Page 33 of Every Beautiful Mile

On cue, the engine roars again like an angry lion, and the dry, jagged mountains mock me through every window like fangs.

His nose scrunches. “Maybe you should slow down?”

“Slow down?!” I snap as I grip my hands around the steering wheel. “I’m the slowest person on the road right now!”

“You should pull over. The gauge shows it’s hot. We could overheat. Marin, turn off the AC. We need to relieve some of the load on the engine.”

“Could we catch on fire?” Marin asks in a high-pitched voice as she fumbles with the dials of the AC.

“No fires. Finn, you’re right. They have pull-offs. I’ll take the next one.”

A sedan flies past us, and I hold my breath. In an act of divine intervention, a gravel pull-off appears.

I slow to a stop, and we pour out of the doors like wax from a lit candle.

Finn pops the hood calmly, aware I am clearly useless as I stand on the side of the road, sweating like a whore in church while my pulse pounds in my ears.

“Let’s just let it cool down and eat some lunch.”

He shrugs. Like this is no big deal. Like we didn’t just almost die.

“Lunch? Finn, we don’t even have cell service!” Marin holds her phone up high in the air. “What if we can’t get it fixed? We could be stranded out here forever.”

She’s the closest I’ve seen her to hysterical since we left.

“Relax, Mar, look at all these cars. Someone will help us. We just have to wait now for it to cool down,” he says, his words mangled from the mouthful of sandwich he’s already started chewing.

Thirty minutes later, with a cooled engine under the hood, we are back on the road, this time with Finn behind the wheel.

“No AC until we get through the mountains. Mom, you look like you went swimming.”

The turn signal ticks as he waits to pull out onto the highway, and he nods toward my sweat-soaked shirt.

“Turns out I don’t handle mountain driving well.” I laugh with relief as I roll my window down and let the warm air smack my face.

***

We spend the next four days making our way through southern New Mexico and into Arizona.

Our first night is spent outside of Carlsbad Caverns, where we watch the nightly exodus of the bats from the mouth of the cave. Hundreds of thousands of them pour out at dusk, silently flapping in unison like a black cloud into the desert around us. The park ranger who narrates the departure talks like a ventriloquist, barely moving his mouth, which is both a distraction and highlight of the evening.

“His mouth is creepier than the bats,” Finn whispers as the ranger drones on about something called white-nose disease.

I laugh.

There has been the slightest of shifts over our days on the road. Nothing happens overnight, of course, but as the minutes and miles tick by, the grief that has plagued me for so long lifts in degrees. It’s the kind of change someone would only notice if they knew where to look.

Closely.

By the time we make it to Arizona, I sleep without dread and laugh without guilt.

After we check Travis’ box of an O.K. Corral gunfight reenactment, Marin insists on having old-timey photos done, which we promptly hang on the fridge in the Avion. Finn dressed as a sheriff, Marin holding a shotgun, and me as my best western floozy are forever frozen in sepia tones.

Outside of Tucson, we stay in a nature preserve away from the lights of any city, with the huge saguaro cacti towering around us like giants.

Stoic and silent.

When the sun goes down behind them, it looks like the most iconic Western painting there ever was.

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