Page 84 of On the Way to You
Time was ticking by too quickly, and I needed to move — but I didn’t know where to go.
I didn’t let myself lay in the snow for long before I was blindly crawling to my feet and dragging myself back inside in a zombie state, racking my brain for anything he’d said over the past two weeks that would help me figure out where he was going. He’d turned off his phone, all of my calls and texts ignored, and the sickening possibility that I would really never see him again hit me like a boulder, flattening my heart, steamrolling me to the pavement.
“I just need to see something.”
“My grandmother just passed away, and there’s a place in Washington that was her favorite in the world. She made me promise I would go see it.”
I squeezed my eyes closed tighter, Kalo whimpering on the bed beside me as I thought through his journal entries, too.
But there was nothing.
No clues, no map, no reassurance that I had any chance in hell of finding him before it was too late.
My fingers were dialing Tammy’s number before I even realized, and when she answered, my chest ripped open with another sob.
“Oh, my God, are you okay?” Her voice was frantic. “Where are you? Did he hurt you? Was there an accident?”
“He’s gone,” I choked.
“Gone? What do you mean, gone? Did he justleaveyou? That little bastard—“
I shook my head as she continued, willing my breaths to come easier so I could speak. “I messed up. I lied to him and I read his journal and he caught me and everything just… blew up.” The wind howled outside with another gust of snow, as if to mimic my words. “He’s going to hurt himself, Tammy, and I have to find him. I have to stop him. But I don’t know where he went and I don’t know what to do and I just…” My voice trailed off, tears pooling in my eyes again. The snow outside blurred into one blinding, white blob. “I have to find him. I have to find him.”
“Okay, baby, calm down,” she soothed, and I closed my eyes, letting the tears fall hot down my cheeks. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll figure this out. Take a breath, start from the beginning, tell me what happened.”
It was a shortened, panicky version, but I somehow managed to get the words out to tell her everything. I told her about the first few days together, about when I discovered his journal, about how I’d promised myself I wouldn’t read it again after Vegas and then caved and did it, anyway. I told her everything that had happened, sparing no details, not even the ones I knew I should be ashamed of. I told her about his depression, about how it was getting better, or so I thought. And, with as much composure as I could muster, I told her about the last entry I read.
Just talking about it broke my heart all over again.
“I don’t know what to do,” I sobbed when there was nothing more to say. “He’s gone, and I don’t know where he’s going or how to stop him. His phone is off. I can’t…”
“Think,” she interrupted me. “Think long and hard about the conversations you’ve had with him. Is there anything you might have missed, any clues?”
“There’s nothing,” I said desperately. “I’ve cranked through every moment, every conversation, every journal entry. All I know is it’s somewhere in Washington. I thought maybe it was the bridge there in Seattle, the George Washington Memorial bridge, because it’s known for suicides but it doesn’t make sense. He said it was his Grandma’s favorite place in the world, it can’t just be a bridge.”
Tammy hummed on the other end of the phone, and I imagined her sitting on her front porch, one foot on the banister as she thought. It was her favorite place to think, our favorite place to be.
“Is there anyone you’ve met along the way who he might have trusted, someone he might have confided in?”
Emily was the first one to pop into my head, but I had no way to reach her, even if he had told her for some reason where it was he was going. We’d talked to a lot of people along the way, but Emery had barely told me anything about his grandmother — would he really tell a stranger?
Then it hit me.
“Oh my God.”
“What?” Tammy asked quickly, hope in her voice as I jumped up from the bed.
“Nora and Glen. We met this older couple in Colorado. We camped with them. We got high with them.”
“You what?” she asked, her voice a little more scolding this time.
“We were talking about lists, about places we wanted to go and things we wanted to do in our lives. But I don’t remember…” I closed my eyes, pressing my fingers into my temples as I tried to sort through the fog. “Ugh, I don’t remember! Everything is a blur.”
“Well, you were high. Which we will have a long conversation about after all this is over, by the way,” she said, her voice stern. “Can you get a hold of either of them? Do you have their numbers?”
I gasped. “I do! Oh my God, I can’t believe I didn’t think of this. I have to call Nora. I have to go.”
“Wait!” Tammy screamed just before I could end the call. “Listen to me. Call her, and please let me know if you find anything, butpromiseme you will sleep before you try to go anywhere. I’m serious. Emery just left, it’s dark, if he said he needs toseesomething, he’s not going to do anything tonight. You can’t drive the way you are right now.”