Catching Up to You

Chapter 12 - A Short Road Trip

"What is it with you humans and moving from place to place?," the once shy, lanky stranger now turned half-friend, half-chauffeur grunted as he brought the last of Linny's boxes in the car. On a whim, Linny made a last-minute purchase of a red 2000 Ford Taurus from her now ex-colleague. The chipped paint near the headlights hinted the number of miles this vehicle had traveled.

"Says the person who moves from place to place 24/7 as part of his job." She said.

"Yeah, but I never had... all of this baggage... and attachment to things you don't need." He took in the sight of her ukulele that was just covered in a layer of dust an hour ago, debating whether or not to ask if he could keep it.

"If you only knew."

"Sorry, what?"

"I said, can you move any slower? I thought that if I had wished all of this packing to be done, it would've been done quickly."

"I'm no fairy godmother, but I promise you, you're going to get your Eat, Pray, Love chapter very soon."

"Ooh, you were so close with that reference - Eat, Pray, Love is my sister; I am Wild."

Angel froze in his puzzled expression. "No, you're not. You're like the tamest human being I ever met. Granted, you're the only one I've interacted the most with."

"I meant, Wild the book. You know, the woman who hiked on the Pacific Crest Trail to find herself?"

"Why would she need to go find herself? How did she even lose herself in the first place? Are you implying that you've lost yourself in some sort of way that I'm not aware of?"

Linny could feel the questions draining the remainder of her energy. "Forget it." She patted his shoulder and forced her smile. "You'll probably get to have your own Wild epiphanies in the upcoming weeks," she said as she dropped the last item into the back of her - the purple Deuter hiking backpack that Trang left behind in the apartment. Lynn assumed that her sister wouldn't be going anywhere far anytime soon given her current physical conditions.

"What about your sister's stuff?"

"I still have a month left of my rent here, so she can come back for them anytime my mom's ready to kick her out of the house. They're all boxed up, anyway..." She slammed the trunk door as hard as she could, bouncing the car a few times. The two got into the car, Linny's in the driver's seat and Angel in the front passenger.

"What's the matter? Are you mad at-"

"No." She stopped him abruptly. "This is just... very typical of her. Leaving me to take care of her shit."

She started the car and began driving towards Route 90. They sat in a few moments of silence.

Then, Angel turned his head and looked at her with empathy. "She probably didn't mean it."

Linny sighed and spoke, "When we were still going to the same high school together, our mom gave her the only copy of the key to our house. My sister, being my sister, had missed the bus that took us home after school everyday. So, what did she do? She asked a friend to walk her home. By the time she got home, she was still happy and high from being with her friend that she didn't even remember that I was still waiting for her to open the front door."

"You were on that bus?"

"Yep. I was wailing when she got there - back then, we didn't have cell phones to contact each other."

"But then she wouldn't have been able to get in touch with you anyway."

"No, but she should've made it to the bus in the first place."

Linny slowed down to merge into another lane.

"Have you told her how you felt?"

"I don't really see the point, and it seemed to be working well on her side."

Angel scrunched his eyebrows. "You humans are so odd."

"Same thing back at ya." She made a sharp turn, screeching the tires for a split second.

"Well, with my recent chosen ones-"

"Wait, what do you mean 'recent chosen ones?' You mean that I wasn't the only one that you've been guiding to their last day?"

She saw him shaking his head in her peripheral view. "They were much in their later years, though - in their eighties and above." She had never heard his voice trembling before. "Sweet people, I recall. A couple, actually. Been together for more than fifty years."

"Wow, they must've had a story worthy of Humans of New York. What were their final wishes?" Linny asked, thinking to herself about how if she had gone out and got married with some stranger the next day, they wouldn't have even been together for even one percent of that old couple's time together by the time she leaves this world.

"They wanted to meet their daughter, who passed away just shy of her twentieth birthday in a car accident."

"But you can't bring the dead back..." The speedometer accelerated a shy above the speed limit.

"You're right. The best I could do was to let them relive a life they would've had if their daughter had stayed alive in their final slumber."

"That would mean a lifetime's worth of dreams, no? How was that possible when they were only a few short breaths away?"

"Yes, but you probably know that dreams distort your sense of time. In the real world, it lasted only a few seconds."

"I see..."

"They were constantly showering their daughter with words they told me they wished they could've said to her more when she was alive."

"Damn, Aesop. I didn't know that you were going to lay it to me that hard."

"You know, you and your sister are the same." Angel let out a sigh and turned his head to show Linny his full smile.

"Hey, don't be racist."

"I just don't want you to leave this world with any regrets." Angel's eyes looked like they were signaling a throat cracking near his end.

"I think you're too late for that," Turning her gaze to the front of the car, she muttered.

She suddenly turned the car into a parking lot. "Post office?"

"Yeah. Got to drop off some of my baggage."