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Show Blue Run/35 all but gone, though traces outline the base of a few dunes where I imagine eggs cracking open, the young about to crawl down against long odds. We sit wordless for a while, the salty air and birdsong-the summer-tanned youths riding out the green waves. "Okay, sweetie Honey, let's go." Lara says, "Stay." She sits on the board rail between me and Renee. I breathe her hair in. I could weep now, long and hard That's how I feel, like the moment we drive off a hard rain's going to fall, and the world will end-everything that's ever been for me, it's all about to be over. A parasail leaps colorfully over the horizon, the broad back of the world shining through We're close now, my family We've tanned. Renee's hair has lightened. She's taught Lara to swim these last few days, and that's good, very, very good. We can not stay here any longer, not another minute, but the big water and all it encompasses-everything that's happened and not happened-holds us, holds me For a little longer, we sit there and breathe between the road and the ocean The highway to Jacksonville goes past the Volusia County Sheriffs Detention Center, just outside New Smyrna Beach. Renee's on cruise control, debriefing herself from this family visit, the fin station playing one Tom Petty song after another Lara's sacked out with her neck in a painful-looking angle in the car seat behind us. The Pathfinder's smooth, we're lucky to have it for the road, even if it is, now, officially stolen We're officially in violation of state and federal law Renee's talked herself deep into her family, up through how her brother Rocky worked off his jail time at this very place after the DWI when he was a student at FIT in Melbourne. The encampment stretches for miles along Highway 95- the poor bastards out there suffering the |