Page 14 of Every Beautiful Mile

“Travis, that thing is creepy as hell. There’s no way I’m going anywhere in it, much less sleeping there,” I told him, arms crossed.

“You’ll see, I’m going to make it so pretty you’ll be begging me to stay in it forever!” he insisted.

There was no talking him out of it. The damn thing was already in the driveway, and his mind was made up.

I don’t know how long I sit reliving those conversations with my finger sliding across the map. Minutes or hours, I have no clue. Ideas I can’t even fathom start to form in my head, and like a line of dominoes falling in succession, I can’t stop them once they start.

Yesterday, my dad told me I wasn’t allowed to work all summer. Last night, Marin suggested we take a vacation. Though I’m sure this wasn’t what she had in mind—here it is. My chance to come back from the plane crash that somehow has taken so much more than my husband.

I don’t know how to have fun, but Travis did. I fold the map back up and take it with me as I walk to the door. I pause briefly, giving one last look at the change that had happened without me knowing.

Dammit, Travis, you win.

Five

I almost pace the skin off my feet in the living room while waiting for the kids to get home from school. My latest display puts the morning of t-shirts to shame.

Finn’s Jeep tires crunch over the gravel driveway followed by the sounds of doors opening and closing along with Marin’s muffled, cheery voice. My throat is bone dry, but there’s no time for water. I only have seconds.

I eye the wall—the whole scene looks like something from a suspense movie where the lead investigator gets so obsessed with finding a killer that he destroys his house with pinned-up pictures of the victims and crime scenes. Instead of crime scenes, I have landscape photos, and instead of victim statistics, there are distance calculations.

The door opens.

Here they are.

Speechless.

I swear five whole years pass in the silence that follows.

Marin drops her backpack instantly, walking to the wall. Finn looks at me hesitantly, eyebrows pinched, then wanders over behind her.

Marin’s eyes are wide as they bounce between me and the highlighted map that takes up most of the wall. “Mom? What is all this?”

I drink the entire glass of water I forgot I was holding as moisture puddles in my armpits.

“I went in the old camper,” I say, like that explains everything.

They blink, confused.

I shake my head and try again. “I went in the camper, the one Dad bought before… before. I don’t know if you knew, but he started doing work on it. He never really talked to me about it, probably because I told him over my dead body would I ever sleep in it because it was so creepy. But he made it... better. It’s not finished, of course, but it’s close. Then I found this map.” I point to the wall. “And those notes,” I nod toward the small scraps of notebook paper pinned next to it. “Your dad was planning a trip. For us.” I fumble with my braid in my fingers. “I thought maybe we should take it. We could spend the summer going to these ridiculous places he picked out for us. I just thought we had so much fun talking about him last night and looking at his shirts today, and Marin, you did suggest a vacation…”

The silence is heavy as I spin my wedding band around my finger.

“I scheduled it out. We could take ten weeks to see it all and still get back in time for you to have a week here before school starts. And I know that’s a whole summer away from your friends. I know what I’m asking.” I pin my eyes to Finn. “Finn, you’re going into your senior year next year, and this is our last big shot to do something like this. And I know that might sound awful, being trapped in an old camper with your sad mom and little sister for ten weeks, but I think I might need you to do this for me. I think my heart won’t survive if we don’t try. He wanted this, and I don’t know how to be anything right now without him guiding me. I don’t want to be the mom that freaked out at her husband’s funeral and never recovered.”

There’s a desperation I feel at the tip of every nerve ending in my pause.

They eye the wall again.

“And we don’t have to only go to the places he wanted. We can choose our own adventures, too. God knows ten weeks of his kind of weird might drive us all insane.” I laugh under my breath with the final words.

“Ten weeks, Mom?” Finn rubs his finger down the bridge of his nose. “I have baseball!”

“All summer? Who needs that much practice?” I laugh, he doesn’t. “I mean, I can call the coach and see what he says…”

He ignores me, arguing further, “And I wanted to get scuba certified!”

“That one’s easy. Someone has that course offered almost every weekend. We can sign you up for one in August.”

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