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“Palm trees?”
She laughed. “No, art schools.”
“Oh. Yeah, of course. Art schools are everywhere.”
“Have you ever been there?”
“A few times when I was a kid. My father used to go to New York on business.”
“I saw on Jeopardy! it’s the city that never sleeps.”
He smiled. “Some people call it the city of dreams, too.”
She gazed at him. “Maybe we could go there to follow our dreams.”
“Maybe.” He laughed. “But I’m pretty sure they don’t have palm trees.”
* * *
The Blackburn city-limit sign was worn and faded, the green paint sandblasted to a dirty gray. The white writing on it was barely legible. Carmine did a double take as they passed by. “Did that say population seventeen?”
“I didn’t think it was that many,” Haven said. “I ran for hours.”
Nothing but uninhabited land surrounded the barren highway. “I believe it. We haven’t passed anything for miles.”
They drove for a few minutes before he spotted something in the distance. He slowed the car, hoping to find a gas station since the gauge hovered near empty. A hotel would be nice too, since his eyes burned from fatigue, but as he neared the structures, his hope diminished. The abandoned shells of buildings looked as though a small gust of wind could knock them down. His hair stood on end as they drove through, an eerie feeling overcoming the car.
“This is a ghost town,” he said. “Where the hell are the people?”
“Maybe they moved.”
He laughed dryly. “Or they all died.”
“Some did,” she said.
Her strangled voice told him a story existed behind those words, but it wasn’t the time to ask questions. She looked to be teetering on the brink of a breakdown, and he couldn’t risk pushing her over the edge.
Carmine continued to drive, passing another city-limit sign. They’d gone from one side of Blackburn to the other without seeing a living soul. The town was an enormous prison cell. There were no bars or chains, no physical restraints, but it was a mass of oblivion cut off from the world. There were no people, no cars, no stores, no houses . . . there wasn’t even any color.
It was like it didn’t exist.
Suddenly, so much made sense to Carmine. He knew she had grown up isolated, but knowing and seeing were vastly different things. He wanted nothing more in that moment than to pull over and hug her. She communicated, and drove, and took GED tests. She opened herself up to everything when she had literally come from nothing.
Nothing.
In the next town, they came upon a tiny motel. Carmine paid the old man at the front desk in cash and grabbed the key from him with little conversation. He grimaced at the shabby conditions while Haven shrugged. “I’ve stayed worse places.”
She had. He understood now.
* * *
Carmine was startled awake by a ringing the next morning, the shrill noise causing his heart to violently pound. Sitting up, he rubbed his eyes and grabbed his phone off the stand beside the bed.
He answered without looking, hoping it was his father calling with some news. “Yeah?”
“Have you arrived?” Corrado.
“Yeah,” Carmine said, yawning halfway through the word.
