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Before they move to Jackson, Ellie gets to meet a different side of Joel for the first time since knowing him. She’s seen glimpses of him, on occasion, when he’d laugh freely, or when he’d sit cleaning his guns, humming to himself.
This, however, is different.
Jackson is still a shithole when they arrive. The idea of living alone is scary, but somehow the idea of living with Joel is even more terrifying, so they settle for the one option that makes sense, which is that Ellie gets to have her own place right next to Joel’s house.
“I think this place has the chance to become really nice,” Joel says after they’ve been there for a total of one week. He’s leaning his elbows on the railing of his porch, eyes trained on the people dragging wooden planks from one side of town to the other.
Ellie glances at him, cast in the yellow light. For once, he doesn’t look plagued by exhaustion. She thinks that this is the most hopeful she’s heard him in weeks. Doesn’t say that it doesn’t really matter where she lives, just that she’s glad it’s with him.
“I agree,” she settles on. “It could be an actual town again.”
The week after, Joel has torn the carpet from his living room and stands amidst it with his hands on his hips, glancing around.
Ellie watches from the doorpost and stifles a laugh. She doesn’t say that the sound of him renovating his house had woken her up early.
“You think I should get a new rug for in here?” he calls over his shoulder.
“If you can find one that’s big enough.”
Joel turns around, raises a brow as he walks over to one of the shelves. “If I can find one that’s not covered in mold,” he mutters. “Here. Found you this.”
She glances at his face before she takes it—always so stoic, and yet after months spent on the road with him, she can tell there’s a hint of nervousness underneath. It’s a journal. “What’s this for?”
He shrugs. “Thought you’d wanna keep them drawings of yours somewhere.”
She looks down at the cover and nods slowly, withholding a smile. “Thanks. Appreciate it.”
“It’s nothin’,” he says. He inhales like he’s about to say something else, but turns on his heel instead, and starts about the carpet again.
They do end up finding a rug, coincidentally, a while after. Joel claims that it’s too small for his living room and that it would just look stupid—so he rolls it back up and carries it to Ellie’s house. “Looks good,” he claims once he’s put it in front of her couch. “Just needs a coffee table to go with.”
Ellie never really thanks him for it, more so because he never seems to know how to accept gratitude, or to acknowledge that he’s being nice, for that matter. But it comes in waves, each one stronger than the prior. He smiles at her more often, and this immovable sadness in his eyes recedes, most of the time, when he looks at her. He burns dinner the first time he attempts to use an actual stove again and then laughs when she pokes fun at him for it—not a reserved laugh, no, he throws his head back and closes his eyes and laughs.
She can do nothing but stare at him in wonder.
It’s the middle of summer and Ellie has never felt a happiness so tangible.
It takes her two whole weeks to figure out when Joel’s birthday is; in the end, she only finds out because Tommy tells her. Before she walks across town to get home, he grabs her shoulder and stops her. “Ellie,” he starts, a grave look on his face. She’s pushed on something tender. “His birthday is not—it’s not a time that brings up great memories. So. Tread carefully, alright?”
She understands, and feels strangely enough guilty for it, like she’s been prodding in a place where she shouldn’t have.
That night she lays awake and stares at the ceiling, wondering what, and mostly whether, she should just forget about it in entirety. Joel had waved the topic off every time she started about his birthday, always so forcefully indifferent about it. It’s only a few weeks away now, with summer coming to its last breath, which leaves her with little time to decide.
She listens to the creaking of the house, can hear when Joel’s gone to bed at last—on quiet nights like these, after the crickets have quieted down, it’s like the wood sways along, like the mountains come to life around them, whispering to her.
It’s eerie, and mostly so incredibly invigorating to be in one place for long enough to start recognizing its fundamentals.
Three weeks pass; Ellie picks up on bird songs early in the morning, learns how to tell them apart, remains uncertain still about what to do with her situation no matter how much she mulls it over in her mind.
On Monday night, it rains. On Tuesday morning, the sun reflects perfect shades of purple and orange in the puddles of water along the roads in town.
For Joel’s birthday, Ellie makes him a friendship bracelet.
⁂
After the initial happiness of settling down wears off, uncertainty follows. And as fall seeps into winter, she watches the wind tear the leaves from the trees and wonders why she’s still here.
It all feels remarkably unfair.
The way Joel and Tommy laugh together about some inside joke; the way Joel looks at her after he’s made a particularly bad joke, as though seeking her approval; the way Maria will squeeze her shoulder and invite them over for dinner when she’s made a dish Ellie likes.
She gets to have this. So many other people in her life didn’t.
She hates her immunity; refuses to believe that there was no cure. Because it meant that everyone she’d lost leading up to it, she’d lost for nothing: her mother, Tess, even Marlene. It meant that she’d watched Riley die for the sole reason of being haunted by her. That she couldn’t have somehow changed that outcome had the odds been in her favor.
Sometimes she thinks she’s upsetting herself for nothing. Joel told her that there was no cure. But she can never tell if she’s imagining the uncertainty she swears was in his eyes when he did, if she’s making it up because she so desperately wants to believe her life has meaning.
If he lied to her, despite how hard she tries to tell herself differently, part of her is still deeply touched by the fact that he cared enough for her to want her to live. To make such a cruel decision to keep her alive and damn everyone else with him only to hold onto her a little longer.
She resents that part of her most of all.
At first these thoughts are easy to ward off. There’s more people coming into town every day, and with the cold winds of winter slipping through the cracks in the wood, there’s enough work to keep her busy.
But as the ice spreads across her windows in the morning, fanned out like veins, the doubt slowly sinks into her mind with talons deep enough to leave a mark.
She stares at Joel and wonders if he’s condemned her. Wonders, most of all, if he did it knowingly.
Beneath all the careful tiptoeing and the fleeting expressions of gratitude, she thought there had been love. A deep, vast understanding between them that she had shared with no one else before in her life.
But condemning her—even if it was to prevent his own devastation—and doing it while knowing what she would have wanted is not love. Not even close to it.
It’s selfishness. Greed. In attempt to save her, he’d ruined her. And in attempt to keep her close, he’d lost her instead.
⁂
There had been a moment, ever so briefly, in which Ellie had wanted to call Joel dad. She must’ve been sixteen, right after her birthday, and the promise of summer made her crave a new kind of intimacy. She’d thought of it as an urge, a nonsensical longing to feel such a connection with him because she’d never experienced it with someone else, but had simultaneously understood that it was a line she could never truly cross.
She’d nearly slipped once. Joel hadn’t noticed. She felt so guilty afterwards that it had taken her three days to be able to look him in the eye again.
And then gradually the urge had faded away. You are not my dad, she echoed to herself. And her mind had echoed back, then what are you?
⁂
When she wakes up, even before she gains sight of her surroundings, Ellie understands that something has irrevocably changed.
Tommy is still knocked out to the right of her, but she can barely spare him a glance as she crawls over to Joel. What is left of him.
“Please,” she begs. “Joel, please.”
There’s so much blood that her jeans are soaked with it in an instant, and she nearly chokes on the smell.
Her voice is hoarse with how she yelled it raw earlier, but it had made no difference in the end and it makes no difference now. “Come on, you have to wake up,” she chokes out. “Please. Please.”
He is so limp in her arms, so heavy. The blood sticks to her fingers and wedges under her nails. She doesn’t know when her begging turns into sobbing, just presses her forehead against Joel’s and rocks him back and forth gently.
She holds his body until it’s gone cold.
Then she holds onto it a little longer.
Dina is there, trying to pull her away, but Ellie snaps at her in a daze, and her hands recede. Her ears feel like they’re about to pop. She holds Joel’s face in her hands and nearly apologizes for the tears dripping onto his cheeks, diluting the blood.
She can hear cursing next to her, a deep voice in a southern lilt that doesn’t match the one she wants to hear so desperately. Tommy kneels on the other side of Joel’s body, the denim around his knees coloring red. He only stares, and stares, and stares.
Dina paces a few feet away from them, her hand pressed to her mouth. She doesn’t hear Jesse burst in through the door, doesn’t register the aghast look on his face at the sight in front of him, the way he turns to Dina, speechless.
Ellie doesn’t know how much time passes. She just holds onto him.
“C’mon, kid,” Tommy says then, his voice rough with disuse. His hands close around her arms.
“Please, I need to—he can’t—” she gets out, refusing to let go.
Tommy is gentler this time. “He’s gone,” he says, and tilts her face up with a calloused palm, forcing her eyes on him. “It’s okay.”
It’s not. It never will be again. She doesn’t resist, now, and Joel slips through her hands, back on the cold tiles once more. She glances at him, clearer now without the tears addling her vision, and can’t stop staring at his morphed face. Can’t stop hearing the crack of his skull as the golf club landed its final blow.
She doubles over and vomits all over the floor.
Days later, she will look back on this moment and won’t remember how she got back to her house. How she had washed his blood off her skin, and crawled into bed cold and shivering. She won’t remember how she stopped crying, or if she did in the first place.
It feels, strangely enough, like the world passes her by as it happens. She is watching from behind a window, fingers pressed to the glass. She is watching the world through someone else’s eyes, so different from her own.
The trek down the mountain, Jesse’s hands holding onto hers from where she’s sat behind him on his horse. Maria’s immediate understanding the moment they ride through the gates, covered in blood, with a company of four instead of five, and the way her face falls. The reluctant murmuring of the men around her as she talks quietly to Jesse. She walks over to Tommy and tucks him into her arms—he shakes, a break in the current, and her gaze lands on her. Full of water and pity.
Ellie doesn’t understand. She hates Tommy for his emotions, then, Joel can’t be gone, he can’t be, he will just be right where he always is on his stupid goddamn porch—
She turns on her heel and before Dina can stop her, takes off to the other side of town. To a house she spent two years growing up in and two more years longing for.
After she told Joel she hated him, she didn’t set foot inside his house for a long time. Almost a year; she kept score. But she would watch, either way, to the place that had always felt like home to her. Not because of the cozy living room and the carefully picked rug and the lights that changed with the seasons—because of who lived there, and what he meant to her.
And now he’s gone.
Ellie reaches the gate, slips on a patch of ice and sinks into the snow on her knees and hands. She hurls, but nothing comes out except for a wet sob. The loose snow furls around her palms and leaves the remnants of Joel’s blood on his doorstep like a distant goodbye.
Oh, god.
This can’t be happening.
Dina has caught up to her at last, panting as her fingers curl around Ellie’s shoulder. “Are you okay?” Her eyes are wide as she takes her in. “God, Ellie—”
The cut on her brow is still bleeding, curdling her vision. Dina kneels next to her on the icy ground and lets Ellie collapse against her body, arms holding her tightly.
In a cruel and indifferent irony, the snow only reminds her of the cold touch of Joel’s body.
⁂
There is a moment in between loss and grief that consists of a longing so intense and heart-wrenching that she can’t put it into words.
She’s experienced this before, with every other person she lost in her life. Yet with them it had been a mere moment, a hair’s breadth, a single intake of oxygen. And after that, she’d plummet onto the cold bottom of a ravine, left to her own devices to find a way to climb out of it.
Time passes, and the nightmare doesn’t end. Ellie has started her descent and is falling, falling, falling, into an endless abyss of nothing .
The only thing that makes her fall abate, however briefly, is the promise of revenge on the back of her tongue, which somehow manages to overrule the taste of iron in her mouth. But even that fades the harder she tries to hold onto it, and then she’s engulfed in the same darkness again.
She cries out for him inside the abyss, Joel, please, get up, and isn’t sure if it’s her voice or her echo that rings in her ears. The only person who could drag her out of it—who’s done it before, countless times, again and again without fail or question—is not here to help her this time.
Her front door remains locked. No one gets to enter. This solitude, both inner and outer, feels deserved.
It’s four in the morning and Ellie is awake. Her dreams leave her restless; Joel’s pained screams follow her all the way out of her sleep, clinging to her like a second skin, somehow echoing even in the creaking of the pipes when she turns on the tap. Everything she touches is tainted with his memory.
It’s like someone split her world down the middle the way they would dig their fingers into a clementine and rip the skin apart. So casually cruel. So thoughtlessly devastating.
The taste of blood sticks to her teeth, and Ellie kicks back the covers, slipping into worn sweats and her ragged converse. She doesn’t bother closing the door behind her as she crosses over into the cold of the night.
Out of all her reckless decisions, this might be the most foolish one yet.
Joel’s front door gives easily, and then she’s inside, and it’s still cold. Even winter reached the heart of his home unnoticed.
She tries not to shake as she walks over to the heater and turns it on; a low hum wriggles through the air before the metal starts glowing orange. Without daring to look, she turns on the lights.
For a few unmoving seconds, she stands there, frozen. Then she raises her gaze.
Everything is as she remembers, albeit a bit distant, locked in a standstill. It almost feels as though everything inside his house stopped the same moment Joel’s heart did while the rest of the world moved on without him. That alone is so unfair it makes her nauseous.
She pretends her hands don’t tremble as she drifts through his house. She circles the living room, takes note of the blanket she used to sit with outside in spring when she’d listen to him practicing on his guitar endlessly, the books piled haphazardly on his shelf, some titles about space, some others about fossils and dinosaurs.
The air is so thick it’s hard to breathe.
In the kitchen is a plate with crumbs, to be cleaned after he’d come back from patrol. Next to it, a mug with a remnant of coffee leaving rings on the ceramic. Ellie picks it up and inhales, and it doesn’t smell good by any means but it’s familiar and she has to close her eyes with how bad they sting.
She trudges up the stairs, every step heavier than the last. She moves past the picture frames without a second glance out of fear she will fall apart at the seams completely; in his work room, unfinished projects are littered around in careless abandon. He had no reason to stash them away, because nothing led him to believe he wouldn’t get to finish them. Two half-carved figures are on a workbench. In the corner is a stringless guitar he’d been cleaning.
The cold makes her shiver, and she folds her arms over her chest. With a last twinge of doubt that she ignores, she turns to the one room she hasn’t dared face just yet.
Joel’s bedroom is exactly as she remembers it. He feels most alive in here, in the sway of the curtains and the crumpled sheets folded back onto the bed and the closet left half open. His memory feels tangible, here, as though he could walk through the door any second and ask her if she needs anything.
There’s a box on his bed that contains his splintered watch and his jacket. Maria must’ve cleaned the blood of it, gently, after they retrieved his body from the mountain cabin. Ellie takes the watch out of the box and holds it carefully.
When her lip starts trembling, she sinks her teeth into the soft flesh and inhales raggedly through her nose. She puts the watch back and closes the lid, her fingers lingering on the cardboard for a few seconds before they slip off.
The hardwood floor creaks in a soft echo of her steps. Her hand hitches, for just a second, before she tugs a flannel from one of the hangers in his closet. It’s soft and worn with use over the years, and reminds her of when she first got to know him. That feels like a lifetime ago now, like they were different people entirely.
She pulls the flannel over her head, raises the collar to her nose and inhales deeply. Her forehead tips against the half-opened door of the closet with a quiet thump.
She misses him so much.
The past weeks have felt like a tide that never turns. Even now, in this brief respite of artificial peace, she’s still knee-deep in the quicksand. Whether she’s standing still or trying to break free, it doesn’t make a difference, because she’s stuck all the same.
And she’s just so tired.
The night is unkind to her, no matter how hard she’s tried bargaining. Dina had given her a herbal tea and it helped nothing, Maria had given her a bottle of meds that didn’t change a thing either.
It feels treacherous when she turns around. But she can’t help herself. She’s lost so much already, and the exhaustion she feels is like it’s rooted in her very bones.
Ellie climbs into Joel’s bed.
She manages to keep the tears at bay for a few minutes, but in his house, in his bed, surrounded by the parts of him that mattered most, it’s impossible to keep herself together. She curls on her side, tucks the blanket under her chin, and accidentally catches a glimpse of The idiot’s guide to space on his nightstand.
That’s when she starts crying. Ugly, heaving sobs that make her whole body tremble. She clenches the sheets in her fists until her knuckles turn white and she can’t breathe. Time feels like it doesn’t exist here, and the tears keep coming like a dam finally pierced, and the sky as it slowly starts lighting up frowns down at her through the window as if to say, foolish girl.
She wears herself out with it. Just as the sun comes up, Ellie falls asleep.
⁂
For her sixteenth birthday, Joel takes her to the Wyoming Museum of Space and Science, and Ellie thinks it’s the happiest she’s ever been.
“I do okay?” he asks her when they’re in the space capsule, and she’s cradling the cassette tape to her chest.
For a second, she can’t find the words. Her heart feels like it’s expanded three sizes. “Are you fucking kidding me?” The sliver of worry in his eyes dissolves at that, and his smile grows.
She feels so loved.
Joel keeps the stupid hat on the entire way back and listens to the ridiculous jokes she’s memorized without complaining once; just instructs her where to put her footing during the tricky parts of their hike and helps her over a few mossy tree trunks.
She stares at his back and the way his shoulders shake when he laughs at her jokes and the way the sunlight filters through the tree to fall onto their bodies in patches of yellow, briefly thinks that there is no one in the world that she cares more about than him, at least not in a way she’s experienced it before. She must exude it, there’s no other option—surely he can hear, even from six feet in front of her, I love you, I love you, with how her heart pounds it through her ribcage.
For a long while, she had thought herself not to be capable of it. After losing so much, and after feeling so much grief for the people she cared about, she thought she would never be able to love someone again.
But Joel is walking in front of her with his hands tightened around the straps of his backpack, and he glances over his shoulder every now and then to make sure she’s still behind him, and he taught her how to play guitar and shoot a gun and defend herself and taught her most of all how to live, so yes, it makes perfect sense. Of course she’s capable. Of course it’s Joel.
She loves him.
A few weeks later, when she’s in his kitchen to help with dinner and she goes to grab her cup from the living room, she stumbles to halt.
On the shelf against the wall is the fedora, given its own place like a prized possession.
⁂
The snow has already started melting and leaves trails of brown sludge on the side of the paths despite the last blizzard of the season having hit barely a week ago. Despite that, it’s still freezing cold the morning that Ellie takes Shimmer and tracks him up the mountain.
When she will return in a few hours, with the sun fully risen, it’s surely going to be a shit storm back in town. Maria will scold her endlessly for leaving at four in the morning without telling anybody. Dina will be mad, even though it’ll be only from a place of worry.
Ellie doesn’t care.
The contents of the jerrycan in her backpack slosh around wildly with every jerking movement that Shimmer makes, though he dutifully follows the creek up the mountain and doesn’t scare in the dark. The edges of the sky start unraveling just as she makes it to the cabin, a lighter shade of blue bleeding into the ink of the night. She lingers to watch, only for a minute, before she tightens her shaking hands into fists at her side and slips inside through a broken window.
The place feels like she’s here for the first time. She doesn’t remember much of it—but she’d stormed through the different rooms then anyway, so frenzied that she hadn’t taken any of it in.
Now she’s standing in the living room, takes note of the discarded sleeping blankets scattered around. The forgotten bags, the ammunition, the rations. A dull pressure starts behind her eyes.
The nausea grows the longer she walks around—her hands, however tight she’s clenching them, won’t stop shaking.
At the top of the stairs, she freezes. For a few horrifying moments, she’s back to a few weeks ago, standing in the exact same spot and hearing Joel’s pained grunts echo through the hallway.
If she’d made it here any faster, would she have been able to make a difference?
In a lot of ways, she thinks she’s failed him. In his final moments, he’d glanced at her and twitched his fingers at the sound of her begging. Even on the brink of death, he’d attempted to reach her. To soothe her.
Nothing hurts more than that thought.
In something of morbid curiosity, and maybe fatal determination, too, Ellie clenches her jaw and descends the stairs.
Most of the blood has been scrubbed from the floor, undoubtedly by the people who came to retrieve his body. But a stain remains on the wood, rust-colored and irrefutable, a stain the size of what her heart used to be before it bled out along with the person she loved most in this world.
She kneels near it, ignores the nagging sense of deja-vu, and carefully lowers her hands to the wood. Her jaw trembles, but the tears she’d been expecting don’t come.
It’s cold enough inside the cabin that her exhales form little clouds in the air, and her heart pinches tight in her chest.
She had not known for pain like this to exist. For the sky to feel like it’s falling, for the blood to be freezing in her veins, for her body to be ripped apart limb from limb slowly and meticulously.
After weeks of free-falling, it seems she’s finally crashed. The abyss, however, is worse. She’s all alone here, and no matter how hard she calls out, there’s no one to hear. There’s no one to understand.
I’m sorry, she quietly tells him, fingers splayed on the hardwood floor and eyes closed. For minutes she sits there, until her limbs have gone stiff and her joints hurt from the freezing cold.
When she opens her eyes, her gaze lands on the golf clubs next to the window. Then, at last, the anger seeps in.
Ellie opens her backpack, takes out the jerrycan and sways to her feet. The Baldwin mansion has no place here, not anymore, not after what happened inside these walls.
Tommy finds her just before noon. The sun is high up in the sky, and the temperature has climbed to an early Spring chill. She is standing in front of the cabin with her arms folded over her chest and watches the mansion go up in flames.
“Jesus Christ, Ellie,” Tommy says, spinning her around. His face is distorted in a worried, disbelieving scowl. “What did you do?”
Sometimes it hurts, looking into Tommy’s face and finding the similarities between him and Joel. But where Tommy regards her in worry and bewilderment, and even in anger at her sudden departure this morning, with Joel there had always been a different edge to it. A warmth to his gaze that Tommy lacks.
“I burned it down,” she answers.
The fire roars from a distance, the wooden foundation of the house groaning in defiance. But in the end, it gives, like all things do, like all things break. The middle beam of the roof creaks loudly, a final sigh, before it collapses into the floor.
A sea of sparks flare up in its stead.
Ellie turns on her heel and leaves its destruction behind.
⁂
Her life kind of feels like it falls apart when she turns seventeen, because after being so happy for two years, it’s a very long way down.
She finds out the hard way.
For a while, she hates Joel—vividly. Hates him so much that she can barely stand the sight of his face. She goes out of her way to avoid him, taking on more patrols than her body can catch up with and spending the rest of her time anywhere but home.
Over the summer, she calms down about the situation a little. It feels like a stupid realization that the only person she could go and talk to about this is the one that betrayed her.
Her life was supposed to mean something.
In the back of her mind, it echoes, it meant everything to him. That’s why she’s still standing here.
She can tell that Tommy wants to talk to her about it—can tell he has to bite his tongue every time he’s around her, and the way he watches her is careful, calculating. Either Joel told him to keep his mouth shut about it or he respects her enough to leave her to her own decisions, because he never does.
It stings, though, that he knew the truth before she did.
For months, she only sees Joel in passing. When he comes back from patrol and she’s just leaving, or when she’s getting vegetables from the store, or when he’s picking up a book from the library.
The distance was her own initiative and that doesn’t make it hurt any less.
She comes home at night and watches the light dance behind his curtains, the window opened to let in a draft. Sometimes, when it’s a quiet night, she can hear him humming along to the radio, or strumming his guitar inside his living room.
At the end of a hazy and humid summer, she realizes that no matter how hard she tries, she still considers this place home, and it’s not because of her house or her belongings.
Maybe she hates him because she wants someone to blame. Maybe this is a truth she is not ready to face yet.
That year, she doesn’t celebrate his birthday with him. She has no clue where he went that day or who he actually spent it with. The whole day she’s been going back and forth like a pendulum on her decision, staring at the wall until it drove her crazy.
Right before the clock strikes midnight, she walks up the steps to his porch and knocks on his front door. His face lights up in surprise when he opens it. “Ellie,” he gets out—an exhale, a breath of relief.
Something fractures in her chest. She hadn’t thought there to be anything whole left.
She pushes a wrapped box in his hands, and before he can say anything else, turns and leaves him standing in the pale moonlight.
⁂
Ellie has a plethora of experience when it comes to pain, but Joel’s death is something that never stops hurting.
Oftentimes she is too scared to probe the bruise and shuts out all thoughts about him. Other days he is the only thing on her mind and she can’t stop thinking of him.
She dreams of him, sometimes, all the time, and when she wakes it leaves her gasping for air, with tears on her cheeks and her heart pattering against her ribcage like an echo searching for him.
She is scared she’s starting to forget. His face, his voice, the way his laugh would rumble through the room. She fills whole journals with drawings and memories, anything that comes to mind when she thinks of Joel; some entries are angry, so fucking livid, others are so desperate that her handwriting tangles together in the frenzy, like it’s an almost physical thing the way she vomits the words onto paper, frantic and overwrought.
The happy memories, though, the happy memories are good. And they hurt, but it’s nice to cradle the page to her chest after she’s written it down and the ink has barely dried, and she usually cries then, because it doesn’t ever stop hurting and she just misses him so much.
Despite the ache they’re always accompanied with, it’s a good reminder that she still has those memories to hold onto.
Exactly a year after he died, Ellie spends the whole day in bed, only getting up to light the candles in her room. It’s struck her that it’s been a year, to the point she feels paralyzed with it. It was a slap to the face to wake up to it. A year since she last saw him, a year since she was supposed to watch that dumb movie with him, a year since she sat in a puddle of blood and clung onto what remained of him.
All time does is pass and all she does is forget more about him.
Tommy stops by her house that night, the only person she sees that day. They’re quiet, the air thick with emotion, and they’re halfway through dinner when Ellie’s fork drops onto her plate and she breaks down. It’s silent tears, and her shoulders shake, and the food tastes like sand in her mouth, and Tommy can only reach out across the table and hold her hand. On this day, it’s the only consolation he can offer.
She understands that, in the face of a wound like this, the only way to deal with it is to tread around it. There’s no stitching, no healing to it. You watch it bleed and hope for the best.
“Do you think I made it worse?” she asks at the end of the night, fidgeting with her ring finger and eyes trained on the table. “By being there in the end?”
Tommy halts in the doorpost from where he was about to leave. He looks at her for a long moment. “No,” he says then. “He loved you.”
That, in itself, is answer enough.
Spring comes quietly that year. The ice thaws slowly over the span of a few weeks, until it’s suddenly all gone, and a watery sun shines down on Jackson in something precarious enough to break if looked at too hard.
In April, Ellie feels hopeful again for the first time in a very long time.
It’s about halfway through the month that she flings some of her belongings in her backpack, slings her rifle over her shoulder and kisses Dina goodbye.
Dina, for as much as she looks like she wants to beg her to stay, knows that this is something Ellie must do, and she must do it by herself.
She leaves Jackson when the sun has barely risen, with Joel’s jacket pulled close around her and the morning mist kissing her cheeks with a gentle chill. Tommy and Maria wave from atop the wall until she and Shimmer are out of sight.
The day before, he’d sat her down and handed her a map. “This is where he lived,” he said, pointing to the dot with home written underneath, then dragged his finger further west, “but you probably want to go right over here.”
Now she’s on her way to Austin, Texas, with the sun at her back and the horizon stretching endlessly before her. The road before her is long, but it does not feel so daunting.
The temperature rises the farther south she gets, and she ties Joel’s jacket around her waist. The sunburn on her arms and shoulders glows hotly at night, but it’s a suffering she embraces openly. It takes her weeks to even get to Texas, and it’s only when she’s greeted with an overgrown sign crossing the border that her nerves catch up to her at last.
Joel had told her, years ago, that he and Sarah used to go on hikes together, just outside of Austin in the surrounding state parks. His voice had gone all distant and dreamlike while he was telling her, the way it always did when he was recalling his daughter. But he’d spoken of her warmly, and there had been an undying affection in his eyes.
For some reason, this particular memory had stuck with her. He talked, and so Ellie listened. About the things they’d seen on their hikes, Sarah’s favorite trails, the fact that she always wanted to trek a bit further even though she’d end up exhausted. During their last hike together, Sarah had picked a favorite tree, a specific type of oak that had grown wide and sprawling, and then insisted on carving their names into it. Like in those damn romance movies she always wanted to go see, he’d said, and laughed about it. But Ellie could tell it meant a lot to him, still.
“Do you think it’s still there?” she’d asked.
Joel gave it a moment of thought before he shrugged. “I don’t know,” he’d said. “I’d hope so.”
When she makes it to the state park after three weeks of traveling, it takes her half a day to find the tree. Its trunk splits into two and branches out broadly, and her heart patters in her chest irregularly, because she knows this is it.
She circles around it, knees buckling and breath catching when she sees it—two initials unevenly carved into the bark, the edges worn by time and weather, but still very recognisably a J & S .
Her vision goes a little blurry. After so many days on the road, she feels weary and gross, and her skin stretches across her bones in a way that’s almost confining. She pulls Joel’s jacket closer around her shoulders and tries not to shake too much.
Ellie takes off her backpack and sinks down against the tree.
For a while, she sits with the memory of him—of him here, with Sarah, even though she didn’t know him then. She closes her eyes and takes it all in, like going through a catalog of the last five years, thumbing through the memories one by one.
She doesn’t think it will ever get easier.
But there’s no tears this time—it seems that, after so much endless bleeding, the well has finally dried up, the wound has staunched. For now. It will rip open again, she knows, it will tear clean through the makeshift stitches and bleed again like it never stopped in the first place.
Where she sits right now, so close to him that she can almost feel his presence, she feels like she’s going to be okay despite it.
The whole afternoon, she sits there by that tree, with the trunk digging into her back and the park humming around her. Just as the sun makes its final descent to the horizon, painting the sky a burning orange, she gets to her feet and zips open her backpack.
In the end, they hadn’t buried Joel. Not really. Tommy had decided on it, and so they’d lowered an empty casket into the ground.
Take him home, Tommy had asked of her right before she left.
And so she has.
Spreading his ashes feels like a final goodbye, one that she will never be ready for. The ache wells up like a tidal wave and lodges in her throat, clouds her vision and makes her stomach feel like it’s filled with stones.
He loved her. The thought echoes in her mind. He loved her, he loved her.
She wishes that she’d brought her guitar so she could play him a song. And she doesn’t really believe in the afterlife, or in ghosts, but the thought of him being truly gone is too daunting for her to grasp—she traces her trembling fingers over the J carved into the tree and thinks that he’s still with her. He always will be.
She loves him. There’s nothing in the world that could take away from it.
She kisses her knuckles before she opens the canister, and then tries to steady her breathing as she tips it over. Part of it gets brushed up in the wind, though it’s a gentle movement, something reassuring. It’s okay, she tells herself, over and over. It’s okay to leave him here.
Though she’s not really leaving him. Just taking him with her through other means.
It’s dark by the time she finally departs, and the moon watches over her warmly when she turns on her feet. It’s a clear night. The stars blink at her expectantly.
She glances over her shoulder. “See you around, old man,” she says, and the wind rustles in response.