The Edge of Everything (Untitled #1)(3)

So, yes: her dad was weird, as you pretty much have to be to go caving in the first place. But he was weird in a good way. In fact, he was kind of amazingly weird. He was superskinny and flexible, and if he put his arms over his head like Superman, he could crawl through incredibly narrow passageways. He used to practice by bending a wire hanger into an oval and wriggling through—or by crawling back and forth under the car. Literally, he’d be doing this stuff in plain sight when Val or Dallas came over. Dallas was a caver, too, and thought it was all deeply awesome. Val would avert her eyes from whatever bizarre thing Zoe’s father was doing and say, “I’m not even noticing—this is me not noticing.”

Zoe started caving with her dad when she turned 15. (Nobody called it “spelunking”—because why would they?) They caved religiously every summer and fall, until the snow blocked the entrances and ice made the tunnels treacherous. Zoe was only semi into it at first, but she needed time with her father that she knew she could count on. Unless you were going caving, you just couldn’t trust the guy to show up.

Zoe had gotten used to his disappearances, just as she’d gotten used to the fact that there were things he never talked about. (His parents, his hometown in Virginia, anything at all that happened when he was young: those parts of the map were never colored in.) Her father specialized in grand gestures—he’d changed his last name to Bissell instead of asking Zoe’s mom to change hers—and he could be the coolest dad in the world for weeks on end. He’d make her feel warm and watched-over, like there was a candle or a lantern by her bed. But then the air in the house would change somehow. It’d lose its charge. Her dad’s SUV would disappear, and for weeks she wouldn’t even get a text.

Zoe eventually stopped listening to her father’s excuses. They usually had to do with some weird business he was trying to get off the ground—something about “drumming up the freakin’ financing.” When she was younger, Zoe blamed herself for the fact that her dad never stuck around for more than a few months at a time. Maybe she wasn’t interesting enough. Maybe she wasn’t lovable enough. Jonah was still so young that he worshipped their father unconditionally. He called him Daddy Man, and treated every glimpse of him like a celebrity sighting.

Zoe knew that she and her dad would always have their treks up to the caves, and she stopped expecting anything else. So that day in November when she’d woken to find that he’d gone caving without her felt like a betrayal.

The cops led the search for his body. Zoe had invented the Do Not Open box to hold back the memories.



*



Zoe cursed Jonah under her breath the minute she got outdoors and started hunting for him and the dogs. She couldn’t see more than a couple of feet in front of her or walk more than a few steps without stopping to catch her breath. The wind, the snow: it was like being punched in the stomach.

The light, meanwhile, was dying fast. The coffin lid over Montana was getting ready to snap shut.

Zoe felt inside her pockets, and had a surprise bit of good luck. She found a flashlight—and it actually worked.

It took her five minutes just to zigzag down to the river where she’d seen Jonah playing. There was no sign of him or the dogs, except for a snow angel already partly filled in by the storm and two weird, blurry indentations nearby, where Jonah had apparently tried to get Spock and Uhura to make dog snow angels.

She screamed Jonah’s name but her voice didn’t travel. The wind pushed it right back to her.

For the first time, she felt dread crawl up into her throat. She imagined telling her mom that she’d lost Jonah, and she pictured her mother’s heart blasting apart, like the Death Star in Star Wars. If something happened to that kid, her mother would never recover. Zoe tried to push that thought down, too. But the box at the back of her brain could only hold so much, and everything began seeping out.

Zoe finally found Jonah’s footprints and followed them around the house. It was slow going because she had to bend down low to the ground, like a hunchback, to see the trail. Branches were breaking off trees and blowing across the yard. Every step exhausted her. Sweat was trickling down her back even though she was freezing. She knew that sweating in the frigid cold was bad news. Her body heat was evaporating. She had to pick up the pace, find Jonah, and get inside. But if she moved any quicker, she’d sweat even more and freeze even faster.

Another thought the box didn’t have room for.

Maybe Jonah was back in the house already. Yes. He definitely was. Zoe pictured him, his face and hands all puffy and pink as he spilled cocoa powder across the kitchen floor. She told herself that all this was for nothing. She followed his tracks, sure they’d lead right to their door.

But ten feet from the front steps, they veered down the hill and got swallowed up by the woods.

Zoe took a few cautious steps into the trees and shouted, but she knew it was pointless. She’d have to go in after Jonah and the Labs. Her cheeks and ears stung like they were sunburned. Her hands, even in gloves, were frozen into little sculptures of fists.



She used to worship the forest. She’d grown up running through the trees, sunlight splashing down around her feet. The trees led to the lake, where Bert and Betty Wallace had lived. They’d been like grandparents to Zoe and Jonah. They’d been there for them even when their dad was off on one of his mysterious trips, and they were a continual source of kindness when he died. But Bert and Betty had been going senile for years. This past fall, Zoe had kept Bert company as he cut photographs of animals out of the newspaper and barked random stuff like, “Gimme a break, I’m just a crazy old codger!” (When she asked him what a “codger” was, he rolled his eyes and said, “Gimme a break, same thing as a coot!”) Jonah had sat crisscross-applesauce on the floor and knitted with Betty. She’d taught him how, and it turned out to be one of the few things, besides chewing his fingernails, that eased his ADHD and stopped his brain from whirring like an out-of-control blender. Toward the end, though, Betty couldn’t keep her hands from shaking, and she’d forgotten everything she knew about knitting. Now Jonah had to teach her how.