“I can put in a good word with the owners to hire you as my replacement,” Colby said. “You’re young, but you can do it better than anyoneelse. For crying out loud, look how you’ve handledthis. Page, I’m so sorry. I left at the worst possible time.”
And he didn’t even know the half of it. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “But I think I’m going to move on from Sonnet. I might leave Utah, in fact.”
“Good for you,” Colby said. He sounded proud. He is the closest thing I have to a brother, and he’s a good one. “Keep in touch?”
I told him I would.
It’s darker now. The stars are coming out.
Eve and I always said,You have to leave to come back.
We are very far down this road, she and I. “Okay, Eve,” I say, “let me know when,” and I glance over at the box, and it’s ridiculous as hell, what I’m doing, so I begin to laugh, and I’ll admit there’s a note of hysteria in it. I’ve taken my eyes off the road for a split second, but when I look back at the road, there’s something huge, with animal eyes flashing in the headlights.
A deer.
I slam on my brakes, my head snapping forward on my neck. A thunk, heavy and hard.I bit my lip when I hit the brake, I realize, tasting blood. I look up. The road is empty and dark.
I didn’t hit the deer.
The thunk was the box. Eve’s ashes have gone flying out of the seat belt and into the footwell. The box has split open. In the dim light from the dashboard I can see that something is on the floor, spilling from the box, something gray and ashy.
Oh no.
I pull over to the side of the road, well onto the shoulder, and rest my head on the steering wheel. Seconds ago, I was laughing, and now I’m crying. Am I going to have to pick up my sister’s ashes by hand, try to put them back into the broken box? Is Eve literally going to slip through my fingers once again?
There’s nothing to be done but to do it. I unbuckle my own seat belt,walk around to the passenger side of the car, open it, and shine my phone’s flashlight into the footwell.
Oh.
The ashesdidcome out of the box, but they’re still sealed inside a plastic bag. The relief is absolute.
“Let’s tuck you back in there,” I say to Eve, and I pick up the bag and the box, ready to slide it back inside, get on my way. But as I do, I look over at the side of the road. There’s a gentle incline leading up to the kind of sagebrush-y, juniper-tree landscape that is common in the desert. It’s nowhere special. But even with the light pollution from my headlights, there are so many stars.
“Okay,” I say. I pick up my keys and the plastic bag with Eve’s ashes inside. It’s heavy. I hold it close to my body as I walk.
At the top of the incline, I stand looking out at the road, up at the stars, back down at the bag in my hands. Using the pocketknife on my keychain, I slit the bag open. And then, without thinking too much or too hard, I shake the ashes out onto the ground. “I loved you,” I say. “I love you.” Because I do, still. Eve being gone does not change that fact. I will love my sister all my life.
I walk back down to my car, toss the empty blue cardboard box into the back seat. I start the engine, check behind me, pull onto the asphalt. I leave my sister somewhere by the side of the road. I do not make note of any landscape clues so that I’ll know where I’ve left Eve’s ashes. It’s too dark, anyway.
I will never know where my sister is again.
75
THEIR FACES COME UPon each other’s phone screens, one by one by one.
They’re all sitting in their cars, in varying stages of light, depending on where they are in the country. It’s brightest for Hope, darkest for Caro.
“So how is everyone?” Hope asks, and they all crack up, because, well. “Caro, have you gone back to work?”
“Not yet,” Caro says. “My hands are still kind of a mess.”
“Oh my word, of course,” Hope says. “But they’re going to heal completely?”
“That’s what we think,” Caro says.
“And I didn’t mean to sound like you have to return to the hospital,” Hope says. “Everyone acts like youmust climb back on the horseor whatever. You don’t. You don’t have to keep going back to the place that hurt you.”
“Or where I hurt someone else,” Caro says.
