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I need to hurry to find Rae, not only to say another goodbye while I still can, but to tell him what could possibly help him.
For now, I tell Asa something else I’ve found out.
About me.
I take the hand he offers and promise, “I wouldn’t miss that for the whole world, mate,” and I mean it.
By the timeI finally escape Rowan’s classroom, it’s even closer to the end of the school day.
The last bell will ring soon, signalling the start of a weeklong break. The kids who don’t board here full time will stream out and Rae will leave with them. Only he won’t come back, and he’s told me enough times about where he’s needed. Seeing that little life vest made his driver so real to me.
I still want to find him, and I even take a few steps, which is as tough as wading through hip-high water. But that’s what Rae did, isn’t it? Waded through waves to give that life vest to a child he told me should have been airlifted out of Kabul. He waded uphill for me too, through a torrent to grab my hand so we could face a wild ride together.
I want that again now.
Now?
He already knows I live season to season. Wanting more doesn’t fit my future. I still can’t make myself stop wading, only Rae isn’t inside the art block with his students when I go inside to find him. I’m alone inside a studio where huge windows show acres and acres of trees hiding where Rae could be.
“Shit.”
“Looking for someone?”
I turn around to see Sol wipe paint from his hands. He doesn’t wipe away his smile, although it’s gentle. It’s also a reminder of Mitch smiling across a scrapbook full of photos that broke me, and suddenly I’m exhausted, wiped out, like I was by the sex that put me back together.
I’m also swamped with want, like when a little boy asked me to stay a little longer.
I want Rae to stay too.
I can’t wade through that or hold it back. I can’t hold this back either.
“I’m not ready for him to go yet.”
Sol doesn’t make a joke by asking who. Instead, he steers me to a corner of the studio I didn’t notice. No one would, not when sheets hang from the ceiling, walling it off from view. “This is where he’s been working for the last few days. Calls it his last-chance cave. I used to have to make him one before every deadline at college.” He gestures at windows, which are alsocovered, and tells me what I know already. “Because the slightest thing distracts him, but look.”
This workbench is littered with evidence that Rae has been plenty busy.
“And this isn’t even half of what he’s churned out in the last forty-eight hours like someone lit a fire under his arse.” Sol flicks through sketches, sounding thoughtful. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he changed his mind about meds.”
That feels like confirmation.
He holds out an example. “Because this work?” Sol touches an image of Neptune rising out of stormy water, a child in a slashed life vest safe on his hip, only this giant is me with barnacles in my beard instead of burrs or straw or sawdust.
“And this?”
Ivy trails across the next picture Sol shows me. It knots around giant goalposts. I stand between them, that ivy tangling my ankles as if it will trip me, and isn’t that a perfect representation of how my last chance ended?
But I didn’t fall completely, did I?
I fell onto my feet here, and he sees that.
It also takes me time to see that Rae has drawn a row of sunflowers, and a little boy in old-fashioned clothing who beckons me from a gap in a hedge, complete with a speech bubble.
Let’s see where the river takes us.
I’m still taking in that detail as Sol says, “If this is his worst work, he’ll smash his meeting. Any charity would want to endorse him.”
“This is his worst work?”
