And I need to be held by Beau. To make sure he understands how deeply I really do love him. How kind and gentle and soft he is. How safe and cared for he makes people feel, and how much brighter the world is for all he does and gives. How good he is, and what kind of life he deserves despite the one he’s been given.

But there may not be time to say these last words. I can’t risk it. This is my only chance. I’ll never get to tell him how I think that if it were an option, I could love him well until I died.

I guess I will love him well until I die. I have to believe the world will pick up where I leave off. I have to believe that, whether I’m there at the end of the world with Beau or not, love is bigger than death.

“I’m scared too,” Grandmother whispers in my ear. “But we’re so brave, girl.”

I give a phlegmy laugh. I’m minutes from death and nonexistence, and I’m laughing. Suddenly, I’m laughing hysterically, and Grandmother’s laughing too, and we’re both rocking on the floor of our bedroom, tears of laughter streaming down our faces, snot dripping from our noses.

She regains composure first, gritting her teeth, smiling forcefully, and nodding at me. “You can do this. I should know. I was a surrogate mom twice for Jack and his husband.” She responds to my surprise with a dramatic wink. “We can do anything.”

I nod because I can’t speak. Harsh sobriety has set in, and yet my head and breastbone feel as light as balloons, like all the weight of anxiety is gone now that the choice has been made, and I’m full of something bright and warm, a gift for the boy I love. I stand up, and Grandmother stands too, then pulls me into a bone-crunching hug. She steps back but grips my upper arms with surprising strength. “Because of you,” she says, “a whole new world’s about to get born.”

She lets me go, and I walk toward the closet door, catching its frame in my hands and pausing. I look back to where she stands, back straight, hands clasped in front of her stomach and chin tipped up. “Grandmother,” I say.

“Yeah, honey,” she says.

“Do you think . . . I mean, is it possible . . . that there is a God?”

She smiles that same smile I recognize from childhood, the mysterious one that makes our eyes sparkle. “Girl,” she says, “how do you think any of this is possible if something didn’t want it to be? Something tore a hole in time just over our bed all so you, lucky bitch, could know what it is to love. Someone tore up a tree and let us look through and decide to fall.”

“You think God loves me like you do?”

“I think He or She or It loves us like we love Beau. I think God loves us fucking well, Natalie Cleary.”

Tears flood my vision. I nod once then turn, walk into my closet for the last time, slip through my window, hop down into my beautiful, blue-green swamp of a yard, and get into my car. Before I pull away, I see Grandmother standing in the closet, silhouetted by light. She leans forward over the windowsill and shouts to me, loud and clear, “Her name was Bridget. Our ishki’s name was Bridget, and she never stopped caring.”

Bridget. I whisper her name to myself twice, and then I fold it in my chest with everyone else who’s a part of me, all the people some version of me has already known and those who—I have to believe—some version of me will meet someday. Then I drive back to the intersection and pull onto the shoulder one last time, chills alive over every centimeter of my skin. But I’m not panicking, despite my fear. I’m not dizzy, despite the swelling lightness in my chest and head. I’m staying, I think, I’m staying until the end and for whatever comes after.

I want you to understand something, Natalie. No matter how hard it feels, you don’t need to be afraid to move on. There’s always more to see and feel.

32

I stand in the middle of the road, facing the direction from which I know I’ll see the car from my nightmares come, drifting mindlessly across the yellow line. For now, the rain has let up, and the night is still. This time, when I think of that song I first heard Beau play, it comes to me—a measure of it, at least—and I take time by the hand with no more than a gentle tug, sending it unwinding backward right through me.

Night turns to day turns to night in flashes, like a yellow-

gold strobe light. Cars zoom past as blurs of color on either side of me, whipping my hair around my face, shaking my clothes out until they’re dry.

I don’t know how I’ll know it’s time, but I believe I will.

I watch several accidents reverse until I see a maroon blot against the creek—a pile of crushed metal unfolding again and pulling back onto the road, parting ways with a black pickup. I go just past that before I stop focusing on Beau’s song, on the wheel of time, and let the world fall back into its rhythm.

Neither Beau’s dad’s car nor my mom’s are in sight, but a shiver trickles down my vertebrae, letting me know—as Grandmother must have known when I told her of my impending Closing—that this is the same night. I feel the night air itself thick with expectation, like the still woods and the mute crickets and the barometric pressure and the floating clouds and ancient rocks are all holding their breath, preparing to weep for me.

At the end of all this, the end of the world, I stand on a yellow line of paint and look up into the night sky, searching the stars. “Are you there?” I whisper.

I feel nothing but the warm breath the night’s held on to since the Sun’s last setting, the soft glow of the Moon, the distant heartbeat of Thunder, the lick of Fire, and the flash of Rainbow, and while none of these is the voice of my father or the face of my mother, I know—with certainty—that I am somebody’s child, that I am deeply loved. And when the headlights reach around the bend at the end of my line of sight, that’s enough.

It’s enough when I glance over my shoulder and see the truck rumbling from the opposite direction, bouncing drunkenly between the shoulder and the median.

It’s enough when I face the glare, peer through it to the maroon car beyond, and step into the middle of the lane. Because I found myself in the stories Grandmother told and in the hearts of those who loved me.

I start walking toward the end, heading off my own accident. All the while, time shudders around me. It pulls against me, like a river current trying to drag me back to my own time. I find a stone in the road, and I take it in my hand. There’s not much time until I’ll be whisked away from all this, certainly not enough time to redo this if it doesn’t work. I have one chance to make any sort of change, and so I dig my heels in with every step and keep moving. In a way, I become the dark and mysterious mass from my dreams, moving toward myself.