“I had a nightmare about you last night and realized we’re the same person,” he said.

I looked at him for a moment, waiting for him to say more. He didn’t.

“What was it about?” I finally pressed.

He shook his head and crossed his arms. I glared at him, angry he was withholding some key thing about me from myself.

“What was it about?”

“I don’t want to say. But it scared me.”

He looked at me and said, “I’m going to miss you so much.”

“I’m here with you. I’m not leaving.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

We sat quietly for a while, staring at the wall, into space. He was not dying yet. He would be fine, or as fine as he could be, and we would have to wait for the inevitable all over again once they let him out of the hospital.

When he was finally discharged, after what seemed like hours, my father brought me back into the stained-glass corridors of the Catholic hospital I had wandered through while my mother received chemo treatments years before. The sunlight shone through them as we rounded the corner on our walk to the parking lot. He trailed after me, as if in trouble. I remember spending my teenage years here, peering into the chapel to watch the shuddering backs of weeping people. I turned to him, though, because I wanted to hurt him, and said, “Look where you brought me back to.”

I wanted him to remember, because he had spent the last two decades trying to forget.

As I drove through the Arizona desert, I thought about all of this, memories flooding back to me, memories that provided a template for my future. The kind of life tremors that had caused me to seek out Bethanny. The sun had gone down, and large bugs filled the desert air, quickly and quietly splattering my windshield as I headed east. I was getting tired, and I was still two and a half hours away from the convention. I had watched the sunset in my rearview mirror and wanted to see the last bits outside of my car, so I pulled onto an exit that led to nowhere—a sharp, straight asphalt line into the desert expanse—and turned off the car. The light formed a half-moon on the horizon; everything else was perfectly dark. There were no buildings out here, though I had parked next to an inexplicable construction site with a few empty cars and no one in sight. It would eventually be another gas station beckoning drivers. But now it was nothing, just a caged-off square with its windscreen already in tatters from the desert dust-ups. A thin line of red and white lights pulsated on the freeway in the distance, and I began to scream into the wind.