The Road is a River. Nick Cole

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       Chapter One

      Can you let go?

      The Old Man is sick. The Old Man is dying.

      His fever is high in him and the days pass long and hot, as though having no end to them. The villagers come one by one, and it seems to all of them that what’s left of the Old Man will not be enough. Though there are no goodbyes, there are words and looks that mean just as much.

      Yet she will not let him go.

      “No, Grandpa,” she says to him through the long days and even longer nights. “I need you.”

      Can you let go?

      He has told the villagers as much as he can of Tucson through the ragged flaming trench that is his throat. The security of the Federal Building. The untouched mountain of salvage. The tank. The villagers are going there.

      That could be enough. They have Tucson now.

      He lies back and feels that swollen, fiery ache within every muscle.

      Just rest.

      Most of them, most of the villagers have gone on to Tucson and all that he has promised them of a better life waiting there. A new life, in fact.

      Can you let go?

      The Old Man is sick.

      The Old Man is dying.

      My wife.

      He thinks of her olive skin.

      Will I be with her again?

      Soon.

      He is glad he thought of her when the wolves were beneath him and his hands were burning as he’d crossed over the abyss. He is glad he still loved her when he needed to remember something other than the burning pain in his fingers.

      “No, Grandpa. I need you.”

      The Old Man thinks, in the darkest of moments when it seems as if he is crossing from this life to the next, that there are things worse than wolves snapping their jaws beneath you as you pull yourself across an abyss while thinking of your wife.

      And he can hear the worst.

      What is the worst?

      His eyes are closed.

      His granddaughter, Emily—she is his best friend, he remembers—is crying.

      “No, Grandpa. I need you.”

      And he is going. Almost gone. Fading.

      He hears her sobs. Weeping. Weeping for him.

      His failure to live just a little longer.

      She needs him just a little longer. “Forever,” she tells him.

      The worst is when you imagine the grief of your loved ones after you have gone.

      ‘When you are sick in the night,’ he thinks, ‘you imagine the worst. To hear my granddaughter in grief for me … that is the worst I can imagine.’

      Can you let go?

      ‘Not yet,’ he thinks. ‘For her I will stay just a little longer, and maybe I can die later when it won’t matter so much. She still needs me now.’

      That is the love of staying when you know you must go.

      And the Old Man lives.