LINDY ULTIMATELY DID end up going on her drive across Washington. After she fiercely hugged Krist, making him promise to come find her or at least leave a voicemail on her home phone if any news on Kurt's whereabouts developed, Lindy decided what she needed to do if she were to keep her head on her shoulders.
She was strangely calm as she got into her car, looking down at her hands as they gently laid themselves upon the steering wheel. They weren't shaking, which was odd enough in itself. Her hands always shook when she was scared.
She had just learned that Kurt was missing, nowhere (and clearly not wanting) to be found, but she wasn't crumbling into a pile of dust over the thought. Yes, it felt like Kurt was slipping away faster than she could catch him, but an eerie tranquility had settled around Lindy, keeping her steady as she pulled her car away from her apartment and out onto the main road.
Mostly, she tried not to think of the baby. It was a hard thing to do — after all, the little human was living inside her, a constant reminder that she was never really alone. But thinking of the baby meant thinking of it never meeting Kurt if he was not found. And that was an imagination that Lindy didn't want to entertain.
She drove and drove, indecisive as to where the winding roads she was on would take her. For a brief second, she thought of visiting Trae. But that would not do any good. She wanted to be alone. She didn't want to hear anyone else's voice crowding her mind, at least not anyone else's voice but Kurt's. Lindy didn't want to have to repeat the words Krist had told her aloud to her brother.
Regardless of her choice not to involve Trae, Lindy steered her car towards Aberdeen anyway. She was drawn there by invisible force, her sense of direction carried to the small town as if by a breeze of wind. Every turn of her wheels and push of the gas pedal was made by someone else. Or at least that's what it felt like. Lindy didn't really know what she was doing as she drove out of Seattle's city limits.
Kurt would not be in Aberdeen. No, not even if hell froze over would he return to the place where he'd grown up. That was the difference between Lindy and Kurt. She welcomed the pain of confronting her past, but Kurt despised it. It was easier for him to bury it away in a place where not even he could find it.
But still. It would have eased Lindy's burden if she would have been able to find him in the simpering small town where his life had began. That was merely the best case scenario. Find Kurt then, so there would be no worrying later. Finding him would mean being able to hold him, to know that he was okay.
As Lindy finally arrived in Aberdeen, she felt suddenly surrounded by thousands of ghosts. It was all the same scenery that she had seen countless times before, but now there was absence and mystery in this old environment. There was something lacking in the places that she had once walked in and out of and around as a kid.
It was all because Kurt's life was about to end. She felt it, she felt it deep in her bones.
Don't start, Lindy thought.
They had made it so far. Every hurdle had been jumped over and this was only a final test, one last obstacle that Lindy remained determined to shove out the way so she could finally be with Kurt once and for all. She had fought since she was a teenager to keep her happy ending with Kurt in clear sight.
Every stop Lindy drove by was a trinket of a memory from long ago. These ordinary places, so insignificant to anyone passing through Aberdeen, had Kurt marked all over them like visible handprints. There was the record store, Spin City, where Trae had worked endlessly to secretly fund Lindy's schooling and where Kurt and Lindy had shared their real first kiss over Skittles.
