I am a firefly in the night.  The headlights.  The calm glow of the moonlight reflecting off the ripples of an unnamed lake in the cascade mountains, mountains of large black velvet so large they swallow everything, so dark that if I drive hard enough, I know I could disappear forever in between their hills.  It is the start of our journey.

Her lips tell the story of her dreams.  They part and awaken with strange words of far off places where dendrites coalesce and mingle with reality and all that she has witnessed.  As she sleeps she says ‘two lips’ and the images of the cabaret dancers play just for her.  It is nonsense.  It is everything.

The radio hums old CDs I place in one at a time.  Alone the radio would be loud.  But now, with her, it is an homage, witnessed in solitary contemplation of the road and thoughts of never stopping.  I pray she sleeps forever.

****

It is late in Las Vegas and when I insist the boys stop.  We had come into town for a free buffet at one of the casinos.  This is before I get arrested for minor gambling in a small satellite town.  This is after my friend and I are caught in a rip tide at a random cove in Mexico.  It has been three weeks of driving and climbing and searches by the federales and now we are back in the states in the City of Lights.  They pull over the station wagon and I put quarters in the phone.

“Happy Birthday,” I tell her.

“You remembered!” she says, and it is clear I have woken her. 

We talk.  We chat like teenagers do who are out discovering the world, thoughts evolving like images on a polaroid.  I tell her about the city.  I tell her about the rip tide.  I tell her we’ll be in Lewiston soon, and I’d love to meet up.  I don’t tell her that earlier, among the casinos on the strip that I realize I love her. 

****

It is our wedding, but it is not our wedding.  Our wedding would be held in a far off place with sacraments between her and me, in strange places with strange people, in the winding European backstreets where romance lives forever, or at the fountain out near King Street in Sydney when I should have proposed. 

This is a wedding for her parents, and my parents, and our friends.  She comes down the steps of her uncle’s house to violins.  She wears make up that is not her and I wear a tuxedo that makes me uncomfortable.  The priest presides over us, a man we have not met or spoken with and his words are routine and touch on a story he knows nothing about.  I think it is lost, what should be this perfect moment, and I tell myself that I will lie to her forever and say that it was perfect. 

The priest breaks from the script, and I break from my trance as she looks at me with her eyes that I swear are green, even though she says they are brown.  The priest talks about Ithaca, the Greek inscription on the inside of our rings.  He says we are travelers bound to be apart, and they are her words coming from his mouth.  He reads lines from Cavafy’s poem. 

I start to cry.

****

We are outside of our apartment in New York.  She is smoking and I am smoking, and we are talking about our friends who were married and are now getting divorced after six short months.  It is recent news and we speculate about their relationship. 

I watch her talk in the cold rain.  We have just returned from counseling.  This is after the war.  This is after nine years together.  This is after eight apartments in five separate states, after twenty thousand miles of road trips and five continents and the mediocrity of stillness.  This is after sexless months and a sexless year and a relationship of broken phone calls and broken hearts in a foreign land and still, we are here, she and I, poor and miserable in this place, but here together, committed and foolish and mad, mad, mad. 

****

For the past sixteen hours I have driven.  I talk quietly with a friend for the first half dozen hours.  Then he sleeps and I am driving the quiet highways that emerge after midnight in America.  I am headed north, the phone call fresh in my mind, my Las Vegas revelation still drying in the ink of my notebook.

The stars play tricks.  The road merges from a hundred miles into six hundred into a thousand.  Nevada.  Utah.  Idaho.  Oregon.  Dawn rises in a vapid pink outside a gas station just south of Lewiston.  I keep driving because I know I am close.

It is the first time I see her town.  It sat on the periphery of my childhood, which occurred a hundred miles north, in another town called Spokane.  I drive past the pea fields where I’ll work the harvest later in my life.  I drive past the place where late one night she and I will pull off and make love in the dirt of freshly made field.  I drive past all of that, tired and exhausted, thirty-six hours of consciousness. 

I stop at the gas station where she said she would meet me and I wait, but for no reason.  She is watching me beneath her cowboy hat, filling her truck and watching me.  I turn and I see her and she looks at me, and at that moment I know.  The ink dries.  I collapse into her arms, excited and tired.

****

At the arrival tent in Ali al Saleem in Kuwait I wait with her favorite value meal from McDonald’s because I know she will be hungry when she arrives from Iraq.  It’s a peculiar thing, the McDonald’s here in the desert in Kuwait, but it is a stale flavor of home in this middle ground between war and peace and so like all soldiers, we celebrate our departures. 

I wait for her. We are to go on leave together.  It will be the first time I see her in six months, after we talk about the specter of divorce, after the realities of war and her first letters to me when I breathe and realize that everything will be alright at some point, not now, but at some point.  I wait and she does not arrive.  I go to my tent.

The next morning I am awakened by a stranger.  He shakes me and asks if I am Homer Langley.  I say yes and he says there is someone outside.  It is darkness in the tent, and when I walk outside into the heat and morning light I am blinded.  I cannot see but I reach out and grab her and she grabs me and we hold each other in a grasp that as long as I live I will not forget.  We have arrived in Ithaca, her and I, if only for a moment.

****

We are in Greece on an island called Aegina.  My eyes are closed against the morning light falling in on our small room.  I am awakened by her lips on my skin, soft and kind and focused.  Eyes closed I wrap around her and our bodies intertwine with a soft firmness.  We make love in pure white sheets, a Mediterranean breeze on us, our eyes never having opened between dreaming and waking.   

****

Twenty miles outside of Colfax the sun rises and blinds me.  With it comes the fine details of the landscape, blades of young wheatgrass, tilled dirt and dilapidated wooden houses left in the fields from long ago. 

The road curves on toward sunrise and dips between the waves of hills that litter the Palouse like an ocean of subsistence, dirt and greenery.  The air smelled pure and fertile and by the time we begin the winding descent into Colfax, Cassie wakes and stretches and opens her eyes.

“Is this . . . where is this?” she asks, rubbing her eyes.  The county highway merges and becomes the town’s main street.  Small brick buildings trail on its side and beyond them are a few houses and more farmland.  I tell her where we are and she curls back under her sleeping bag. 

We drive slowly through the town and we speed up on the town’s outskirts and gun it up and out of the small place, heading southward and ever eastward.   As we drive toward the Valley the fields become more familiar.  They are the fields we harvested, some of them at least. 

My hands are old on this steering wheel.  I have trouble seeing far.  My posture is more hunched.  I’m driving thirty.  I’m ninety-two.  My lungs are shallow from smoking too much.  I wear thick glasses.  There are dentures in my mouth.  Part of my hip is plastic.   She is beside me, better preserved, her skin tighter.  Her long grey hair is tied loosely behind her.  She is staring out the window against the sun, the wrinkles in her eyes taking form as she squints.  A vague smile stays on her two lips. We hold our hands.  We are not alone. 

We are getting better, two young people on that road.  The sunlight blesses us, the road carries us, and we persist eastward, onward, and homeward into the Valley.