Page 53 of Open Road

“The drawing’s in my chest pocket,” I say. “If you want proof.”

Janie does the thing that’s not quite a laugh again. It’s a better sound this time.

“Roam.”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you,” she says it small, the way she says the things she means the most, offering it carefully, not sure yet if it will be received right.

“You don’t have to thank me for the truth.”

She looks at me for a long moment.

Behind her eyes, something is quieter than it was.

Not gone. I know it won’t be gone yet, possibly for a long time, and I’m not fool enough to think one conversation in a bathroom dissolves four years, but it is quieter, though. The particular quality of a volume turned down one degree in the right direction.

It’s enough for tonight.

“Go check on Rose,” I say. “She went to Gerald an hour ago, and Gerald is a pushover.”

The corner of her mouth moves up, and then she goes.

I stay in the bathroom for a minute after the door closes. The light from my bedroom is still on, the mirror dark now, the room holding the particular quiet of a space where something real has been said and received.

I look at where she was standing.

There is a version of me that would have walked back from the door, given her the privacy she wanted, moved away, and treated it as something I wasn’t supposed to hear. Twenty-two years of this club taught me to be useful and not to overstep, to handle the thing in front of me and not press into rooms I haven’t been invited into.

Rose handed me a purple drawing two days ago before breakfast.

Janie looked at me in the dark on the side of a highway and chose to trust a stranger with the most important thing in her life.

Some invitations don’t come in words.

I know how to read a road. I know how to read a room. I know how to read the difference between an exit and a beginning, and I’ve been riding away from beginnings my whole life because the road was always pointing somewhere else.

The bag is on my bed.

Different than it’s ever been, and I know it. The wear on the buckles is the same. The weight is the same. What’s different is me standing here knowing I could unpack it completely, and the thought doesn’t feel the way it used to. The way putting down something you’ve always carried feels before you know you want to put it down.

It feels the way something given feels…

Not something taken.

Chapter Eighteen

JANIE

The bedroom light goes off with a click that sounds louder than it should.

Dark.The kind the compound does well, deep and total, no streetlight finding the window at this hour. I stand in it for a moment, the towel around me, the rug warm under my bare feet, and breathe through the decision I’ve already made.

It isn’t a reckless decision. It isn’t grief, gratitude, or the particular vulnerability of a woman who has cried in front of a man and is mistaking relief for want. I’ve turned all of that over carefully, in the twenty minutes the shower ran, in the quiet after, standing at the mirror in the dark where Craig’s words used to live and finding them quieter. They are not gone yet, but they are quieter.

What I want is standing on the other side of the bathroom door.

What I want is to choose it. Eyes open. Both hands.