We wait, and I’m bad at the waiting. The others are watching the trees, hands ready, doing the job, while I’m standing here with a rope on my heart. Every second we’re not moving makes it ache that much more.
I can’t tell any of them.
I don’t think they’d understand.
They all look like they always do on a mission.
If they’re feeling this too, I can’t see it.
I’ve stopped needing to know what’s at the other end. I just need to get to it, and standing in a dead clearing is keeping me from it.
Brock comes back. “Clear. Nothing’s here. Nobody’s been here but him.” He lets out a breath he’s been holding. “There’s just the stone. He sat on it. A lot.”
That lands on all of us as we all look at it. He didn’t give up trying to come home.
I should have known.
We all should have known.
Leif’s shoulders drop a half-inch — all-clear, from him — and the rest of us feel it and follow, the coil easing out one man at a time. They ease. I don’t. Whatever’s wrong with this place let go of them the second Brock called it clear, and it hasn’t let go of me, because it was never this place. I don’t say that either.
“Which way,” Leif says.
I don’t have to think about it. “Toward the lights.”
Earth hits all at once — beautiful in its own way and overwhelming at the same time. It smells like exhaust and fried food and old rain. People outside a bar spilling loud into the street like nothing could ever reach them.
Gunnar stops walking.
“They’re still doing all of this,” he says.
“Yes,” Brock says.
“All of them. Out here. Like this.”
“Gunnar.”
“I’m moving.”
He’s not moving. He’s watching a man across the street lose a fight to a stroller, a coffee, and a dog all at the same time. The dog has the leash in its teeth and the high ground.
“Little late for a walk with a kid, isn’t it?”
“Gunnar.”
“Moving.”
He moves.
The city should be a lot. It slides off the more we move. The closer we get to what’s making this ache build in my chest. The direction is straight ahead and I’ve quit doing anything but walking toward it. The others think we’re following Erik, and we are — he’s laid over everything, years of him worn into these streets.
But Erik isn’t the pull. Erik’s just on the way.
There’s a bench, and a man asleep on it, newspaper over his face.
Gunnar slows. “Is he—”
“He’s fine,” Brock says.
