The Edge of Everything (The Edge of Everything #1)(26)

X saw both hurt and anger in her—they were like competing storms.

“Yet you loved your father?” he said. “Or the disappointments would not pain you?”

Zoe hesitated just long enough that X felt his cheeks redden and wished he hadn’t spoken.

“I loved him,” she said. “Sometimes I think I loved him just enough to screw me up for the rest of my life.”

X was silent a moment.

“You do not seem … You do not seem screwed up to me,” he said.

Zoe laughed.

“Get to know me,” she said.

This time X spoke without thinking.

“Would that I could,” he said.

Zoe frowned and turned away. X wondered if it was because he’d reminded her that he would eventually have to leave. He decided it was better that she not forget it. It was better that neither of them forget.

She was staring down at the ice now. The edge of the hole was speckled—decorated almost—with Stan’s blood.

Zoe shivered, and straightened up again.

“There’s other stuff that Stan said,” she said. “I can’t stop hearing it in my head. He said he heard my dad died in ‘some goddamn cave’ and that we just left him there.”

“More poison,” X said.

“No,” said Zoe. “It’s true.”

There was another silence and, because the wind had quieted, it felt deeper somehow. X waited. Zoe began to tell him about her father—about the morning she woke up to find him gone, about the search for his body. She seemed surprised that the story flowed out of her so freely.

“I was pissed when I realized he’d gone caving without me,” she said. “I mean, it wasn’t just our thing—it was our only thing. If he thought I wasn’t ready to go caving in the snow or whatever, he should have waited for me. He should have trained me. We had one thing! How hard is it to keep one thing sacred?”

Zoe stopped for a second. X didn’t know if she would continue.

“I figured he’d gone up to Polebridge,” she said, at last. “There are two really tough caves up there—Black Teardrop and Silver Teardrop—so about 20 of us helped the cops look for him. It was insanely cold. My friends Val and Dallas came. They don’t even like each other, but they pretended to because I was so freaked out. Dallas brought a big jug of this disgusting, like, weight-lifter shake that he said would give us ‘the strength of a thousand badasses.’ I refused to drink it.” Zoe paused. “Jonah came, too. I mean, it was nuts that he was there. Some therapist told my mother it was a good idea. The kid was still seven—and he was up in the mountains looking for his dead dad.”

Zoe fell silent again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t want to hear all this.”

“I do,” said X.

Zoe searched his eyes to see if he was telling the truth.

“It’s a horrible story,” she said.

“Perhaps telling it will take away some of its power,” he said.

She nodded, and continued. X didn’t recognize all the words—some swam past him in schools, like exotic fish. Still, he felt Zoe’s pain seep into his chest and become his own.

“We searched around Silver Teardrop first,” she said. “We didn’t find anything. The caves up there both have supersteep caverns—just straight, like, hundred-foot drops—so nobody actually went inside. But at Black Teardrop, we found the rope my dad had used to lower himself down. One end was tied around a tree. The other just kind of disappeared into the cave.” She looked at X, and paused. “Jonah was the one who found the rope. He had this happy, little-kid look on his face, you know? He was like, ‘I found him! I found him!’”

Zoe turned away from X now.

“Then Jonah saw the blood on the end of the rope and all of a sudden he dropped the thing like it was a snake and started crying.” Zoe stared up at the sky. “I took the weight-lifter shake from Dallas and chugged the thing,” she said. “I ended up puking all over the place. Attractive, right?”

X could find no words to offer.

“Your father,” he said, when the silence had become uncomfortable. “He had fallen into the cave?”

“He must have stopped to take a picture while he was rappelling down,” said Zoe. “He probably wanted me to see some ice formation, or something. That’s actually the part that …” She couldn’t finish the sentence. “You know? Because he was doing it for me. And it would have been okay except that he used to wear this nerdy old helmet that had an actual flame for a light. That’s the way my dad was: he would do things because they were dorky. The flame must have burned through the rope. I used to love what a dork he was. But this time it got him killed.”

Zoe’s words hung in the air.

X put a hand on her shoulder. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched anyone that way. He wasn’t sure he ever had.

“The cops promised they’d go get my dad’s body, but they never did,” said Zoe. “They just fenced off the cave and left his body down there, all mangled or whatever. We had a memorial service in town, which was totally awful. Even the food sucked. Then my mom and Jonah and me had a little ceremony in our backyard. Jonah wanted to bury one of our dad’s T-shirts. He decorated a cardboard box with purple stars—that was, like, the coffin, I guess?—and put an old T-shirt in it that said Ninja Dad. We buried it under a tree that Jonah’d be able to see from his window. We couldn’t bury it very deep because the ground was too hard. Anyway, it was this whole big thing. Jonah wrote a poem, but he was crying too hard to read it, so we just passed it around. I could only read, like, two lines before I started losing it. The first two lines—seriously—they were like, ‘Now that Daddy Man and I are apart / I don’t know what to do with my heart.’”