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The shoulder was wider than it looked from a car. He’d noticed that before on walks around town, the way roads that seemed to barely have room for two cars going opposite directions actually had several feet of buffer you could stand on. He walked in thatbuffer with his hands jammed in his pockets and his head down, facing traffic the way you were supposed to.
Cars blew past him doing sixty, seventy, some faster. The wind off each one hit him sideways, lifted the edge of his hood, found the gap between his hoodie and his jeans and ran up his spine like ice water. He hunched his shoulders and kept walking.
Missoula was sixty miles. He hadn’t done the math on that before he started walking, and now that he was doing it, he shoved it back down. The Bitterroots were huge on his left, already throwing long shadows across the valley even though it was still afternoon. The light had that thin, going-fast quality of mountain afternoons in spring, gold at the edges and colder than it looked.
He thought about Kolby’s voice. Your mom’s not even cold yet.
He thought about Amber in the kitchen in Denver at six in the morning, hair still half-down from sleeping, making the coffee too strong the way she always did, humming something to herself that she’d stop as soon as she noticed him watching. The way she’d say morning, baby, like every morning was the first morning and she was genuinely glad about it.
He thought about how she’d once taped a note to his textbook in middle school that said you’re the best thing I ever did, which he’d seen three kids in homeroom see and had wanted to die, but he’d kept it. It was still in his wallet. It was in the backpack he’d left on a chair in the Solace High School cafeteria.
He walked faster.
The highway started to climb slightly, and the trees closed in on the right. The shoulder got narrower where the road curved. More than one car drifted close enough to the line that the downdraft made him stumble sideways a step. He kept walking.His calves were starting to ache—he wasn’t in bad shape, but two hours of pavement in worn Nikes wasn’t the same as gym class.
He didn’t cry. He hadn’t cried since Amber died. He was not going to cry on the shoulder of Highway 93 where anyone in a passing car could see him.
He passed a green highway marker for Missoula: 48 miles.
He’d been walking two hours and covered twelve miles.
The sun dropped behind the Bitterroots with almost no warning — there, and then behind the ridge, and then the light was gone and the temperature dropped fast, the way it did in Montana like someone had thrown a switch. He hadn’t believed Bear the first time he’d mentioned that, but he believed it now. He pulled his sleeves down over his hands and kept going.
A Forest Service sign appeared on the right: PAINTED ROCKS TRAIL — 0.2 MI. He almost walked past it. Then a truck came around the curve doing eighty with its high beams already on, the light sweeping across him, and he felt something in his chest crack open a little.
He turned and went up the trail and didn’t stop until his legs started shaking. He spotted a downed log just off the path, gray and moss-covered, big enough to sit on. He pushed through two feet of undergrowth and sat down.
The cold came through his jeans immediately.
The forest was dim but not fully dark. The sky, where he could see it through the trees, had gone the pale gray of a fading bruise. He could hear his own heartbeat.
He pulled out his phone.
Two percent.
No service bars.
He looked at the screen. The wallpaper was a photo of his mom, a good one, her laughing at something off to the left. He’d taken it two years ago in Tucson in the apartment with the dancing skeleton cabinet decals. She was wearing her greensweater. Her eyes were more blue than gray, which meant she’d been happy that day.
He pressed the side button to light the screen again. Went to contacts. Scrolled.
He stopped at Dad.
He didn’t press call. Couldn’t press call, even if he’d wanted to. He stayed on the contact page, the screen showing Bear’s name in plain white letters. Somewhere in the trees above him, something moved — a branch releasing, a bird dropping from one pine to another.
He put the phone back in his pocket, pulled his knees up to his chest, and dropped his forehead to his knees.
His throat ached. His eyes were burning. The cold was getting into his shoulders now, working through the hoodie seam by seam.
He’d been so sure at the gas station. So sure this was the thing he was doing, this was real and final, and he was going back to Denver because Denver was home and home was where his mother was.
Except his mother wasn’t anywhere anymore. And the apartment was someone else’s apartment now. And the woman down the hall with the casseroles didn’t have a key to his door because he didn’t have a door?—
He pressed his forehead harder into his knees and breathed.
thirteen
