Chapter Text
Epilogue
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Peter asked.
No, Neal thought to himself as he walked through the metal detectors.
“You don’t have to do,” Peter continued, following behind him.
Neal turned around, almost coming within centimeters of Peter’s face. “Please, just . . . I need to.”
So Neal entered the door. He sat down in the third booth as instructed by the guard. The short partitions next to him were dark green and ugly. He concentrated on them nonetheless as breathing was suddenly becoming foreign nature to him.
Then he saw, but did not hear, the door on the opposite side of the plated glass wall open. He watched his feet shuffle, dragged against the floor due to the metal shackles constraining them. Then there was the bright orange adorning his legs and more.
But Neal couldn’t bring himself to look at the rest, not just yet.
The two guards holding his arm dragged him to the third booth, and Neal, still looking down, knew he was sitting there, across from him, staring.
But Riggo couldn’t touch Neal, not through that thick glass. And Neal, deep down, knew that. But he was inches from his former captor.
He swallowed the lump in his throat and forced his hand to pick up the phone on the wall. And then was the hard part---looking up and straight ahead.
“You miss me, dah?”
And Neal shivered at the sound of that voice.
“I knew you’d come for me, Neal.”
“H..ho..how does it feel?” he finally said—though he wished his voice didn’t shake so much.
“How does what feel?”
“To be chained, tossed around, ignored? Does that feel good, Riggo?”
“Like being back home—no cigarettes though, I do miss that, Neal.”
Neal took the phone from his ear and banged it against the glass in anger. “You’re going to die in here.”
But Riggo only smiled.
“Nothing every goes according to plan, dah? You left early….I might, too.”
“Shut up!”
“They feed me here, three times a day. I go outside, one hour a day. I get t.v. twice a week.”
“Shut up!” Neal yelled again.
“I get pillow and blanket. Toothpaste and toilet paper. I never had it so good. You?”
Neal threw the phone at the glass harder than before. It fell limply towards the floor, just hanging there on its string, swinging back and forth.
“Neal.”
That sounded like Peter.
“Neal, it’s okay. We’re leaving.”
He remembers shaking his head, he also remembers Riggo standing up and the guards pulling him towards the door, but there were too many tears in his eyes to see that clearly. And everything hurt again. His head, his stomach, his soul.
And somehow he was outside, walking through the snowy parking lot. He was in the car, heat blasting on him, Peter saying something along the lines of ‘It’s okay,’ and ‘he can’t hurt you anymore.’
But he doesn’t remember much after that.
The next time he does remember, he was back in the cabin, in his bed, breathing heavily through sweat and tears.
“Peter?” he calls out.
But no one answers. And he doesn’t know whether he had dreamt it or not.
*****
Neal left the cabin on December 31st, a little before midnight.
Contrary to Peter’s belief, he was not good at everything he put his mind to, but he had a driver’s license—well, Neal Caffrey didn’t, but Nicholas Park did, and Allen Turner, and so did Harry Townsend. Him and one of his former aliases would take him where he needed to go.
But where exactly where this?
Neal didn’t know.
No one was on the road, which he found a little odd since it was New Year’s Eve, but he was in the middle of nowhere, so in the end, it was alright.
There was nothing but black, open road before him. The headlights of his rented Ford Explorer captured the falling snowflakes, and it was somewhat exhilarating how he paved right through it all.
It was close to six a.m. when he neared the border of Indiana. His tired eyes and constant replay of the Rolling Stones from his iPod told him he needed a break. He pulled off of I-90 W at the next stop and his hand steadied the wheel towards the diner on the right.
He stretched his legs in the parking lot, rolled his neck to work out the cranks, and breathed frosty air in and out as the sun rose. Flamingo pink and tangerine orange.
“Gettin’ up or windin’ down, sugar?” a woman with a nametag that said ‘Dottie’ on it asked.
“Maybe a little of both,” Neal said.
Dottie laughed and grabbed a menu. “Sit anywhere you like, sweetie. Counter, booth—but pick fast, the truckers start comin’ in around 6:30.
He forced a smile and nodded as he sat down at the counter. He pulled off his scarf and unbuttoned his coat, glancing around as he did so. It was your standard, Midwestern, truck stop. At least Neal knew the coffee would be decent. Neal noticed an older gentleman in the back, reading the paper, sipping on tea.
“What’s your pleasure, darlin’?” Dottie asked, pulling the pencil out from her brown beehive of hair. She was older, probably in her mid-sixties, the blue shirt uniform she had on was worn, and it was clear she had been in the waitressing business longer than Neal had been alive.
“Coffee,” he said, but it was barely audible.
“And to eat?”
“Just coffee. Thanks.”
She narrowed her eyes and slowly, her left-penciled in eyebrow was raised. “You travelin’ through?”
He nodded, keeping his eyes down on the menu that he wasn’t reading.
“Well,” she said, “you can’t officially pass through until you try our blueberry pancakes. That’s our specialty.”
“Oh, no, that’s okay—”
“Get them while you can, like I said, the truckers are comin’ in soon. And once that batter is gone—it’s gone. Hey Bill!” she yelled, turning around to the kitchen window. “Pancakes, double short stack.”
Six minutes later, a plate of perfectly golden brown stack of pancakes was in front of him. The blueberries glistened under the light. Steamed whiffed from the top, and it filled his nostrils in delight. And then, something strange occurred.
His stomach rumbled.
“Thank me with your tip,” she said, topping of his mug with coffee.
The batter was perfect. It was so perfectly sweet that he didn’t even bother with syrup. And those blueberries added the exact right amount of tartness to balance it. He was on his second one before he finally realized this was the most he had eaten at one time in . . . well, a very long time. In fact, he couldn’t even remember the last time he had eaten anything so delicious.
He was halfway through the third one when his stomach started to cramp a little. He put his fork down and leaned back. He looked at his plate and smiled. Most of it was gone.
True to Dottie’s word, the truckers started rolling in around 6:30, and she was scrambling around getting menus and coffee. He didn’t want to bother her with the check, so he left the bill underneath his empty mug.
He just hoped the $100 bill would be enough to thank her.
******
He slept in motels in Missouri, Colorado and Arizona. He watched the sun set in Oklahoma, Utah, and the Nevada Desert. He walked on the beach in San Diego and he cried when he saw the sun rise from there one morning.
He took the train up the Californian coast, watching the landscape from the window.
“Hey, mister, did you know the train from Chicago to California makes forty stops?”
Neal turned to his right, and across the aisle was a boy, probably age five or six. He had a Jets baseball cap on, as well as a Jets jersey t-shirt. The woman next to him, presumably his mother, was asleep. “No, I had no idea.”
“Yea,” he said. “It’s the longest train ride in America.”
“Really?” Neal asked.
The boy smiled and nodded. “It’s a three day ride.”
“Wow,” Neal said, smiling. “You must be pretty smart to know all that stuff.”
The boy smiled. “That’s what my mom says. I have to know this stuff, because I’m going to be a train conductor when I grow up.”
“That’s a really cool job.”
“It’s the best job. But, I might also be an astronaut, or a football player. Or I might be all three.”
Neal chucked and nodded. “I’m sure you’ll be good at whatever you decide to do.”
“What do you do?” he asked.
And for some reason, Neal was taken aback by the question. In his former life, he most likely was at one point an astronaut, and a football player—never a conductor, though he may have committed a crime or two on such mode of transportation. He looked again at the boy, who had now leaned towards him, as if his fate depended on the answer to be given. Neal could have lied, said he was a teacher, an artist—that would have been somewhat believable, right?
“I don’t do anything,” he finally said.
The boy’s face scrunched together, confused by the response. “But . . . you have to do something, don’t you?”
And again, for some reason, Neal was taken aback by the question. Was this little boy right? Did he have to do something? “Well, I used to do a lot of things . . . but now, I . . . I’m trying to find something new to do.”
The boy seemed somewhat more satisfied by this. “That’s good. My mom says you can get into trouble by doing nothing.”
Neal forced a smile. “You’re mom is smart, listen to her,” he said, grabbing his unopened Kit-Kat on the empty seat next to him. He stood and placed it in the boy’s hand, then he grabbed his backpack from the overhead compartment and headed forward.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the conductor on the loudspeaker said, “we’re about to arrive in Portland, Oregon. If this is your destination, please exit from the second and third car. Thank you”
*****
By the time he got to Wisconsin, it was mid-March.
He had drunk real coffee in Washington, eaten chicken fried steak in Wyoming, and had multiple slices of Huckleberry Pie in Montana for desert.
He had met hundreds of people—short, tall, fat, thin, all colors and races. Some were rude—most of them were not. It was hard to talk to them at first, it was only small-talk, but the more he did it, the more he felt like his old self. And to Neal, that felt nice.
He even found himself laughing, almost like a lunatic, at a bar in downtown Minneapolis a few nights back. Although his sleeping had improved quite drastically for the better, there were still nights here and there where he just couldn’t get his brain to turn off. So he roused himself from the motel and walked the three blocks to Lou’s Tavern. It was there he met Jerry, a retired firefighter—forced to take his pension early because of an injury he sustained to his leg while on the job.
“So Tim, one of the other firefighters in my house, is quoting the dang bible,” Jerry said, “and then the probie goes ‘wow, I didn’t know you listened to Pink Floyd!’”
And Neal laughed like a dang ghoul. Maybe it was the three sips of beer he had allowed himself to actually have, or maybe it was the way Jerry brawled himself at his own story; either way, it felt good.
He drove from Chicago to Cleveland in one stretch, and treated himself to a Holiday Inn instead of a motel. He slept wrapped in the complimentary fluffy white robe and ordered pay-per-view without thinking about the charge.
And finally, on April 1st, he was back in New York.
The snow had melted, yet the air was still crisp with fresh coolness. He parked a block away and walked, letting the smell of the borough attack his senses. Cronuts, harbor sea water, pizza dough . . . life.
His hand touched the railing and up the stairs he went. He didn’t ring the doorbell though once he got to the top. He glanced in the door, seeing his reflection.
Much better.
And that was when the door opened.
“I’m just checking to see if the mail is—”
Neal’s eyes locked with Peter’s—who’s mouth and eyes had widened in almost disbelief.
“Hi,” Neal said.
Peter did one, very, very quick sweep of Neal. He nodded and immediately pulled him into a hug. “Hi.”
Neal patted him on the back once the hug lasted longer than ten seconds, but he didn’t mind when Peter still didn’t pull away.
“I got Neal a gift,” Neal said.
Peter pulled back, allowing him to reach into his pocket.
“It might be too small,” he said, pulling out a little train. “He might put it up his nose or something, but—”
“It’s perfect,” Peter said, nodding. He faced Neal, and placed his hand on his shoulder, subtly breathing a sigh of relief—he didn’t feel bone. “How you doing?”
He could have said great, or good, at least, but he didn’t want to lie. He still had his ‘days’. He’d miss meals for over 24 hours, go without sleep for 48, lock himself in a motel bathroom and cry—wishing it would just end. But they were few and far between his other days—his better days.
“I’m fine,” he said.
As Neal walked into the house, Peter was left on his porch with a smile.
The glass wall had been shattered.