“I’m sure,” I said, and we kept walking. “It’d somehow be a disappointment if I ever got to talk to her anyway. I wouldn’t know what to say, or she’d think I was crazy, or maybe she’d be crazy. They are, you know, all those celebrities.” I bent to pick up a tiny white shell, then rolled it back and forth between my fingers. “I don’t think I really meant to talk to her in the first place, anyway. I am sorry, though, that I didn’t get to use those tickets. Who knows what Finn had to do to get them.”
A breeze rolled off the water, dragging a few strands of hair across my face, and I tucked them behind my ear. “But I need to get to Austin. Classes start the day after tomorrow, and I already missed orientation week, and now I don’t want to miss any of it. Not when Finn—”
“We can head out tonight if you want,” Rusty said.
I stopped walking and turned to him. “I’m gonna take the last of my savings and fly down there.” He looked confused, but I’d made up my mind about this. “I want you to take the Pala. You can drive it back to Arizona and have it at school, and it can be yours.”
Rusty opened his mouth to interrupt, but I didn’t let him. “I thought it all out already. You paid all that money to get it out of the impound lot, and I can pay you back for that eventually, but really, that car belongs with you. You and Finn have more memories in it than I even know about.” I paused. “Maybe more than I wanna know about.” He smiled at this, and I looked down at our bare feet facing each other in the sand. “It’d make him happy knowing you have it. And”—I brought my eyes back up to his—“it’d make me happy too. So you can’t say no.”
He breathed in deep and looked past me to the ocean, or maybe even past that, all the way back to the days he and Finn spent driving it around Big Lake together, two friends who’d loved and depended on each other and become brothers over the years. Or maybe he was thinking of the hundreds of miles he and I had spent together in the car, through all the things we knew about each other and the things we were surprised to find out, all the while bound together tight by the person Finn had been.
Rusty swallowed hard and looked down at the sand, nodding like he had just convinced himself. When he brought his eyes back to mine, they were full with the things he didn’t say out loud. He didn’t need to. It was all laid out there on his face, and I knew it was the right thing to do because I could see how much it meant to him. And because that’s what you do when you love someone.
And I did—love Rusty. I loved him in a way that had everything to do with how our past and our present had come together over the miles of highway we’d traveled, how our back then and our now had led us here, to this tiny point on the map. I closed the space between us with a single step and reached my arms around him—a small gesture to tell him so, and he pulled me in close and rested his chin on my head. Standing there together like that felt right as rain, and I knew that after everything, we’d somehow ended up exactly where we were supposed to be. There was no telling where we might find ourselves down the road, but for the moment it didn’t matter.
“Thank you,” Rusty said into my hair. Then he gently pulled me back by my shoulders and looked past me again.
I turned to see what he was looking at and knew right away. A few feet behind me, lying on its side in the sand like a shipwreck, was one of the lanterns from the ceremony the night before. Rusty and I walked over and he picked it up, inspecting it in the late-afternoon sunlight. Aside from a tear in one side of the paper and a bent corner, it wasn’t much worse for the wear. It even had the little candle inside still.
“That’s kinda sad it didn’t make it with the rest of them,” I said, remembering the twinkling lights that had spread out far and wide like stars across the water.
Rusty held it up to the light, inspecting the bottom. “I bet it’d still float.” He looked at me then, and I wondered if he knew what I’d been thinking as we watched the ceremony the night before or if he’d been thinking the same thing or knew what I was thinking now. “You wanna send it back out there?” he asked.
A long moment passed before I answered him, and in that time I made up my mind. We could send Finn off from the beach he’d unknowingly guided us to, the two of us. Together. “I think that’d be perfect,” I said.
Rusty nodded once in agreement, then kneeled down and set the lantern in the sand. He reached around to his back pocket and pulled out a shiny book of matches with a guitar on the front that I recognized from the bar.
“Wait,” I said, reaching for my own back pocket. Rusty looked up, and I slid the letter out, my “real letter” to Finn, with my thank-yous and sorries and stories and hopes scrawled messy on the backs of his pages. And my good-bye. I folded them once more, then kneeled down and slid them between the paper of the lantern and the little wooden frame, tucked in safe and sound for the long trip over the water. “I had a few things to tell him,” I said when I looked back to Rusty.
“Hope you told him all the good parts,” he said with a smile. Then he pulled a match out and lit it, holding the small flame between us. “You wanna say anything?”
I hadn’t noticed any tears creeping up on me, but they were there now. I breathed in deep and shook my head. Rusty touched the match to the candle’s wick, setting the whole lantern aglow with soft, white light. Then he waved the match out and nodded at me to do the honors. I took one more deep breath, then lifted the lantern in my hands and stood up. We walked the few paces down to the water’s edge, then stood still and quiet a moment, nothing but the lantern and the gentle whoosh of the waves between us.