Come Find Me(70)

Silence. And then: “Will you go through that night, one more time, Kennedy? Every second of it, to the best of your recollection.”

“Yes,” I say.





I sit in that room, listening to every painful thing Kennedy has to say.

Imagining myself there.

Her voice lulls, haunting in the barren room, and it’s like I’m there.

I can feel the rain. I can hear the thunder. The house lights up in the distance, under a crack of lightning.

“I was waiting at the fence,” she says. “At the edge of the property. There was a light on, in Elliot’s room. That’s all I could really make out, in the dark. The lightning felt so close, and I didn’t want to get struck while I was running across the fields, but I figured at that point, I could also get struck just standing there, too, while I was waiting at the fence. So I talked myself into it. After the next bolt of lightning, I would go. But then I heard a boom. And it sounded so much closer…like something else….” She shakes her head. “So I counted down from three, and then I ran.”

    I open my eyes, and she’s looking straight at me. I counted down from three, she says, and I feel something stir inside.

Three, two, one, I hear, and I can’t breathe.

The timing of the signal. We were wrong—it wasn’t pi, nothing about the geometry of a circle, or trying to communicate through math. But the count of three. Three, two, one.

It was the message.

She keeps talking, telling her story, but I’m somewhere else. I’m no longer in the room at all.

The trees come into focus first, and they blur by as I race through them. I’m running through the woods after Liam, both of us younger, shirtless, in bathing suits. The branches catch at my skin, and he’s laughing. Come on, Nolan, he calls over his shoulder.

We emerge in a clearing, and he points over the ledge, to a still body of water. We’re standing on top of a granite formation, slick gray walls jutting out in geometrical patterns, a pool of impossible blue down below, in the middle. Our parents are somewhere out there on a picnic blanket, looking up—but I can’t pick them out from all the others. And there’s a lifeguard on a stand waiting at the base. Some people have jumped. Other people are swimming.

There’s another lifeguard in the clearing, and he gestures to the pile of flotation devices beside us. Liam hands me an orange life jacket from the pile, but my fingers aren’t strong enough to work the straps.

I’m maybe eight or nine, and I’m scared, but I don’t want him to know it. But still, he can tell. He fastens it for me, tugging on the straps. Look, you have a life jacket, he says, same as his. I remember not stepping any closer to the edge, the feeling that my feet were too heavy to move, connected to the earth.

    And then Liam reaches out and grabs on to my hand. He’s ten or eleven and had long stopped holding my hand. But he does it then, and says, Turn around.

I stand beside him, our hands interlocked, my feet at the edge, but looking off into the trees instead. Three, he says, and I join him for the rest. Two, in perfect unison. One, and we’re flying. No, we’re falling.

I remember now: We fell together, children who could still hold hands. I saw the sky falling away from us, and it felt like I was sinking into a black hole.

He didn’t let go the whole way down, until the cold water welcomed us and my life jacket pushed me back up to the surface.

Liam popped up beside me, smiling, shaking his hair out. “Again?” he asked.

I scrambled up the bank after him, took the dirt path up and up, to the top of the quarry. Over and over we jumped. Counting down together every time.

Three. Two. One.

I open my eyes.



* * *



—

The room is emptying out. Kennedy stands, alongside Joe. I try to smile at her, but I feel nauseated. Disoriented, like I’m both here and somewhere else at the same time.

“Thanks for staying,” she says, and I nod, heading toward my car. “Nolan?” she calls after me. “Is everything okay?”

I shake my head, and she stares at me, then pivots in the other direction, at something Joe says instead. I can’t hear him through the buzzing in my ears. I keep hearing Liam’s voice in my head; I keep picturing that scene. The trees. The path.

    And suddenly Joe is beside us, repeating something. “Is that okay with you, Nolan?”

“Hmm?”

“He’s going to see Elliot, and the lawyers. To ask Elliot about Hunter, and to find out if there’s something he remembers that he’s not telling us. Can I go back with you instead?” she asks.

I nod. “Yeah, of course.”

“Be back by eight tonight, Kennedy,” he says. “And bring your phone. Leave it on, and please, Kennedy, answer it. I’m trusting you here. Both of you.”

She pulls me by the arm to the car, then says, “What happened?”

I shake my head, thinking it’s impossible. I can’t explain it—who would believe it? But then I think: She would. It’s possible. All of this is possible.

“I don’t know,” I say. “You were talking, about the count of three, and…I remembered something.”

“What did you remember?”

I close my eyes. “I remember being somewhere. Some quarry, like a family park? Somewhere my family used to go together, when we were kids. I remember jumping with Liam. I remember him counting down, from three. Just like you said. And…I keep thinking of that picture. The picture in the email.”