Page 77 of Roadrunner

We took the coast road first, because I wanted one more look at it before I gave it up, and because some part of me, the part that had grown up on a cliff above this exact water, needed the goodbye to happen slowly instead of all at once.

Highway 1 south of Monterey doesn’t let you drive fast even if you want to. It curls along the cliffs above Big Sur in long, deliberate bends, cypress and fog and a two-hundred-foot drop on one side, and for the first hour neither of us said much, because there wasn’t a sentence that improved on just looking at it.

“It’s like the edge of the world,” Arthur said, somewhere past Bixby Bridge.

“It felt that way to me too, growing up,” I said. “Like everything real happened somewhere else, and we just got to look at the ocean while it did.”

He thought about that for a while. “Is that why you left?”

I hadn’t expected the question, not phrased so plainly, not from a child with his forehead against the window. “Partly,” I said. “I think I left because I wanted to find out if anything real would happen to me, too, if I put myself somewhere it could.”

“Did it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Eventually. Not the way I expected.”

He didn’t ask me to explain that, which was its own kind of mercy, and we drove on through the fog and the cypress and the long green quiet of it, and I let myself feel the specific grief of leaving a coastline for good, underneath the larger thing I was driving toward.

We picked up 101 near San Luis Obispo by early afternoon, the road straightening out, the cliffs giving way to gold hills and vineyards and the flat gray ribbon of a highway that no longer asked anything of the driver. Martina called it in from the other car twice, once to report she’d found a rest stop with clean bathrooms and once, unprompted, to tell me the plant was doing fine.

By Santa Barbara the ocean had gone from slate-colored and dramatic to postcard blue, palm trees lining a highway that ran close enough to the water that Arthur could see surfers out past the break.

“Can we stop?” he asked.

“Not today,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of road left.”

“How much?”

I did the math I’d already done three times that week, lying awake. “About eight hundred miles, all told. We won’t make it in one day. We’ll stop somewhere tonight and finish tomorrow.”

He accepted this the way he accepted most logistics, filing it away without complaint, and went back to the window.

We stopped for the night outside Palm Springs, in a motel with a pool Arthur was not allowed to swim in because it was already dark by the time we checked in, a fact he raised twice at dinner and then let go of with visible effort. Martina took the room next door. I lay on top of the covers in mine for a long time before I slept, looking at a stucco ceiling that belonged to no one, in a town I’d never see again after I woke up, thinking about the drive still ahead of us and what was waiting at the end of it.

I thought about the notebook, still folded into the bottom of my suitcase under the winter clothes I probably wasn’t going to need where we were going. I hadn’t told Riley about it yet. I turned that over for a long time in the dark. Not because I’d changed my mind about telling him, but because I understood, lying there, that once I did, there would be no version of the life waiting for us in Arizona that didn’t include the question the notebook raised. I could arrive and simply live for a while first. Let Arthur have a school, a bedroom, a normal Tuesday. Before I handed Riley something that might reorganize all of it.

I didn’t know yet if that was mercy or cowardice. I suspected, lying there, that it might be both, the way most of my decisions that year turned out to be both.

I thought about Riley on the other end of the drive, going about an ordinary Friday in a town Arthur had never been to, with no idea what was coming down the highway toward him. Not just a woman he’d once loved and a boy he hadn’t met, but a version of the last ten years he didn’t have, sitting quietly in a suitcase, waiting for its moment.

I thought about what I wanted, and found I still didn’t fully trust the answer, because wanting things for myself was a muscle I’d spent years letting atrophy.

I fell asleep before I finished the thought, which felt, in its way, like an answer too.

We crossed into Arizona a little before noon the next day, and the desert did the thing deserts do, which is announce themselves all at once after miles of pretending they might not.

“There,” I said, when the first saguaro came up along the shoulder, alone and enormous and entirely unbothered by our arrival.

Arthur sat up straighter. “They’re huge.”

“Wait until you see them up close.”

He pressed against the window as the desert unrolled on both sides of the highway. Creosote and ocotillo and distant mountains gone the particular hazy blue that meant they were farther away than they looked. We came through Phoenix a little after two, traffic and heat shimmer and a skyline that looked, for a stretch, almost like any other American city, before the road opened back up into desert again on the far side of it.

“The mountains are blue,” Arthur said, somewhere past Picacho Peak, where the saguaros started coming in thick enough to look like a forest instead of a scattering.

“They always are,” I said. “In the afternoon especially.”

He looked at them for a long time.