32
I stand in the middle of the road, facing the direction from which I know I’ll see the car from my nightmares come, drifting mindlessly across the yellow line. For now, the rain has let up, and the night is still. This time, when I think of that song I first heard Beau play, it comes to me—a measure of it, at least—and I take time by the hand with no more than a gentle tug, sending it unwinding backward right through me.
Night turns to day turns to night in flashes, like a yellow-
gold strobe light. Cars zoom past as blurs of color on either side of me, whipping my hair around my face, shaking my clothes out until they’re dry.
I don’t know how I’ll know it’s time, but I believe I will.
I watch several accidents reverse until I see a maroon blot against the creek—a pile of crushed metal unfolding again and pulling back onto the road, parting ways with a black pickup. I go just past that before I stop focusing on Beau’s song, on the wheel of time, and let the world fall back into its rhythm.
Neither Beau’s dad’s car nor my mom’s are in sight, but a shiver trickles down my vertebrae, letting me know—as Grandmother must have known when I told her of my impending Closing—that this is the same night. I feel the night air itself thick with expectation, like the still woods and the mute crickets and the barometric pressure and the floating clouds and ancient rocks are all holding their breath, preparing to weep for me.
At the end of all this, the end of the world, I stand on a yellow line of paint and look up into the night sky, searching the stars. “Are you there?” I whisper.
I feel nothing but the warm breath the night’s held on to since the Sun’s last setting, the soft glow of the Moon, the distant heartbeat of Thunder, the lick of Fire, and the flash of Rainbow, and while none of these is the voice of my father or the face of my mother, I know—with certainty—that I am somebody’s child, that I am deeply loved. And when the headlights reach around the bend at the end of my line of sight, that’s enough.
It’s enough when I glance over my shoulder and see the truck rumbling from the opposite direction, bouncing drunkenly between the shoulder and the median.
It’s enough when I face the glare, peer through it to the maroon car beyond, and step into the middle of the lane. Because I found myself in the stories Grandmother told and in the hearts of those who loved me.
I start walking toward the end, heading off my own accident. All the while, time shudders around me. It pulls against me, like a river current trying to drag me back to my own time. I find a stone in the road, and I take it in my hand. There’s not much time until I’ll be whisked away from all this, certainly not enough time to redo this if it doesn’t work. I have one chance to make any sort of change, and so I dig my heels in with every step and keep moving. In a way, I become the dark and mysterious mass from my dreams, moving toward myself.
I think of the blueness the girl fell into in Grandmother’s story, endless possibility. Even that can be terrifying. I have to believe in whatever lies within the blue, that within its primordial goop there’s another Beau, another Natalie, another summer containing all time, when we’ll stop asking who we are and let ourselves be savored fiercely by the world. And if there is no other Natalie on the other side of this, I have to believe there’s at least a long and exceptional life for the person I love. The tears start to fall; my speed increases.
Goodbye, Sun. Goodnight, Moon. Thank you, Thunder. I love you, Fire. Goodbye, Rainbow.
And Mom, who stroked my hair when I woke from nightmares drenched in sweat.
And Dad, who squeezed my neck on the deck overlooking the mist, as he told me he’d always listen.
And Matt, who loved me first.
And Megan, who loved me best.
And Rachel, who loved me fiercely.
And my Bridget, who loved me selflessly.
And Beau—Beau Wilkes, who loved me until the end.
I stop walking as the lights bear down on me. They swell. Brighter and brighter and brighter still, until they’re a pool of clear blue. A beautiful, perfectly broken new world I would die to see. For a moment, I imagine the dark outline of a hunched woman, her smile and her wrinkly hand lifting. She was there. The Grandmother I know said she never saw Beau’s and my future, but she was there. She stood on our porch and looked through our window. And maybe she’d come there to look at the past with the Beau she’d already lost, while I stood there looking toward his future without me, with someone else. But maybe, just maybe, she—that old, crooked version of me—had just come home from the grocery store. Maybe she was standing on the porch her husband had built for her, weighed down by bags of beer and cereal, when she thought she saw something familiar in the window. Maybe she stopped and felt her insides shiver because, for an instant, she could’ve sworn she saw herself, sixty years younger, standing in the living room with arms coiled around the love of her life. Maybe she lifted up her hand to say, I’m here. I’m still here after all this time.
I had meant to throw the stone in my hand at the hood of the car, but it’s becoming hard to see. Time is whipping against me, every breath a fight to stay.
Now, now is the moment I have in life—no future, no past. Now is the moment I have to choose how I live, and now is quickly collapsing. I let the stone fall out of my hand as I lift my arms up over my head. I’m here, I think. Maybe that will be enough to undo everything, but if not . . . if not, I’m still a happy kind of sad. “I’M HERE.”
The headlights grow. And then they consume me, fold me in their endless arms, and I feel nothing.
Though I see a dark orb swelling behind the car, beyond the light, trying to catch me and tear me back into place before time falls shut.
Though I hear the screech and thud, even the sharp intake of breath from behind the glass.
Though I hear the door swing open and the desperate breathing.
And very last, the last thing I’ll ever hear, my mother’s words: “There’s no one there. I swear I saw a girl. There’s no one there. She’s—”
And that’s when I’m lost, and in my place, the world gets born.