Jack stepped off the plane with the aid of a walking stick, his new companion. The chain had done quick and dirty work to his hip bone. He sauntered up the Jetway with a limp and a grimace. The doctors assured him that the pain would subside with time, but gave less confidence that he would be able to walk without an aid going forward.
Not exactly the memento he had hoped to return with from Las Vegas.
Laura strolled beside him as they walked through O’Hare, back to the hustle and movement of Chicago life.
Home.
“Well, we’re back,” Jack said.
“Yeah.”
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?”
She smiled and gave him a kiss. He received it without reservation.
After the airport, they made their way home. The once lonely house now seeming a new place of hope and love.
Life settled in around them at a fast pace. Routine does that. It dulls the senses, bores a person into apathetic slumber. But the couple did their best, and when things got strained, they would talk about the desert, about the highway, about the mountain, and in the times of loneliness they would huddle back together in renewed comfort.
History. It’s what they had again. A shared journey.
They would talk of Boots, sitting on his porch “out there,” chewing on his tobacco and gazing at the dust and tumbleweed. They doubted they would ever see him again, and to Jack’s surprise, that saddened him.
He tried to wrap his head around the mystery of it all. How their drive on that fateful day ended with them stuck on hell’s highway, trapped in a trailer with a hermit, and then up a mountain to confront a homicidal maniac. It made his head hurt just trying to connect all the pieces.
Small steps of mystery.
When he’d returned to work, his colleagues asked what had happened, why he had been gone so long, why was he now walking with a cane? But as with his new method of locomotion, his bluster had been crippled too.
“Got in an accident, just glad to be home,” he would say, knowing full well how incomprehensible the real story was. It was his and Laura’s story, one that he would keep to himself.
Laura would have times when she thought she would see Boots in a parking lot or a crowded shopping mall. She would find herself quickening her step to catch up with the old pedestrian, only to be disappointed at finding that it wasn’t him. She had a dull ache in the pit of her stomach that missed him, that had found comfort in his words and manner. At night she would dream of the front porch, the few days she had sat there with him.
The highway.
Whenever the thought of the near tragedy entered her mind, it quickly gave way to the longing of being in the company of Boots. And when she thought about the horror of the mountain, she remembered the words Boots had told her when he left to go get Jack.
“You willin’ to do what it takes to get what you want? You willin’ to put yourself out there to help get back what’s been lost?”
Had everything been orchestrated? Had the seeming chaos been scripted? Who was Boots, really?
Whatever the answer, Laura was happy. Happy that Jack had returned to her. Not the old Jack from long ago and not the Jack of recent recollection. A Jack who had evolved into something new, grown from an experience that neither could explain but both agreed in time that it was an experience worth having.