Page 84 of The Drifter

His voice was level. That was the terrible part. It was the flattest, calmest voice I had ever heard come out of him, and I understood, watching him, that the flatness was the sound of a man holding a whole building up with his bare hands.

He said, "I'm coming." He hung up.

He sat on the edge of my bed with the dead phone in his hand and his back to me. For one second—one—he didn’t move at all. I saw his shoulders. I saw the breath go into him and not come back out for a long time.

Then, he told me.

"My mother's missing." His voice hadn't changed. It scared me more than shouting would have. "The care home, out in Marfa. The staff said the FBI came. He even gave them his name …" A muscle went in his jaw.

He stopped. Whatever came after that, he couldn't say it. I watched him not be able to say it.

"Clint."

"Two years." It came out of him low and ruined, and it had stopped being about the phone call, and I knew it had. "Two years, I ran loops around that town, Sasha. A hundred miles. I got that close and I never went in. She came out into the dark and found me again and again when I was a boy and I couldn't make myself walk through one door and sit in one chair and let her look at me. And now⁠—"

His voice broke clean in half.

I had never heard it do that. This was the man who told me the truth in a level voice while he handed me a door, the man whose heart ran slow as a sleeping animal, and it broke in half in my bedroom. He put the heel of his hand against his mouth to stop the sound.

"And now she's gone," he said, behind his hand.

I was across that bed before I decided to move.

I got my arms around him from behind, my chest against the broad, ruined shape of his back, my face in his neck. I held on, and I didn’t say it's okay because it wasn’t okay. I didn’t say you're not a coward because he wouldn’t have heard it. I didn’t say any of the smooth things that come out of me when somebody needs handling.

I just held on. The way he'd held me. Nothing in my hands but him.

"We'll get her," I said. It came out low and certain. "You hear me? You are going to get her."

He turned in my arms. His eyes were wet and wild and he looked at me like a drowning man looks at the one solid thing in the water.

"I have to go," he said. "Now. I have to⁠—"

"I know."

He was already up, already reaching for the leaving clothes, already moving with that terrible, waste-nothing economy. I sat on the edge of my wrecked bed and watched him armor up for the second time. I felt the whole thing arrive in me at once—clean, and total, and past the reach of the dread that was still sitting in my chest exactly where it had been all morning.

Because the dread was still there. It hadn't moved. It hadn't quieted for one second. If anything, it had gone darker. Every reasonable cell in my body was saying this is it, this is the thing, this is what the feeling was warning you about, stay home, stay clear, he told you himself to get clear.

And I stood up off that bed and said, "I'm coming with you."

He stopped.

He had the shirt half over his head and he stopped, and he looked at me. I watched him get ready to argue—watched the no form, the it's not safe, the I need you where I know you're protected.

"Don't," I said. "Don't you dare. You told me to listen to the feeling. I'm listening to it. And the feeling isn't telling me to run from you, Clint. It's telling me the one thing I cannot do is let you get on that plane by yourself. So, I'm coming. You are not going to sit alone in the sky with this."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then, he crossed the room and took my face in both his hands and pressed his forehead to mine, hard. He didn’t argue.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Get dressed."

After that, it was a whirlwind, and I was in the eye of it. I have never in my life been so completely a passenger.

I dressed fast. I grabbed a bag without thinking, the old concierge reflex taking over where the rest of me had gone numb—a change of clothes, a charger, my ID, the passport folder I'd started that I didn’t stop to laugh at. Down in the street, the woman in the car was gone and a black SUV was at the curb before we hit the lobby. I understood that it had been coming since before Clint hung up the phone, that the machine had already been moving, that this family did not wait for you to be ready.

The man driving didn't say anything. Clint sat in the back with my hand crushed in his and his eyes out the window, gone somewhere I couldn't follow. I didn’t try. I held his hand and I watched Charleston go by—my Charleston, the streets I'd narrated to him days ago, the piazzas and the iron gates and the pharmacy window—and it all looked strange now, tilted, like a set for a play that had let out.