Tim is much easier to find than his sister.

You're back at Rolly's, which is so much worse in the daytime than it ever has been at night. As soon as you open the door a wave of cold darkness rolls into your chest, and you hold in a cough and step inside. He's at the bar, same chair he was in last night, and for a moment you wonder if any of it was real.

Sylvia laughs in your memory. Yeah, no such luck. It was real.

You can't help but wonder about Sylvia, if she knew where Angela was all along, if she still talks to her at all. They were always together in high school, bending toward each other in the hallways, sharpening their laughter on the backs of whoever walked by. What does it take to break up a friendship like that? What does it take to never break it at all?

Soda, waiting in the truck outside, would be able to tell you. But you don't want to ask, really. You just want to finish this crazy ass quest and go home and watch TV, listen to your brothers bicker in the kitchen, listen to the crickets bickering outside the window.

Rolly's is a hole. You know this is not the last time you'll slide down in it, but you also know, in the same thought, that there will be a last time. And that thought comforts you.

Tim doesn't look around when the door opens, of course, so you walk up next to him and put your forearms on the bar, which is a mistake, because it's sticky as hell. You pull them up again quickly, and Tim deigns to turn his head toward you, you lucky thing, before looking away again.

"I found her," you say without preamble.

"Who?" says Tim.

"Anne of Green Gables, you dumb fuck." Shit. "Shit. That wasn't supposed to be out loud."

Tim's laugh is throaty and horrifying, like metal dragging on asphalt. Sparks in the air. Your luck (well, not your luck, since it appears to be good, but perhaps someone else's luck) is truly with you, because from all possible angles he doesn't look even a little pissed, or even a little drunk. He just looks like you made a joke.

You take it.

"Sorry." This is untrue. You are not even slightly sorry. "Anyway, I found her." This part is true. You did in fact find Angela. Accidentally? Sure, but it's not like Tim has the power of omniscience.

His long fingers drum once against the bar, the only indication that he heard you at all. If it is that.

You wait. And after a while, those awful eyes move toward you, on you, up and over and away again. And a breath you didn't mean to hold slips out.

"And?" says Tim.

"And she's leaving." Somehow, it is not in you to tell him where. Maybe it's that courage the newspaper kept howling on about when you were a kid; maybe it's that stubbornness Darry always found in your every move. But fuck Tim if he thinks you're going to blow Angela's chance to get out on him.

But you think of Mary Maxine, and something like compassion turns over inside you. So you add: "She's got a job set up, though. A real job, a good one."

Tim does not respond to this revelation. He doesn't even turn and look in your direction. He takes a drink, sets it down, stares at the mirror over the bar. You turn to meet his eyes in the glass.

"I guess you're as smart as he always said you were," he says after a minute.

And what would you have given, in another life, for Tim Shepard to praise your intelligence? What would you have done, in the absence of your own brothers, to gain the approval of this man?

But it's nothing to you now.

"Look," you begin without knowing the ending, only that it's somewhere in between fuck you and be better and let's get out of here and I am so sorry about your brother.

But maybe Tim is omniscient after all, because he grins at the mirror and shakes his head, just once, and you shut your mouth.

He lights up, which you take as dismissal, but he raises an eyebrow at you just before you turn to leave and you stop.

"Buck up, kid," he says around a mouthful of smoke. "It's a brand new day."

It's four in the afternoon. You suspect he knows this.

"You okay, Tim?"

There must be an invisible sign on Shepards that only you can see. That reads, perhaps: Not Okay. Please consider asking about, even though that's stupid.

Tim smiles. It's just as bad as you remember.

"Give you to the count of ten to beat it," he says languidly, but you know the absence of malice in his voice does not mean an absence of malice behind it. Still, you wait eleven seconds before walking out the door, and that stranger's luck must still be behind you, because you can still hear him laughing all the way out onto the street.

It's a bad sound, a sick sound, but it doesn't echo in your ears the way it would have last week or last month or even last night. It doesn't stay with you. You get in the truck, Soda drives you home, and soon- so soon you can hardly believe it- you're in front of the TV with Mary Max, watching Carol Burnett dance around and listening to Darry and Soda argue about how much sauce to use for the spaghetti. Outside, you can hear a single cricket talking to itself, but you know soon there will be more. Enough to fall asleep to on a calm summer night.

...

The moon is out this time. You look up and there it is, hanging low and full and more beautiful than it has any right to be.

Your feet are hot. You bend down and take off your shoes, hold them in your hands like a priest holds bread. You look around, but the swings are empty. The park is empty. You're alone.

You do not move toward the water.

When you first started coming here and wading in the fountain, it felt like freedom. It felt like giving the drowning boy inside you the choice to survive, to step out dripping of his own free will.

It does not feel that way anymore. Now it feels like a river in a story, singing you in, beckoning. But every time you heed it you lose something you can't name or quite catch hold of, even in your mind.

It feels like you can't stop stepping in and out of a memory in a way that is not, at this point in time, doing you any good.

The knowledge that has been growing inside you for a while now is blooming up into a strange little self, a gray-green thing with gold at the edges. And as corny as it feels- as corny and real and profound as it feels- to admit it, you're glad.

You think of Angela's blood on the wall of that house, her name written boldly beneath it.

You think of Johnny and Bob and Dallas and Curly, of a hundred boys in a jungle, of a chance you got that not everyone gets. You think of your parents backlit in the doorway of your bedroom, smiling down at you while you pretend to sleep.

The fountain whispers. But inside you, something has unfolded, and you will not fold it up again.

You bend down and put your shoes back on. Your feet are hot, but it's summer. It's all right. It's supposed to be this way.

You turn and walk away from the fountain, out onto the moonlit sidewalk, and back toward home.

Healing takes a long time, and it hurts, but it's coming. It's coming.

You can feel that down in the muscles of your chest. Down in the very bone.