Page 53 of Every Beautiful Mile

I level her with a glare as I snatch the plate from her and set it on the hood.

“Real mature, Penelope,” she says before walking back to help Finn.

I fumble to pick up pages that have scattered across the ground when I see it—a piece of notebook paper.

The handwriting makes me stop breathing.

Travis.

The sun no longer feels hot, and my heart no longer beats as I pick it up, praying it won’t slip like the desert sand through my fingers.

Well, Nel, it starts, and my heart wilts like a flower at the two familiar words.

We must be in some kind of trouble if you’re reading this. I purposefully tucked this note in the atlas, somewhere I know you’d never willingly look unless we were lost. So, we must be lost, and you must be pretty pissed.

I can only hope we are at least somewhere fun, so if you make me hitchhike, I’ll come home with a good story.

I pause to laugh. This dusty road in Idaho is as far from fun as it gets.

I have no doubt wherever we are supposed to be going is somewhere I picked. I want you to know, wherever it is, I don’t care if we go. We can turn around right now. I have you—there’s nothing else I need to see.

You decide where we go from here—I can find a t-shirt anywhere.

Love you,

Travis

I stare at the paper, speechless. Emotion erupts in me like a volcano as I clench the paper so tightly my hand shakes.

I can see him—leaning on the hood and trying not to smile about how mad I am.

But he isn’t here. The letter is years old, and he’s gone. Lost to the sky and the sea. Life yanks the rug out from underneath me all over again.

I re-read it, every sentence a needle in my heart.

I try to breathe, but the oxygen feels like it’s laced with shards of glass that slice every part of me when I inhale. My knees give out, and I hit the jagged rock-covered road as a sob rips out of my throat.

I look at the letter in my hand like it is both the thing that will kill me and the elixir of life.

Then a question crashes into me like a meteor—what were we doing here?

This trip, all our planning, has been an ode to Travis. We’ve gone to all the places he had wanted to go. Why? Am I looking for him? Do I expect to find him standing in a fossil bed?

Of course not.

I’ve been holding onto him. I’ve been going to the places he wanted to go, not so I can move on, but so I can hold on—to him, to us, to the future that was robbed from us by a fluke storm over the Gulf of Mexico.

I read the words again and wipe the final tears that fall down my face.

You decide where we go from here.

I sit on the ground, jagged rocks digging into the backs of my thighs, and force my eyes shut.

Inhale for four, exhale for four.

The Avion jolts angrily behind my back from something Finn does with the tire.

I look out at the beautifully lonely Idaho landscape, the red tips of the grass sway just barely from a breeze so soft I’d miss it if I wasn’t paying attention.

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