I thought I saw something in the trees. And then I couldn’t find the door.”
“Yes.”
He looked up at her. “I couldn’t find the door again.”
The bottle slipped from his fingers.
She caught it.
And then, in a voice that was barely voice at all — barely sound, more like the thing underneath sound — he said: “Mom?”
She put her hands on his face.
He was real. Warm. Alive.
She had been walking toward this moment since the day she turned around in a rest stop and found him gone. She had been walking toward it in the mornings she woke up before the alarm with his name on her mouth, in the anniversaries she spent driving toward nothing in particular, in every newspaper article she had given interviews for when hope had gone thin and all she had left was the visible, documented act of not giving up.
