So Close to You (So Close to You - Trilogy)

by Rachel Carter

  I look back at Grant. “You know, I’m really sick of talking about the Montauk Project. I get enough of this conspiracy garbage at home.” Grant opens his mouth, but I put my hand out to stop him from saying anything. “It’s getting cold, and I left my sweater in the car. I’ll be back in a while.”

  “Wait, I’ll come with you,” Grant says. Hannah is finally quiet, her gaze shifting between the two of us.

  “No, don’t. I just need some air.”

  Hannah’s car is parked on one of the roads that winds through Camp Hero, almost a quarter of a mile away from the party. I walk through the dark, weaving slowly between the tree trunks, stubbing my toes on rocks and feeling the sharp sting of branches grab at my skin. Though I can still hear the music and the laughter behind me, the moon isn’t very bright, and the trees cast deep shadows across my path.

  A branch snaps in the wind, and I jerk my head up, straining to see into the darkness around me. Even though I know the Montauk Project isn’t real, there’s still something eerie about being here late at night. I can’t help but think of the countless times I’ve walked through these woods with my grandfather, and worse, all of the years I spent believing in his theories.

  I was seven years old when my grandfather brought me here for the first time. Camp Hero had only just been turned into a state park, and parts of it were still closed to the public. Before that it had been an abandoned military base with NO TRESPASSING signs scattered around the woods. Of course that never stopped my grandfather from exploring. He’d sneak in through holes in the fence and run whenever he heard dogs barking or the sound of a patrol car.

  But by my first visit most of the fences were gone, and a parking lot sat near the cliffs. It was late July, and the air was heavy with the promise of a storm. As we parked the car, the sky already looked like a new bruise—blotches of purple, blue, and black. The trail leading to the bluffs was empty, the tourists scared off by the rising wind and the water crashing against the rocks below. Grandpa led me right to the edge of the cliffs, ignoring the signs that warned visitors to stay back at least twenty-five feet. Below us, rough waves broke against the sharp gray rocks. The Atlantic Ocean stretched out in front of us on all sides, so that the whole world seemed made of water.

  That day, deterred by the rain, we didn’t get past the parking lot, but it wasn’t long before we came back again, and then again and again. In the early mornings we would leave my parents sleeping and drive through the small downtown center of Montauk, past the Fort Hill Cemetery, the Deep Hollow Ranch. When we were almost at the farthest eastern point of Long Island, we would make the turn into Camp Hero.

  We’d spend the day hiking together looking for signs of the Montauk Project. My grandfather would point out manhole covers in the ground and tell me how they led to the underground facilities. We would inspect the concrete bunkers that were stuck into the sides of every hill—though they weren’t natural hills, according to my grandfather, but top-secret government labs.

  He told me about Nikola Tesla, a famous scientist he believed had faked his death to develop new psychological warfare tactics for the American government during World War II. The army base on Montauk Point became a cover for the experiments under the ground.

  For years I believed all of his stories and theories about Camp Hero. Sometimes I’d even think I felt eyes on us, watching as we prowled the grounds of the camp, looking for proof that the underground lab was still active.

  One cold day when I was ten, my grandfather took me to his favorite spot at Hero—a bunker hidden deep in the woods. It was late autumn, and the leaves were changing. The bright reds and yellows obscured the concrete bunker as it receded into the side of a manmade hill. There was a cement door blocking the entrance, with a sign that read DO NOT ENTER. My grandfather told me that before they turned Camp Hero into a park, there was an apple-sized hole in the cement. If you looked through it at the right angle, you could see a large room filled with debris and a line of doors.

  “Why would they have all of those doors if it was just for storage?” he asked. “Think about that.” I did, but had no answers, so I stayed quiet, sitting on the damp grass. My grandfather is a tall man with a full head of steel-gray hair that was almost the same color as the concrete door of the bunker. “There are just too many questions. Not enough answers.” He was mumbling to himself. Talking under his breath. “This is where they took my father,” he whispered finally, so softly I could barely make out the words. He ran his hands almost reverently across the cement, tracing the grooves in the rough surface.

  “What are you talking about, Grandpa?” I asked.

  He turned to face me. He looked different, wide-eyed and manic, and I shrunk away from him as he came forward. He pulled something from his pocket and shoved it into my hands. It was an old leather-bound journal. I carefully opened it, not sure what I was looking at.

  “This is my father’s journal. This is the proof.”

  I knew his father had disappeared when he was a little boy, almost sixty-five years ago. But my grandfather never talked about it, and my father told me not to bring it up. This was the first time I had ever heard him mention it.

  “Look. Look how he wrote the name Tesla in the margins. Look how he writes about a secret project he was working on.”

  I tried to skim the pages, but my grandfather kept flipping them over, faster and faster. My eyes started to blur. I wanted to be away from this person who seemed so different from my steady, strong grandfather.

  “Don’t you see, Lydia? My father was part of the Montauk Project. It’s why he disappeared.”

  I nodded, though I knew, for the first time ever, that I didn’t believe what he was saying. I could no longer deny the small voice of doubt that I had ignored for so long, the people in town who called my grandfather crazy, or the way my parents would roll their eyes whenever the Project was mentioned. Out of grief, my grandfather had allowed himself to get caught up in a story, a myth, and he had convinced me to believe in it too.

  “You need to find the truth for yourself,” he liked to say, but he never found any truth. Instead he paced the cliffs of Montauk searching for answers to questions that had long been buried, or had never existed at all.

  It takes me longer than I thought to find Hannah’s beat-up Toyota. She’s parked off of the road, half hidden in the trees. Other cars are nearby, nestled in the woods, the thin moonlight reflecting off their metal bodies.

  I open her passenger-side door and yank on my black cardigan, shivering in the cool air. Though it’s early summer, the wind coming off the water is chilly and brisk. I look out toward where the ocean meets the cliffs. It’s too dark to see anything but the shadow of the forest and the outline of the old radar tower jutting into the sky.

  I close the car door, flinching at the sharp noise it makes, so loud out here in the empty darkness. Hopefully Grant and Hannah have finally stopped arguing and it’s safe to head back to the party.

  I step into the woods, but then I stop abruptly.

  Someone is watching me.

  CHAPTER 2

  It starts as a prickly feeling, like something is hovering behind me. A shiver slides down my back. I stare into the black forest, but I can’t see anything. “Hello?” I call out softly. No response. Maybe it’s Grant following me out to the car. Maybe it’s one of my classmates passed out in the woods. But why wouldn’t they answer me? And why do I feel like something is crawling over my bare skin?

  I take a deep breath. It’s nothing. I’m overreacting. But I can’t quite shake the feeling that someone is out there.

  I step forward. Stop. It’s silent, except for the distant noise of the party. I take two more steps. This time when I stop I hear something crack behind me. The sound of a branch underfoot. I whip my head around, expecting to see a man standing there, maybe with a knife, or a gun, or a chain saw. But there’s nothing. I hold still, my heart lodged in my throat. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see something move. Maybe i
t’s a small tree blowing in the wind or some animal rustling the grass, but I start to run, panic clawing at me. I feel branches pull at my clothing, scratch at my face, but I don’t stop. Something is right behind me, matching my steps. I can hear it getting closer.

  The party is just up ahead, the bonfire flickering through the trees. I trip over an exposed root, falling to the ground. I scramble to my feet, ignoring the stinging in my palms, and I keep moving forward, aware that something is closing in on me. Then I run smack into a large object and fall onto my back. Hard.

  “Whoa,” Grant says, stumbling. He rights himself and leans down toward me, holding out his hand.

  I stare up at him, one of my hands clutching a pile of wet leaves, one pressed against the top of my chest. My breathing slows and I blow my bangs out of my eyes. There’s a sharp pain shooting up from my tailbone.

  After a minute, I take Grant’s hand and he pulls me to my feet.

  “Lydia, are you okay? Why were you running?”

  “I don’t know. I thought … never mind. I’m an idiot.” I rub my lower back. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was looking for you.”

  Behind Grant I see light from the party streaming through the leaves and branches. People are dancing, vague figures that flow in and out of the trees.

  I can barely make out Grant’s face, just the shape of his long nose and thin, almost gaunt cheeks. He takes a step toward me.

  “Don’t be mad about the Hero stuff,” he says. I stare at him in confusion before remembering the argument.

  “I’m not mad. I just don’t love talking about it.”

  “I get it. I wasn’t spoon-fed conspiracy theories like you were.” He takes another step toward me, until we’re only inches apart. “It must be frustrating sometimes.”

  “It’s not frustrating, exactly. Just sad.” I think of my grandfather at the bunker, running his fingers over the concrete again and again. “I need proof before I can buy into something like the Montauk Project.”

  “Do you always need proof to believe in something?” His eyes are hidden, dark, and I wonder how my face appears to him. Am I like a ghostly version of myself? All deep hollows and shadows?

  “Yes. I’m a journalist, remember? My job is to find the truth and then report it to the unsuspecting masses.” I laugh nervously.

  “You like being on the paper, huh?”

  I love it. Interviewing people. Getting a tiny lead or suspicion and then chasing it down to figure out the truth. It’s exciting. “Yeah, I do.”

  Grant smiles, the white of his teeth catching the moonlight. “Lydia. Do you want to … I mean, tomorrow I’m—”

  “There you guys are!” Hannah’s voice emerges from the black border of trees. The firelight is to her back, and she’s nothing more than a shadow as she approaches. “You can’t just leave me alone like that. I saw Brent Miller getting to second base with some freshman and now I need to scrub my eyes out with bleach.” She stops and her long skirt makes a swishing noise as it settles around her. “So what are we talking about?”

  I smile, a little too widely. “Nothing much.”

  Grant is staring down at the ground. “I was asking Lydia what she’s doing tomorrow,” he says quietly.

  There’s a strained silence.

  “Why?” Hannah asks. “You want to hang out? I’m free in the afternoon.”

  “Actually,” Grant starts, “I was thinking—”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday, right? I’m busy all day,” I quickly interrupt. “I promised my grandfather I’d come out here with him.”

  “Oh. Right.” Grant’s voice is flat. “Out here, you mean to Camp Hero?”

  “Yeah, one of his clue-finding missions.”

  “Why do you keep agreeing to do that, since you’re a nonbeliever?” Grant won’t meet my eyes.

  “Her grandfather thinks she still believes,” Hannah says.

  “Really?” Grant finally looks at me. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d hide something like that, Lydia. It doesn’t seem like you.”

  I shrug, uncomfortable. “It would really hurt him if he knew how I felt, or if I stopped coming out here to look for proof that the Montauk Project exists. Besides, I like spending time with him, even if I don’t always like what we do.” I glance out into the forest around me. Every shadow seems to be moving, every small noise twists through the trees. I turn to Hannah. “Look, can we get going? I’ve had enough of Camp Hero for now.”

  “I’ve been ready to go since we got here,” she says.

  Grant gestures at the party behind him. “I drove like four people so I should get back there. But are you free on Sunday?”

  “I totally am,” Hannah answers. She winks at me. Grant looks like he wants to strangle her.

  I try not to laugh. “We can all do something. And sorry I can’t hang tomorrow.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Grant smiles. “I kind of wish I was coming, walking around here and looking for stuff. Who knows, maybe you’ll find the truth this time.”

  “I doubt that,” I say. “If there was anything weird going on at Camp Hero, my grandpa would have discovered it long ago.”

  The next morning I wake up late and lie in my bed, staring at the white ceiling of my room. The paint is starting to peel in one corner, and cracks spread out in thin, intersecting lines. My room is sparse and organized: a dresser, a brass bed, a bulletin board with my most recent stories attached in neat rows. I thrive on order. Hannah says it’s because I’m an Aries, that I have a thing about control.

  I tell her that she needs to get a new hobby.

  As dust floats through the morning sunlight, I think about Grant standing in the dark woods, his face filled with hope. I like Grant, I always have, but the thought of kissing him fills me with a vague sense of revulsion. Not that I have much experience to go on. I’ve only kissed a total of three boys in my life and none ever blew me away. I’m still waiting for that perfect kiss, but I know that Grant isn’t it. It would be like kissing my brother.

  I sit up, pulling my long, tangled red hair over one shoulder. The heavy waves have knotted and I run my fingers through them as I slide my feet down to the floor.

  “Lydia? Are you up?” I hear my mom yell from the kitchen.

  “Yeah, I’m up!”

  “What do you want for breakfast?”

  “Why is everyone so goddamned loud in this house!” my dad calls out from the vicinity of the living room.

  “Because we know you love it so much! Lydia, French toast or pancakes?”

  “French toast!” I stand up, stretching my arms over my head, the hem of my old-fashioned silk slip riding up my legs. I don’t bother getting dressed yet, just pull a robe around myself and wander out into the hall.

  The stained-glass window at the end of the hallway spills light and color onto the hardwood floor. I walk past my grandfather’s bedroom on my way to the stairs. “Lydia,” he says through the open door. “Come here.”

  “What’s up, Grandpa?” I step into his room. It looks like it always does: cluttered and comfortable, with solid, dark wood furniture and a braided rug on the floor. He’s sitting in a straight-backed chair facing his desk, papers strewn across the top. The warm scent of his pipe hits me as I cross the room.

  I take a seat on the wide bed, the same one that’s been in this room since he was a child. When I was a little girl, my family used to live in a condo near Amagansett, but my grandmother died when I was five and my grandpa didn’t want to live alone. So we moved into this house, with its faded, blue-gray cedar shake siding, large windows, and wide front porch.

  Grandpa still sleeps in his childhood bedroom, the same place where he listened to his mother crying through the walls after her husband disappeared in 1944, the same place he inherited after her death when he was only twenty. This house is in his bones, and I know that he will eventually die here, never having spent more than a few nights in another bed.

  “Mom wants us downstairs for
breakfast,” I say. He turns his head to smile at me, his face pale and wrinkled, round glasses covering his green eyes—the same deep-sea color I inherited from him.

  “I heard. We’ll go down in a minute, but I wanted to talk about our trip today first.” He taps the pipe out into an ashtray and starts sifting through the piles of papers on his desk.

  I cross my legs, swinging my foot impatiently from side to side. I want to go eat French toast, but I try to give Grandpa my full attention. I might not believe his theories, I might even worry about him sometimes, but I’d never let him see that.

  My small family is close in its own way, though it can sometimes feel distracted. Mom and Dad are always busy. They value their independence, and they’ve always encouraged me to do the same. I like to spend time alone, and the thought of having someone else in my space for too long makes me itchy and claustrophobic.

  But if there’s one person I rely on, it’s my grandfather. He helps me with my school projects, drives me places when I don’t have a ride, and still makes me dinner most nights. He’s always supported me in my dream of becoming a journalist and has been helping me with my application to Northwestern, even though it means me moving halfway across the country to Chicago.

  If exploring Camp Hero makes him happy, then I’ll keep my mouth shut and pretend that I’m a believer.

  “Look what I found.” He hands me a wrinkled black-and-white photograph of a tall, slim man standing next to an old car. He’s wearing an army uniform with a tucked-in shirt, high, almost baggy pants, and a cap that sits at an angle on his head. He’s scowling at the camera, his face half hidden in shadow. “This is my father.”

  I finger the crumpled edges of the photo. I’ve never seen a picture of my great-grandfather before. “He looks serious.”

  Grandpa smiles and leans forward in his chair. “He was serious. But he was a good father and a good husband. He was a first lieutenant in the army, and he commanded a lot of men. He was stationed on the Western Front through the fall of forty-three. After the Allies invaded Sicily, he was sent to Camp Hero to work on a secret project. He writes about it in his journal, though he never says what it was.”