However Measured or Far
FLEUR
Visiting hours at the nursing home start at noon. Jack follows Amber’s directions to the facility where her mother lives, one hand on the wheel and one resting in my lap. No music plays. There’s no bickering or small talk. We’re each shrouded in our own thoughts. Mine are torn, some still tangled in memories of last night—the way it felt to wake up beside Jack and know that everything has changed. The rest of my thoughts hover closely around Amber.
She spends most of the drive staring out the window, loosely holding Julio’s hand across the back seat. No other part of them touches. As if she’s reluctant to get too close. She doesn’t look at any of us. Not at Julio. Not at Jack in the mirror. Not at me when I turn in my seat with an encouraging smile that probably doesn’t mask the worry beneath it.
We park down the street from the senior center, away from the security camera by the vestibule doors and the ones high on the lampposts in the parking lot.
“You okay?” I ask her when she doesn’t get out.
There’s a quiver in her voice. “I don’t recognize any of it. Not any of the streets, the stores, the houses... I’m not even sure where we are. It’s all different,” she says, fixated on the swiftly moving clouds reflected in the tinted windows of the brick building beside us. “My mother’s ninety-two years old. Ninety-two,” she says, her brow creasing as if the number is somehow unfathomable. “What if...?” She shakes her head. “I was going to say, what if she doesn’t remember me, but what if she does? How do I explain...?” She swallows hard, like she’s fighting back tears. I’ve never seen Amber so fragile before. So unsure of herself. Jack and I were both assigned to territories in the same regions where we died. We faced our own painful homecomings years ago. We’ve watched our childhood friends age and our families move away, the homes of our youth bought and sold. Whole cities have grown up around landmarks we’ve mourned. The losses came gradually, year after year. I can’t imagine what Amber must be feeling right now, as she prepares to face it all at once.
Her breath hitches on a sigh. “How do I tell her I’ve been alive all this time? That I’ve known where she was all these years, and I never came to say goodbye?”
Goodbye.
The word sucks the oxygen from the car, and I wonder if the others are having as hard a time breathing as I am. Suddenly, all the little things Amber hasn’t entirely come out and said are shouting in my head all at once—the silent, stoic way she parted with Woody, as if she’d made peace with their parting a long time ago. The way she refused to take the car keys and leave with Julio at the cabin. Her reluctance to sit close to him now.
Last times can come with their own set of regrets, she told me that morning in the creek.I’m glad he has you....
This moment has been Amber’s destination all along. This is as far as she ever committed to go. So who’s Amber preparing herself to say goodbye to? Her mother, or all of us?
She slings on her backpack and reaches for the door.
“If I’m not back in an hour, go on without me.” She gets out without looking back.
Julio leaps out of the car, catching her on the sidewalk.
“So this is it?” he asks, his face flushed with anger as he blocks Amber’s path. “If you’re not here in an hour, we’re just supposed to leave?”
She stares at his feet. “I’m just saying you shouldn’t wait for me. You’ll be fine with Jack and Fleur.”
Jack squeezes my hand tight, as if he knows how close I am to launching myself out of the car.
Julio reels as if he’s been punched. “What does that even mean?”
“I abandoned my mother once. I can’t leave her again. Not if she needs me.”
She steps around him, but he takes her by the arm.
“Don’t run from this!” The wind stirs, hot and urgent. He pitches his voice low, but there’s no way to avoid hearing it. “Don’t run fromus. Please. I’ll go with you. I swear, I won’t get in the way.”
“I have to do this alone.”
“Then tell me you’re coming back.” He searches her face for some reassurance. “What about last night? Didn’t last night mean anything to you?”
She looks at him, into his eyes for the first time since we all woke up this morning, and a tear slides down her cheek. A lump hardens in my throat when she says, “I have to go.” She backs away from him, giving him one last look before she draws her arms around herself and goes on alone.
Julio gets back in the car and slams the door. He slumps in the corner of the back seat and glares off into the distance for the next thirty minutes, not really here, lost somewhere inside his own head. I’ve never seen him like this. Deep worry lines cut into his face, and under them, I see the old man hiding inside him. The one who cares. The one confronting the possibility of dying alone. And every minute that goes by and Amber’s not here, my heart breaks for him. For all of us.
“She’ll come,” I assure him. “We’ll wait as long as we have to.”
Julio rubs his eyes and watches the place where she disappeared down the sidewalk thirty-two minutes ago, as if by the sheer will of his longing, he can somehow bring her back.
Jack taps the steering wheel, studying the faces of pedestrians and the cars passing on the other side of the road, his head tipping to check the snap of the flag in the parking lot for shifts in the wind. I rest my head against the window, watching the filmy desert clouds move across the sky. It hardly seems real. A plane ticket to the Grand Canyon more than twenty years ago was the closest I’ve ever come to the desert before now. It was supposed to be my wish, my dream trip, the milestone marking the end of my life, and somehow it feels all right and all wrong that we’re here, staring off into a chasm of our own dark thoughts. And just like that, I don’t want to see the Grand Canyon anymore.
Gray clouds begin to gather like tumbleweeds. They roll over the sun, casting a shadow over the car. I close my eyes and take a slow deep breath, determined to rein in my mood. Jack cracks his window as Julio shifts anxiously in the back seat. The air prickles with a feeling I can’t place, and I open my eyes, suddenly uneasy.
