Nolan pays for the expedited service even though he can't afford the extra fee. This means his passport will arrive in two to three weeks instead of four to six. Nolan wonders if three weeks will be too long, but he also wonders if it will be long enough.

Three weeks can seem like forever if you're waiting for something to happen. But it can pass all too quickly when it's the only time you have left to share with someone. Nolan understands this better than most.

Two months after Nolan's skate-park mall-girls seventeenth birthday, Marcus turned sixteen. He wanted to get his driver's license, but their father said no. Having both boys insured would cost too much and besides that, Marcus wasn't ready and would only end up getting himself killed.

Marcus did not respond well to his father's bullshit show of concern.

That night, without telling Nolan, Marcus took the car keys and struck out on the road with a box of cheap beer and a determination to prove his father wrong.

The irony of the resulting events was not lost on Nolan. Marcus lived for exactly three weeks after wrapping his father's car around a telephone pole. He never regained consciousness. Instead he hovered someplace in between this world and whatever place dead people go to, until the day their father made the decision to pull the plug.

Now Nolan is the one hovering and it's uncertain whether he'll wake up or not. He doesn't know if he wants to. His mother is someplace in this world, and Clara waits for him in the other.

Nolan doesn't want to decide what happens to him. He doesn't want the power to be able to decide. This is why he avoids Clara all day. Her presence reminds him that there is a decision pending, and it is one that only he can make.

Nolan doesn't meet up with her at the hatch. He goes back to his room and picks up his book in an attempt to distract himself. He has lost his place, having removed the passport application he'd been using as a book mark. After a half-hearted attempt to find the page he'd left off on, he shuts the book. It's hard to focus on anything but Clara, especially when she's in the hall right outside his room. He knows she's there, just like he knew on that evening almost a month ago that she was watching the sunset play out on the bark of cedars and firs.

He wants to invite her in but he sits on his bed and stares at the door instead. When he's certain she's left, he stares at the door for another long while.

Nolan wasn't there when his brother died. His father waited until he had gone to the hospital cafeteria to get coffee and breakfast and then he had the nurse unplug Marcus' connection to the world. By the time Nolan returned, his caffeinated body full up on blueberry pancakes, it was all over.

Nolan had missed his brother's last breath. He had lost the opportunity to stop his father from exerting his authority as to whether Marcus lived or died. Marcus was going to die from his injuries eventually, but the decision of when and how he would die should not have been his father's. Someone who loved Marcus should have done it. And that meant Nolan.

Nolan stares at the empty room and then swings himself off of the bed. He goes directly to where Clara is certain to be and when he finds her, lovely and asleep and more substantial than she's ever been to him before, he lies down next to her. He sighs and then holds his breath, then sighs again. There is a freedom to this confinement.

He lets himself go.