“Unless it really is the QuikMart,” Sam said. He looked at me then, in a pensive way that made me feel a little fidgety. He said, reluctantly, as if suddenly remembering his manners, “Are you tired? I’ll go back in with you, if that’s what you want.”
“I’m not tired,” I said. “I want to just be with you for a while. Before everything gets difficult and confusing.”
He frowned off into the night. Then, all in a rush, he said, “Let’s go see if those really are the northern lights.”
“You have an airplane?”
“I have a Volkswagen,” he replied valiantly. “We would have to get someplace darker. Farther away from the QuikMart. Into the wilds of Minnesota. You want to?”
And now he had the shy little grin on his face that I loved. It felt like ages since I had seen it.
I asked, “Do you have your keys?”
He patted his pocket.
I gestured upstairs. “What about Cole?”
“He’s sleeping, like everyone else at this time of night,” Sam said. I didn’t tell him that Cole wasn’t sleeping. He saw my hesitation and mistook the meaning of it. “You’re the practical one. Is it a bad idea? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a bad idea.”
“I want to go,” I said. I reached down and took his hand firmly. “We won’t be gone long.”
Getting into the Volkswagen in the dark driveway, the car rumbling to life, it felt like we were conspiring to something greater than just chasing lights in the sky. We could be going anywhere. Chasing the promise of magic. Sam turned up the heat all the way while I moved my seat back — someone had moved it all the way forward. Reaching over the center console, Sam briefly squeezed my hand before grabbing the gearshift and backing out of the driveway.
“Ready?”
I grinned at him. For the first time since the hospital, since before the hospital, I felt like the old Grace, the one who could do anything she put her mind to. “I was born ready.”
We raced down the street. Sam reached over to brush the top of my ear with his finger; the action made him send the car slightly crooked. Looking hurriedly back to the road, he laughed at himself, just a little, as he straightened the wheel.
“Watch out the window,” he said. “Since I can’t seem to remember how to drive. Tell me where to go. Where it’s brightest. I’m trusting you.”
I pressed my face against the window and squinted at the hint of lights in the sky. At first, it was hard to tell which direction the lights were coming from, so I just directed Sam down the darkest roads first, farthest away from house lights and town. And now, as the minutes passed, it became easier to find a path north. Every turn took us farther away from Beck’s house, farther away from Mercy Falls, farther away from Boundary Wood. And then, suddenly, we were miles away from our real lives, driving down a straight-arrow road under a wide, wide sky punched through with hundreds of millions of stars, and the world was vast around us. On a night like tonight, it wasn’t hard to believe that, not so long ago, people could see by starlight alone.
“In 1859,” I said, “there was a solar storm that made the northern lights so strong, people could read by them.”
Sam didn’t doubt my facts. “Why do you know this?”
“Because it’s interesting,” I said.
His smile was back. The little amused one that meant that he was charmed by my overdeveloped left brain. “Tell me something else interesting.”
“The auroras were so strong that telegraph people shut off their batteries and ran their telegraphs by the power of the auroras instead,” I said.
“They did not,” Sam said, but it was clear that he believed me. “Tell me something else interesting.”
I reached over to touch his hand where it rested on the gearshift. When I ran my thumb over the inside of his wrist, I felt goose bumps raise underneath my fingers. My fingertips found his scar, the skin unnaturally smooth, the edges still puckered and lumpy.
“I can’t feel anything on my scar,” he said. “It’s got no sensation in it.”
I briefly closed my hand around his wrist, thumb pressed tightly into his skin. I could feel the flutter of his pulse. “We could keep going,” I said.
Sam was silent, and at first I thought he didn’t understand what I meant. But then I saw him working his hands on the steering wheel. By the light of the dashboard, I saw that he still had mud underneath the nails of his right hand. Unlike me, he hadn’t left his dirty skin behind.
I asked him, “What are you thinking?”
His voice sounded sticky when he replied, like he had to dislodge the words to get them out. “That this time last year, I wouldn’t have wanted to.” Sam swallowed. “I was thinking that now, if we could, I would. Can you imagine it?”
I could. I could imagine a life someplace far away, starting over from scratch, just us. But as soon as I pictured it — Sam’s socks draped over a window radiator, my books spread across a tiny kitchen table, dirty coffee mugs upside down in the sink — I thought of what I would leave behind: Rachel and Isabel and Olivia and, finally, my parents. I had left them so conclusively, through the dubious miracle of my shift, that my old anger at them felt dull and remote. They had no power over my future now. Nothing did, except for the weather.
Then, suddenly, out Sam’s window, I saw the aurora, clear and bright, obviously not a reflection of any store’s lights. “Sam, Sam! Look! Turn, turn, turn, go that way!”
Twisting slowly in the sky above to our left was a sinuous, shaggy ribbon of pink. It pulsed and brightened like a living thing. Sam pulled a left at a narrow, barely paved road that led through an unending black field. The car dipped through potholes and weaved, loose gravel rattling behind us. My teeth snapped as we went over a bump. Sam made an ahhhhhhhhh sound so that his voice modulated crazily with the jolting vibration of the Volkswagen.
“Stop here!” I ordered.
The field rolled out for acres in every direction. Sam pulled up the parking brake and together we peered out the windshield.
Hanging in the sky directly above us was the aurora borealis. Like a brilliant pink road, it snaked through the air and disappeared behind the trees, a darker purple aura clinging to one side of it. The lights shimmered and stretched, growing and receding, striving and shrinking. One moment the light was a singular thing, a path to heaven, the next moment it was a collection of many, an army made of light, marching ever northward.