Take Me With You

The novel opens with a prologue set on a Venice Beach bike path. Two strangers collide: Jesse del Ruth, a twenty-two-year-old on Rollerblades, and Norman Alfano, an older man on a bicycle. While they recover under a lifeguard tower, Jesse tells a tender story about racing star-shaped soup noodles through a disconnected drainpipe at his aunt's cabin in Maine. Norman is captivated. When the lifeguard clears them, Norman extends his arm: "Are you coming?" Jesse answers with what becomes the defining refrain of their thirty-year relationship: "Where you go, I go."

Three decades later, Jesse and Norman are married and living in Joshua Tree, California, a small, unincorporated community in the Mojave Desert. Norman, an architect, has renovated a glass-and-concrete house, and the couple has relocated from Los Angeles hoping to revive their relationship. Their early months are idyllic, but Norman begins using an app to send signals into the sky, holding his phone aloft each night. He refuses Jesse's requests for a dog and quietly backs away from their plans to become parents. One evening he asks, "What if I'm not always here?"

Around two in the morning, Jesse wakes to a tremor and blinding light. He finds Norman in the backyard, naked, touching a beam of light. Norman mouths "I'm sorry" and steps backward into the beam, rising off the ground. Jesse leaps and clings to Norman's legs, but the force pulls Norman beyond his grasp. Norman vanishes into the sky, and Jesse is left alone.

Nineteen days later, Jesse begins teaching a humor writing class at the College of the Desert, where he also meets Orson Bodner, a handsome younger professor of Applied Sciences. Jesse tells anyone who asks that Norman is away on a work trip. This cover story is tested when Norman's younger sister, Lally Alfano, a flight attendant, arrives unannounced. Over dinner, Lally reveals her true purpose. Years earlier, after a failed adoption in which the birth mother's family erupted in protest and the placement collapsed, Norman and Jesse turned to in vitro fertilization using Lally's donated eggs and Jesse's sperm. Nine embryos were created and placed in cryopreservation, but Norman later backed away from fatherhood. Lally, now single, wants the embryos so she can become a mother. Jesse deflects, insisting Norman must be part of the decision.

Jesse throws himself into teaching, assigning his students humorous stories about abandonment that prove unexpectedly moving. Seeking answers about his own history of loss, he visits his mother, Gail Wyler, in Santa Barbara and asks about his father, Jesse del Ruth Sr., a Marine who went missing in Vietnam before Jesse was born. Gail reveals little, insisting that dwelling on a problem preserves the problem.

Jesse's solitude deepens. A nighttime trip to Joshua Tree National Park with his neighbor Randall Moss, a conspiracy-minded libertarian who lives in an Airstream trailer, proves pivotal: Jesse sees the Milky Way in its full glory and begins to understand Norman's attraction to the sky. Randall tells Jesse the answers he seeks lie underground, referencing "the second alternative," his theory about vast subterranean bunkers built by the government. Taking this literally, Jesse buys a shovel and begins obsessively digging in his backyard. He visits the Integratron, a dome-shaped structure in nearby Landers built in 1959 from plans its creator claimed were given by extraterrestrials; during a sound bath, he hears someone whisper, "Norman isn't here." He adopts a foster dog, begins writing again, and over the following weeks composes unsent texts to Orson. One night, digging alongside the dog, his shovel strikes something solid underground.

The narrative shifts to Lally's perspective. On a red-eye flight, she witnesses three unidentifiable lights hovering in formation off the wing at impossible speeds. She hires Harlan Faulkner, a private investigator she grows increasingly attracted to. Harlan confirms that Norman is not in Minneapolis and presents MISSING posters from the Joshua Tree area, suggesting a pattern of disappearances. A flashback reveals the childhood death of Lally and Norman's brother Robbie, who suffocated when a snow fort collapsed on him. The trauma shaped Lally's fear of loss; she followed Norman to California and recognized that he replaced Robbie with Jesse, who shares Robbie's humor and need for attention. Through her investigation, Lally contacts Edith Marsay, whose son also vanished from the area. Edith describes the light as something that "calls to you."

Lally confronts Jesse directly. Inside the house, she sees the enormous excavation through the glass wall. Jesse shows her what he unearthed: a wooden box containing love letters from the house's original architects, tracing a love story that mirrors his and Norman's, passionate at first, then cold, then silent. When Lally threatens to call 911, Jesse agrees to give her the embryos on the condition that the child will know he did not abandon them.

Norman returns exactly one year after his disappearance, believing he has been gone only ninety minutes. He learns that Jesse divorced him to proceed with the embryos, Lally is pregnant, and the house has been transformed. Jesse tests Norman by asking what story he told on their first date; Norman answers correctly with the Chicken & Stars soup. After a medical exam confirms Norman's health, he explains that he was drawn to the light not by a desire to leave Jesse but by exhaustion with the world. "The light was home," he says. Jesse replies, "I used to think I was home."

Norman struggles to reintegrate. At a wedding reception for one of Jesse's students, tension flares when Jesse introduces Norman as his "ex-husband" in front of Orson. Norman visits a psychic named Julia, who receives fragmented impressions: "Collision. Stars. Racing. Father," and the letters A-L-F. He surprises Jesse with a desert getaway, where Jesse says he understands why Norman left but valued the mundane routines of their marriage. Jesse frames his choice not as one between Norman and Orson but between Norman and himself. Norman hosts a dinner party and proposes remarriage, but Jesse erupts, shouting "YOU LEFT!" Gail, learning about the pregnancy for the first time, is stunned; Randall clarifies that his advice to "dig deep" was a metaphor for self-reflection, not literal excavation. Later that night, Gail privately tells Jesse to fix things: "Your husband came back."

In the middle of the night, Jesse opens the signal-sending app on his phone. The light returns, pooling in the backyard. Jesse slides open the doors and is bathed in its warmth. Norman appears at the glass door, mouthing "Don't," but Jesse understands now. He wants what Norman found: trust, passion, and the certainty of feeling loved. His feet leave the ground. He hears a faint whisper, "Dad," and everything goes dark.

The epilogue replays the prologue from Jesse's perspective: He crashes into Norman on the Venice Beach bike path, says "Dad" while dazed, and the scene reveals itself as both a first meeting and a return, the light having delivered Jesse to the beginning of their love story. A final chapter depicts their remarriage at their Joshua Tree home. Lally officiates, and the flower girl is Robbie Jay, short for Roberta Jesse, nearly one year old, named after Lally's late brother and Jesse's missing father. Gail brings a surprise guest, Travis Funt, who served with Jesse's father in Vietnam and confirms that Jesse Sr. was overjoyed about the pregnancy. Norman presents Jesse with his old Rollerblades, their brand name "Alpha" partially worn to read A-L-F, matching the psychic's letters. Jesse takes Norman's hand: "Where you go, I go." The story ends as it began, with a promise that it will be an adventure.