I stayed at the airport until I saw Cal’s plane taxiing toward the runway. It was still pretty dark—the sun wouldn’t rise for another hour—and I felt a harboring silence inside the truck, even though a handful of cars and shuttles from local lodges were coming and going, dropping off travelers for the morning flights out of town, one to Salt Lake City, and the one Cal was on to Minneapolis, where he had a short layover on his way back to New York.

I was thinking about how I, too, often woke up with October on my mind and went to sleep hoping she’d show up in my dreams. Which she did. Often.

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.

Chapter 26

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.”