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In the part of her mind that's always writing, Jean is aware that she should feel untethered after subletting her apartment back in the city and hitting the road with Cheyenne. Even when she's hooked onto a story, there's always been that sense of empty space under her feet when she's living out of her car and out of her phone.
Not so in the temporary house in Salem, or in the houses and hostels and motels that follow on the way to the west coast.
Instead, she finds herself rooted deep in the softness of freshly overturned earth and archived paper, of damp moss on crumbling headstones. In the spill of words filling up page after page, screen after screen, making a beginning, middle and end out of buried pieces of the truth. In the sound of her own heartbeat in the silences, out at the places where birds don't sing and locals won't speak.
And most of all, in Cheyenne.
She can see her sometimes, all of her, in the reflection of the car window as they drive up the two-lane highways. There's something white and still, waiting in the glass. Something beautifully strange, with a crown of antlers that stretch into the bare tree branches outside. In the confines of the vehicle, it's clear how the tender heat comes off her in waves when she breathes, and how there's always a slight tinge of blood on the air around her——not the nauseating wrongness of a crime scene, but something familiar and unworrying, like the second day of a period.
One moment she looks just like the kind of girl Jean would have crushed on hard in college, bracing her knees on the dash and commandeering Jean's phone to add to her playlist, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear as she pulls up some Mitski and Morena Leraba. The next, a glimmer of red flashes in the reflection and she's sitting up straight an instant before Jean spots the figure ahead on the shoulder of the road.
They pull over. The relief in the hitchhiker's eyes is clear when Cheyenne rolls down the window and she takes stock of who's inside. Her name is Amber. She's 28, and she's trying to get home from a cancer scan in the city. The bus that was supposed to take her never showed up, and she needs to be there for her kids tomorrow because her husband has to go back out on his two weeks at the logging camp where he works.
Jean is aware of Cheyenne's gaze lingering on her, rapt and soft at the same time, as she asks a few questions and then budges over to make space for Amber's story: the lack of answers at the hospital, the long stretches of empty road, the white trucker with the bad vibes, the car that swerved like it was going to run her down.
Cheyenne passes the phone back, holding it at the end of the aux, and lets Amber pick the music as Jean mentally revises their route, up the long highway and then off it to the little community where Amber's family is waiting for her.
The first time Jean kisses a magical being older than the stars is in a motel bathroom in northern British Columbia, under a dingy ventilation fan that's losing the fight against the ammonia-and-perfume stink of a bowl of Starry Night (Blue-Black #3).
She's sitting on the painfully narrow edge of the bathtub, clipping Cheyenne's hair into even sections and trying not to stare too long at the curve of her neck.
"I'm good, you know," Cheyenne says. "I've got this, if you've got other things to do or... you wanted to go out."
There's a carefulness there that surprises her. One that walks a fine line between butterflies at a bar and a request to sign her soul away. The implication is: if she wants to go out and meet someone else.
"I don't." She carefully gathers another lock of hair, twists it once around her finger, and puts on the clip. "And I can do my own hair just fine too, but you don't have to when you've got a—"
Here she breaks off, unsure of what kind of word would fit in the scant space between their bodies, with what they've been up to. Sister, like their cover story in Salem? Friend? Chronicler, devotee, partner in justice? Puller-up of maps, taker of the driver's seat for parallel parking? "—someone."
It's not her best work.
But all the same, Cheyenne raises a hand to hers and turns to face her with eyes that are blood-red to the core and crinkling at the corners.
"You're a really good someone," she says, and presses her lips to Jean's.