These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

He gets back to the inn and totters up the stairs inside. At the door of the room he’s looking for his key and, not finding it, wonders whether it was taken with his phone. As it occurs to him that maybe he rushed from the room without the key and should check whether the door is locked, it opens from the other side.

The boy stares at his father. “What happened?” he says in the smallest voice his father has heard from him since the time the car crashed in an oil slick on the canyon boulevard. Zan grabs his son and pulls him close; Parker crumples into his father’s chest. “What happened,” he murmurs again in his father’s shirt.

“I’m O.K.,” Zan says, “please, please don’t leave again.”

“I won’t. I’m sorry. Are you O.K.?”

“I am.” He might have a cracked rib. “Looks worse than it is.”

“I’m sorry,” Parker says again.

“No,” the father whispers, “I made a mistake. Mom wouldn’t have wanted us to leave Sheba.” He says, “We have to go back and find her.”

“O.K.”