It’s reminding me of other, shorter road trips. Ones Jasper and I took together to a few national parks, or over to Sacramento. It makes me think about the fact that he’s driventheseroads before, exactly like I am — that I’m following the path he mapped out for me, including the stop in Eugene for a hotel.
That he existed before, and now he doesn’t. That if something goes wrong on this trip, I can’t call him for help.
Knowing him, he’d just pull over to a rest stop on the side of the road and lean back in his seat, sleeping for a few hours before setting off again. He was never a hotel kind of guy, which is why it makes sense that he bought the land in Montana to begin with.
Jasper started working in construction when he was seventeen. He helped pay for my mom to get her real estate license, and he was there for her every step of the way through her pregnancy and my birth. We all lived together up until my tenth birthday, and I still remember the day he decided to move out, so Mom could take his bedroom as an office.
At the time, I was devastated. I didn’t understand how it could make any sense for him to leave; we all loved each other. We loved living together. What I didn’t get, at the time, was that two adult siblings probably wouldn’t want to live together forever. And as much as Jasper loved my mother and me, he wanted his own life, like any twenty-seven-year-old would.
And my mother wanted her space.
While she made it clear that she never would have made it through her pregnancy without him, she also made a point to me that she paid back every single penny she owed him, and more, after her real estate business got off the ground. By the time he moved out, my mother and I were doing just fine. By the time I got to high school, my mom proudly told me that anywhere I got into college, she would pay for me to attend.
I blink when I see the sign for Eugene, and pull off the highway, finding the hotel I booked with my points and checking in. As I ride up in the elevator, I think about having to tell my mom Iswitched from pre-law to computer science. Then, that I added on applied art as a second major.
She wasn’t happy, even when I earned a scholarship my second year on the e-sports team. And she was even unhappier when I went to grad school for game design, even though I got a full ride for that and she didn’t have to pay a cent.
As I brush my teeth and watch myself in the hotel bathroom mirror, I think about Jasper’s insistence on marking occasions together.
Jasper celebrated with me each time my mom couldn’t muster up the excitement. When I got an internship in Tokyo, he took me out for sushi and sake, and when I got into grad school, he and I went wild in a computer parts store, where he let me pick out everything I would need to build him a sick gaming computer.
He even got on to play with my friends and me a few times, before I got so busy with work that gaming wasn’t really in the cards.
As much as he got into gaming for me, his real love had always been being out in nature. When I was a kid, he was always talking about taking a trip to see the redwoods, and when we finally did, it was one of the most impactful moments of my life.
It made sense when, after a decade of working in construction and taking time off on the weekends to go hiking and sleep in the back of his 4Runner, he told Mom and me that he had bought the land in Montana. It meant he was gone a lot more often — sometimes disappearing up there for months, sometimes even taking construction jobs near the cabin while he worked on it.
After a long day of nothing but driving and thinking, I crawl into the stiff, cool hotel bed and tuck myself in under the covers, trying hard not to think about every time I told Jasper I just couldn’t make it out for a week at the cabin.
Everynext time!text I sent, without realizing that, at some point, I would run out of next times with him.
Vanessa callsme when I’m an hour away from the cabin, and I nearly explode with gratitude. Mom has been weird about the whole thing. I can tell it hurt her feelings that Jasper left the cabin to me, that he and I had always been closer than I’ve ever been with my mom.
“Hello?” I say, tapping the screen to accept her call. “Can you hear me?”
“Uh, yeah,” she deadpans. “Good to know you’re not dead.”
“I texted you that I was taking a few days off.”
“Yeah, which I took to mean that your phone was taken by your kidnappers, who had alreadymurderedyou. Hey — this isn’t an AI-generated version of Lacey’s voice, is it? If you’re AI, shut down.Accept prompt— tell me the truth about where my friend is.”
“Shut up.” I laugh, already feeling slightly better. Halfway through yesterday’s drive, I’d started to feel good. But then, today, the closer I got to Montana, the more I dreaded seeing the cabin. It would be like unearthing another piece of Jasper, finding one more thing to be torn up about in his absence.
“Well, I lost five bucks on that bet. Greenie thought for sure you finally had a breakdown, but I thought better of your mental state. I figured your weird, work-love psychosis would prevent you from skipping unless you were literally tied up in some weirdo’s basement.”
“Good to know you guys are betting on me.” I roll my eyes and flick on the turn signal, ears popping as I start to climb into the mountains again. For a long stretch through the skinny part of Idaho, it was all flat land.
“So, what’s going on?” Vanessa asks, and though the tone of her voice suggests she doesn’t really care if I answer or not, I know her well enough to know that it hides her true, nosy nature.
Plus, she’s my best friend. So, I clear my throat and say, “I’m going to Jasper’s cabin.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, then says, “Jasper’s cabin, as in the one he asked you to come visit a million times and you never did? Why are you going out there?”
“He left it to me. In his will.”
Vanessa lets out a breath. “Damn. I didn’t think Jasper was thewilltype.”
“Guess he had time to make some arrangements.”
