Back on the Road

Three weeks had passed since the village slid into the sea, and Sara still dreamed about it more nights than not.

Not nightmares, exactly. She dreamed of cold green light and a small shape with glowing eyes weaving between her ankles, and she always woke reaching for a cat that was never there. Granger had stopped asking if she was all right when she woke like that. He just pulled her closer and waited for her breathing to even out again.

They had a new car now, a sensible silver sedan the rental company let them buy outright once the insurance settlement came through — Acts of God, the adjuster had called it, landslide and subsidence, and he had not asked why there was no address for the town in question, only a set of GPS coordinates that, when he tried to look them up, returned nothing but open water. Sara had two cameras hanging from the rearview mirror bracket where her sun hat used to hang, the old one and the new one, and she still couldn't look through the viewfinder of the old one without a small, foolish hope rising in her chest.

"You're doing the thing again," Granger said, glancing over from the driver's seat.

"What thing?"

"Waiting for him to show up in the pictures."

Sara lowered the camera. "He liked me. Cats don't just stop liking someone."

"He's not a cat, Sara. Not anymore." Granger said it gently, the way he'd said most things since that night, as if the whole world had gotten fragile and needed handling with care. "He went back into the water with the others. I watched him do it."

"I know what I saw." She turned to look out the window at the pines sliding by, gold late-summer light slanting long through the trunks. "I just don't think that's the last of him. He liked being looked at too much."

Granger didn't argue. He had learned, in three weeks, not to argue with his wife about ghosts and ghost cats.

They still had ten days left on the honeymoon they had promised each other, and against all reasonable advice — Sara's mother's, mostly, delivered in a long, tearful phone call after they'd finally worked up the nerve to explain, in the vaguest terms possible, why their old minivan was gone — they had decided to keep going. Sara had a portfolio to finish. Lighthouses to photograph. And, though neither of them said it aloud, neither of them wanted to go home yet and let the ordinary business of living — his football season starting, her negatives waiting in boxes — swallow up what had happened to them, before they'd had the chance to be simply amazed by it, together, out here on the road where it still felt like theirs.

"There's a covered bridge on this detour," Sara said, tracing the paper map open on her knees. She still preferred paper; cell service had never quite trusted her since that night. "And a glassworks museum. Might be nice for an afternoon before the coast again."

Granger checked the exit sign coming up out of the trees. FENWICK HOLLOW — 4 MI, it read, the paint on the old wooden marker peeling in long curls like birch bark.

"Sure," he said, easing onto the exit ramp. "One afternoon. Somewhere normal, for a change."

Sara laughed, but she was already reaching for her camera.