“If you want to call me tomorrow, or you want me to call you, that would be okay,” I say.

“Good,” he says. “I will.”

I smile. Warm blanket. “I gotta let Aisha back in the car. She’s probably frying.”

“Sure,” he says.

“And will you maybe not drink before you call?”

“I’ll try, Carson,” he says. “Every second is hard. You get that?”

“Kind of. Not really,” I say. “But I’ll try.”

“I love you, my boy,” he says, and the words are hard to squeeze out of my mouth in return. I love him and I hate him and I have so much hope now and it’s totally futile and if we get close, unless he miraculously recovers, we’re doing it just in time for me to miss him the rest of my life.

“Love you too, Dad,” I spit out, meaning it and not meaning it. Because it’s what you say.

I hang up and look out the window. Aisha is on the side of the road, ahead of me and to the right, plugging away on her phone, texting God knows who. I knock on the window.

She doesn’t hear.

I knock again.

She waves me off. She is intently typing away, and since she let me have my time, I give her all the time she needs. I close my eyes and recline in the passenger seat, allowing the hot sun to bake me, to be my warm blanket.

I wake up when she opens the door and settles into the driver’s seat. She turns the ignition on and blasts the A/C. The car is really hot, but I was deeply asleep and it was a good sleep, hot or not. I felt at peace in a way that I have never felt before. The hole, the homeless feeling in my heart: Its throb is missing.

She turns toward me. “So you want to hear what I wrote my dad?”

I had a feeling. I nod.

She smiles, a scared, grief-stricken smile that trembles at the corners. She reads: “Dad, I know you raised me to be your baby girl. You raised me good and you raised me right, and you raised me never to raise my voice to you, which is the right thing for a father to teach a child. But I am afraid if I don’t raise my voice this one time, I’m gonna lose my daddy, and my daddy is gonna lose his baby girl. So here goes.”

The next part she says really loud, her voice filling every inch of the Neon.

“YOU’VE KNOWN WHO I WAS FOR A LONG TIME, DAD. I DIDN’T JUST GROW UP AND ONE DAY DECIDE I WAS GONNA BE A DYKE. I WAS LIKE THIS WHEN I WAS LITTLE, AND YOU KNOW THAT. YOU KNOW IT.

“I’M YOUR BABY GIRL AISHA, AND I CAN’T BE ANYBODY OTHER THAN YOUR BABY GIRL AISHA. YOUR BABY GIRL AISHA LIKES OTHER GIRLS, ALWAYS HAS, ALWAYS WILL. YOU REALLY THINK I’M THE DEVIL, DADDY? THIS IS HOW I WAS BORN, AND IT’S OKAY, DADDY. IT IS. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT, AND IF IT IS YOUR FAULT, I THANK YOU BECAUSE I LIKE ME. MAYBE NOT IN BILLINGS, BUT THERE’S OTHER PEOPLE LIKE ME IN THE WORLD, AND I’M GONNA FIND THEM, I KNOW IT. I WILL FIND OTHER PEOPLE WHO LOOK ME IN THE EYE AND KNOW ME.

“SO THIS IS WHAT’S GONNA HAPPEN, DADDY. YOU’RE GOING TO WRITE ME OR CALL ME. WE ARE GONNA FIGURE THIS OUT SO THAT WE CAN BE IN EACH OTHER’S LIVES. SO THAT WHEN I HAVE A BABY GIRL OR A BABY BOY, THEY CAN HAVE A GRANDDADDY WHO IS THE GREATEST MAN IN THE UNIVERSE, BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT I ALWAYS THOUGHT YOU WERE. ARE. I THINK YOU ARE THAT, AND THE ONLY THING YOU EVER DID WRONG, DADDY, WAS MAKE ME GO. I CAN FORGIVE YOU, BUT ONLY IF YOU CALL ME AND TALK TO ME ABOUT ALL THIS.”

Her voice gets more calm now.

“One last thing, Daddy. And as you see, I’ve lowered my voice now, because I’m tired of yelling, and it’s not right to yell at your daddy anyway. I just need to ask you this one thing. You really think God wants you to never see your daughter again? Didn’t Jesus hang out with the sinners? Even if I am a sinner, and I don’t think I am, I think I deserve that much from a man who follows Jesus. I believe he would want that.

“Love always, your baby girl, Aisha.”

She looks up at me, and I reach over and hug her tight and bury my face in her frizzy hair. It smells like olives.

“That’s awesome,” I say, inhaling the scent. “You’re awesome.”

“Thanks,” she says in my ear. “So I should hit Send?”

I pull back and look her in the eye and nod. “Hit it,” I say.

She takes a deep breath, and then she taps a button and puts the phone in her pocket.

We drive in silence. My heart feels new. It doesn’t feel good, because it hurts still. For Aisha and what she’s going through. For my dad and what he’s going through. But it feels new.

“Walking wounded no more,” she says, and all I can do is grab her hand and hope that’s true. For both of us.

We sail through western Utah. There are no exits, no homes, no nothing. The Great Salt Lake seems to go on for hundreds of miles to our right, and to our left is a sandy wasteland. We don’t talk much. I think I fall asleep again.

When I wake up, we are driving into water. The road ahead is covered in shimmering blue. We’re going to skid into it and die, and Aisha doesn’t seem to see it. “Look out!” I scream, closing my eyes and putting my hands in front of my face.

She doesn’t stop driving or slow down, but we don’t skid into water either. I lower my hands. The water in front of us recedes. As we drive, it keeps receding. It is always twenty feet ahead.

“Is that a …?”

She smiles. “A mirage. Cool, huh?”

I study it. “Can you stop the car?”

Aisha decelerates, pulls over, and stops the car. We get out. The same water we’ve been seeing ahead of us is to our right, and I’m not sure if it’s the lake or more of the mirage. We step toward it, onto the sparkly white salt flats. They give a little under our feet, like damp sand might, and it appears there’s a lake about twenty feet ahead. But there are also track marks, like someone drove across the flats and right into the water.

“You see what I see?” I ask.

“Yep.”

We slowly walk out. The salt continues to give, and ten feet in, I exhale dramatically. The water keeps receding.

“It really is a mirage,” I say.

“Yup.”

“I could have sworn — I could have sworn that was actually water.”

“Me too,” she says.

“Maybe we can’t trust our senses all the time?”

“I don’t know.”

I take a deep breath. “I always have felt like, if I can sense it, it exists. And if I can’t, it doesn’t. But what if my senses, like, don’t give me all the information? And what if that means that there actually could be, you know, something? Like —” I can’t even say it.

“So now God exists?” she asks me, her voice funny.

I don’t respond. It’s just … I don’t know.

We get back in the car and drive farther, and my attention stays on the side of the road. Even though I know it’s a mirage, it feels impossible for me to believe it’s not actually water. But it isn’t. My mind spins with new possibilities.

“Stop!” I say again. It looks real, but it’s not. I need to take a picture.

We get out and walk on the salt flats again. This time, my sneakers come away wet.

So the mirage is real? Sometimes? I can’t even figure out what that means. And the salt. So mesmerizing in its shimmering whiteness.

“I wonder what it tastes like,” I say.

“Try some.”

“It’s probably the world’s most poisonous salt.”

“Only one way to know,” Aisha says, teasing.

I bend down and scrape my finger across the ground. When I stand up again, we study the salt crystals.

“You’re like Willy Wonka,” I say. “Tempting me to eat something, and I’ll probably turn into a saltshaker and roll away, and the Oompa Loompas will come out and sing about my personality flaws.”

We stand there, both lost in thought. And then it comes to us at the same exact moment.

“Veruca Salt!” we yell, and then we point at each other and laugh.

Back in the car, Nevada can’t come quickly enough. And then, at Exit 4, as if they know Utah won’t last for much longer, the salt flats end. Four miles later, we cross the state line, and we woo-hoo and high-five.