“I know.”

“She’s doing much better. She’s talking about teaching again.”

The boy nodded. “That’s good.”

Grant drew his fingertips along the dash, looked at them, rubbed the red dust with his thumb. “Do you want to go there now? We could put you on a plane. Or—” He didn’t finish.

“Or what?”

“Or we could drive there together. If you wanted to.”

The boy glanced at him, and turned back to the sun. A tepid orange disk sitting exactly on the edge of the world as if it could go no further. It didn’t seem possible that the whole western half of the country lay before it and not beyond it. The mountains, the deserts. The wide plate of the sea, all waiting for their own sundowns.

Without turning he said, “We can’t do that.”

“Can’t do what?”

“We can’t leave her there.”

Grant said nothing. In his chest were two hearts, two thudding fists. One of these hearts beat with the memories of his daughter, and the other beat with the sight of his son before him. Each the more furiously in the presence of the other.

He put the Chevy in gear and pulled out of the lot. He found the on ramp and accelerated up it and merged into the westbound traffic, into the lanes of cars and trucks and semis all racing toward the horizon as if they meant to catch it, as if they might go flying over it as if over a rise in the road, thereby forcing the sun back up into the sky, again and again, keeping it indefinitely aloft, the day indefinitely alive.

40

They drove the long midwestern state again, end to end, exactly as they’d driven it that July long ago when there had been four of them and everything, even Nebraska, had been worth looking at, and then had driven it again when Grant and the boy returned in the two trucks. Now it was just the two of them once more, in the single truck, and they drove at night and there was nothing to see but the same length of highway, the same median, and the same bleak radius of snow-blown nothing that came along with them and around them like a moving island they could not escape. Just outside of North Platte Grant stopped for gas and to use the restroom, and when he came back out Sean was still asleep, slumped against the door, against the roll of sleeping bag.

Later the boy sat up and squinted into the oncoming lights and asked where they were, and Grant said they were just inside Colorado, and did he want to stop for dinner? Sean said Okay and they took the next exit, but when the waitress came to the counter in the overlit diner he set aside the menu and ordered only coffee.

“That’s all?” said the waitress.

“Yes, please.”

“How about a little plate of hot beef sandwich? Folks drive from all over for the hot beef sandwich. I’ve got this old couple drives all the way from Sterling for it. Though I guess I would too if I lived in Sterling. And was old,” she slyly added.

Grant told her that they themselves had driven from Omaha and the waitress cried, “Omaha!” as if announcing some appalling discovery on the floor. “What on earth were you doing in Omaha?”

The boy looked to the window, which held only the reflection of the diner: himself and his father sitting there.

Grant handed the waitress the menu and said they’d just been passing through on their way to the hot beef sandwich.

When she was gone he said, “I thought you were hungry.”

“I never said I was hungry.”

“I asked if you wanted to eat and you said yes.”

“You asked if I wanted to stop for dinner. I figured you were hungry so I said okay.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“What do you mean why?”

“What’s the difference?”

He stared at his son, his thin face, and for a moment he could have been just some young man in the diner, just off the road like himself.

The waitress returned and filled their coffee mugs and went away again.

“When I was fat everybody tried to starve me. Now they want to shove food in me I don’t even want.”

“You were never fat,” Grant said, and the boy looked at him. “You just had some vertical compensating to do.”

They got back on the highway and the boy drove while Grant slept. The night was clear and there was little traffic and he tracked a three-quarter moon as it overtook him on the left, cold and steady. In time this same moon pulled from the black foreground a luminous row of teeth, and he watched in bleary confusion before he understood what he was seeing, which was the first snowy reef of peaks, yet hours away, baring itself to the plains.

Grant raised his head to see the mountains rising in the night, and they both found their cigarettes and sat waiting for the knob in the dash to pop. They gapped their windows and smoked while the cold night spooled in and whistled around them like a mad spirit. The boy thought of the jail cell, the hard cold stink of that place, and he saw the man from the adjacent cell like a projection on the windshield: his bloodshot eyes, his disembodied hands hung in space. I can see you ain’t no rapist, my man.

He blew smoke and tapped his ash in the gap.

“Do you think we’ll ever feel normal again?” he said.

“I don’t know. What’s normal?”

“I don’t know,” said the boy, watching the road, the mountains. “Not this.”

A few miles on, Grant put out his cigarette and powered up his window and the boy did the same and the whistling stopped and the cab grew warm again. Don’t forget about the airport, Grant said, and the boy said he didn’t forget, and two miles later they took the exit for it, and they found the green Chevy in the sea of cars, and after that they drove the two trucks in tandem toward the lighted city.

41

The boy kicked off his boots and fell back onto the little bed and watched as a multitude of near-invisible bodies rose into the space above him. Dense nebulae coalescing into shapely whorls like the formation of stardust into stars and planets and moons. Himself rising bodilessly and traveling through systems of light and color and mass that he alone had ever seen and that were his alone to name. But in the next moment, or what seemed like the next moment, there was a sound, and the alien worlds dispersed as if in fright and he opened his eyes and listened, and after another moment it came again, a kind of cry. A single windy note, short and uncertain. It came at slow intervals and he thought it must be his father in the bedroom across the hall fashioning some new kind of snore in his nose. But then he realized it wasn’t coming from across the hall but from his own room, and he sat up and listened, and then he leaned and looked under the bed, finding only dust and the old floorboards. The sound, louder and nearer, came again while he was bent over looking. After a minute he pulled on his boots and trod quietly down the hall and out onto the porch into the cold dawn.

He stood on the porch listening, his breath smoking. Then he went down the steps and got down on his good knee to look under the porch. Nothing there but packed dirt and a kind of smooth wallow, roughly lined by the remains of a once-red blanket. He dropped to all fours in the snow and crawled just under the porch to peer into the recesses of the crawl space, and when he was under there, waiting for his eyes to adjust, boots clopped overhead on the floorboards, the storm door hinges croaked, and boots came clopping down the steps.

“Did we bust a pipe?” His father stood stooped in the light behind him, hands on knees, face upended.

“No. The dog’s under here.”

“She’s under there?”

“I’m looking at her.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Looking at me.”

“Why doesn’t she come out?”

“I don’t know.” He called the old Labrador by name and told her to come on out of there. She made her whimpering sound and the boy said, “I think she’s hurt.”