Laura stared up at the darkness of the ceiling. Her thoughts drifted to earlier times of life back home with Jack. She missed him. She couldn’t force herself to write him off. To hate him. No, her heart was attached to him no matter how hard she tried to think otherwise.
She had missed him for a long time. Longer than just this day. She couldn’t remember how long.
The silence of the desert was all consuming. She felt so small, tucked away in this unseen corner of the world without relief from the loneliness. All she wanted was simple. She didn’t want all the things that Jack’s career afforded them. She just wanted someone to sit across from her at the dinner table and talk with her. To listen to her. To be interested in what she was thinking.
She had put her life on hold for him. Supported him emotionally and invested all she had into him. But as he climbed, he seemed to grow tired of her. She was of little value to what he now put his worth into. She felt that down to her bones. And she cried.
Where was he? Sitting out in the dark? Alone on some rock, looking up at the stars and basking in his freedom? Was he now happy? Running free on his own terms. She thought of her last words to him. “Don’t say ‘we.’” They had always been an “us,” or so she had always thought.
The idea of him dead or dying out in the vast Mojave was something she would not entertain in her mind. No. He was well. Laura couldn’t imagine him any other way. She relied on Boots’s promise that he would go get him. That everything would be all right.
She got up and walked quietly through the cabin, fetched some water, and walked back toward the bedroom. Molly was sound asleep on the couch. This little vagabond running wild in a madman’s world. Laura stopped and adjusted the covers on the young girl before heading back to bed. Back to the endless racing of her mind. Back to her loneliness. She stopped herself and decided to sit at the end of the couch next to Molly’s feet. She just did not feel like being alone. No, she had had enough of that feeling.