* * * *
Forty hours after finding his father, Paul stared at his reflection thrown back by the multiple layers of glass in the airplane’s window. He’d spent Friday walking the beaches he’d known all his life, watching Lake Michigan’s brooding December power and doing some brooding of his own.
The first answer came with a gust of cold wind that sliced through his clothes. Like a tactile memory, the cold stirred thoughts of Thanksgiving night and he heard Bette asking him, “What are your dreams, Paul?”
He knew now. She was his dream. A life with her. It was what he’d wanted from the start and what he’d fought so hard against. Fought her, fought himself, because he was still fighting Walter Wilson Mulholland.
He remembered his thoughts of earthquakes while he and Bette sat in Jan and Ed Robson’s living room and looked at each other across the tiny body of a baby. More like a heartquake, he thought now. Well, the rumbling and shuddering were over—at least as far as he was concerned. His world had shifted and rearranged itself into a new conformation. Into a landscape that had Bette at its center. He wanted to make plans now. Plans for children, for finding a house with a yard, enough room for some twilight games of catch. Plans for college educations, for old age. Plans for a life with Bette.
In a few minutes they’d land at the Phoenix airport and he’d be at the Whartons’ house not long after. Then he would tell Bette the things he hadn’t told her Tuesday night. Then he could try to make her see what had happened since she left two days before.
Paul Monroe had grown up.