Free The Prophet by Michael Koryta

backpack on, walking through the chill night toward a car that no longer waited, and he thought that he woulddeal with that problem in the morning. She’d be angry, but he could always joke his little sister out of anger fast enough, could always raise a smile even when she desperately wanted to refuse him one. His dad was tougher, but that, too, could be dealt with, and what
really
mattered right now was the fact that Chelsea was being taken from him.
    You had to prioritize.
    He drove Chelsea to the pier. Put his letter jacket around her slim shoulders and held her when she told him that her father was going to be released in November and that meant she was gone. They’d go back to Cleveland, and they’d stay there. The city was an hour’s drive away, but that night, the idea of it was a world apart. They were standing in silence at the edge of the pier, water slapping on the pylons below, when she pulled her face away from his neck, looked into his eyes, and said, “Can we go somewhere?”
    He had two blankets in the trunk of his Ford Taurus. There was a county park not far from the pier, up on the bluffs where you could see out to the lake, popular for summertime barbecues and sunsets but empty on this night, the first cold evening of autumn, with that menacing wind pushing down from Canada. They had no trouble with the cold, though. Two eighteen-year-olds, first time together? No, cold was not an issue. Snow could have been flying and they wouldn’t have cared. There was a moment, as they lay on their sides, her back to him, his hand tracing her breast, side, hip, that he knew it was going to be a night that lingered, something they would talk about when they were old, because the first time with the right one, the one that lasted? There was nothing else like it on this earth. Tonight would linger with him, always. He was sure of it.
    He made it home by eleven.
    The first of the police cars was in the driveway.
    Twenty-two years later, as he drove to her husband’s housethrough a light rain, he remembered the police questions, the look in his father’s eyes, his mother leaving the room.
    The last five hours, you’ve been where?
    The pier and the park.
    Doing what?
    Talking, man, hanging out.
    You just forgot to give your sister a ride, is that it?
    Well, no, my brother reminded me. But it was kind of an emergency.
    Marie was still gone at three, and then at six, and then any half-hearted hope that she might have gone to a friend’s house and fallen asleep or broken an ankle or, hell, even run off with a boy to do the same damn thing Adam had done was gone. The questions grew more pointed, the truth more painful.
    Yes, I was supposed to take her home.
    No, I did not.
    I got in the car with Chelsea Salinas and drove away. We were at the pier, then the park. We had sex on a blanket.
    No, I did not call to tell my parents I’d left Marie to walk home alone.
    Yes, I passed her heading out of the parking lot.
    No, I did not stop to speak to her.
    No, I did not see her on the street when I came home.
    But he felt that he had. In fact, he felt that she was still there, that on the right night, with the right half-moon rising behind charcoal clouds above the lake, walking into the right cold breeze, he might find her heading into the parking lot in search of the car he’d driven away from her. Felt that if he hit all of those elements just perfectly, he’d see her marching through the dark and toward the lights of the football field, backpack on, and she’d turn and look at his slowing car and flash the cautious smile before remembering that the braces were gone and then finally letting the smile go wide and radiant. She would slideinto the passenger seat, call him a jerk, and he’d get her home. Back to her bedroom, where the sign warned away trespassers. It was still possible, somehow, it had to be, because if it wasn’t? Well, fuck this world, then.
    He was sitting with his head on the steering wheel, his eyes