Page 146 of Our Last Resort

He goes back to Seattle. I go back to New York.

I get up. I drink my coffee. I walk Charlie. I make some trades.

I don’t go climbing. I don’t go to my pottery workshop. I don’t see the few people I can realistically call my friends.

I leave my car in the garage. No more country roads for me.

The documentary producers email me, asking for a date to shoot my interview. I ignore them.

Every hour, I think that this could be it. The moment when Gabriel decides to go to the cops and tell them everything he knows.

It feels so real. The idea that Gabriel will report me, that a wave is coming to swallow my life. I expect the police to show up at my apartment, to ambush me in Central Park.

Before it’s too late, and because I need to know, I call Deputy Calhoun. She owes me. I get to ask questions.

“The coyotes,” I say on the phone. “Did anyone ever go to help them?”

There’s silence on the other end of the line. I can picture her perplexed expression.

“It’s important,” I tell her.

“The coyotes are fine,” she says. “The mom was rescued with her pups. She’s recovering. In time, they’ll go to a sanctuary.”

“That’s good.”

I hang up.

The feral puppy inside of me settles a little.

I walk past my old diners. The first one, the second one. I walk through Grand Central. I walk through Penn Station.

I even walk past the storage facility.

Early one morning, I walk to the river.

I’m on a mission.

The single dollar bill. The one I took—stole—from Émile, half a lifetime ago. The one I kept.

It’s almost nothing. But it is here, in my wallet, following me wherever I travel. This tiny part of my life that hasn’t let go.

It has to happen at dawn, before the streets fill with passersby. It has to happen a few feet from my apartment, the nearest part of the Hudson I can access on foot.

There’s a handful of runners out already. I don’t mind them; they don’t mind me. Most don’t even seem to see me, this anonymous woman in jeans and a T-shirt, face bare, hair in a ponytail, kneeling by the water, something fluttering in her hand.

I’ve thought about burning it. Taking scissors to it. Burying it somewhere upstate, stomping on it, spitting on it.

None of those options felt right.

I crumple the bill and dip my fist in the water. It’s cold, and it’s gross, and I’ll have to scrub my hand two, three times once I get home.

For now, I hold on to it. Émile’s little secret.

I think of a quote I read somewhere in a Kerouac book, the one about the road, about his friend. (A friend who—I couldn’t help but notice—breaks his thumb on his girlfriend’s face at some point in the story.) Something about how if you drop a rose in the Hudson River, think of the places it’ll visit, think of its travels to the ocean, “think of that wonderful Hudson Valley.”

I think of that wonderful Hudson Valley. Slowly, I open myfingers. The water doesn’t wait. It rushes in, lifts the dollar bill from my palm, carries it away from me.

Slowly, the dollar bill floats away.

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