An arch passes overhead like the neck of a concrete dinosaur.
W_LCOME TO STRAND BEACH
Emma has always felt an odd mix of emotions while driving home from long trips, a sort of happy melancholy. Home calls warmly, but the days spent here are gone. When you return, you’ll be older. Maybe you won’t return at all.
As she crosses the thin concrete bridge, the Strand shrinks in her rearview mirror, transitioning from a place to an idea. She doesn’t look back. She rolls down a window so Laika can slide her face outside and enjoy the rush of drizzly air, her tongue wildly flapping, the buoyant glee of going fast. It’s not quite orbit, but it’ll do.
We’re going fast, Mom.
“Yes. We are.”
The road is long. Winding up hills cloaked in dripping evergreens, around brackish estuaries and sandy mudflats. The land rises. The trees thicken. The sea mist thins away and the world seems to sharpen.
We’re going so fast.
On the highway, miles tick by and Laika rests on crossed paws in the back seat. With a power nap planned at midnight, Emma estimates she’ll reach Salt Lake City by dawn. Somewhere around Port Swanson or Port Hanson or maybe Tortland (the rainy little towns all blur together), she sees deer at the road’s edge. A whitetail doe and a tiny spotted fawn climbing the grassy berm together.
The fawn timidly follows her mother on still-new legs—but glances back at Emma.
As if recognizing her.
Then both brown shapes whip on past, and by the time Emma glances to her rearview mirror, they’re gone.
Three thousand feet above sea level at a mountain pass in the Cascades, she’s finally gathered the courage to call her husband. She stands outside the visitor center at the parking lot’s edge, watching the sunset turn the snowcaps orange.
On the fourth ring, he answers.
“Emma?”
She’s still not ready for it. The sound of his voice squeezes her heart.
“Are you there?”
She tries to speak, but her lungs are empty.
“Emma? Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I am.” She swallows, gripping her phone, steadying her voice. “Some things happened. I’ll explain later. Just know that I’m okay, and Space Dog is okay, too.”
Silence.
He says, “You don’t sound okay.”
“For the first time in months, I think I am.” She looks back at her Corolla, at Laika’s white face in the window. “And I’m coming home.”
Her husband sighs.
An unsteady, crackling breath. An emotion she can’t read.
She repeats, “I’m coming home.”
Her mantra, whispered a thousand times to the racing highway. I’m coming home. Is she asking him? Is she telling him? Does she even have a home to come back to? Maybe her things are boxed up in a storage unit. Maybe they’ve been given away. Maybe Shawn and his family have already mourned her, too, and said their goodbyes to Shelby and Emma alike and moved on. Maybe she’s only her own ghost and she’s already too late. She doesn’t know. She can’t know. And there’s more to say, so much more, but it’s all clotted up painfully inside her chest. She’s trying to form the words.
Say it.
She can’t.
“Emma? Are you still there?”
Say it.
No self-edits.
“Emma, I don’t understand what you’re—”
“I’m sorry.” It comes out like a slashed vein: “I’m so, so sorry, Shawn, for what I put you through. And I understand why you’re angry. You should be. We were supposed to be a team. I took a vow on that. We should have grieved together and supported each other, and instead of doing that, I got in my car and ran away and forced you to suffer our daughter’s death alone. I made everything so much harder for you. For us both. And you don’t have to forgive me. That’s your right. I hurt you.”
She stops for a breath.
He sniffs. A crackle of static.
“Shawn, I abandoned you when you needed me.”
He says nothing.
Dusky light falls over the visitor center. She’s alone here. She checks her phone’s screen—yes, the call is still connected. The call timer still ticking seconds.
Emma feels it again, the inexorable downward tug. The enormity of things unspoken, unspeakable. Maybe this was a mistake. The sun is dimming behind the nearest peak, the mountain pass shadowed into a cold lake of darkness. Still, her husband says nothing.
She pats her purse on instinct, wishing for a cigarette. Before leaving Strand Beach, she’d smoked the last one in her squashed pack, also vowed to be her last one ever, with Old Cop on a boardwalk bench overlooking the waves.
Fuckin’ writers, man. She’d taken a long drag. Maybe they’re all nuts.
Old Cop—no, his name is Eric—had laughed until he coughed. What else can you do? And then he’d softened and touched her shoulder.
Remember, Emma. Time. Tears. And talking.
She’d nodded.
That day, she’d also visited Jake Stanford’s parents. On their front porch she told them that their son’s last delivery that night, the parcel that cost him his life, was an item that helped save Emma’s. She felt they deserved to know that.
Last of all, on her way out, she stopped at Strand Beach’s secondhand bookstore and purchased a yellowed paperback of Silent Screams. On the back cover, a black-and-white Deek, two decades younger and clearly at the apex of his life, nods knowingly with a hand raised to the brim of his fedora. A gesture she’s seen before.
M’lady.
Howard studied his idol, all right.
The face still gives her a chill. The silver hair. The square jaw. The piercing eyes. This face will always exist in history—even if police found the man himself dead in his recliner with his bowels released and his honorary revolver still in his mouth. On his whiteboard, a fully drawn stick figure hung on a noose.
Emma’s forearm still itches as it heals. The scar, however subtle, will remain on her skin forever: DEEK KILLED ME. Like a tattoo, a reminder of what she almost lost.
Almost.
She shivers in the mountain air and checks her phone screen again—it’s been more than a minute now. Her husband still hasn’t spoken. She can hear his distant breaths, a faint rhythm to the static. “Shawn?”
Aching silence.
She dreads the answer.
When it finally comes, his voice is barely audible over the hum of the highway: “Emma . . . where are you?”
She reads a sign. “Glacier Ridge.”
“The ski resort?”
“No. A visitor center.”
Silence again.
Her chest tightens.
“Okay,” he says. “It looks like the exact midpoint between that visitor center and our house is . . . uh, some little town called Brighton. It’s in Idaho. Five hours and fourteen minutes from me. Five hours and eleven minutes from you. I’m getting in my truck, right now . . .”—in the background, she hears a door shut—“and I’ll meet you halfway. Okay? I’m sorry, but I can’t wait until tomorrow. I just can’t, Emma. Your call is the best thing to happen to me in I can’t remember how long, and I need to see you and Space Dog as soon as possible. Today. Tonight. In five hours and fourteen minutes.”
Tears cloud Emma’s eyes and she laughs with a shiver. She slides into a crouch against the building’s brick wall.
He pauses. “Is that . . . is that okay?”
“Yes.” She nods hard, wiping her eyes. “Yes, yes, yes—”
“I love you so much.”
“I love you, too.”
“Brighton,” Shawn promises. “I’ll meet you there.”