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.
“I hear you,” she responds. “Miss? Are you okay?”
Something’s happening. Something terrible.
“Help us. Please,” I say. Because Nolan needs something that no one can give him anymore. I don’t know how to help him. I think this must be how Joe felt, standing in the doorway of my hospital room, watching me sit there, staring off at the white curtains.
I give the woman our location and tell her it’s an emergency.
I tell her what we’ve found.
I’ve just hung up and am about to turn around and run back to Nolan when I catch another glimpse of color through the trees, in the parking lot. This time, a flash of blue.
I step closer, until I can make it out: the light reflecting off the blue of a car.