Page 86 of The Drifter

Cash was on the plane. And Tommy. And two of the others whose names I was still learning, and a big, tan dog that lay down across Cash's feet and watched the aisle with its ears up. Nobody talked much. The air had that pressurized quiet of men going toward something, the same quiet I'd felt come off Clint, multiplied by five and shut into a metal tube.

I was the only one who didn't belong, and everybody was too kind or too focused to say so. I kept myself small and still and useful-adjacent the way I know how to do, and I watched.

We went up over the water. I had never flown over water. I had said that to Clint about Dubai, and here I was doing it for the first time.

It was nothing like I'd dreamed it, because I wasn't looking at the water. I was looking at the man beside me, who had his eyes closed and his jaw set and his mother two thousand miles ahead of us, gone from a bed she'd been in the night before, and no one on earth able to tell him where.

And I thought about Clint’s mom.

I couldn't help it. Somewhere over Georgia, with the engines droning and his hand loose in mine and his face gone far away, I started thinking about the woman we were flying toward. I couldn’t stop.

His mother. The woman who ran a ranch full of boys on a wooden spoon and a look. Who put her boots on in the dark and went out across that hard country with a flashlight and his father's old coat over her nightgown, multiple times, to find one runaway son and squat down in the dirt in front of him and say all right, then, and take his hand and walk him home. Who never once hollered when she found him. Who raised the man whose head was on the seat back beside me—raised him hard and raised him right, raised him to fold a woman's shirt over a chair, raised him to hand a frightened person the truth and the choice instead of the smooth voice.

Everything I loved about him, she made. Somewhere on a ranch in West Texas, that woman had made the man I loved, one long, patient day at a time, alone.

And I would never get to tell her.

That was the thought that came up out of the floor of me over Georgia and wouldn’t go back down.

She might be my mother-in-law. I let myself think the word, all the way, in a private jet at forty thousand feet—mother-in-law—the woman who'd sit at the head of the table someday, who'd size me up the way older women do, who'd decide whether the girl from the Charleston hotel was good enough for her boy.

I'd have wanted her to like me. I'd have worked for it. I'd have poured her coffee the right way, my grandmother's way, and told her about the land and the oysters and let her tell me stories about Clint at eight years old standing at the end of a road.

And instead, the first thing I would ever do in her life was help go looking for her, in the hope of finding her before something did. If we found her at all. If.

The feeling, said the feeling, from where it sat in my chest, quiet and certain and unmoved by any of it.

It was still there. It had not quieted for the tears or the truth or the decision to come, and it did not quiet now. If anything, at forty thousand feet, flying west into whatever was waiting, it had gone very still and very clear, the way it goes right before it turns out to be right.

I laced my fingers tighter through Clint's. He came back from wherever he was, just for a second. He looked at me, and squeezed my hand, and went away again.

I turned my face to the window and held the hand of the man I'd broken every promise for, and I flew toward a woman I might never meet and a danger I couldn't name.

I did not let go. I did not look away. I did not set the feeling down.

I couldn't. It knew something I didn't.

It always had.

26

CLINT

Somewhere over Louisiana, I felt myself start to spiral.

I know the feeling from the inside. I've watched it take other men—good men, steady men—in aircraft exactly like this one, flying toward exactly this kind of thing. The mind starts running the same ground over and over, cutting the rut deeper every pass, and the rut always has the same name.

Mine was two years long.

What happened to my mother was not my fault. Craine took her. Craine walked into that building with a badge and a warrant and a voice like oiled hinges, and no version of me visiting on Sundays would have stopped a Deputy Director of the FBI from doing what he did. The guilt made no sense. I knew it made no sense.

It didn't care.

It sat on my chest at forty thousand feet and it said, you circled her for two years and never went in, and strangers took her out the front door. It said, she came into the dark for you every time, and when they came for her, you were in bed in South Carolina. It said things in my own voice, which is the worst voice, because there's no arguing with it.

I did what I know how to do. I pushed it off me and gave my mind a target.

Craine's face.