's ok with me.

I know you're probably so pissed at me. I know you're going to be fine. I know you're going to have an amazing life and you're going to meet someone who loves you so much and gives you everything, because how could anyone not want to do that, and you're going to be happy. I hope you'll remember me. I hope you won't remember me too much.

I know this is the end of something. But I think it's the beginning of something too. It will be for you. It could be for me. I don't know what's out there but I want to find out. I want to see it. I never felt like that before, like I could. Like there was anything to see. I used to be afraid all the time and now I don't feel like I'm afraid of anything. Not really. That's because of you.

I can choose this because of you. I can do that now.

I won't say goodbye. I'm never going to see you again, but I won't say goodbye. I love you, Beth. In the end I guess I wasn't a creep but I'm being a jerk and I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I love you.

I'll love you for the rest of my life.