There’s another lifeguard in the clearing, and he gestures to the pile of flotation devices beside us. Liam hands me an orange life jacket from the pile, but my fingers aren’t strong enough to work the straps.
I’m maybe eight or nine, and I’m scared, but I don’t want him to know it. But still, he can tell. He fastens it for me, tugging on the straps. Look, you have a life jacket, he says, same as his. I remember not stepping any closer to the edge, the feeling that my feet were too heavy to move, connected to the earth.
And then Liam reaches out and grabs on to my hand. He’s ten or eleven and had long stopped holding my hand. But he does it then, and says, Turn around.
I stand beside him, our hands interlocked, my feet at the edge, but looking off into the trees instead. Three, he says, and I join him for the rest. Two, in perfect unison. One, and we’re flying. No, we’re falling.
I remember now: We fell together, children who could still hold hands. I saw the sky falling away from us, and it felt like I was sinking into a black hole.
He didn’t let go the whole way down, until the cold water welcomed us and my life jacket pushed me back up to the surface.
Liam popped up beside me, smiling, shaking his hair out. “Again?” he asked.
I scrambled up the bank after him, took the dirt path up and up, to the top of the quarry. Over and over we jumped. Counting down together every time.
Three. Two. One.
I open my eyes.
* * *
—
The room is emptying out. Kennedy stands, alongside Joe. I try to smile at her, but I feel nauseated. Disoriented, like I’m both here and somewhere else at the same time.
“Thanks for staying,” she says, and I nod, heading toward my car. “Nolan?” she calls after me. “Is everything okay?”
I shake my head, and she stares at me, then pivots in the other direction, at something Joe says instead. I can’t hear him through the buzzing in my ears. I keep hearing Liam’s voice in my head; I keep picturing that scene. The trees. The path.
And suddenly Joe is beside us, repeating something. “Is that okay with you, Nolan?”
“Hmm?”
“He’s going to see Elliot, and the lawyers. To ask Elliot about Hunter, and to find out if there’s something he remembers that he’s not telling us. Can I go back with you instead?” she asks.
I nod. “Yeah, of course.”
“Be back by eight tonight, Kennedy,” he says. “And bring your phone. Leave it on, and please, Kennedy, answer it. I’m trusting you here. Both of you.”
She pulls me by the arm to the car, then says, “What happened?”
I shake my head, thinking it’s impossible. I can’t explain it—who would believe it? But then I think: She would. It’s possible. All of this is possible.
“I don’t know,” I say. “You were talking, about the count of three, and…I remembered something.”
“What did you remember?”
I close my eyes. “I remember being somewhere. Some quarry, like a family park? Somewhere my family used to go together, when we were kids. I remember jumping with Liam. I remember him counting down, from three. Just like you said. And…I keep thinking of that picture. The picture in the email.”
Her eyes widen.
“I think I know where the picture was taken,” I say. “I think I know where he wants me to go.”
She takes out her phone, starts searching for things like quarry and park, but we’re coming up empty.
“Come on,” I say. I want to see that picture again, enlarged on the living room table. I’m not sure if my parents are there, if the police are there, if they’re all looking for me, waiting to bring me in for questioning—but I have to try. It feels like Liam is right there, right on the other side of something, like the memory of his fingers linking through my own—like I can just about reach out and touch him.
* * *
—
There are no cars out front when I pull up to the house. Still, we sit in the car alone for a bit, making sure no one is just waiting around the corner, watching for this moment. I step outside, and nothing. Kennedy follows me to the front door—more nothing.
I start to wonder if maybe I’ve been cleared. If anyone has noticed that, once again, I’ve disappeared. If they’ve forgotten about me. Or whether I’ll go inside and find my photo already up on the wall of the missing.
“Hello?” I call, once we’re inside. The house is deserted; it feels deserted, like no one’s been here all day. No leftover scent of food, or dishes in the sink; no mess from Clara or Dave or the other volunteers; no papers left out on the table. It’s like stepping into another dimension.
The only thing with presence here is Liam.
His picture is still sitting on the table, enlarged, so you can’t miss it when you walk through the room. He’s everywhere. He always has been.
Leaning over it, I look closely at the trees, at the trail beyond him. I run my hand over the edges, as if that will tell me something. It seems familiar, in that way of a dream, a premonition. But I’m not sure if I’m projecting here. If I just want to believe, if I want it to be real.
I need to see images from the same location, to compare. The only computer remaining in this house is a new laptop on the dining room table. All the other electronic equipment has been cleared away, as potential evidence, to see whether I was storing the photo elsewhere—if they can trace it back to the source.
I hope the password is the same from when I’ve had to help out my parents, and it is.
Kennedy leans over me as I type. I search for granite quarries plus swimming plus Virginia, and eventually find a link to a place that was shut down several years ago, after a drought. It’s called Old Granite Quarry, and it used to be an open park with a registration hut and a lifeguard station, with a shed for equipment. The article says that the water seeped out over time, drying it out. When I search for Old Granite Quarry, there’s a relatively new article about the land surrounding it recently being purchased by a developer.
The article shows the map overview, from above. Under the image tab on the main search page, there are a few old family pictures of kids jumping into the water or swimming. It’s definitely the place I remember; I just don’t know if it’s the place in the photo.
But I have this feeling. I need to know before the police come back. Before they start prying at my story once more.
I hear a car out front, and I shut the laptop.
“Go. Through the back,” I tell Kennedy.
She heads toward the kitchen, then stops. “Aren’t you coming?”
“They’ve already seen my car. If it’s my parents or the police, I can’t just run, Kennedy. But you don’t have to get sucked into it.”
“I don’t—”
“Go,” I say, and I suddenly understand why she said the same to me, outside the college. There are things you want to protect from each other. Pieces of you that you’d rather not let them see.
I hold my breath when the key in the lock turns, but it’s Mike who pushes open the door. “Nolan?” he calls.
I exhale slowly. “Hey, Mike. Sorry. You scared me.”
He enters the house slowly, closing the door behind him, looking confused. “Uh, your parents have been looking for you.” He looks away, then back. “Everyone’s been looking for you.”
Meaning: the police. Meaning: I’m in trouble, even if I don’t understand why or how.
“I’ve been worried about you, Nolan.”
“Mike, I have to go. I’ll be back. Just, please don’t tell them I was here?”
He shakes his head, then stops. I wonder if he’s remembering his own sister, how she disappeared. If he remembers how it feels to lose someone; if he remembers the desperation to find them.
He walks to the dining room,
sits in front of the sole computer, and pretends not to notice me. “The others will be pulling up within the next five minutes,” he says.
“Thank you.” And with that, I’m gone.
* * *
—
It takes an hour and a half to make it to the quarry parking lot, as navigated by the familiar tone of Kennedy’s cell phone.
“Is this it?” she asks, leaning around me.
There’s no sign at the turnoff, and the road is blocked by an old, rusty metal gate.
“I think so.”
She gets out of the car and pushes the gate, which swings open slowly. It looks stiff and heavy, from the way she digs her heels in, leaning her weight into the metal. I inch the car forward and she hops back in.
The road from here is dirt, and it all comes back to me. Bouncing in the backseat with Liam as the car drove over the uneven ground, littered with bumps and potholes. Up ahead is a parking lot, now abandoned. Just a circle of dirt now, surrounded by trees.
The dirt settles when we exit the car, the path ahead leading the way through the trees. I think there used to be a sign here for the quarry ahead, but it’s been replaced with one that instead says: WARNING. NO TRESPASSING.
We take the path, which is only wide enough for one of us at a time, and eventually it opens up at the old ticket counter. The open window area is surrounded by rotted wood from being left uncovered, and it breaks off at the corner when I lean my hand on it. Around back, there’s a storage area, with a locked door.
I push my hip into it, and the door gives with a gust of stale air, like it’s been holding its breath all this time.
Inside is dark and dust-streaked, but there’s a pile of old forgotten furniture—some chairs I can remember my family renting—and there’s a desk with a mini-television on it.
No one has been here for ages. Maybe I was wrong.
I step outside and Kennedy’s looking up, at the corner of the building. She’s frowning. “What?” I ask.
She points up, and I see it: a narrow camera, angled off to the side, like it was meant to keep track of the people coming and going. She turns around, and I do the same, as if we are the camera, seeing the same perspective.
It focuses on the path heading back into the trees. Where, I remember now, the quarry is located.
I see the photo in my head, of Liam, the dog, heading into the woods, surrounded by trees.
Maybe the leaves are a little different, the angle slightly off, because we’re lower, and it’s a different time of year. But I think I was right.
The photo came from that camera. From this shed.
Liam was here.
“This is the path,” Nolan says, taking off.
“Wait,” I call, but he doesn’t seem to hear me.
He weaves through the trees, his hand slightly in front of him, like he’s following a ghost, or a memory.
The path diverges up ahead—to the right, it slopes downward, and to the left, it angles up. Another broken sign, with an arrow pointing downhill for a picnic area. But we go the other way. Nolan doesn’t even pause, just veers left, on instinct. It’s like he doesn’t even notice me.
His hand grabs a branch as he passes, and his steps pick up speed, until we’re almost running, and I can suddenly envision it myself: the scene he told me about on the drive up.
Two young boys, in bathing suits, racing through the trees, for the clearing. Running, the older one laughing, the younger one struggling to keep up.
And then we’re there. We’re at the top, at the circular clearing between the trees, overlooking the quarry. Nolan stands in the middle of the open area, panting. He paces, then steps closer to the trees. The wind blows, and you can hear it coming through the trees, like a warning.
Up here, the sun does something odd to the granite, turning it gray-white, and it looks unnatural, like blocks of stone placed down one by one, balancing precariously. The dust blows over them like chalk in the wind.
Nolan runs his hand through his hair, staring off into the woods.
“Liam?” he calls into the trees.
The word is heart-stuttering. It freezes everything; me, and him, and time. It’s like he’s crossing some barrier, giving voice to what he believes might be true, and possible. And then, louder, “Liam!” The name echoes, fading into the distance.
We listen, but only the wind calls back. He steps closer to the trees, and I start to feel sick. The kind of sick I don’t want to think about too deeply, to examine the source. The sort of sick that says it knows something, in the sinking pit of my stomach.
My hands start to shake.
He’s yelling off into the trees, and I can picture it again: the brothers together. Two young boys, in bathing suits and life jackets, the sun cutting through the trees, cutting across them. They counted down together. Three. Two. One.
It’s the reason we’re here. It’s the reason he knew to come here.
“Liam!” he calls again, just inside the tree line now, and it makes me jump.
I press my knuckles to my mouth. He’s not looking in the right place. I step away from him, turning around, though I don’t want to. Instead of walking toward Nolan, I approach the edge.
One step closer, and my mind goes somewhere else: to the shadow house. The horrors I can only imagine. I kept my eyes closed then, because I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t.
But if I look now, he won’t have to.
My foot breaks a branch in the clearing, shattering the silence of the woods. I look back over my shoulder just as Nolan turns around, his brow furrowed, like he doesn’t understand.
I look away. I can’t bear to see this, either, the moment when he understands what I’m doing.
And then I lean forward, peering over the edge….It’s a long way down. The distance is disorienting, and it makes my stomach drop. The earth below is brown and green between slabs of granite. It’s an empty crater, dry and thirsty, but it’s not barren, the green pushing back up, like it’s beginning anew.
My eyes skim the surface quickly, only with the edge of my vision. But then something catches, and I have to look again. Really look this time. In a circle of green and brown is a different color, not of this landscape. But it’s a color I’ve seen before, in a picture enlarged on Nolan’s living room table. The deep maroon of the fabric of a shirt.
I stumble back, squeezing my eyes, trying to undo it.
“Kennedy?” he asks as I backpedal farther from the edge.
I breathe heavily, trying to quell the twisting in my stomach, spreading everywhere. But Nolan’s across the clearing, asking.
Here’s the thing about the shadow house: In my mind, everything is blurred, and so when I think of my mother, I still see her laughing, sliding a plate of pancakes in front of me. Or holding my chin in her hands years earlier and telling me to keep very still as she dabs the ointment on a cut under my eye. I can still feel the press of her lips on my forehead after, her breath as she says, Be careful, my wild one. When I see her now, her eyes crinkle in joy.
And at this moment, Nolan still sees a boy holding his hand, counting down and jumping. And that will be gone, I know it will be gone, five seconds from now, as soon as he walks my way.
I walk toward him instead and put a hand on his chest. Firmly. Until he looks me in the eye, asking. He’s been asking all along. But this is not the answer he was searching for.
“Nolan,” I say, trying to hold my voice stable, not to cry, not right now, because it’s not about me right now. My other arm wraps around his side, to hold him this way. “Don’t look.”
I feel his muscles give, everything just exhale, like some great hope has left him. And I hold on tighter, though he doesn’t fall. He lists slowly to one side, and I guide him to a tree stump, farther from the edge. He sits with his head in his hands, and I think: He’s in
shock; he’s only part here; he’s going to fall apart, but not yet.
Not yet.
I don’t know what to do. Everything feels urgent, and yet it’s also not. What am I racing for? It’s already happened. Like the shadow house.
It exists, and so do we, and now so does this, and nothing will change that.
It isn’t fair.
That’s all I can think: It isn’t fair. This isn’t how his story ends. It can’t be.
I take out my cell phone and place the call. Someone picks up, but it seems like dead air. No, it’s static. It sort of connects, but I can’t hear the voice on the other side. “It’s only static,” I tell him. Static, cutting in and out. Like the voice is too far away, unreachable.
Out here in the quarry, there must be no signal. Not this deep in the woods. But I know we had a signal out on the road. My GPS on the phone got us here, after all.
“We have to go,” I say, but he doesn’t budge, and I have no idea if he’s heard me. I crouch down in front of him. “Nolan, all I get is static. We have to—”
“No,” he says, and he looks up then, this haunted, hollow look that I don’t think I will ever forget. “I can’t. I can’t leave—” He shakes his head, and I nod, understanding.
“Okay. Okay, stay here,” I say, standing up. “I’ll be right back.”
I look behind me once, to see him still sitting in the exact same position, before the trees close in around him as I move farther away. And then I start running. I’m only half-paying attention as I race back down the trail, looking at my phone to see when the signal comes back, so I almost trip on a root before steadying myself on a trunk nearby. I shake out my leg and try again, but all I get is static once more. I keep going, veering at the cutoff, back past the shed. I’m almost all the way to the parking lot, and I try again, begging the phone to connect.
I pace beside the shed as the phone in my hands rings. And then the phone connects, and I grip the phone tighter. “Hello? Can anyone hear me?”—a memory of a call I made months ago. The same greeting. The same response.
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