The cracked pavement rumbles under our truck's tyres. It abuses the old Ford's creaky suspension, making a quiet roar like stifled rage. I look at my dad. He looks older than I remember. Weaker. He grips the steering wheel hard. His knuckles are white.
'Dad?' I say.
'What, Perry.'
'Where are we going to go?'
'Someplace safe.'
I watch him carefully. 'Are there still safe places?'
He hesitates, too long. 'Someplace safer.'
Behind us, in the valley where we used to swim and pick strawberries, eat pizza and go to movies, the valley where I was born and grew up and discovered everything that's now inside me, plumes of smoke rise. The gas station where I bought Coke Slushies is on fire. The windows of my grade school are shattered. The kids in the public swimming pool are not swimming.
'Dad?' I say.
'What.'
'Is Mom coming back?'
My dad finally looks at me, but says nothing.
'As one of them?'
He looks back at the road. 'No.'
'But I thought she would. I thought everyone comes back now.'
'Perry,' my dad says, and the word seems to barely escape his throat. 'I fixed it. So she won't.'
The hard lines in his face fascinate and repel me. My voice cracks. 'Why, Dad?'
'Because she's gone. No one comes back. Not really. Do you understand that?'
The scrub brush and barren hills ahead start to blur in my vision. I try to focus on the windshield itself, the crushed bugs and tiny fractures. Those blur, too.
'Just remember her,' my dad says. 'As much as you can, for as long as you can. That's how she comes back. We make her live. Not some ridiculous curse.'
I watch his face, trying to read the truth in his squinted eyes. I've never heard him talk like this.
'Bodies are just meat,' he says. 'The part of her that matters most . . . we get to keep that.'