Chapter Text
The idea hits her early, but her back feels as if its ensconced in a cloud pillow on her leather couch, so she lets it brew in her until she can’t hold it any longer. It’s afternoon when she finds Grace sitting at her laptop, working, and yanks her by the hand and to the car. Provisions in tow, the Leaf’s tires pound the asphalt, stick a little in the desert sun. It’s setting but they’ve got an hour or so of daylight before everything around San Diego becomes tucked in a shadow.
She takes the 5, because she’s got balls of steel now, and meanders them to Border Field State Park. The look on Grace’s face is asking what the fuck? as she turns in the passenger seat for her inaudible query. The sign announces their arrival and before Grace can ask anything else, whether it be with her eyes or her ears or her heart, Frankie is leaving the vehicle and pressing her body into the metal hood.
Squinting against the dying light, she wriggles to make herself as comfortable as one can get sitting on top of a parked car with no padding at seventy-five. Regret will come, she knows, but she pulls her knees into her chest and adjusts the plastic bag she’d grabbed on her exit from the vehicle.
“I’d ask why we had to drive to the Mexican border, but I’m assuming this is all part of some greater metaphorical lesson,” Grace’s voice punctures the air with a stab, sass and sarcasm abundant. She perches beside Frankie and looks out across the expanse of land, at nothing. At everything. They watch as the seabirds plummet to the surf and the wind does a number on their hair.
“Something like that,” Frankie admits. “Do you remember when I said meet me in Mexico?”
Grace nods, tightly, small. Close to what she knows, what she has been. It’s an old cloak. Frankie doesn’t mind. She doesn’t wear it as much as she used to and Frankie likes to think she is, in part, a reason for that.
She pulls a joint from her pocket, feels Grace practically claw at her from her right.
“Are you insane!? We are right near the border. The damn name of the place even has it in the title. You’re going to light up now?”
Frankie would laugh if Grace’s eyes weren’t bugging out to the size of dinner plates. She also might let a snicker escape if she wasn’t here for the reason she is: atonement.
Grace doesn’t know that though and has willingly come along. Frankie suspects she would have for almost anything at this point, nothing as potentially bad as where they have been. Nothing able to induce nightmares worse than what they’ve already experienced.
“If this is some kind of test to prove that I’ll go along with anything, I think my track record has proven that,” Grace hoarsely whispers for no real reason whatsoever.
“I’m starting at the place where I made my last mistake,” Frankie cuts in, exhaling a fume upon the air. She watches the California winds beat against the Pacific Coast Gulf Stream. Watching it die before really getting to live. To feel empathy for smoke…
“So we’re working on your cosmic balance sheet?”
The joint poised precariously between Frankie’s digits shifts and feels like it’s falling, jolting her out of a dream-like reverie. It’s then she finds that it hasn’t fallen at all, instead being removed by Grace who inhales and then lets a stream of smoke curl into the sky.
A smile tugs at Frankie’s lips. Uptight Grace, no longer as square, removed from the little peg that she depended on for so long to define who she was. A solid nod to answer her question as Frankie lets her eyes scan the horizon again. Sand, surf, sun retreating into the blanket of the world more with every passing second.
“To really understand now, I have to go back to before. I have to make sense of it before I can fully transcend into the next stage of my life,” Frankie says, taking the joint again and staring at the smoldering flame and ash.
“I’d ask at which juncture this is going to finally start making sense, but I’ve learned to stop asking after five years,” Grace huffs, her usual agitated tone failing to reach its highest level.
“I have to go back to the beginning,” Frankie sighs, tokes. The pain begins to flutter, deep, but necessary. “I have to start where I went all wrong.”