Lamb

The two left the motel in the morning, before the sun was up. The frontage road was quiet, traffic lights still blinking red, gas stations bright in the bleary cold. Everything was over. The day was a shade cooler, a shade grayer than the day before.

“Last day,” he said when they pulled out of a Chevron station. Little cold needles of rain turned to sleet. “And here comes winter.”

“It’s only October.”

“That’s ice,” he said, nodding at the windshield.

When they came into Lombard the streets were black with rain and ice, the parking lots of grocery stores and strip malls nearly empty.

“Nobody’s up,” Lamb said.

“Lucky for us.”

“Desolate as the field behind the cabin,” he said. “That stretch to the base of the mountains. See? You’ll find that same openness if you look for it.”

She cried deep and shaking and coughing sobs, and he pulled over in front of an empty pharmacy so she could get it out. Snot ran down the girl’s face and he reached across to wipe the tears from her cheekbones and chin. He leaned in and caught them with his mouth, and kissed her with his eyes open, checking the parking lot around them.

“Right?” he whispered, and she nodded. “This is how we said it would go, didn’t we?” She closed her eyes and opened them and closed them. “I never lied to you, did I?”

“No.”

“Didn’t I let you stay longer with me?” Then he straightened her yellow sweater, brushing it down with an open palm. She watched him. “I’ll make you a promise, okay?” He leaned in and spoke with his face very close to hers. “Valentine’s Day,” he said. “I’ll come find you, right? We can be together for a little while. That’s less than four months.”

“You will?”

“Just over a hundred days. Can you carry this that long?”

“You’ll come back to get me?”

“I’ll come visit. I’ll be very careful, and I’ll protect you. Right?”

She nodded.

“We’ll go back to our white hotel. Or out to those little falls by the river. I’ll send you a sign. And when you see it you’ll wait there for me. And I’ll take you away in this wonderful old truck for an hour, or two or three, right? You’ll have to keep your eyes open all the time for the sign from me.”

“What will it be?”

“A ribbon tied some unlikely place. Or at Christmastime, a tiny blue lightbulb in a string of white lights. Or a broken window, like that little broken window in the cabin.”

She was crying all over again.

“Oh, sweetie,” he said. “Oh, sweetie, it’s your cabin. It will always be yours. I’m going to leave it for you. Didn’t I say I would? And you can live there forever when I’m gone.”

“Maybe.” She was trying to say something.

“I can’t understand you.”

“Maybe in a few years?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe we could just tell everyone.”

“I think you may be right,” he said and again wiped the tears from her face with the back of his sleeve. “I think it may have to be that way.”

“I think. They. Would under. Stand.” Her chest heaving up and down and her words froggy.

“Because it’s love, isn’t it?”

She nodded and ran the inside of her hand up against her wet nose.

He drove slowly out of the parking lot and onto the street. “You remember the plan, right?”

“Yes.”

“Now, Tom. You have to collect yourself. You have to be brave. Remember all the things we said about keeping everyone safe.”

“I know.”

“Can you stop crying now?”

“I’m trying.”

“This is how it has to be for a little while.”

“I know.”

“You keep yourself well and strong so when I come back for you everyone will believe it was good for you, right? Doesn’t that make sense?”

“Yes.”

“If I come back for you, and you’ve been a hysterical mess, everyone will say I’m no good for you, won’t they?”

Nod.

“Good girl.”

He drove out onto Butterfield Road, and there were the tall rectangles of the girl’s triplet concrete apartment buildings off in the distance, less than a mile up the road, the ones they’d been picturing in all their conversations and dreams when they had been surrounded by trees and river and wind. Here they were, real and tall and solid and filled with sleeping people, the girl’s mother up there, and Jessie, half the window squares bright yellow, lit up like an unfinished game in the gloom.

“Couldn’t we? We go somewhere?” Her face ugly and red. “You could have. Coffee.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, baby. This is the last chapter. We knew it was coming. We have to be strong. When you get to have a love like this you have to be strong enough to bear it. A love like ours is expensive. Think of it that way. And we pay for it with the next empty string of days. I know you’re good for it. I’ve always known.”

She nodded and looked down at the backpack between her feet.

“You know what to do if they’ve moved, right?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“I tell the security guard I ran away in September but here I am and would he help me find my mother.”

“And you’ll be strong and beautiful. Say it.”

“I’ll be strong and beautiful.”

“And you won’t cry when you say it. You’ll be just perfectly self-possessed.”

“Yes.”

“You know I can’t stop,” he said when they were a block away.

“I know.”

He pointed, then regripped her hand. “I’m going to slow down right up there. Twelve seconds and you hop out and take your backpack and go.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Ready?” It took less than ten seconds.

“Wait.”

“Here we are. I can’t kiss you here.”

She took the ball cap off her own head and pushed it toward him. “You should keep it.”

“Ready set go. Good-bye, Tommie.”

She opened the door and hopped out shaking in her fleece, impossibly bright in all the gray around her, and she dragged the backpack after her and it was over. She stood on the corner watching David Lamb steer back into his lane and through the yellow light. A moment later she started running after him in her boots, dragging her backpack crookedly behind her, alone on the wet sidewalk. A few cars passed without slowing. He couldn’t hear her, could only see her shrinking pale white face twisted in anguish and bobbing unevenly behind him in the rearview mirror.