Come Find Me(72)

The road from here is dirt, and it all comes back to me. Bouncing in the backseat with Liam as the car drove over the uneven ground, littered with bumps and potholes. Up ahead is a parking lot, now abandoned. Just a circle of dirt now, surrounded by trees.

The dirt settles when we exit the car, the path ahead leading the way through the trees. I think there used to be a sign here for the quarry ahead, but it’s been replaced with one that instead says: WARNING. NO TRESPASSING.

We take the path, which is only wide enough for one of us at a time, and eventually it opens up at the old ticket counter. The open window area is surrounded by rotted wood from being left uncovered, and it breaks off at the corner when I lean my hand on it. Around back, there’s a storage area, with a locked door.

    I push my hip into it, and the door gives with a gust of stale air, like it’s been holding its breath all this time.

Inside is dark and dust-streaked, but there’s a pile of old forgotten furniture—some chairs I can remember my family renting—and there’s a desk with a mini-television on it.

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.