“I promise,” Grayson said. “We are not going to get stuck. We’re going to keep going. No matter what.”

The tent radiated with cold. It was sleeting lightly. Faint trails of moisture beaded the tent, pattering on top. I had to keep myself very still. If I reached out my hand to touch the side of the tent or bumped it by mistake, I would send icy streams cascading into my palm.

“Are you going to be able to sleep?” Grayson asked.

Other than the sleet, the woods were silent. No generators hummed. No animals called out to each other in the night. “Do you think it’s safe here?” I asked.

“Is anywhere safe?”

Lobo said if she had to try things with anyone, he was the best person. He would sit with her, watch her. He would take her to Billy Crow’s, the medicine man down the holler, if her limbs trembled, if foam came from her mouth, if her breathing slowed too much. He could get anything for her. He was a magician, a peddler who came from the woods, from the stars. I knew why she loved him. He brought magic, like scarves from his pockets, like a coin where there was no coin, like a silk bouquet. Any number of pills, brightly colored, could appear in his hands, or powder wrapped in a paper twist. He coaxed magic from the ground, made the seeds sprout, made the plants grow money. Conjured fire and warmth and attention. She had been so lonely with me in the duplex. With Lobo she would never be lonely.

Like any peddler, people loved him: children, the boys in the banged-up trucks. Someone was always coming over to buy something; to ask for something; to sit around the table, with the gun beneath it like a sleeping dog, and smoke, talk about smoking, talk about the weather. That grew old.

Mama was a searcher, Lobo said. She was on some kind of mission, to experience all sensations, all feelings, to know the world, to see. But that didn’t make sense to me, because dope made you see nothing. It slit your eyes, dulled them like the dead. It made the world a narrow sliver. Molly made you love everyone. Opioids turned you into a doll, a doll who didn’t care about anything. Weed made the world bearable.

I would do none of it. When Lobo said Mama had been asleep before—before when she was married to my daddy, when she had cried in the duplex, when she had carried me...that she was just now waking up and experiencing things in full color, seeking here with him—what did that make me? Someone that didn’t matter, didn’t register. But I had been with her all along. A ghost beside her sleepwalker.

Things would be better in California.