“I didn’t know,” I say, watching him nod in the rearview mirror. I worry I will never know half of what they know and there isn’t enough time to ask.

We don’t stop driving until we reach Tombstone, Arizona, and by then the sun is setting and the sky is a kind of pink I’ve never seen before in real life. I’ve driven through the Southwest dozens of times and have seen the desert skies alight with the sunset before, but in my dream the sky is the color of sherbet, because the sun is setting behind storm clouds. It feels hopeful, even though things inside the car are dire. The three of us are looking for any kind of hope, so when I stop at the rest stop to go to the bathroom, I roll down the windows and yell, “Look!”

My father is preoccupied with his crutches again, but my mother does what she’s told, and then she starts to cry. We’ve reached a rainbow in Tombstone, and though it feels overwrought, too on-the-nose, this is what happens. In my dream, each of us begins to cry, because we believe this means what we think it means, which is that no one will die on this trip, in a Quality Inn somewhere off the I-10 in New Mexico. It’s not lost on me that in my dream it’s the same Quality Inn that I have passed through before—once alone, and once with Bobby when we were also still full of hope, driving as far west as we could get together.

But of course my parents and I have to sleep on this trip. And that is when I’m scared all over again. I lie awake next to my mother while my father is in the other queen bed, next to us, tossing and turning. My mother is wheezing next to me, and I am so used to her labored breathing that when I don’t hear it, I reach over and touch her face to make sure she’s still alive. I check to make sure her skin is still warm to the touch.

When my father suddenly becomes silent in his own sleep, I get up and touch his face, too. I do this all night—touch their faces to make sure they’re still alive. The next morning they laugh when they tell me how they woke up to me stroking their faces in the night.

I don’t want to cry in front of them, so I go to the continental breakfast in the lobby to get them coffee. It is filled with aging boomers watching TV and eating waffles from the waffle maker and drinking hot, bad coffee. They don’t even look at me, because I am a ghost to them. We are all here at a stopover to somewhere better.