“Why are you here?”

“You.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re you.”

“Nonanswers.”

“Only ones I’ve got.”

We were alone, naked, in the dark. Jimmy was committing my body to memory with his eyes and hands, not wanting to miss any part of me, as though I might disappear. Ironic, all things considered, but that’s how a moment like this feels.

We had stopped at a motel halfway between the border and our destination. We had already been here nearly a week. Harrigan’s idea — he’d suggested we might need to hole up for a little while. The buzz he was getting — however the hell he was getting it — wasn’t good. The random acts of violence seemed to be surging. It would likely wane, he said, it always did, but for now it was probably a good idea to keep off the roads. It wasn’t a bad week. Jimmy and I were mostly alone; Harrigan would disappear and come back with supplies, bits of news, the former usually surprisingly good and the latter almost always bad.

“That guy,” I said, shaking my head. “I can’t figure him out. He hardly seems human sometimes. Though that’s hilarious coming from me, I guess.”

Jimmy pressed his nose into my hair. “You’re human. No question there.”

“I mean, really, does he ever sleep?”

Jimmy’s tongue flickered against my shoulder, teasing its way down. “He won’t. Not until he settles the score with Maggie’s killer.”

“And you know this how? You and he soul mates now?”

“I just figure. I know how I’d feel.”

“Jimmy.” I pulled away slightly. “We’ve known each other, what, six days?”

“Does it matter? Six days, six years, six decades. Time’s all messed up now, you know that better than anyone.” I turned to look at him. “Am I right or am I right?”

“What about your restaurant and all that? You’re just dropping everything for a road trip to Canada with two strangers — with an emphasis on ‘strange’?”

“The restaurant can wait, and hell, I’ve done a lot more strange things that were a lot less — ” he pulled me on top of him. “ — fun.”

Fun. Not a word that gets used much these days, and because of that it seemed precious rather than frivolous.

We had some fun.

+

“You trust him?”

Jimmy was peering out the motel window to where Harrigan was waiting for us in the car.

I laughed and spooned up the last bits of risotto from the pan. It was an odd breakfast, leftover from last night’s dinner, but I didn’t care because somehow Jimmy had managed to turn ordinary rice into something exquisitely sumptuous. “I thought you two had some kind of male bonding moment last week,” I said, licking my fingers. “Now you’re suspicious of him?”

“That’s just it, though. Why isn’t he making vengeance his first priority? Why would he give two shits about helping this silver spoon couple? That is, if that’s really who his clients are. I kind of have my doubts.”

I did too. It didn’t make sense to me that Harrigan would work so diligently for a couple of yuppies given everything that had happened with Maggie. Still, I only said, “Everybody’s got a price… she said cynically.”

Jimmy shook his head. “He’s not telling everything.”

“And we are?”

He turned to look at me. “I thought we had some kind of bonding moment. Several, in fact.”

I picked up my backpack and joined him at the window. “Nobody tells everything. That doesn’t mean what they’re concealing is harmful to anyone else or even to themselves. It just means not everything can be told.”

He looked at me quizzically and then smiled. “OK. Fair enough.”

When we got in the car I could tell something was very wrong with Harrigan. He’s someone I would definitely not play poker with, his face so ordinarily unreadable, that when I could plainly sense worry in him I felt my stomach contract into a tight hard ball. “Something’s happening back in the States,” he said.

Jimmy and I hadn’t paid much attention to the news all week — it was always the same these days, and obviously we had other things on our minds — and I stopped carrying a phone years ago; too easy to be traced and followed. I had no way of finding out the up-to-the-minute developments the way Harrigan did, and Jimmy didn’t seem to care to find out. “Something not good, I take it,” Jimmy said.

That Harrigan didn’t even bother to give Jimmy a withering look worried me all the more. “I don’t know. No, not good — anything this uncertain is going to be bad — but whatever it is, it’s big. They aren’t letting anyone else over the border. We made it out by a few hours. All I hear are bits and pieces — the collapse of the government, martial law, civil war, the usual stuff the media likes to throw around when they sense a good potential disaster. Only this time — ” He shook his head.

“This time what? It’s for real?”

“It’s real and it’s different. It’s not something anyone seems to know how to talk about.” He stared ahead at nothing in particular, then turned the ignition. “Well, we’re here, anyway. Let’s go find Ruth Baxter.”

The quiet of his voice shook me more than another explosion would have. I wondered now just as much what we were leaving behind as what we were going toward.