Dust (37 page)

“I miss dessert,” Lisa said, her voice low and easy with tiredness. “Not stale grocery store candy either. I wouldn’t mind a cake.”

“In what oven?” I demanded. “Plugged in to what outlet?”

“Solar,”
she said triumphantly, raising her head with a little smirk. “Weren’t you Miss Environmental while we were alive? You should’ve thought of it. All you need is tinfoil and a box. I know there are books about it.”

While we were alive.
Lisa’d never talked that way before, not so easily. Maybe she’d finally accepted she was one of us. Time would tell. And we had that much.

The sunset lost its tangerine streaks, turning dull orange and then dim orange-yellow; then the sun seemed to fall, very slowly, the old optical illusion as the sky went dark. We waited, squinting with sun and sleep, until the last bits of orange and purple and magenta were faded out and gone.

“It’s beautiful,” Renee said, watching the cold silvery waves crest and spread against the sand. “It really is.”

Linc nodded. Lisa, who’d dropped off, started awake with a face-splitting yawn. Stomachs full. Time to sleep.

As we headed back up to the cabins, the oak tree branches flapped hard in the wind, like kids’ hands fervently waving, and then subsided; a possum froze, let out cautious sniffs as he passed us, then just ambled away. Linc and I stood in the doorway, watching the night come drifting in all around us. The trees rustled again in the breeze, then turned still and quiet.

This story’s for you, Florian. And everyone else I ever lost, even the ones that tried to lose me first. Enjoy eternity. Come visit if you like. I’ve been in and out and on the threshold enough times to know, the door’s always open. Even when it looks like it’s been slammed in your face.

Enough talk. It’s getting dark.