bright morning, ready to embrace their new, old lives.
It wasn’t until lunch time that they spared a thought for Dillon again, when a coffee shop waitress told them their lunch was on the house.
Dillon watched them drive down the dirt road away from Slayton’s shack. The van’s stereo was blasting, and Dillon could tell they were already soaring back into the world of love and life—a place where Dillon could not join them. Once the sound of their engine faded in the distance, Dillon approached Carter.
The boy still sat near Slayton’s grave, doing nothing, thinking nothing. Dillon sat down in front of him and looked into the boy’s eyes; the large black pupil of the left, the tiny pinhead of the right.
Dillon gathered all of his attention, pushing out his own fear and confusion. He held this boy by the shoulders and looked through those empty eyes, until he found the impossible jigsaw of a little boy . . . mindless . . . patternless, splintered beyond any hope of repair, and yet Dillon set himself to the task of repairing it.
Dillon sat there ten minutes, twenty minutes, an hour, pushing his own mind into the boy’s chaos and stringing together a lifetime of thought and meaning. It wasn’t as easy as destruction; it was a thousand times harder to recreate what was no longer there, but Dillon forced himself to do it.
When he was done, Dillon felt drained, cold and exhausted—but when he looked into Carter’s eyes now, the boy’s eyes looked normal. And they began to fill with tears.
“I done bad things,” cried the boy, with a mind all too clear. “I kilt people. I done bad, bad things.”
“It wasn’t you,” Dillon told the boy. “It was me.”
Dillon took the sobbing boy into his arms and together they cried in the lonely woods. Dillon cried for all the souls he had ruined, for all the pain he had caused. . . .
. . . And he cried for Deanna. Losing her was more than he could bear. If she had been here, she could have comforted this boy, touching him with her gift of strength and faith. She could have healed his heart just as Dillon had healed his mind. What a wonderful world this could have been if Deanna could still be in it.
So they both cried, and when neither of them could cry anymore, Dillon put the boy into the Range Rover and got into the driver’s seat.
The boy, still sniffling a bit, studied him. “You old enough to drive?” he asked.
Dillon shrugged. “Not really.”
The boy put on his seat belt, and Dillon started the car. The boy didn’t ask where they were going. Maybe he just didn’t want to think about it, or maybe he already knew.
Interstate 84 crossed out of Washington, then followed the Columbia River east, along the Washington- Oregon border. Just before dark, they turned off the interstate, heading down a country road that wound through a dense forest. Less than a mile down, the road was blocked by a police barricade; only the truly determined would be getting anywhere near the town of Burton, Oregon, for a good long time.
Dillon stopped the car and took a deep breath as he stared at the barricade. In the distance, he could hear ghostly wails of the mad ones still lost in the woods—so many of them, it made Dillon wish he could turn and run, screaming louder than the voices in the woods. But then he remembered how bravely Deanna had faced things at the end. Certainly Dillon could find a fraction of that bravery now.
As they got out of the car, the boy looked at Dillon with trusting eyes, as if Dillon had all the answers in the world.
“Can you make it all better?” asked the boy. “Can you fix everything?”
Could he? There was no pattern Dillon could see that gave him an answer; there was only his will, the boy’s hope, and a memory of Deanna’s faith in him. But perhaps that’s all he needed to begin the mending.
“I don’t know,” said Dillon. “We’ll see.”
Then he took the boy’s hand, and together they walked toward the barricade of the shattered town.
