When I pulled out of the airport and headed back toward Whitefish, the sun was just starting to highlight the peaks to the east, and I could feel my heart—I was going to say beating—but it wasn’t a beat I felt that morning, it was a flow, as if my heart were an hourglass with sand trickling through it.
I had a vision then. And for the next twelve miles I formulated and designed, in my head, an art piece I was determined to build after I got back to California. The piece would be based on that hourglass feeling, and it would serve to remind me of something October had said to me the day after we ate the mushrooms.
You live like someone who doesn’t understand how fast the sand moves through the hourglass, Joe.
I stopped at the Cowgirl Coffee hut for a cappuccino, and then I hurried back to my cabin, suddenly feeling the restless anticipation of having someplace to be.
At first a voice inside my head tried to correct me. You don’t have anywhere to be, it said.
But right away I thought No, I do.
I thought, I have to go home.
TWENTY-SIX.
The morning I started my drive back to California, Cal emailed me an article about a border collie from Orlando named Ace who had disappeared while on vacation with his family in Hilton Head, South Carolina. The dog took off down the beach one morning while his humans were out boogie boarding and didn’t come back. The family stayed for three extra days searching for him. They put up posters, promised a generous reward, and regularly checked the local animal hospitals and shelters. Nothing. Heartbroken, they went home without him. Three years later, Ace showed up on their front porch, the prodigal canine. No one knew where the dog had been or how he’d found his way home, but there he was.
There was a photo in the article, taken moments after Ace was discovered at the door. He was all skin and bones, mangy and full of scabs, but he looked happy to be back.
“Ace is your spirit animal,” Cal wrote, adding two lines of laughing-face-with-tears emojis. “Good luck.”
I left Whitefish as soon as I could. But I hadn’t wanted to abandon my commitments the way I had before, and it took me a few weeks to wrap up my life there. I finished out the month with my guitar students and attended the last two writing workshops of the session. In the meantime, I painted the walls and refinished the floors in the cabin—my parting gift to Sid, to thank him for his profuse hospitality.
By the time I hit the road, October was already well into her monthlong stint at SFMoMA. And because I’d decided—or rather, Cal had convinced me—that visiting the exhibit was the safest way for me to reunite with her—“In a setting that forces you to talk and her to listen. Where she has no choice but to hold your hands and absorb your Eeyore-ness.”—I didn’t have time to lag on my drive.
I made it to Bend the first day and spent the night at the Rainbow Motel, a whitewashed, flowery little motor court that three years earlier I’d deemed too bright and cheerful for my state of mind. I considered it an indication of personal and spiritual growth that I chose to stay there on my return.
I left Bend before sunrise the next morning because I’d set up appointments to see three apartments later that afternoon, all within walking distance of downtown Mill Valley. For the first time in my adult life, I could afford a decent place to live in my hometown, and I ended up taking the second apartment I saw: a furnished, one-bedroom in-law unit in a well-built, contemporary craftsman-style house. The apartment had its own entrance, off-street parking, and offered a month-to-month lease, which appealed to me, because eventually I wanted to buy a place of my own.
Cal told me October was staying at the St. Regis—a hotel across the street from the museum—for the duration of the exhibit. The good news was I could get settled in Mill Valley without worrying about accidentally running into her at Whole Foods. The bad news was I couldn’t accidentally run into her at Whole Foods.
It should be said that I harbored no false hopes of reconciliation. I didn’t expect October to be pleased that I’d returned, and I didn’t expect she’d want to see me. But I knew that in