desireearmfeldt

“I ran after her,” says Fraser, soft in the pitch-black Canadian night. 

It’s our last night out here on the Quest together.  Tomorrow we hit civilization (for some definition, anyway), and the day after that. . .well, my brain knows I’ll be back in Chicago, but I’m having a hard time imagining it.  Seems like I’ve forgotten what Chicago looks like, or feels like.  Who I am when I’m there.

Our last night alone together with eight dogs and a whole lot of Nature.  And for whatever reason, this is the night that Fraser just starts talking.  Just spilling out all that real deep secret stuff inside him that he never shares—because Fraser, even when he talks personal, it always seems like he’s just showing you the shiny surface of the iceberg, and he never, but never, invites anyone to take a peek at what’s hidden underneath.

Turns out there’s some sad, scary stuff under there.

“I ran after her.  After everything she’d done, after everything I’d done to her, she held out her hand and I ran after that train.  I caught it, too, I was close enough to touch her, but, well.  Ray stopped me.  Shot me, actually.  I don’t know whether—he always said he was aiming for her, that he thought he saw a gun in her hand, but. . .  Anyway, the point is. . .It wasn’t that I thought, that I believed that we could be happy together, not really.  Not by then.  It was just. . .”

He sighs, a little gust of sadness in the still, dark air of the tent.

“All my life, it seems, people have been leaving.  Leaving, or sending me away.  Not always on purpose: my mother certainly didn’t choose to—to be murdered.  And it’s not. . .Well, it seems presumptuous of me, with all the advantages I’ve had, to complain about. . .things.  And yet, when I saw that train pulling away, and Victoria reached out her hand and called my name and told me to come with her. . .it felt like the only time in my life—she was going, but she wanted me to go with her.  How could I do anything other than follow?”

I don’t know what to say to that, but the silence stretches out and I’d damn well better say something. 

“Yeah, I know how that feels.  Why the hell you think I ended up hanging off the wing of that airplane?”

Fraser puffs out a breath: not laughing, more like an oh yeah, right kind of grunt.

“But you know what?” I say, surprised to hear what’s coming out of my own mouth.  “That ain’t nothing new.  I done nothing but follow people around my whole life, pretty much.  Even when they stop wanting me around, I just. . .you kind of have to whack me over the head with a baseball bat to get me to go home.  But I. . .well, you know all about what’s wrong with that, you’ve certainly told me enough times to leave Stella alone.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and I don’t know if he means for me wanting people who don’t want me back, or for the way I shoot myself in the foot, or for all the times he pointed it out to me when I was doing it.  Or for something else.  But his voice is wobbly like I ain’t never heard it before.

“You ain’t coming back to Chicago, are you?” I ask, because someone’s got to say it.

Fraser doesn’t say anything for way too long.

“’Cause if you’re just waiting for an invitation, you got one.”  I have to force the words out, but I’ll be damned if I let him go because I couldn’t say it.  “I mean, I would’ve asked you before, but I didn’t think. . .it ain’t just that, is it?  It ain’t enough.”

“Ray, I. . .”  His sleeping bag rustles as he shifts around, and then his gloved hand just misses mashing me in the face, finds my shoulder instead, and squeezes hard through the layers of clothes and sleeping bag.

“I don’t know,” he murmurs after another long silence.  His voice sounds smothered, and I wonder if Fraser’s crying.

“Look.”  I squirm around until I can get my arm free and cover his glove with my own.  “It’s okay.”

It feels like anything but okay, but I’ve only seen Fraser anywhere close to tears once, and it wasn’t when Muldoon said he’d killed Fraser’s mom, or even when he saw Vecchio take a bullet, it was when a women he liked walked away from him.

“This ain’t the last train out of town, Frase,” I say.  “The invitation ain’t got no expiration date, okay?”

“I. . .Thank you,” he says.  And then he doesn’t say anything else for a long time, but he doesn’t take his hand out from under mine, either.

As I’m drifting off to sleep, I imagine—or maybe I dream it—getting into a little puddle-jumper plane on some dinky airstrip surrounded by miles of snow.  Fraser stands on the ground watching me board the plane, and I stand in the doorway as the damn thing starts taxiing, and I see his face crumple like a little kid about to cry, and I hold out my hand. . .and Fraser starts to run. . .and I’m reaching out to him as the nose of the plane tilts up, and Fraser’s fingers touch mine, and our hands latch onto each other. . .and he jumps and I haul him in and we fly off into the sky together.

Of course, that ain’t the way it’s going to happen.  I’ll get on the plane and he won’t, and then I’ll be home in Chicago and he’ll be home in Canada, and that will suck bigtime.  But I think the chances are pretty good that one day—months from now, maybe years, who knows?—I’ll get home from work and find him on my doorstep with his bedroll and his stupid hat. 

‘Cause when I woke up this morning, he was still holding my hand.