The Truth About Keeping Secrets(38)

You’re OK.

‘He got so mad at me,’ I said. I wasn’t sure if I was speaking to June or the trees. ‘He was kind of a nature purist. I think it was one of those, uh, parenting moments. I was just trying to show him … I don’t know.’ June said nothing. I stood up. Wiped my face. ‘The river’s, it’s, uh, down here.’

June followed me. Ahead of us, past more awnings and meandering pathways, the trail sloped downwards, but before it got too steep it turned into a bridge that led over the bubbling water. Styx wasn’t the sort of river that rushed. It plodded. As if it knew it would get there eventually, so there wasn’t any hurry.

Once we’d made it to the bridge, I lingered near the barrier and rested my elbows on the railing to watch the Styx bubble past. ‘Can we sit?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, dude. Go for it.’

We cleared a spot by the end of the bridge, snow and ice tumbling down and dissolving away into nothing, and then sat, the silence situating itself on top of our eyelashes, in the creases of our clothes. There were no birds.

Is this it?

Panic swooped down, grabbed me by my shoulders and fed me to its chicks.

‘I hadn’t even seen snow before I moved here,’ June said, breaking the silence. She kicked her legs back and forth above the drop. ‘It’s pretty much what you’d expect.’

‘What was moving like?’

‘Yeah, it was rough, for sure. Definitely. At least at first. I worried about a lot. It was right at the beginning of high school, and I didn’t know anyone here, and – I don’t know, maybe it’s stupid – but being mixed, I was like, oh my God, this is gonna be horrible, everyone’s gonna be racist, whatever. And no. It wasn’t stupid. Because there was some of that for sure.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Hey, it happens. But, you know, there was this, like, overwhelming fear, because stuff would never be the same. I was leaving everything I’d ever known behind. And I don’t have family there any more, so, like, the whole of California might as well have burned to the ground, you know? There was no, like, reason for me to ever go back. Ever. And that was scary. Sad. I have this dumb memory of, like, driving away for the last time, and sitting in the back seat but facing behind us, you know, so I was always looking back at where we came from, because … I guess maybe I thought it’d, like, fall apart or something if I wasn’t there to look at it.

‘But looking back now, I’m like, that’s so stupid, because of course I was gonna leave eventually. Right? I think – I think a lot of, like, fear, and sadness, and stuff comes from thinking things that won’t last forever are gonna last forever. Good things and bad things.’

She was so quiet that I worried I’d imagined her ever being there.

‘That’s not dumb,’ I said.

June shrugged. ‘Maybe less dumb and more selfish.’

‘Why?’

‘Because things don’t exist just so we can be there to look at them while they do. You know, like … Just because you love something doesn’t mean it can’t go on without you.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I guess.’

‘And then, once I’d actually gotten here, I sort of met Heath right away, and, you know. The rest is history.’

‘Did you ever see the redwoods?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘In California. The … the redwoods. Did you ever see them?’

She nodded. ‘I was in the Scouts when I was younger and we went camping. Up north.’

‘Did they make you feel small?’

‘Like a flea. They didn’t even seem real. Like aliens had put them there, or something. I was little at the time and I bet ten of me couldn’t even wrap all the way round the bottom.’

‘Did you … like that?’

‘I don’t know. I guess I didn’t really like or dislike it. It just sort of was.’

I don’t know what possessed me to ask. But suddenly it seemed my thoughts and my words were one and the same – I was empty of everything besides what I was saying, now. There wasn’t anything else. I might as well have been talking to myself. ‘Where do you think we go when we die?’

June scoffed. ‘I don’t actually know. I don’t think anyone actually knows.’

‘Because I don’t think we go anywhere.’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe. Maybe it’s something more than that, though. Not cliché, like, you know, heaven, or anything. I think maybe we just, like, float through the ether forever.’

It was so scary I almost started to cry. ‘That sounds horrible.’

‘No, I don’t think so. Like, I don’t think it’d be, like, Earth-Sydney, or Earth-June. I think it’s a version of ourselves, but … different. The kind that’s happy to float.’

A gust of wind sent snow tumbling from the bridge, and I shivered.

I felt the urge to tell her, so strongly that I almost couldn’t imagine not telling her. Not thinking of the fact that Heath might have already told her, or the obvious contradiction in trying to combat death with more death: ‘I’ve been doing something kind of fucked up.’

‘All right. What kind of fucked up?’

‘I’ve been watching videos of people dying,’ I said.