Ben sat upright in the gray soup of morning. He wasn’t sure if he’d slept. He felt as though he hadn’t. It was already hot, or it had stayed hot, for days on end. The june bugs buzzed early, or they hadn’t stopped. The days without Mira were beginning to run into one another, indistinguishable in their emptiness.
Ben jammed his knuckles into his eyes and smelled Eddie’s dried blood on his hands. After arriving home from the boat club, he’d collapsed on the couch watching stupid kids’ sitcoms, stuff he hadn’t watched in ten years. Each show ran exactly twenty-three minutes and followed the same formula. The flash of trendy clothes and the flip way they spoke to one another and their disdain toward adults was the opposite of the weirdly antiquated Cillo world and so was an antidote to his pain. Ben had let it wash over him.
The green numbers of his clock read 5:58 a.m. He couldn’t sleep or lie unsleeping for one more minute. Not when there were still six places where he had touched Mira. Ben swung his legs over the bed. He pulled on a pair of nylon basketball shorts from the floor and a clean shirt from his drawer, and lifted Mira’s note and the first letter, fanned and damp, from his underwear drawer, where he’d thrown them the night before. He slipped them back inside the cheap string bag and strapped it over his shoulders, then closed his door with a soft click—his parents wouldn’t bother to open it; they’d let him sleep in on his day off. He slid out the back of the house and mounted his bike. The air was heavy with low tide. He pedaled against the early morning traffic, past bland faces in cars, shipyard laborers, garbagemen, and people in suits leaving Powder Neck to commute into Boston, and the people who served sweet muddy doughnut-shop coffee to those people. The road trailed along the edge of the Neck until it merged into busier Route 3. Ben rubbed his eyes every few seconds to clear the ocean mist that settled in them. He remained firmly to the right of the white line, rode through glass and Red Bull cans and sticks, knowing that most people who drove cars at this hour were either rushed or half-asleep. He rode and rode, his shirt pillowing out from his back. He left the Neck with the sun climbing behind him and coasted into the parking lot of Johnny’s Foodmaster and around back, where he jammed his front tire into the bike rack and popped the rubber-coated chain lock around the cage.
He looked toward the quarry and beyond, toward the jagged, low skyline of Boston. A haze lay over the familiar string of high-rises, their broken reflections on the ocean beneath. For a second, Ben was transfixed, sensing he was seeing something special and beautiful.
“Are you watching?” he called to the sky, his voice thin.
The expressway hummed back.
He shifted. The nylon bag felt disproportionately heavy for two scraps of paper. He told himself it was just damp, not trying to get his attention. He tore himself away. If he didn’t hurry, kids who couldn’t stand the heat would start showing up. And he wanted to be alone with Mira’s words when he found them.
Ben switched to a jog. If Mira was watching from heaven, he wanted her to see him running, with purpose, to make things right for her memory. His feet had gone numb riding, and it felt good when his sneakers touched the ground. He allowed himself to imagine he was running through these same woods centuries ago, living peacefully on top of five acres of rock, before a steel company machine-blasted a crater into it and the crater filled with rain and bodies and rusted things. He tired of jogging and took long strides over rock and patches of rough vegetation. Brambles scraped his calves and branches blocked his path. He didn’t remember the path being so tough to pass. Maybe the flow of kids had slowed since the accident, and nature crowded in. He shook the idea off. It had been little more than a week, and quarry kids weren’t the scared type. You don’t jump a hundred feet off a ledge or watch other kids doing it if you don’t have some balls. Besides, the quarry was a grave before Francesca and Mira fell. Half the time, when they were looking for one body, they found another, sometimes from decades earlier.
Ben came to the clearing and froze. He knew the quarry held majesty for blue-collar kids who hadn’t seen the world’s wonders beyond the Internet. For Ben, it had a different aura, the sense that the whole place was alive, rank and pulsing, and the quarry kids were trapped in it, like in movies where the characters got shrunk and injected into the vena cava, or the throat, or tumbled along arterial walls.
Today was entirely different. He had never seen the quarry still. No bodies on the ledges, slick from sunblock, playlists belting the same overlapping songs, a scene at once fun and grotesque. This was closer to what Mira must have seen that night. Underneath the morning mist, the water was silver instead of its usual iridescent patina. Ben’s mother had warned him that decades earlier, Bismuth Steel Company had pumped hundreds of gallons of poisonous pickle liquor—waste left over from cleaning metals—into the quarry. If his mother knew Ben swam in the quarry she would have grounded him, and, possibly, called a Realtor to put their little cape on the market. She had been looking for such an excuse. The real danger wasn’t poison, but the objects underneath: boulders, old refrigerators, cranes left to rot. High dives had become competitions. That the water was contaminated amped the X factor, but it wasn’t something kids talked about.
There would be no diving today. Ben was on a mission.
He used his hands to lower himself down to the altar rock. The pack on his back swung as he climbed. The altar rock was the flattest, best ledge, left empty for the Cillos every day of the summer, and the site of a growing memorial: two stuffed bears, wilted carnations in a plastic cone, a ceramic cross, old ballet slippers, a bottle of Panama Jack suntan lotion, and a plush angel with a halo made of gold pipe cleaner.
Ben looked down into the water. The high-speed ride and hike had left him shredded. Vertigo slammed him, a shift deep in his ear that made the painted quarry walls take on funhouse angles. His eyes fuzzed over, and he backed away from the tip, dropping to his knees and easing himself to the ground. Already, the sun was fierce and open, same as that day when Ben had touched Mira for the second time.